Today I have the privilege of welcoming Meredith Mileti to Chick Lit Reviews. Her debut novel, Aftertaste, was released just over two weeks ago and has been getting rave reviews. My review will be coming up next week, but until then I am excited to share a bit of behind the scenes info from Meredith about how she tested recipes for her novel. So, without further hesitation on my part, Meredith Mileti…

A few weeks into the editing phase of Aftertaste: A Novel in Five Courses, my editor sent me an innocent little email about a dish that Mira, the protagonist in the novel, had prepared. “Mmm… ,” she wrote, “This sounds good. What do you think about including this recipe at the end of book?”

Innocent, right? “Sure, that would be fun,” I replied. A couple of days later, she wrote, “”Oh—how about one recipe from each course?” “Absolutely. Great idea,” I responded, despite the fact I’d never written a recipe in my life. I may not be a professional chef like Mira, but I’ve been cooking since I could hold a spoon and I like to think of myself as a pretty experienced home cook. How hard could it be to write a few recipes? After all, I’d followed plenty of them.

“You’ve got to include the cassoulet,” she said in a phone call a couple of weeks later.

It was then that I started to feel the creeping chill of panic, the inkling that perhaps I’d miscalculated.

No, not the cassoulet. Anything but the cassoulet.

Of course, I had to include the cassoulet. It is the signature recipe of the book, an Italian riff on the French classic dish, prepared to seduce Mira at critical juncture in the story. It was made with wild boar sausage, Barolo, roasted peppers and fennel. And duck confit. Lots of duck confit. It is so delicious that upon tasting it, our heroine exclaims, “It tastes like love,”

The description may be a bit over the top — which arguably it needed to be in service of the story — but the problem was that I needed to make it taste as good as I’d described it. Therein lay the rub.

I had never made cassoulet. I had never cooked wild boar. I seldom soak my own beans. I had never worked with duck confit. And, as if all of that weren’t enough, how could I possibly do justice to the description, “It tastes like love?”

What to do? I did what any self-respecting writer in my position would have done. I procrastinated.

The recipes were due on January 3. As the December holidays approached, the weather turned unusually snowy and blustery even for Pittsburgh, and a little voice in my head kept whispering, “perfect weather for cassoulet… ” At that point, I jumped on the Internet and was surprised to locate good mail order sources for both wild boar and duck confit with only a few clicks of my mouse.

My boar and duck confit arrived a week later, but still I was afraid. Would I be hoisted on my own petard? Done in by duck fat, exposed as an epicurean enticer, a foodie fraud, the culinary charlatan that most surely I am?

My suspicions were quickly confirmed. Being an experienced home cook and being able to develop a coherent recipe are, I found, distinctly different.

While the novel’s food descriptions were intended to have a certain literary panache, translating them into teaspoons and pinches, and directing when to sauté as opposed to braise, well, let’s just say my first attempt was a disaster. It took me nine hours (I had to soak those beans and braise that boar!) and cost me two good kitchen towels that went up in flames. A little known tip for would-be arsonists — if you have any duck fat handy, you needn’t bother with kerosene!

My first attempt most definitely didn’t taste like love. It tasted more like a homeowners’ insurance claim. I bought a fire extinguisher and decided to use canned beans and pork tenderloin for my further experiments.

The week between Christmas and New Years I easily consumed 20,000 calories. Would I live long enough to make that post-New Year’s call to Jenny Craig or would my rapidly clogging arteries take me out first? At least then I wouldn’t have to finish the recipe.

We ate cassoulet every night. I reheated the leftovers for lunch, dissecting what was wrong with each particular version and making complicated notes to structure the next attempt. It became my full time job. My husband, who in over twenty years of marriage had never complained about anything I fed him, suddenly started groaning, “Cassoulet, again?” My teenage son claimed that he had become a vegetarian, although the empty Big Mac boxes I found in the back of our van told a different story.

I started inviting friends, and neighbors to dinner. I got feedback, some of it useful, some, not so much. In the end, the technique was a product of trial and error and did not turn out half bad. Now, how to write the recipe? That I learned from Mira:

“There is an art to the written recipe. Assume your reader only knows so much. Deliver the information clearly and in small doses. Leave just enough ambiguity to allow for interpretation. Each cook needs to find the holes, the tiny gaps that allow her to improvise, to make the dish her own.”

Good advice. It isn’t the first thing I’ve learned from Mira. In fact she has been a fine teacher.

I’ve now cooked it, tasted it, and written it. You supply the love!

Thank you so much for that wonderful insight into Aftertaste Meredith! I’m thrilled to have had you hear today and can’t wait to share my review!

Please make sure to stop by Meredith Mileti’s site and check back here tomorrow when we will have a copy of her debut novel, Aftertaste, up for giveaway to our US readers!

About Aftertaste:
Mira Rinaldi lives life at a rolling boil. Co-owner of Grappa, a chic New York City trattoria, she has an enviable apartment, a brand-new baby, and a frenzied schedule befitting her success. Everything changes the night she catches her husband, Jake, “wielding his whisk” with Grappa’s new waitress. Mira’s fiery response earns her a court-ordered stint in anger management and the beginning of legal and personal predicaments as she battles to save her restaurant and pick up the pieces of her life. Mira falls back on family and friends in Pittsburgh as she struggles to find a recipe for happiness. But the heat is really on when some surprising developments in New York present her with a high stakes opportunity to win back what she thought she had lost forever. For Mira, cooking isn’t just about delicious flavours and textures, but about the pleasure found in filling others’ needs. And the time has come to decide where her own fulfilment lies - even if the answers are unexpected.

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