Holidays always include memories of family and food for me, some of them delightful and others best not repeated. My family’s nineteenth century plum cake recipe still results in a glorious dessert and nobody has ever made sage stuffing as well as my grandfather did. Period. On the other hand, my mother’s tuna fish and cranberry mold tasted better than you might expect the only time I ever ate it.
I love to work descriptions of food into my novels. The recipes in The Irish Devil come from a period cookbook my grandmother gave me and a period travel guide to Arizona. (Who’d have thought ham was the priciest meat around back then???) The River Devil’s menus came from travelers exclaiming over the fine food available on board riverboats, especially its incredible freshness. I like to imagine my characters savoring a particularly delightful morsel, when it’s part of a reunion with friends. Or how easily inexperienced men could have ruined bean soup for dinner. (Nothing like scorching the bottom of the pan or not getting all the rocks and sand out to make beans the next best thing to inedible!)
What foods mean holidays and family – or friends – to you? Do any meals stand out in your mind?
I have a $25 Starbucks gift card for somebody who mentions food. I’ll pick a winner at random by Monday and will post it in the comments section.
