How to Cook a Tart - Hardcover

Killham, Nina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582342695 ISBN 13: 9781582342696

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Nina Killham was born in Washington, D.C. After graduating from the College of William and Mary, she wrote about food for the Washington Post. She lives in London with her husband and their two young children. Her husband does most of the cooking.

Reviews

Food, sex, murder and more food are the subjects of Killham's decadent debut. Jasmine March, a Rubensesque cookbook author and gourmand, is on a crusade to bring her rich recipes to the masses. She lives in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Daniel, an acting teacher who's sliding into a classic midlife crisis, and their 16-year-old daughter, Careme, a frustrated virgin with an eating disorder and a pet python. Jasmine's publisher threatens to drop her unless she can come up with a low-fat cookbook, even though she longs for "the days when men were gluttons and proud of it... when food was prized, not shunned like some leprous disease," and when her so-called friends in the cutthroat food business don't help at all, she menaces one with a cleaver. Meanwhile, the eponymous tart in question is Tina Sardoni, a wafer-thin student in Daniel's acting class, who has a thing for colon cleansing and married men. The latter predilection lands her on Jasmine's kitchen floor, bludgeoned to death by a marble rolling pin. Jasmine is the perfect suspect, but is she the killer? Foodies, celebrity chefs, fad diets and skinny people all get what's coming to them, as Jasmine waxes poetic on everything from butter to bull testicles. Elaborate culinary descriptions and metaphors tend to overpower the rather meager plot, but this amusing satire will delight readers who believe that eating well is the best revenge.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The tastes of Washington food writer Jasmine March run counter to current trends. She relishes high-fat foods and refuses to reduce her substantial frame through dieting. And since nutritional correctness favors only low-carb, low-salt, low-flavor recipes with every gram of fat meticulously tabulated, her career lies in shambles. More troubling, Jasmine's adolescent daughter, Careme, has fallen into distinctly anorexic eating habits. To make matters even worse, Jasmine's seemingly devoted husband, Daniel, has taken up with a mistress who demands he undergo colonic irrigations. Just when everything in Jasmine's life seems about to fall apart, a chance television appearance transforms her into a minor local celebrity. Fat is suddenly in, and the suffering scribe now has a chance to resolve the disparate elements of her life. Although murdering the mistress wasn't in her plan, the woman's corpse suddenly appears in Jasmine's kitchen and demands disposition. In the ensuing comedy of errors, we learn the answer to the question assumed by the book's title. Dedicated foodies will find themselves bemused by Killham's drooling descriptions of foods and wines. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Jasmine March loves to cook and write about rich and tasty food. Unfortunately, her book editor is not convinced that her excessively fattening dishes-caviar canapes and venison stew, to name a few-are the way to go in today's diet-obsessed market. This puts Jasmine's career on shaky ground. To complicate matters, Jasmine's teenage daughter is anorexic, and her husband, Daniel, seems to be spending a little too much time with one of his young theater students. This first novel by a former Washington Post food writer tries hard to be comical and entertaining, but a third of the way through, it gets a bit stale with the food jokes, overwrought descriptions of dishes, rants about food preferences, and numerous caustic observations about food. Killham, however, salvages the story with a taut and darkly comedic ending. Recommended for large fiction collections.
Margaret Hanes, Sterling Heights P.L., MI
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582342695
• ISBN 13: 9781582342696
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256