by Dana Bate
Praise for The Girls’ Guide to Love and Supper Clubs
“Foodie fiction has a new it girl! Dana Bate’s debut, The Girls’ Guide to Love and Supper Clubs, is the kind of book you just devour. Hannah Sugarman is Bridget Jones with a killer cinnamon bun recipe, and you will cheer her triumphs in the kitchen while you suffer with her trials in love and life. A delicious read from appetizer to dessert.”
—Stacey Ballis, author of Good Enough to Eat and Off the Menu
“Clever and charming.... The pages practically turn themselves—and thank goodness, because you’ll want both hands free to make Hannah’s mouthwatering carrot cake and other irresistible dishes. An absolute treat.”
—Jael McHenry, author of The Kitchen Daughter
“Dana Bate’s delicious debut tells the story of Hannah Sugarman, whose passion for cooking is an escape from her pressure-filled life—until it causes more complications than ever. Hannah is the kind of heroine you'll root for, the descriptions of food are dangerously good, and Bate adds a healthy dash of humor to the mix.”
—Sarah Pekkanen, author of These Girls
“Hannah is a girl I can relate to. She knows the value of a good carrot cake, and she’s sometimes the most awkward girl at the party. Hannah is like all of us: she has dreams that seem so right and yet, so terrifying. She reminds us that dreams are often chocolate frosted and hard fought, but the key ingredient is believing in yourself.”
—Joy Wilson, author of Joy the Baker Cookbook
dedication
to my parents
contents
Cover
Title Page
Praise for The Girls’ Guide to Love and Supper Clubs
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Recipes
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation With Dana Bate
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
CHAPTER
one
As soon as Adam pulls into his parents’ driveway, I panic: maybe the carrot cake was a mistake. Two days ago, it seemed like a great idea. Everyone loves my carrot cake. Everyone. Even my boss, Mark—a man who subsists on cheese sandwiches and hot dogs—even he loves my carrot cake. But the Prescotts aren’t like everyone else. They drive Lexuses and summer in Tuscany and keep a personal wine cellar at The Capital Grille. Adam’s mother will probably take one look at the cake and call it quaint. That’s what she called me once: quaint. A polite way of saying unsophisticated.
I should have made something fancier, like chocolate mousse. Or a Sacher torte. Why didn’t I listen to Adam when he said bringing dessert was a silly idea? Probably because “silly” has become his favorite word to describe my obsessive interest in food, followed immediately by “crazy.” His criticism functions as muddled background music, like when my parents talk about my “future” and “direction.” The words barely register anymore.
Adam parks the car along the cobblestone circular driveway in front of his parents’ Georgetown home, a pale yellow mansion that takes up the better part of a city block. Among the Federalist brick and clapboard town houses, all sandwiched together along the tree-lined streets, the Prescotts’ stand-alone home towers above the rest, with its creamy facade, jet-black shutters, and series of rectangular columns covered by tumbling sprays of wisteria and knotted ivy. It is one of the most beautiful homes I have ever seen. It is also one of the most intimidating.
Adam smoothes his gelled, chestnut hair with his hands and shoots me a sideways glance as he unbuckles his seat belt. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I say. But of course I’m not okay. Everything about this evening lies outside my comfort zone, and I wish Adam would turn the car around and drive the two miles back to our apartment in Logan Circle, a neighborhood whose character is more vintage thrift shop than vineyard vines. But we’re here, and I have a carrot cake in my lap. Turning around is not an option.
I throw off my seat belt and steal a glance in the car’s side mirror. Disaster. I spent an hour and a half grooming myself, but thanks to the July heat and humidity, my forehead glistens with sweat, and my wavy locks have swollen into a fluffy orange mass. One more thing for the Prescotts to love: their son is dating Carrot Top. Carrot Top with the carrot cake. Perfect.
Adam fumbles for the door handle as I shudder at my reflection. “Relax,” he says. “There’s nothing to be nervous about.”
“I know.” But that isn’t true. There’s plenty to be nervous about, and we both know it. It’s no accident that, in the fifteen months we’ve been dating, this is the first time his parents have invited me to their home, despite the fact that we live in the same city. I would say “better late than never,” but at the moment, the idea of “never” seems just fine.
“Oh, but could you not mention the apartment?” Adam asks. “I still haven’t told them.”
“We’ve been living together for three months.”
Adam scratches his square jawline and looks through the front windshield. “I’m waiting for the right time.”
Whatever that means. We dated for six months before he finally introduced me to his parents. Then, too, he was waiting for the “right time.” At this rate, it will probably be November before he tells them we moved in together. If we’re still together then. The way Adam has been acting lately, I don’t know what to think.
I hop out of the car and follow Adam as he makes his way to the front door, scrambling to keep up as I balance the carrot cake on my arms. “You know I’m the worst at keeping secrets,” I say.
“It’s just for tonight. Please? For me?”
I sigh. “Yeah, okay, whatever.”
“Thank you. We don’t need a repeat of The Capital Grille.”
That’s where his parents took us for lunch the first time they met me, and suffice it to say, the lunch did not go as planned. They immediately sniffed out my lack of good breeding, which came to a head when I accidentally spilled a glass of Martin Prescott’s 1996 Château Lafite in his lap and proceeded to wipe the area around his crotch with my napkin, while uttering a few words and thoughts I probably should have kept to myself. By the time lunch was over, the Prescotts had made up their minds: I lacked the poise and refinement
required of a future First Lady, which meant I was an unsuitable match for their son. I can’t say I blame them.
Balancing the carrot cake on one hand, I smooth my navy sundress with the other, checking to make sure everything is in its right place. The dress’s bulk adequately disguises my curvy figure without looking like a nun’s habit—a strategic move on my part, because although Adam may enjoy staring at my ample bosom, I guarantee his mother will not. Adam is dressed in his typical uniform: navy polo shirt, khaki pants, and penny loafers. A generous squirt of gel holds his dark brown hair in place, and his skin is a toasty butterscotch, thanks to a few summer weekends on the tennis court.
I follow Adam up the broad front steps, past the potted boxwoods and hydrangea bushes, and as we reach the top, the front door swings open.
“Adam!”
Sandy Prescott bursts onto the front steps like a little hurricane of pastels and pearls and frosted hair. She wraps her arms around Adam and kisses him on the cheek, squeezing his shoulders with her bony hands. Martin stands with one hand tucked into the pocket of his salmon-colored chinos and extends the other toward me. Between his boat shoes and Sandy’s pastels, I feel like I interrupted a photo shoot for the Brooks Brothers summer catalog.
“Hannah,” Martin says, grabbing my right hand. He squeezes until I lose feeling in my fingers, the sort of crippling grip one might expect from a high-profile Washington lobbyist. “Good to see you again.”
“Likewise.”
Sandy nods and flashes a quick smile as she glances at my chest, which, apparently, I haven’t disguised well enough. “Hello, Hannah.”
She drags her eyes up and down the length of my figure and makes a light, almost imperceptible clucking sound with her tongue when she spies my faux-leather sandals. Strike one. Two, actually, if you count my unfortunate anatomy.
Sandy tears her eyes from my feet and motions toward the doorway. “Shall we?”
Adam pulls me through the front door into the foyer, a room roughly the size of Alaska with about as much warmth. The ceiling rises fifteen feet, with a crystal chandelier that descends from the top and sparkles like a mini-solar system in the summer sun. A curved staircase sweeps up to the second floor and envelops a round, Louis Quinze table, which sits atop the sleek white marble floor. The entire house reeks of money, even more money than I realized Adam’s family had, and I see now why his parents bristle at my blatant disinterest in Washington society.
“What do we have here?” Sandy asks, pointing to the crinkly mound of aluminum foil perched on my arms. I tried to cover the cake without letting the foil touch the cream cheese frosting—a goal easier in theory than in practice—which means the cake now resembles a fifth-grade science project.
“Dessert,” I say, pausing before mentioning the inevitable. “A carrot cake.”
Sandy smiles tightly. “Carrot cake,” she says, taking the cake from my hands. “How fun.”
Adam sighs. “It’s one of Hannah’s specialties. Making it is at least a two-day project. Quite the ordeal.”
Sandy stares at the mountain of foil and knits her brows together as she shakes her head. “That sounds like an awful lot of trouble for something like a carrot cake. I guess I’ve always figured that’s what bakeries are for.”
She lets out a bemused sigh and carries the cake into the kitchen.
See? The carrot cake was a mistake. I knew it.
What follows is a carefully choreographed dance involving me on one side and the Prescotts on the other. I don’t want to step on the Prescotts’ toes, and they don’t want to step on mine, but really, all of us would be a lot happier if we didn’t have to dance at all. I, for one, would much rather sit along the sidelines and watch everyone else dance while I stuffed my face with candy.
But round and round we go, and the longer we dance, the more the smile tattooed on my face begins to ache and tingle and develop its own pulse. And yet I keep smiling, mostly because I am Adam’s girlfriend and they are his parents and, well, it’s pretty clear whose position is the least secure. I don’t expect the Prescotts to love me by the end of this dinner, but I would like, at the very least, for them to stop calling Adam every weekend to voice their concerns about our relationship while he hides in the bathroom and pretends I’m not sleeping ten feet away in our shared bed. In the scheme of things, I do not think this is an unreasonable goal.
We blow through a bottle of Veuve Clicquot as we nibble canapés on the Prescotts’ brick patio, and the champagne both calms my nerves and impairs my ability to focus on what, exactly, Adam and his parents are talking about. As our discussion progresses around the dinner table, I find myself drifting in and out of the conversation, as if the Prescotts are a TBS Sunday afternoon movie playing in the background while I fold my laundry and send e-mails. I hear what they are saying, and I am saying things in response, but significant periods of time pass where I’m not sure what is going on.
As I float away on my champagne wave, I lose myself in the thorny world of my own thoughts: how lately Adam seems mortified by everything I do, how moving in together has only magnified our differences and obscured our similarities, and how consequently I now feel as if I am in the wrong everything—the wrong job, the wrong relationship, possibly even the wrong city.
I snap out of my trance when someone mentions my name, though I’ll be damned if I can figure out who it was. But everyone is staring at me, so I think it’s safe to assume a question was involved.
“Sorry?”
“Your parents,” Martin says. “How are they?”
“They’re good. On sabbatical in London until October.”
“Wonderful,” Sandy says. She hands her empty soup bowl to Juanita, the Prescotts’ housekeeper. “Your parents do such interesting work.”
My parents are the only part of my pedigree of which the Prescotts approve. When Sandy heard my parents were Alan and Judy Sugarman, both esteemed economics professors at the University of Pennsylvania, she saw a glimmer of hope. I didn’t come from a wealthy or powerful family, but at least my parents carried the sort of academic heft that would look good in a New York Times wedding announcement.
“They aren’t the only ones doing interesting work,” Martin says. “Adam showed us the paper you coauthored on quantitative easing. Very impressive.”
“Thanks—although my boss was the one who wrote it. I only helped with the research.”
“She’s being modest,” Adam says, rubbing my shoulder. “You put a lot of work into that paper. And it showed. It was excellent.”
Martin smiles. “Looks like we have another Professor Sugarman in our midst, hmm?”
It is the question I dread most—and, I should add, the one I get asked all the time. Everyone assumes I aspire to be my parents someday, my every professional choice driven by a deep-seated desire to carry on their legacy. The way everyone poses the question suggests I should want that for myself—that I’d be crazy not to. And so what am I supposed to say when someone like Martin Prescott puts me on the spot? That I’d rather stab myself with a rusty knife than become a professor? That what I’d really like to do is start an offbeat catering company someday, but that my parents would go ballistic if I ever did? No, I can’t say those things, not when it’s clear that the one thing the Prescotts rate me for is a career I no longer care about and a scholarly legacy I want nothing to do with.
So instead I smile and simply say, “We’ll see.”
I grab for my wineglass and take a long sip and then, against my better judgment, I add, “But who knows. Maybe I’ll do something wild someday like start my own catering company.”
Sandy blanches. An obvious disappointment.
“Catering?” Martin chuckles, swirling his wineglass by its base. “Surely you can aim a little higher than that.”
Juanita returns to the dinner table, carrying three dinner plates on one arm and holding the forth in her opposite hand. She hands me the last of the plates, a gilded disk of porcelain filled with roasted
potatoes, green beans, and some sort of meat.
“It’s slow-roasted leg of lamb,” Sandy says as I study my plate. She smiles. “I was planning to serve a pork roast, but I wasn’t sure if you would eat that.”
Ah, yes. The Jew ruins the party once again. The truth is, I love pork. I eat it all the time. But I can’t expect her to know that, and by her tone, it is clear that Jews are as foreign to her as aliens or cavemen.
I tuck into my portion of lamb, and the meat melts on my tongue, buttery and rich with red wine and the faintest hint of rosemary. “Wow, Sandy, what did you put in this? It’s fabulous.”
“Oh, I didn’t make this,” she says as she cuts her lamb into bite-size pieces and pushes most of it to the far corners of her plate, burying the meat under wedges of roasted potatoes.
Adam clears his throat. “Mom has a personal chef.”
“Oh,” I say. Of course she does.
“I’d love to cook,” she says, “but who has the time? I can’t afford to spend two days baking a cake.”
The implication, of course, is that only unimportant people have that kind of time. Unimportant people like me. I wait for Adam to jump in and save me, but instead he shoves a forkful of lamb into his mouth and feigns deep interest in the contents of his dinner plate. For someone with Adam’s political ambitions and penchant for friendly debate, I’m always amazed at the lengths he goes to avoid confrontation with his parents.
“I have a full-time job,” I say, offering Sandy a labored smile, “and somehow I manage.”
Sandy delicately places her fork on the table and interlaces her fingers. “I beg your pardon?”
My cheeks flush, and all the champagne and wine rush to my head at once. “All I’m saying is … we make time for the things we actually want to do. That’s all.”
Sandy purses her lips and sweeps her hair away from her face with the back of her hand. “Hannah, dear, I am very busy. I am on the board of three charities and am hosting two galas this year. It’s not a matter of wanting to cook. I simply have more important things to do.”
