How did that book make you feel? HUNGRY!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: A theme! You know how much I love it when my Reds week develops a coincidental theme—et voilà! Today we have one.

The other day we had a fun blog about our stomachs as our co-author. And of course our Lucy and Jenn write wonderful books about fabulous food.

And today we welcome another bookie foodie!


Stories that Make Us Hungry

 by Jenn Bouchard

I think most of us really enjoy stories where the FOOD stands out. Or maybe I’m always just a little hungry.

When I started writing my debut novel First Course ten years ago, I decided that I was going to craft it with a strong food angle. I kept thinking of Nora Ephron’s classic story Heartburn, in which a woman grapples with her husband’s affair through her food writing and cooking some meaningful recipes (key lime pie plays an important role in the book). And because this was Nora Ephron—sister of Jungle Red Writer Hallie Ephron!—it’s quite funny. Years later, I am working on my fourth novel and have submitted my seventh short story to literary magazines. Every single one of them is full of food and cooking. I even give out customized spatulas that I have made on Etsy with the title of my most recent book engraved on the handle.


At every author event I do, people ask me about the food aspect of the books. Why food? I think of food as a connection point. 

We have to eat something, right? We might as well eat something good. 

I’m always thinking about what a person might eat in a situation. Even those times that people are just sitting around, sharing a pizza and some drinks can be memorable. This is real life that we’re writing about as authors. In my book Considering Us, the main character Devon has a few go-tos in her life: ice cream, whiskey sours, and iced coffee. There is nothing remarkable or special about this, but like anyone else, she has her favorites. We all have them!

Food also evokes strong emotions and memories. There are foods that make us feel nostalgic, like something you used to enjoy eating as a child or a meal or dessert your family traditionally made for holidays and other special occasions. 

In Considering Us, the primary setting is a boarding school in coastal New Hampshire. Devon is the new director of dining, and she is trying to find ways to bring comfort and connection to her students. She introduces a really delicious cookie recipe, and the students and staff can’t get enough of these treats. Trust me, they taste like a chocolate-covered cherry!

The other question I often am asked is about my own cooking. Yes, I cook all the time! It’s a form of therapy for me. 

Now that my children are teenagers, there are times when the house is empty, and I’m not rushed to get dinner cranked out in record time. I can move more slowly through a new recipe or an old favorite, enjoying each step and often learning things along the way. Music is playing, and I’ll enjoy a glass of wine. And then a new character might pop into my head, and I know just what she wants to cook.

What’s a book that you’ve read that incorporates food in a unique way? Have you ever made a recipe based on something you’ve read in a book?

HANK: I have never made anything from a recipe in any book other than a cookbook. MAAAYYYYBEEE I made Nora Ephron’s carbonara, come to thing of it, but that was in like, 1972. Or whenever. 

 Food writers, do you test your recipes? Food readers, to you just read the recipes (I always do) or do you actually make the things? Like what? (And I have to say, that cookie recipe sounds pretty delish!)

And a copy of CONSIDERING US to one lucky commenter!

CONSIDERING US

“Bouchard dishes up the sweetest second chance romance that will warm your heart to the end.” –Caitlin Moss, author of You First and Goodbye Again

After an affair with a client's husband leads to scandal, private chef Devon Paige is left with only one client in Boston -a reclusive professional basketball player with a craving for cookies. With no other choice, Devon lands on the doorstep of Rockwood, a boarding school on the New Hampshire seacoast, taking a job leading their dining services. She is shocked to soon discover Kyle Holling on staff, who she hasn't seen in over fifteen years since a memorable night just before departing for college in different cities. Devon and Kyle must determine what their relationship looks like years later, all while dodging the cameras of an underground newspaper, dealing with the installation of a controversial campus sculpture, and grappling with the arrival of Devon's former lover's daughter as a newly-enrolled student.

When Devon meets a handsome paramedic named Heath, she ditches the possibility of romance with Kyle in favor of what appears to be a more straightforward relationship. But a trip to Los Angeles to keep her client well-fed ahead of his basketball game threatens to upend everything, forcing Devon to finally answer the one question she has been avoiding: is fifteen years too late to rekindle a one-night stand?

ABOUT JENN BOUCHARD

After moving eight times before college, Jenn was happy to land in Maine. At Bates College, she helped run large concerts and campus-wide events, survived the ice storm of 1998, met her future husband, and graduated with a degree in Political Science.

From there she moved to Boston, where she fell in love with the Red Sox and earned a master's degree and teaching certification from Tufts University.

After a twelve year stint in Chicago, she and her family moved back to Boston, got season tickets to Fenway, and Jenn began working on FIRST COURSE, her debut novel. She has been a high school social studies teacher for 25 years, and she is a regular presenter at the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) annual conference. In her spare time, Jenn volunteers as both a fundraiser and secretary for her Bates College class and is a past president of the alumni association.She is a member of Grub Street and the Women Fiction Writers' Association, as well as a board member for her local Dollars for Scholars chapter. She is an avid cook and is always planning her next adventure. FIRST COURSE was published in 2021 by TouchPoint Press and released as an audiobook in 2023 by Tantor Audio. It is now available in a second edition through Coastal Whisk. You will find her short stories in The Bookends Review, Litbreak Magazine, The Penmen Review, MARY, the Little Patuxent Review, and FOLIO. She also teaches short story classes for adults in the Boston suburbs. 

Her second novel, CONSIDERING US, came out February 6, 2025.

Food In Mysteries

 RHYS BOWEN:  I was being interviewed recently when the interiewer said "You have a lot of food in your mysteries. You must love to cook."

I'd never thought about this before or consciously made sure I included food in the books. The answer is that I do not love to cook. After fifty years of having to put a meal on the table every night, thinking up the menu, shopping for it, preparing it and then washing up the dishes I have lost interest in cooking. However I do like to eat well. What I'd really like is Mrs. Pattmore, or Mrs. Bridges so that I could summon them to the morning room and ask what they recommended for dinner that night.

"Oh, I'd say we start with the quail in aspic, my lady," they'd reply. "Then the turban of sole and a nice leg of lamb and a summer pudding to finish with."  Food must have been less expensive in those days! Actually I know it was less expensive because even working class families all had a Sunday roast, all bought fish and chips and even oysters. 

But it's true I do like to read about food. I'm excited that Martin Walker has just come out with a cook book for his Perigord region of France. I think how characters approach eating reveals a lot about them. If a lone male detective snatches a hamburger on his way to the crime scene you know he's due for heart problems in the future. If my spinster sleuth invites suspects to tea and we witness the bone china, the tiny cucumber sandwiches and freshly baked scones we know the sort of meticulous lady she is. (and we enjoy that tea vicariously).

Lady Georgie in the Royal Spyness books started out by fleeing from her Scottish castle and coming to London with no money and no real life skills (she knows where to seat a bishop at a dinner table. This is hardly marketable or useful unless you know a bishop.) She struggles to survive living on beans on toast, that British staple for those with little money or students in rented rooms. And so it is food that provides the contrast, that shows us how far she has come by book 17, THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING, that came out this month.

Georgie now lives in her godfather's lovely mansion, she is married, expecting a baby, AND she has just acquired a French chef. She took a gamble with him, not having tasted his cooking but it turns out to be wonderful. She gives a dinner party. Everyone is impressed. And I... I get to write about all those exquisite dishes. Duck breast a l'orange, crab mousse, chilled asparagus soup, floating islands and berry tarts (the latter play a pivotal role in the story).

One of the things I love most about going to France, which we do once a year, is the French attitude to food. They like to buy everything fresh from the market. Local food, picked that morning. There are shops that just sell cheese, shops that just sell charcuterie and boulangeries, where baguettes are always just warm from the oven. And my favorite, the patiseries. Every tiny pastry a work of art. Last fall I celebrated my birthday on a cruise up the Seine with my daughter Jane and son in law Tom. The brought back a box of tiny pastries, each exquisite. A dozen had cost ten euros! A baguette costs one Euro. 

As I'm writing this I'm thinking when can I go back? When can I have crepes and mussels and have to make the hard choice which pastries to choose?

I started to write this about food in mysteries. Somehow I wandered into France and French food. But I'd like to hear your thoughts. Does reading about food detract from the plot of the mystery for you? Or do you love to savor meals with the characters?

Give Me Food!

 RHYS BOWEN:  I was doing an interview the other day when the interviewer said, "I notice you include a lot of food in your books. Do you love to cook?"

The answer to this is that I love to eat, but after all these years of feeding four children, entertaining for my husband's job and having family descend on us I have had enough cooking for one lifetime. What I'd really like is to have Mrs. Patmore to make everything once I've come up with the menu.  Or better yet, to have her come up with the menu too. I'm rather tired of having to decide what to eat.

But I do love reading about food. One of my favorite book memories is the picnic on the river in the Wind in the Willows. I've always wanted a picnic like that. And I adore travel books about Tuscany and France with details of meals.  So I also like writing about food. It's a great way to eat vicariously without the calories.

It's strange that my two new books have exactly the opposite food experience: THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT takes the reader to France in WWII when people are starving. The Nazi occupiers decreed that adults could have 1200 calories per day and old people only 800. That was if food was available. When my heroine makes it to Paris after she escapes German imprisonment one of the first things she notices is there are no pigeons. They've all been eaten.

Quite the opposite experience in my upcoming THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING. The story features a new French chef for my heroine, Lady Georgiana. He comes with dubious credentials but he certainly knows how to cook. There are two banquets in the story, each filled with food items that I love: fresh crab, asparagus, duck breast, floating islands, and fruit tarts.  Of course, being a mystery novel, one of these items is not entirely what it seems...

I had to give Lady Georgie a French chef as she's been eating so poorly for much of the series and lately has had her former maid Queenie to cook for her. Queenie's cooking is not bad but is very much of the stodgy variety eaten by the working class in England to provide enough calories to keep warm in unheated houses. Lots of suet puddings, spotted dick, bubble and squeak, shepherd's pie. Hardly items one can serve to upper class friends when you live in a stately home.  So Queenie is relegated to assistant cook where she can't do any harm... or can she?

I try to visit France every year and relish all the little treats: the pain au chocolat for breakfast, the fresh strawberries from the market and, of course, the patisseries. We have nothing like the pastry shops here in America. Tiny works of art, and so inexpensive too. Okay, now I'm hungry just writing this. 

So who else enjoys reading about food in books? Do you think descriptions of meals detract from the mystery? In the case of my new book they are all vital clues!

THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING comes out on November 7. I'll be signing at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale on November 4 and at Murder by the Book in Houston on November 9. See you there?

Fictional Feasts

***Breaking news: Pat D is the winner of Edith Maxwell's book. Please contact her at Edithmax at gmail dot com to claim your prize!***

LUCY BURDETTE: I've got food on the brain lately, but what else is new? Especially after Rhys had us describing our favorite meals last week. Besides that, it's an occupational hazard of writing foodie mysteries, as you saw yesterday from Edith's post. And you'll see again on Sunday, when Leslie Budewitz visits to talk about her recent obsession with food-related memoirs.

But I realized as I cracked open Ruth Reichl's first novel, Delicious!, that I've always loved reading about food in fiction. Maybe it started consciously with Diane Mott Davidson's series about a Boulder caterer who can't help solving mysteries as she cooks. Davidson didn't just dump descriptions onto the pages, food works hard as part of her story. Here she is at the beginning of Catering to Nobody:

    "For the dessert shortcakes, I used an old trick: make giant scones. Another thing I'd learned in this business: involve the clients with the food. Make the spread good to look at, smell, touch, taste. Gauge action by needs. At a bridal shower, don't give the guests much to do with the food since they're already involved with the presents. But keeping people active at a wake was essential. Being busy, like working, allayed grief. By splitting cakes and heaping on berries and cream, the mourners could start to get their minds off death."

    Barbara O'Neal is another novelist who shows genius about writing food. Near the beginning of The Lost Recipe for Happiness, her chef character has just been fired by her lover/boss. She's been invited to breakfast by a handsome restaurant owner who's offered her a job. Where do you suppose this is heading:

     
"Elena speared a vivid red strawberry, a fruit at its prime, and fell into admiring it. The smooth red flesh, quilted with the tiniest seeds. It tasted slightly grainy, imbued with the sunlight of a summer morning. "Mmmm." She stabbed another and held it out to Julian. "Have a taste."

    Oh, there are so many other meals I've enjoyed on the page--have you read Jessica Sofer's Tomorrow There Will be Apricots? Or Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent? Or Jenny Shortridge's Eating Heaven? Or Erica Baumeister's The School of Essential Ingredients? Or Meredith Mileti's Aftertaste? Or Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of the Lemon Cake? I can't even begin to list all the fun culinary mysteries being written right now, but you'll find some wonderful choices at MysteryLoversKitchen.com.

    Reds, is there a special fictional meal that lingers on your palate? Or a foodie novel we must add to our pile? Or do all these calories on the page leave you cold?

(And by way, here's my favorite recipe for strawberry shortcake--obviously I've got that dish on the brain!)

Comfort Foods

RHYS BOWEN:If you're anything like me you've spent the last week or so baking. And if you're like me, you've been baking the things your mother baked before you. My family always expects mince pies and sausage rolls to eat as Christmas day snacks. A Christmas cake in the afternoon, complete with white frosting. They are not so keen on Christmas pudding but I have to have to anyway because it's part of the English Christmas tradition--it should be brought to the table flaming with silver coins and charms inside.

The smells and tastes of Christmas take me straight back to my childhood. Isn't it amazing the power smells and tastes have to evoke memory? I use them frequently in my books to create Lady Georgie's world of 1930s England. (I don't want to imply that my childhood was in the 1930s, but I'm sure her childhood was pretty much like mine, down to the freezing houses with no central heating). So Georgie eats what I remember eating--my sumptuous feast becomes her sumptuous feast.

And I love reading about meals in other peoples' books. One of my favorite books in the past few years was Nicole Mones's The Last Chinese Chef--an exciting novel that is all about the legends of Chinese cooking. And of course I'm looking forward to blogmate Lucy's new series making its debut next week, featuring a food critic. I hope there will be lots of description of menus.

So how about the rest of you? Do you like reading about food, writing about food? Was your holiday full of childhood tastes and smells?

ROSEMARY HARRIS: A little food is a nice touch in a book. It helps to know if someone is hanging on the refrigerator door eating out of containers or setting a nice table for herself, even if she's alone. Whether her idea of fine dining is pepperoni pizza or Paul Bocuse. Paula Holliday isn't much of a cook so she relies on diner food - some of which is pretty tasty - to keep her going. MY WIP is partly set in Brooklyn so you know there will be more food involved.

My family traditions have changed over the years. I like to have a pot of apple cider simmering on the stove so the house smells nice when people come over - even though not many drink it! And once it dips under 50 degrees I make a fire. My two fave holiday smells!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Baking. Huh. Nope, not me. Sorry, I'm not a baker. I love to cook, and I am a good experimenter, but you can't experiment with baking. That's--chemistry. I bow to you bakers, and will happily accept cookies.

My Gramma Minnie made a fabulous coffee cake, and it filled her house with cinnamon and mocha fragrance--still, my favoirite. After she died, we all pounced on her recipe file box. And we found the recipe! Hurray. But then--it had no quantities. Flour, coffee, sugar, chocolate, etc. No amounts. So the recipe is extinct.

JAN BROGAN - First off, Rhys, I must have that mince pie recipe - mostly because I've never really understood mince pie and I would love to know what's inside from a real, true, Englishwoman.

HALLIE EPHRON: Oh, Rhys, I LOVE Christmas pudding. With hard sauce. Or just hard sauce, served on an index finger.

My mother did not bake. She did not cook except the occasional command performance after which she left the kitchen looking as if it had been hit by Irene and expected others to do the washing up.

I cook all the time. And for the holidays I'm making hanukah cookies (mandelbrot) and iced ginger cookies and trying out a new recipe for a spice cake with a maple bourbon glaze.

LUCY BURDETTE: My father was the only one in the family who would eat mince pie--which I believe he most appreciated as a vehicle for the hard sauce. I already made my double batch of iced sugar cookies as we'll be visiting family over Christmas and not in charge. Somehow a coffee cake called "Aunt Alvina's crumb cake" became the gold standard amongst my family. It's a recipe in the back of AN APPETITE FOR MURDER, though no one has any recollection of an Aunt Alvina. Nor can we find her on the family tree. It's mostly butter, sugar and flour, and completely delicious!

And Rhys, I loved THE LAST CHINESE CHEF! Also AFTERTASTE, by Meredith Mileti who was a guest here earlier this year. I love, love, love food in fiction!

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Ladies, I'm salivating just reading your comments. So let's see: Baking. I make cookies, and Ross does all the cakes and pies. And I do enjoy reading about food in fiction, because it adds another sensory impression for the reader. If I read, "She stirred the orange chicken in the wok," I can see, smell and taste it.

I made the Rev. Clare Fergusson a foodie because when creating the character, I tried to think of what kind of hobbies or pastimes a young, female Army officer constantly on the move might have. Cooking and running seemed the logical choice. It's added some nice downtime moments to the book, as well as giving characters interesting "business" to perform while talking. Chopping, stirring, and tasting certainly livens up he-said, she-said dialog.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I'm not much of a baker, but my mom made wonderful pies when I was child. My fave? Mincemeat! I still love it, but unfortunately I'm the only one in the family who does, and I don't want to make a whole pie just for me. (Maybe I should reconsider that...) I love Christmas pudding, too, Rhys! But again, I'm the odd one out, so must fall back on store-bought.

I don't make Christmas cookies or candy, but I do make lovely gingerbread (the recipe is from Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking.) And nothing smells more like Christmas than gingerbread.

I love books about food, and food in books (so looking forward to our Lucy's Appetite for Murder). What fictional (and real) characters eat and cook and how they feel about food tells so many things about character, personality, background, place... And, as Julia, says, food provides a very nice "bit of business" so you don't have talking heads in your scenes.