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

352 Pages·2010·2.3 MB·English

by  Judy Gelman

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
JUDY GELMAN & VICKI LEVY KRUPP
Creators of BookClubCookbook.com
Copyright © 2011 by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher;
exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
Published by
Adams Media, a division of F+W Media, Inc.
57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A.
www.adamsmedia.com
ISBN 10: 1-4405-0403-2
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-0403-7
eISBN 10: 1-4405-0928-X
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-0928-5
Printed in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gelman, Judy
Table of contents / Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp.
p. cm.
Includes indexes.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4405-0403-7
ISBN-10: 1-4405-0403-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-4405-0928-5 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-4405-0928-X (ebook)
1. Cooking. 2. Cookbooks. I. Krupp, Vicki Levy II. Title.
TX714.G4465 2011
641.5 — dc22
2010038810
While the copyright for this book as a whole is registered under the authors'
names, the content by individual contributors was provided to Judy Gelman and
Vicki Levy Krupp under various permission arrangements and remain under the
copyright of the respective contributor.
Readers are urged to take all appropriate precautions before undertaking any
how-to task. Always read and follow instructions and safety warnings for all
tools and materials, and call in a professional if the task stretches your abilities
too far. Although every effort has been made to provide the best possible
information in this book, neither the publisher nor the author are responsible for
accidents, injuries, or damage incurred as a result of tasks undertaken by readers.
This book is not a substitute for professional services.
This book is available at quantity discounts for bulk purchases.
For information, please call 1-800-289-0963.
DEDICATION
For our husbands Peter Krupp and Peter Zheutlin
Contents
Introduction
OFFERINGS FROM …
Elizabeth Berg
Sarah Blake
Amy Bloom
Jenna Blum
Ethan Canin
Kate Christensen
Jill Ciment
Chris Cleave
Helene Cooper
Barbara Delinsky
Anita Diamant
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Heidi Durrow
David Ebershoff
Jamie Ford
Lisa Genova
Julia Glass
Amy Greene
Philippa Gregory
Sara Gruen
Jennifer Haigh
Joanne Harris
Katherine Howe
Joshilyn Jackson
Hillary Jordan
Kathleen Kent
Janice Y.K. Lee
Elinor Lipman
Laura Lippman
Margot Livesey
Gregory Maguire
Frances Mayes
Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
Jacquelyn Mitchard
James Patterson
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Tom Perrotta
Jayne Anne Phillips
Katherine Russell Rich
Roxana Robinson
Stephanie Saldaña
Esmeralda Santiago
Lisa See
Garth Stein
Hannah Tinti
Adriana Trigiani
Monique Truong
Thrity Umrigar
Abraham Verghese
Meg Wolitzer
Book and Recipe Pairings
Introduction
Table of Contents grew out of our ongoing infatuation with books and literature.
As ravenous readers with a passion for great literature and delicious food, we are
fortunate to have spent much of the last decade immersed in recipes inspired by
the pages of our favorite books. Give us a slice of Sue Monk Kidd's honey cake
while reading The Secret Life of Bees, and we're happy campers. A mojito with
Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera — sublime.
Through our early research into book clubs and our website,
BookClubCookbook.com, we have confirmed what we had long suspected:
we're not the only ones who feel this way. Readers in general are enthralled by
food, and many have a strong appetite for recipes connected to the literature they
read. Book lovers enjoy being transported to exotic locations and exposed to
new cultures in their reading — sampling unfamiliar foods is part of the journey.
Some book clubs recreate entire menus to reflect a reading selection, conceive
unusual dinner themes based on a book, or research a passing reference made to
a dish to serve at their meetings. Countless book club members have shared with
us the joy of using food to enhance and enliven their meetings. As one visitor to
our website recently wrote, “our greatest pleasures in life include both good
books and good food!”
In 2002, we teamed up to create a food and literature resource for book clubs.
The Book Club Cookbook (Tarcher/Penguin, 2004) matched 100 top book club
reading selections with recipes drawn from or inspired by those books. This was
followed by a guide for youth book groups, The Kids' Book Club Book
(Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), which included recipes and activities designed to
enhance the reading experience for children and young adults. Our two websites,
BookClubCookbook.com and KidsBookClubBook.com, offer recipes and
resources for lovers of food and literature. They allow us to stay connected with
book clubs and avid readers, offer current resources to book clubs, and help
bring authors and readers together. BookClubCookbook.com has become a
destination for readers hungry for new and updated author recipes. Here you can
find our online “cookbook” of culinary/literary treasures, including Elizabeth
Strout's recipe for the doughnuts that her character Olive Kitteridge adores, and
the famous Chocolate Pie that Minny bakes in Kathryn Stockett's The Help.
Besides tapping the creativity of book clubs, we have frequently turned to
authors for recipes inspired by their own writing and this book is the result. Food
is often used as a plot device, a way of establishing historical or cultural context,
or a method for revealing character in literature. But what we find most
fascinating are the stories behind these references. Why did a certain dish appear
in a particular scene? Did the author simply imagine the dish? Was it a family
recipe? Was it something drawn from the author's travels or life experience? In
short, was there a reason a particular food or recipe worked its way into their
writing? Authors answered these questions, and through recipes and notes shared
their family histories, interests and ambitions, the origin of their characters, or
the meaning of their books' settings.
The result is the book you hold in your hands.
For this, our latest book, we chose the fifty authors featured in its pages — from
famous and well established writers to a new generation of up and coming
literary lights — for their proven appeal to readers. We didn't choose authors
simply because their novels or memoirs had culinary themes; we wanted to
include authors whose books we know readers and book clubs love.
Many writers were thrilled to participate; they had previously given thought to
the role of food in their writing and therefore welcomed the chance to share their
culinary creativity with readers. Novelist Barbara Delinsky describes herself as a
“noncook,” but says “I cook vicariously through my characters. The opportunity
to offer readers a recipe is a gift that not only brings attention to a special
element of my book, but has drawn in readers who have never read me before.”
Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, perhaps said it best when she ruminated about
the early influences of food and its symbolic and practical role in literature:
I think tastes and smells are particularly evocative to us because as newborns we
first experience the world through those two senses. That means that our
emotional response to a taste or a smell (think of Proust and his lime-blossom
tisane) can act upon us at a very powerful, subconscious level. This is also true
in literature, folk tales, and mythology, where food and drink have played an
important symbolic role for centuries.
In more recent literature, such references provide a handy means of reflecting
different cultures and distant places. It's also a very useful indicator of
personality. Eating habits provide us with an insight into a person's background,