4 Meanwhile, mix ketchup, brown sugar, mustard, allspice, and cloves in a small bowl. Spoon sauce over loaves and top each loaf with a lemon slice. Bake 30 minutes more, or until internal temperature registers 160°F on a thermometer.
Sarah Blake
Ralph Alswang
SELECTED WORKS
The Postmistress (2010)
Grange House (2001)
Full Turn (1989)
Inspiration While I was working on The Postmistress, I returned to Provincetown, Massachusetts, the outermost town on Cape Cod. One morning I was walking down the single-lane main street and overheard two elderly residents in conversation. “Well,” one of them pronounced to the other sagely, “even good doctors have their little graveyards.”
I already had the character of Dr. Will Fitch firmly in mind, but this comment, and the way it was delivered, sealed his fate. From that moment on the street, I knew what his struggle would be. The woman's phrase went directly into the book. And the image of the tiny hidden graveyards all doctors — even good ones — carry with them was haunting and generative, the way all solid simple truths are.
My writing is always inspired this way: by things overheard that have the nugget of a story in them; or by people I catch a glimpse of whose faces suggest stories or questions. For me, the thrill of writing comes in chasing down those questions — catching the stories latent in scraps overheard or chance encounters held — that rise up over and over in our lives.
The Early Bird Gets Writing When I am in the middle of writing a novel or a story, I like to wake up before anyone else in my house — this is very early! — and simply start where I left off the day before. I do this without thinking, before thinking really, and write as long as I can this way. Then, after lunches have been packed, the kids taken to school, other parents or teachers greeted and talked to, and other stuff of the morning done, I can return to that early morning voice and begin again, like meeting an old friend along the road. It is at that point too, that I like to read a few pages of familiar, beloved writers: Woolf, or George Eliot, Yeats or Calvino, taking in their language, their turns of phrases, like hands I grab hold of in order to pull myself up so I can let go into my own writing.
Readers Frequently Ask Since both of my novels take place in different eras from our own — the late nineteenth century and the 1940s — people often ask about my research: how I go about it, how much I do, and how I know when I'm done.
I like to steep myself in the era I write about, reading history books of course, but also getting my hands on magazines, novels, and poems written in the time period so I can get the diction of my characters just right. And when I decided to set The Postmistress during World War II, I knew little about that period and I had to start from scratch. But the wonderful thing about research is that it leads you toward true stories or details that are incredibly generative. When I read that a town in Maine cut down its town flag-pole because of fear of U-boats, I knew I had to use that detail. This one fact also suggested a whole series of scenes between Iris and Harry. It's details like these — and there are many that never made it into the finished book — that make it very hard to leave off researching. But you know you're done when the story takes on its own true contours.
Authors Who Have Influenced My Writing I return to Virginia Woolf every year, and reread her often to get myself set back on track or if I'm seeking inspiration. Woolf's vivid impressionism — in which shocks of life bolt from the pattern of daily life, “moments of being,” as she called them — is my touchstone. A Room of One's Own; Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Between the Acts; Moments of Being.
As a child I read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and fell in love with this passionate rebel who talked back. Reading it again as a literature professor, I was able to study the perfect narrative that is the backbone of this book, the three-story structure with a madwoman in the attic. Now as a writer I return to Jane Eyre, over and over, dipping in anywhere just to pick up and study this incredible single voice running along the tracks of a well-conceived plot.
FLORENCE (GRANNY) BLAKE'S ROMANCE COOKIES
Makes 16 squares
“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own. Both of my novels, Grange House and The Postmistress, take her words to heart as I imagine the lives of earlier generations of women to better understand my own life. But I could easily follow Woolf's dictum with this one: we cook back through our mothers, if we are women. I learned as much about making characters as I did about baking, by cooking (or not) with the three women I grew up with.
Though my mother's mother sailed through her kitchen as through foreign waters, leaving all matters culinary to her family's cook, and my mother mostly shooed my sister and me out — cooking being for her a terribly fraught and uncertain operation — my father's mother pulled me into her kitchen, sat me down, and set me going. Granny Blake had been a surgical nurse before she caught my grandfather's eye. She left it all to follow him to Arizona, where she bore him two sons, only to be widowed at thirty-five. Tiny, with a shock of white hair, she was tough-talking and very firm. She wore a skirt every day of her life, and settled at six each evening with her scotch, the news, and two Kent cigarettes. When you cooked with her, you lined up all your ingredients, like soldiers going into battle, and then you began. If Frankie Bard from The Postmistress had become a grandmother, this is who she would have been.
Romance cookies are a mouth-watering confection, a two layered cookie, with short-bread on the bottom and butterscotch brownie on top. They were the first things she taught me to make, and making them seemed like an act of derring-do, a high-wire act, a race against time to wash and dry the single bowl from the remnants of the first layer and then assemble and mix the ingredients of the second layer in the ten minutes it took to bake the first. As I would later do as a writer, I learned how to build with her, how to plan and build. And then, when the cookies were pulled from the oven and handed around, I learned the secret life of words. These are Romance Cookies, she'd explain again and again, so-called because they are sticky and sweet — she'd pause — like romance. And the grown-up laughter that greeted her signaled a world I didn't understand or know but that the cookies promised somehow to carry with them, a story unto themselves.
FOR THE DOUGH
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
FOR THE TOPPING
2 large eggs
1½ cups dark brown sugar, packed
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 Preheat oven to 350°F.
2 To make the dough: In a medium mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, and butter (you can use an electric mixer if you wish). Use your hands to shape dough into a smooth ball.
3 Place dough in 9″ × 9″ × 2″ baking pan. Press dough into the pan, pushing into the corners so that you make a flat surface, completely covering the pan. Bake for 15–18 minutes so that it is baked but not brown. Don't overbake.
4 While dough is baking, make the topping: Combine eggs, brown sugar, flour, baking powder, vanilla, and walnuts in a medium mixing bowl.
5 Pour mixture on top of shortbread layer and bake for 20–25 minutes, until top layer is set. Cool completely before cutting into 16 squares.
Amy Bloom
Beth Kelly
SELECTED WORKS
Where the God of Love Hangs Out (2010)
Away (2007)
Normal (2002)
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (2000)
Love Invents Us (1998)
Come to Me (1993)
How My Characters Come to Life Although the specifics change from book to book, it is always the case that there is a story I wish to tell and, even more, there are characters I have created who I wish to set loose in the
world. These characters always contain parts of myself, and this gives me a chance to lead 100 other lives.
What I'm Working on Now My new collection of stories is Where the God of Love Hangs Out. I have a novel, expected out in 2012, about two sisters in the 1930s.
Readers Frequently Ask I think most readers have questions either about a plot detail that puzzled them or a choice I made that they want me to explain. Very often the questions are more personal. How did I choose an aspect of a character? Why did I let these bad things happen to a character they loved? I answer people both as personally and with as much detail as I can. Usually I can explain why I made the literary decision I did. I can't explain why it affected them the way it did.
Books That Have Influenced My Writing I think writers are most influenced by people they read when they are young, when they are reading only for pleasure and fun, not instruction. The three books that most influenced me as a young reader were:
Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities
Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
Willa Cather's My Ántonia
These are all books with both great scope and great attention to the interior lives of characters who are whole and engaging and real.
These are three of my favorite recipes, none of which I ever make when I'm working hard. But for brunch to celebrate finishing a book, for bringing a new baby into the world, or for any other occasion of great satisfaction and relief, these are the best recipes I know.
Two of my favorite characters in Where the God of Love Hangs Out are William and Clare, middle-aged friends who become lovers. Clare is what I call a “secret cook,” one of those people who cooks for loved ones but who doesn't like to make a big “dinner party” deal out of it. I imagine that William makes a fire and coffee strong enough to peel the paint off your walls on a Sunday morning while Clare makes these eggs and this hash and this drink and they stay in their pajamas all day.
IDIOT-PROOF SCRAMBLED EGGS WITH LOX, LEEK AND DILL
Makes 4–6 servings
3 tablespoons good quality unsalted butter, divided (unsalted Plugra comes to mind)
8 large eggs Pinch of salt
½ teaspoon ground pepper
1 medium leek, white part only, thinly sliced or diced
1–2 ounces cream cheese, smooshed into pea-sized pieces
5–6 ounces lox, cut into narrow strips or square inches
1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill (if you can't get fresh dill, use parsley or nothing at all)
1 Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in large skillet. Whisk eggs, salt, and pepper in large bowl. Add eggs to buttered skillet and scramble over low heat, until almost set.
2 At the same time in a separate skillet, melt 1 tablespoon of butter over low heat and sauté leek in butter for 5 minutes, until wilted. Toss into eggs. Add cream cheese and lox. Stir 1 more minute. Transfer to plates and sprinkle with dill.
RED FLANNEL HASH
Makes 2–4 servings
Note: Allan Benton's Smoked Country Bacon from Madisonville, Tennessee, is as good as it gets. It has a hearty flavor and, if you can't find it, I recommend doubling the amount of regular bacon you'll use in the recipe.
4 slices Allan Benton's Smoked Country Bacon or 8 slices regular bacon (see note)
1 cup chopped Vidalia or red onion
2 large potatoes (Yukon Gold or Baby Bliss are nice), steamed or boiled, cooled and diced (leave skin on)
1 15-ounce can whole, skinned beets, drained and diced (If you want to boil your own and remove the skins, God bless you.)
½ cup whole milk
1 Cook bacon on medium low heat in a large skillet until brown but not crispy. Drain bacon on paper towel. Crumble.
2 Sauté onion in bacon grease until soft. Mix in crumbled bacon, potatoes, diced beets, and milk. Flatten with a spatula to shape like a giant pancake. Cook until heated through, stirring up the bottom crust a couple of times. Make sure there is substantial crust all around; this takes longer than you'd think (about 15 minutes).
3 Serve. (Some people will really appreciate it if there's a bottle of hot sauce and a few extra strips of Benton's bacon on the side.)
THE VELVET SWING
Makes 1 drink
6 ounces champagne
½ ounce port
½ ounce cognac
1 raspberry
Pour champagne, port, and cognac into a glass with a stem (I recommend a champagne flute) and drop in the raspberry.
Jenna Blum
Marcia Perez
SELECTED WORKS
The Stormchasers (2010)
Those Who Save Us (2004)
The Power of Emotion I always write about subjects that have fascinated me since childhood and pair them with an emotional question. For instance, I've always been fascinated with the Holocaust, so it made sense that my debut novel, Those Who Save Us, was set during that time period. The emotional key in the ignition was the relationship between the novel's primary heroine — a German woman trying to save herself and her daughter — and her sadistic captor, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. The question this book asks is: “How far would you go to save your child?”
Storm chasing is the world in which my novel, The Stormchasers, is set. I got into storm chasing partially because I've been enthralled by tornadoes since I was a child and saw one in my grandmother's farm hometown. I've become a storm chaser as an adult. Yes, I'm like the guys on Discovery Channel who chase tornadoes, except I'm a lot more cautious and subdued about it! The storyline of The Stormchasers is about bipolarity; I've had loved ones who are bipolar and watched them struggle with the disorder. The Stormchasers centers on twins: a storm chasing brother who is bipolar, and his sister who acts as his caretaker. How does the disorder, and the events it triggers, twist their relationship? How far does one go to protect a sibling? These are the questions I'm exploring in this novel.
Readers Should Know I'm what one reader kindly called a “method writer.” When I'm writing, I'm 100 percent committed to a project, to the exclusion of everything else except walking my black Lab, Woodrow. I try to immerse in the world of the book as much as possible. When I wrote Those Who Save Us, I listened to German music, read everything I could about Germany, baked every recipe that appears in the novel, and even dressed like my heroine, Anna, with my hair in braids…though only inside the house! For The Stormchasers, I lived within the setting of the book. Working at home in Boston proved too distracting for me — so much shopping potential to lure me away from my deadline — so I went to the small Minnesota farm town where my characters are born and lived in a motel for two months, until the draft was finished. It was a dreamlike, surreal time that I utterly treasure.
Readers Frequently Ask Readers often ask why I left quotation marks out of Those Who Save Us. The answer, along with much more information about both novels, is on my website (www.jennablum.com), but the short version is this: I wanted the novel, which is so much about the persistence of memory, to have an austere, almost sepia atmosphere. The quotation marks, which are very lively pieces of punctuation, were like little firecrackers on the page and disturbed the book's tone, so I left them out. Some readers loved this. Others are much happier that my second novel, The Stormchasers, has quotation marks in it.
One of my favorite in-person reader questions was posed at an event for which I'd gotten a big swirly updo. A woman in the audience stood up and asked, “Is that your real hair?” There are absolutely no questions I won't answer! (Yes, it was and is my real hair.)
Books That Have Influenced My Writing
Sophie's Choice, William Styron: I aspire to be Styron because his novels wed beautiful writing with moral substance.
The Stand, Stephen King: Actually I like any of the very early King works, not because of the horror component but because he does such a great job of portraying what happens to people's psyches under duress. His imagination is so vivid and so extensive — and the man knows how to tell a story. Without a story, you've got only
a bunch of pretty words. What I aim to do is provide my readers with a good story well told.
Shining Through, Susan Isaacs: I love this book about a peppy everygirl-turned-spy in New York City and Germany during World War II. Another example of great storytelling — not letting the telling of the story get in the way of the story itself.
LUVERNE JOERG'S ROMMEGROD
Makes about 12 (1-cup) servings
Traditionally made at Christmas, with lots of cursing and complaining by the cook that her arms are about to fall off.
My recipe is for a Norwegian Christmas pudding called rommegrod (pronounced “room-a-grout,” and indeed it could be mistaken for and function as grout). Rommegrod appears in my recent novel, The Stormchasers, as a favorite dessert of the novel's heroine and hero, Norwegian twins, Karena and Charles Hallingdahl.
Legend has it that, in pioneer days on the plains, rommegrod was served not only at Christmas but also as a strengthener and curative. Norwegian settler women would give birth, be given a bowl of rommegrod, then get up out of bed and resume working in the fields.
I would think this story was apocryphal if I had not myself witnessed the miraculous powers of rommegrod in action. In her late eighties, my grandmother Luverne Joerg broke her hip while living in farm-town Minnesota. Of course, this unhappy event would normally be seen as the beginning of the end, and indeed my grandmother developed pneumonia while she was in the hospital. It was the first time I had heard firsthand what is known as a “death rattle,” which sounded like a bicycle chain in her lungs every time she took a breath. She was failing fast, so much so that she was not expected to live the night. We called the family members in from New York and Arizona, as well as other parts of Minnesota, to say their goodbyes.
While we were waiting, I said to my mom, Luverne's daughter, “Why don't we go to Decorah and get some rommegrod for her and see what happens?”
Decorah, Iowa, is a Norwegian town that prizes its heritage, and one of the cafés there still offers the pudding. We drove three hours from Rochester, Minnesota, bought a take-out bowl of rommegrod, and returned to the hospital.
Table of Contents: From Breakfast With Anita Diamant to Dessert With James Patterson - a Generous Helping of Recipes, Writings and Insights From Today's Bestselling Authors Page 2
