Synopses & Reviews
American Cookery bursts with the joy of cooking and the spice of life--a feast of friendship and family.
High-spirited Eden Douglass is born into a contentious California clan full of headstrong women who vie for her loyalty. The Douglass women are known to borrow trouble as well as time and money. As a child, Eden's hungers are satisfied with merely having enough to eat. As an adult, her appetite for adventure leads her to serve on the European Front, to elope to Mexico with a charismatic film maker, and become a producer in the golden age of television. Eden's life is seasoned with a rich cast of lively characters. All have stories. Some have legends.
Each chapter is followed by a recipe. Readers can share and savor Emotional Cornbread, Book Club Gingerbread, Parti-Colored Salsa, Figs Napoleon, Stella's Sauce and Ginny Doyle's Cowgirl Chili. American Cookery celebrates those women and men whose cooking forges connection across time and miles and through generations.
Animated as a family reunion, intimate as a lover's picnic, American Cookery is a novel to relish and share, satisfying stories in many flavors, and one woman's journey through tumultuous times. Praise for American Cookery
"A prize-winning Seattle writer cooks up a tasty feast of a tenth novel...this fine fictional tale is complemented by tempting recipes."
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Food provides the structure on which Kalpakian builds this novel of a twentieth-century woman's life...a satisfying read."
--Booklist
Praise for Kalpakian
"Kalpakian is generous, gritty, sexy, full of lyrical musings, and funny as all get-out."
--The New Yorker
"Whatever happened to old-fashioned stories, with fleshed-out characters, well-crafted plots, strong themes, and palpable atmosphere? Laura Kalpakian, for one, is still writing them."
--Wall Street Journal
"Kalpakian creates inspiring, thought-provoking, even bewitching characters."
--Baltimore Sun
Laura Kalpakian has received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and the PEN/West Award for Best Short Fiction. American Cookery is her tenth novel.
Review
Praise for American Cookery"A prize-winning Seattle writer cooks up a tasty feast of a tenth novel...this fine fictional tale is complemented by tempting recipes."
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Food provides the structure on which Kalpakian builds this novel of a twentieth-century woman's life...a satisfying read."
--Booklist
Praise for Kalpakian
"Kalpakian is generous, gritty, sexy, full of lyrical musings, and funny as all get-out."
--The New Yorker
"Whatever happened to old-fashioned stories, with fleshed-out characters, well-crafted plots, strong themes, and palpable atmosphere? Laura Kalpakian, for one, is still writing them."
--Wall Street Journal
"Kalpakian creates inspiring, thought-provoking, even bewitching characters."
--Baltimore Sun
Synopsis
Animated as a family reunion, intimate as a lovers' picnic, American Cookery serves up tradition and innovation in a family novel based on the joy of cooking. The story is complete with twenty-seven recipes from the life and tumultuous times of Eden Douglass.
Eden was born in 1920 into a contentious California tribe, and the ingredients of her life include her grandmother's reserve, her aunt's instinct for action, and her mother's foggy warmth. Seasoned with spicy herbs, and a few bitter ones, simmered and stirred over time, these instincts shape her destiny.
Two strong-willed women--her grandmother Ruth Douglass and her aunt Afton Lance--struggle to pull Eden from the comfy sloth of her parents' home. Her ill-matched parents drift toward financial collapse, and her father, pursuing phantom wealth, takes the family to an Idaho mining town. He finds fulfillment in Idaho, but Eden's mother breaks down, and Eden must shoulder the household drudgery, burdens not in keeping with her aspirations to be a journalist.
Eden's adventurous spirit takes her far from her faith and family. She falls in love in wartime London and rides a motorcycle across war-torn Belgium. After the war, still reeling from a devastating loss, Eden returns to Southern California and is hired by a newspaper, only to confront insidious opposition, yet find an unexpected ally.
Then, in 1952, fate puts Eden Douglass in the path of a runaway horse at Greenwater Movie Ranch, where they're filing a B-movie Western. She falls flat on her face, and Matt March lifts her from the dust. Charming and charismatic, with good looks, cowboy boots, and appetite for life, and his VistaVision of the Western, Matt ignitesEden's passion. Three months later, they elope to Mexico.
In these exuberant California boom years, Eden nourishes Matt's dreams, even though they are sauced with secrets and larded with debt. He tests Eden's strengths and his children's love.
A big-cast book, American Cookery fulfills the wide embrace of its title. The novel chronicles the stories behind family recipes and the lives that touch Eden's--lives of horse thieves, ranchers, railroad men, developers, dreamers, migrants, immigrants, natives, Latter-Day Saints, sinners, silent-film stars, sidekicks, and stunt people.
The good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful emerge in these pages as American Cookery serves up the whole gorgeous banquet of life.
Synopsis
American Cookery bursts with the joy of cooking and the spice of life--a feast of friendship and family.
High-spirited Eden Douglass is born into a contentious California clan full of headstrong women who vie for her loyalty. The Douglass women are known to borrow trouble as well as time and money. As a child, Eden's hungers are satisfied with merely having enough to eat. As an adult, her appetite for adventure leads her to serve on the European Front, to elope to Mexico with a charismatic film maker, and become a producer in the golden age of television. Eden's life is seasoned with a rich cast of lively characters. All have stories. Some have legends.
Each chapter is followed by a recipe. Readers can share and savor Emotional Cornbread, Book Club Gingerbread, Parti-Colored Salsa, Figs Napoleon, Stella's Sauce and Ginny Doyle's Cowgirl Chili. American Cookery celebrates those women and men whose cooking forges connection across time and miles and through generations.
Animated as a family reunion, intimate as a lover's picnic, American Cookery is a novel to relish and share, satisfying stories in many flavors, and one woman's journey through tumultuous times. Praise for American Cookery
"A prize-winning Seattle writer cooks up a tasty feast of a tenth novel...this fine fictional tale is complemented by tempting recipes."
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Food provides the structure on which Kalpakian builds this novel of a twentieth-century woman's life...a satisfying read."
--Booklist
Praise for Kalpakian
"Kalpakian is generous, gritty, sexy, full of lyrical musings, and funny as all get-out."
--The New Yorker
"Whatever happened to old-fashioned stories, with fleshed-out characters, well-crafted plots, strong themes, and palpable atmosphere? Laura Kalpakian, for one, is still writing them."
--Wall Street Journal
"Kalpakian creates inspiring, thought-provoking, even bewitching characters."
--Baltimore Sun
Laura Kalpakian has received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and the PEN/West Award for Best Short Fiction. American Cookery is her tenth novel.
About the Author
Laura Kalpakian has received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and the PEN/West Award for Best Short Fiction. American Cookery is her tenth novel.
Reading Group Guide
1) Consider the epigram:
Tell me what you eat; I will tell you what you are, and what it implies in the book. Are these characters what they eat? As their experience expands beyond childhood, do their lives change with their palates? How does food bring the characters together? How does it separate them?
2) Eden Douglass is born in 1920 in a California railroad town. How do the major upheavals of the 20th century influence and affect the course of her life? Not just Prohibition, the Depression and World War II, but social upheavals, immigration, education, radical politics, the advent of radio, TV, and films?
3) Do the Snapshots at the end of each chapter deepen and enrich the story? What purposes do these fleeting glimpses serve?
4) Of the many strong-willed women in this novel, what price do they pay for that strength?
5) The West created the Western. Or did it? Perhaps the Western created the West. What is the role of myth and legend in the novel? What myths and legends do the characters tell about themselves? Why tell them? Why cling to them? Consider not only with regard to Matt March and his Greenwater dreams, but Liza March, Kitty Douglass, Margaret Thorsen, Naomi Bowers, Winifred Merton, Gloria Patterson, Napoleon, Ginny Brothers and others.
6) How are the various love stories and liaisons in the novel connected by and to food and cookery?
7) Of the Douglass women: ATheir instincts were to preside, to direct, and when necessary, to defend.@ How does Afton Lance continue to preside and direct Eden=s life, long after her death in 1965? Can readers defend Afton=s actions? Does Afton both regret and apologize?
8) To write down a recipe is to attempt the impossible: to revel in the pleasures of the moment, and then, to pick up the pen and preserve that moment.@ How do the twin themes of revel and preserve resound throughout the book? What happens to a recipe when you share it? Can a recipe or a family cookbook be its own sort of memoir? Why name this novel American Cookery? Does the title suit the book?
9) What is the role of religion in these characters= lives? Is religion tied to their cooking?
To contact Laura Kalpakian, please email her at [email protected]