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!)

Elinor Lipman Visits the Reds

LUCY BURDETTE: I am so excited about today’s guest, as I’m a huge fan of everything she writes. She is funny, witty, smart, well, you’ll see...if you haven’t yet read Elinor Lipman’s books, you are in for a big treat. She has written ten novels, including the latest THE VIEW FROM PENTHOUSE B, along with TWEET LAND OF LIBERTY, and a book of personal essays. Welcome to Jungle Red!
Will you tell us a little about the new novel--and if you can stand it, what your writing process is like?

ELINOR LIPMAN:  The new novel is narrated by Gwen-Laura Schmidt, widowed two years previous, now living with her divorced sister, Margot, who was--as I like to say--"Madoffed."  Margot's ex lives in the same building, newly sprung from prison for practicing amorous medicine.  So it's about these two middle-aged women finding their way in the world, with a little forgiveness and reluctant internet dating.  

As for my process:  When I'm working on a novel, I aim for 500 words per day. I don't move forward until I've revised and polished every chapter because I send each one to my two first readers, novelist Mameve Medwed and biographer Stacy Schiff, who was my first editor.  When I'm finished, despite all the polishing along the way, there's still revising for consistency and because I know my characters better at the end than I did when making my way through it, pretty blindly. 

 Also, I never outline, so I have to go back and cut scenes that went nowhere, or amplify ones that proved to be important.   And then revisions that my editor asks for.  I find 90% of those to be good suggestions and very much worth addressing.    

LUCY: The personal essays in I CAN’T COMPLAIN started out not terribly personal. But then wow, the last few about your husband’s death and what it’s like to be single and 60 were so open and touching. How do you figure out what feels okay to write about and when, and what is too personal and private?

ELINOR:  I didn't quite appreciate how personal they all would be in the aggregate.  One section, "Coupling," was made up of essays that appeared in the Boston Globe, so that had been boot camp for marital exposure.   And even more so: The essay about my husband's decline and death was a NY Times "Modern Love" column in 2010.  So what feels the most personal are the new ones in the section "Since Then."  

LUCY: Here’s the way your essay “It Was a Dark and Stormy Nosh” begins: I write novels and I cook dinner, and some days the edges blur. Like me, my characters know their way around a kitchen, and like my family, they are good eaters. Increasingly my plots thicken in restaurants, as waiters hover, and increasingly readers ask, “What’s with the food in your books?”
We are food-crazy here at Jungle Red Writers too! Please tell us about that--how you use food and eating and cooking to show your characters’ style.

photo by Michael Lionstar

 

ELINOR:  I go on to say in that essay (which originally appeared in Gourmet) that food likes and dislikes can be shorthand characterization:  What does a fussy eater who annoys with her (yes, mostly her) complaints and special requests say about her personality?  A lot, I think.  A man who makes himself  franks and beans is one kind of guy; the one who poaches a fish and whips up his own vinaigrette is another.  It's almost too easy, isn't it?  I love to quote a New Yorker cartoon caption where a woman is saying to her dining companion, "I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, then it became a moral choice, and now it's just to annoy people." 

LUCY: I love that one of the characters in the new novel bakes cupcakes. In fact, I got so inspired by the sound of Scarlet O’Hara cupcakes that I made a batch. (And one of my characters will be making them in the fifth food critic mystery.) After consulting with my Facebook friends, I decided that they must have been red velvet cakes with raspberry cream cheese frosting. But now I’m dying to hear how you imagined this recipe would be constructed.

ELINOR:  I imagined it not at all.  I just thought it was a cupcake Anthony would like to own.  

LUCY: Unbelievable! Well just let me say that they were divine...

 

Tell us about your book of tweets.  

ELINOR:  In June of 2011, I thought it was time I joined Twitter.  Actually, I didn't want to, but publicists and such want you to do it, all hoping you'll get a zillion followers like Susan Orlean has.  I didn't want to tweet about nonsense or nothingness, so I pledged on impulse to write one rhyming political tweet per day until the 2012 election--without counting how freakin' far away that was.  I put my pledge on Facebook, and the Boston Globe picked up on that promise, so I couldn't back down.  Then at the (wonderful) Grub Street Muse and the Marketplace conference in May of 2012, Helene Atwan of Beacon Press said, "Someone's doing your tweets as a book, right?"  I said, "No, nobody."  She said, "Well, I am."  Three months later it came out:  TWEET LAND OF LIBERTY: Rhyming Tweets from the Political Circus. (You can follow Elinor @elinorlipman.

LUCY: And finally, you have a new blog in Parade.com?

ELINOR: It's called "I Might Complain." It appears every Wednesday and covers life's little annoyances. So I try to strike a balance between amusing and cranky. 

 

LUCY: thanks so much for visiting! Reds, Elinor will be stopping in to answer comments and questions, so please pile on!

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.