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How to Cook a Tart
by Nina Killham
Published: 2002-10-04
Hardcover : 256 pages
Hardcover : 256 pages
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A dark, wildly funny, and deeply imaginative first novel about the pleasures of food and the perils of marriage.
Cookbook author Jasmine March's life is like a perfectly prepared béchamel-rich, satisfying, and drenched in butter. Pleasingly plump and glowing with health and happiness, ...
Cookbook author Jasmine March's life is like a perfectly prepared béchamel-rich, satisfying, and drenched in butter. Pleasingly plump and glowing with health and happiness, ...
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Introduction
A dark, wildly funny, and deeply imaginative first novel about the pleasures of food and the perils of marriage.
Cookbook author Jasmine March's life is like a perfectly prepared béchamel-rich, satisfying, and drenched in butter. Pleasingly plump and glowing with health and happiness, Jasmine spends her days concocting high-calorie, flavor-saturated recipes.
But even a great béchamel curdles sometimes. Her husband, Daniel, has taken up with one of his Zone-dieting drama students; Careme, her daughter, is bent on starving herselft ot death; and Jasmine's fellow foodies have had just about enough of her astronomically caloric recipes. To make matters worse, her publisher is threatening to cancel her contract. And then there's the samll matter of the dead body she finds one morning on her kitchen floor. It's up to Jasmine to set things right, and she does it with characteristic zeal.
Filled with mouth-watering descriptions of Jasmine's creations- caviar canapés, venison stew with Madeira and juniper berries, crispy chicken breasts stuffed with goat cheese and mint-Nina Killham's smart and spirited first novel is good enough to eat.
Cookbook author Jasmine March's life is like a perfectly prepared béchamel-rich, satisfying, and drenched in butter. Pleasingly plump and glowing with health and happiness, Jasmine spends her days concocting high-calorie, flavor-saturated recipes.
But even a great béchamel curdles sometimes. Her husband, Daniel, has taken up with one of his Zone-dieting drama students; Careme, her daughter, is bent on starving herselft ot death; and Jasmine's fellow foodies have had just about enough of her astronomically caloric recipes. To make matters worse, her publisher is threatening to cancel her contract. And then there's the samll matter of the dead body she finds one morning on her kitchen floor. It's up to Jasmine to set things right, and she does it with characteristic zeal.
Filled with mouth-watering descriptions of Jasmine's creations- caviar canapés, venison stew with Madeira and juniper berries, crispy chicken breasts stuffed with goat cheese and mint-Nina Killham's smart and spirited first novel is good enough to eat.
Editorial Review
Everything about How to Cook a Tart, the debut novel from Washington Post food writer Nina Killham, is too much. Its heroine, cookbook author Jasmine March, is a rotund creation, a lover of cream and butter and pork and all manner of excess. Food governs her. She's given to ruminations along these lines: "of all the herbs, Jasmine thought, basil was her soul mate. Basil was sensuous, liking to stretch out green and silky under a hot sun with its feet covered in cool soil." Her husband Daniel is having an affair with a woman of the opposite extreme: an actress named Tina who's a skinny-limbed disciple of the Zone diet. Jasmine's daughter Careme is--what else?--an anorexic. Killham pushes these characters off the precipice of probability when Tina is found dead in Jasmine's kitchen, a brownie stuffed in her mouth. This could be a rich comic stew, but though Killham has a firm grasp of cookery, she has poor control over her tone. We're never sure if what we're reading is satire or romance or grotesquerie. It doesn't help that she lifts her conclusion from Roald Dahl. Still, foodie fans of Bon Appétit-style purple prose will find much to admire in the descriptions of Jasmine's kitchen adventures. --Claire DedererDiscussion Questions
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