Category Archives: Interviews

Q&A with Erica Bauermeister: We’ve got Answers!

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Erica Bauermeister
When we launched Edible Books in the Autumn of 2012 it seemed like such a dream that we would be able to ask the authors to contribute to our conversation, let alone actually have them do it.

But we did, and following the success of our conversation with Nicole Kelby – author of White Truffles in Winter, we are delighted to introduce Erica Bauermeister the author of our February book choice – The School of Essential Ingredients. We took a selection of the questions that you, the Edible Book Club members, sent to us via email and Twitter and put them to Erica. Here are her responses.

Edible Books:  Where did you learn about cooking to enable you to write about it so beautifully? Your descriptions of the food come across so well on the page that you can practically taste them.

Erica: We lived in Italy from 1997-1999.  Before that point, I was ambivalent about food.  I had grown up in a recipe-based household and cooking simply seemed like one more chance to do something right or wrong.  Italy was a revelation — cooking there was a conversation among ingredients.  My job as a cook was to listen and decide which ones went together.  It opened up a whole new world to me — and I think that more intuitive attitude translated over to my writing, as well.

EB: One thing I’m always curious about is where the seed of the idea that developed into the novel came from. Did the idea naturally expand into the book? Or was it changed into something totally different by the time it was done?

Erica: When we returned from Italy I took a cooking class because I missed being around people who loved food.  That first night we killed crabs with our bare hands.  It was an intimate and shocking experience (I don’t even kill spiders), and there we all were, doing this among strangers.  It seemed like such a strange situation and it made me wonder what would happen to a group of people if they stayed together for a period of time, doing that intimate activity of cooking.  What would happen to their relationships?  And what would be the food that would affect each one, take them to the next place they needed to go in their life, just the way killing the crabs did for me?  I like to say I was shocked into fiction – suddenly the structure for a novel just fell into my head: 8 students and their teacher in a cooking school that would last about 9 months.  And while the characters came slowly over time, and some of them changed, the structure never did.

EB:  Who taught you to cook?

Erica: I learned by watching Italians in their homes, and taking a class from an Italian matron.  She was great, and grumpy — she really didn’t want us to use recipes, but she had to write them down for the class so she did everything she could to subvert the process.  She wrote in complicated Italian, used grams instead of ounces or cups.  She basically forced us to experiment.

 EB: Did a person in your life inspire each character? 

Erica: No.  I never write fictional characters based on people I know – it doesn’t seem fair to the real people or the character.  And in the end, I can go so much farther with a character who is only themselves.  If they were based on someone I knew I might feel constrained by reality.

 EB: What is your favorite recipe from the book?

Erica: One of my favorite things in the world is cooking pasta sauces — that slow simmering, the way the smell travels through the house and greets people as they come home.  It just means family to me.  And btw — if you haven’t found them yet, there are recipes hidden on my website:

http://www.ericabauermeister.com/recipes

EB: What are a few of your favorite books?  Especially any food-themed books you have really enjoyed!

Erica: Yum.  Great question.  Here are some favorite food books, in no particular order…

  • Chocolat — Joanne Harris (don’t confuse it with the movie.  The book is much, much better)
  • Garlic and Sapphires — Ruth Reichl
  • The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake — Aimee Bender
  • The Art of Eating — MFK Fisher
  • The Natural History of the Senses — Diane Ackerman (ok, that’s not technically about food, but you sure will enjoy food and cooking more after you read that book!)

You can find a longer list of my favorite books here: 

http://www.ericabauermeister.com/favoritereads

Our thanks to Erica Bauermeister for taking the time to answer questions for our Edible Books community!  Her  new book, The Lost Art of Mixing, is a sequel to our February book, The School of Essential Ingredients.  

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Q&A with Erica Bauermeister: Questions, Anyone?

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We are very pleased to announce that Erica Bauermeister, author of The School of Essential Ingredients, will be participating in our February book discussion with a bit of Q&A.  With a new book out (The Lost Art of Mixing), Erica is busy with book appearances, but she has graciously set aside a little time for conversation with Edible Books.

Erica isn’t on Twitter, so we’ve worked out a creative plan with her to allow all of us to ask her a few questions.  Between now and Thursday February 14th, leave your questions in comments after this post.  Or Tweet your questions to us if they are less than 140 characters!

Have questions about the characters in this book?  The inspiration behind it?  The writing process?  Erica’s favorite authors? Get your questions to us, we’ll relay them to Erica, and she will answer some or all of them.  We will then post the compiled questions and answers here on the blog.

We know this opportunity to interact with the author will greatly enhance our book discussion and our experience as readers.  Our thanks to Erica Bauermeister—and to all of you, for the ongoing conversation!

~Christina & Natalie

Find us on Twitter @ediblebookclub #ediblebooks

If you need more information about Edible Books, please read the participation guidelines here.

A Conversation with N.M. Kelby: Part Two

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Part two: It was auspicious that Nicole Kelby took time to talk with us on October 28th—Escoffier’s birthday.  In the second part of our interview, we learn more about her book White Truffles in Winter, Auguste Escoffier himself, and her work on her new book, The Pink Suit.

Nicole Kelby’s warm and engaging manner make it easy to chat about subjects ranging from her process as a writer to the importance of family meals, from fast food (she admits to the occasional Filet-O-Fish) to Kindle vs. paper books (both, she says).

She has real, hardback copies of various editions of White Truffles in Winter, and shows us a few while talking about her experiences on book tour:  “This is the British copy–this is beautiful.  They did a beautiful job.” She holds up another edition.  “And this–I toured Italy–this is the Italian version.  That was really fun, and the American version is different too.  It’s really fun to see books in different cultures, and to go to different places, and realize how they value books.  When I was in Rome, it was like I was a rock star.  I was on all the television, all the radio, I was in the papers, and the same thing will be true when I go to Poland.  But in America,” she laughs wryly, “Yeah, you know…we’ve got a lot of writers….”

Nicole originally became interested in Escoffier because of her mother, who had been shot during WWII, and seemed to find comfort whenever she cooked from Escoffier’s book.  It was after her mother passed away that Nicole started looking more closely at that book.  She was surprised to find that Escoffier was charming and even funny.  Then she turned to his memoir.

“There was just nothing there–it was just hardly anything.  I thought, ‘Who was this guy?’ Then I found out that Ho Chi Minh was his pastry chef.  Well, that sealed the deal.  I had to figure out who this guy was.  And I think that he was so interesting as a voice in his cookbooks, but it was so difficult to make this stuff.  He simplified French cooking, but it’s still doggone complicated.  I just kind of fell in love with him then.

“I know that the man I wrote about, it’s not really about Escoffier in a way…It’s not really about the real Escoffier. Because obviously I didn’t really write about him–I just used his words and his way in the world to create this world of the plate.”

White Truffles is a work of fiction based on historical facts, dates, and real people.  Nicole shares some of the challenges in that kind of creative process. “Well, the problem was, I got really excited about writing about Escoffier, and then I realized that he had taken all of that money from the Savoy.  And that was like, ‘How much?  And what happened?’ I started looking at the historical documents and I thought, ‘Oh my god’.

He’d been separated from his wife for thirty years.  His wife just took off one day.  And some of his recipes are like, ‘Hey baby!’ They’re dirty.  They are just flat out dirty!

“So I started thinking– it can’t really be about this man.  It has to be about the persona he leaves the world…Because truth is really subjective…And I think this book does look at the idea of what you say about yourself being very telling of who you are.  I really took how he saw himself, and built the whole bones of the book on that.  Now, the fact that he was accused of all this stuff at the Savoy: I’ve seen the documents, I’m going to have to go with probably true.  But at the same time I didn’t want to defame him, because there’s really no need.  So I thought about what could he have done, given how kind he was, and how much money he had raised for charity, and all these kinds of things, so I sort of created a construct about who he really was.  I mean, you have a moral obligation to tell the truth–obviously, always–in a book.  But you also have to be careful.”

We move on to discuss Nicole’s current work in progress, called The Pink Suit, a book about “The most famous pink suit in American history…the suit that Jackie Kennedy wore on the day that her husband was assassinated.” She sparkles with enthusiasm as she talks about the new book, which isn’t really about the Kennedys, but rather the fictionalized story of a real life Irish immigrant named Kate, who did the final fitting and sewing of the suit.  In the course of researching this book, she has gathered an enormous amount of information about this unknown seamstress, her neighborhood, and the painstaking process of creating couture garments.

This book sounds very different from White Truffles in Winter, but there is a common theme that runs through all of Nicole’s several books.

“I think there’s a certain broken-heartedness in all of them.  I believe that novelists are geographers of the heart…there’s some darkness in there, there’s a definite broken-heartedness.  Even if they are very funny and charming, there’s still that.  I lost my daughter when she was very young and I’ve never gotten over that.  And I think I understand loss in that really profoundly deep way, and the idea of allowing people to overcome loss.  When I was a reporter–a television reporter–I was in the field covering all of these shootings and things where I couldn’t change the ending…I was covering these horrible stories.  I see everybody on their worst day as a reporter.  But when you’re a writer you can rewrite it.  You can change it, you can shift it.  It might not be the happiest ending ever, but it’s better.”

Nicole leaves us with these parting words: “Don’t forget to read the back part of the book, because I do think the novel is based on the bones of fact.  The notes in the back of the book are really important.  Let me just finish by reading this.  Because I think this is very important for you to think about.

‘Escoffier’s cookbooks, memoir, letters, and the articles about him created the voice of this character but we all know that I did not write about the real man.  The elegant savage found in these pages is who we all are when we address the plate.  The magician, the priest, the dreamer, the artist—it is our most hungry self.  That is the only fact that truly matters.’”

 

This interview has been edited slightly for readability.  Our thanks to Nicole Kelby for taking the time to talk with us.

A Conversation with N.M. Kelby

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Part One: As we continue to read White Truffles in Winter the author, N.M Kelby chats to us about writing, the lost art of conversation and how to make perfect Sauerkraut.

“Honestly…you’re on Twitter, but how many times do you actually buy something that you read about on Twitter or Facebook?” Nicole Kelby asks us, smiling warmly. We are sitting, three of us in three different time zones chatting via Google Hangout. Her question was lead by our enquiry about how social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have altered the way she promotes her work.  We know she is keen to interact with her fans but she is also very aware that they may not always want to hear from her. What they really want is a new book.

She enquires, “But what’s my job?  [To] chit chat? Or write that next novel? …” She thinks write, and although she is a delight to chit chat with, the positive response that her novels receive are not going to make us disagree with her.

Born to a French/Belgian mother and a Polish father, Kelby was introduced to books and taught the importance of reading at a young age. She admits to and laughs fondly at the memory of creating libraries of picture books for her dolls so they could check out the books themselves and says that she couldn’t imagine being anything but a writer.

Nicole Mary Kelby (photograph credit to Ann Marsden)

Writing is about effective communication, a subject Kelby is passionate about but one she feels were are losing. “We don’t communicate.  We Face Time, but we don’t really communicate…  My husband and I were talking about who we would like to have over for Christmas this year… Well, who could carry on a good conversation?  Who’s interesting? Who has manners enough?  I love someone who’s opinionated and a big pain but well-mannered…  They can be wildly opinionated and crazy, but they can’t come after another guest.  It’s just funny; people have really lost that ability to talk to each other. [But] you go to the movie theatre and people are talking.  Here in America it drives me nuts, you go see a film – we don’t go to films very often – because people will be just talking, like you and I are talking, and it’s like: ‘shut up!’”

Being a writer is a process and one that doesn’t just involve spending the day sitting at your desk churning out the next new novel or article. “It really is like a crazy amount of actual business, where you have to talk to your assistant about stuff, or you have to get things answered, or people want things like photographs or this or that, which is lovely but it’s very time consuming. I can spend until about ten o’clock in the morning just responding to readers who write me, book clubs who want to do things– it’s just really amazing how much physical work there is that has nothing to do with writing”.

After the business has been taken care of the afternoon is spent writing before taking some time to do some language study. When talking about what language she speaks she is quite nonchalant: I’m always learning languages, new languages, and so I’ll try to study Rosetta Stone, and try to work on my Italian.  Right now my Polish publisher is going to tour me in Warsaw in January…So I’m learning a little Polish: phrases like ‘I am frigid’ and ‘where’s the vodka’, and ‘what was I thinking?’

We all laugh, all the important phrases then.

“But the bulk of the day is really spent working on books”, she says as she leans over and picks up the first hundred pages of her new novel. “So what I’ll do is go through it and read it aloud, and I look at the pages very carefully and I read every word. Because if you think of it, you don’t read every word when you read, you just don’t. When you’re editing, you have to read every word. So when I do that, it really makes me understand the work and I try to think of it as another reader…I pick up what I messed up or what I need to illuminate, then I start to find that I’ll push into the next chapter…So there you are; a hundred pages.” We wonder if we are among the first to see these pages.

Not long ago Kelby joined the ranks as a blogger. Her blog At Escoffiers Table is a delightful mix of poetic language and mouth-watering delicious cookery. When asked what makes people cook something at home, take a picture and post it on the internet for the world to see she doesn’t have to think about her response, “…the internet gives everyone a chance to be a star for a moment. It say’s, here my life is good…yes that was a beautiful meal…it somehow validates your experience”.

Even with such a busy schedule, a book to tour and a new one to write, she still finds the time to admire and digest the work of others.

“What is here on my desk?” she says reaching to find a Gerald Stern book of poetry. “It is a beautiful book [and] I’ve been loving this, um, of all things” she laughs, holding up A Clockwork Orange. “…I’ve got to tell you, the sheer inventiveness of the language in here, I mean Kubrick made a film out of this that we all think about, but Burgess’ actual book is phenomenal…what else do I have? There are a few books hanging around here” She disappears off for a second to hunt or more books. “…that was just funny to read A Clockwork Orange on a New York Subway. I hope no one on the subway knows what I’m reading.  That’s the nicest thing about Kindle – nobody can see what you’re reading, so if you’re reading Fifty Shades of Grey, they don’t know!  They’re like, what are you reading? Chaucer!”

She goes on to say about Fifty Shades of Gray:  I haven’t read it… I’ve not heard anybody say, ‘That’s a new Nin, you know… They don’t say that at all, they just go, ‘It’s trashy!’

But how about a book club?

“No.  You know, I barely have time to breathe, really.  It’s funny here.  We just finished our harvest, so my husband and I [do] lots of things like sauerkraut.  And just before I came to talk to you, I put two pecks of apples into crisps to freeze, it’s just kind of like the stuff of your life, and then when I sit down at my desk I fall into the rabbit’s hole of books.  I don’t really have a book club because I don’t ever really get out”.

“We do a lot of krauting” she says, telling us in detail how to create the perfect sauerkraut.  “We do jams and everything, beets.  It’s just two of us, but it’s just so nice to grow your own stuff, know where your stuff comes from.  And that’s very much like the Escoffier book, he was just very much farm to table of course… we grow pumpkins every year now, so we get sixty odd pumpkins, and we use some of them for savoury, and we make pumpkin bread, and jams, and we eat that through the winter…It makes you feel very accomplished”.

With a long running broadcasting career, several best-selling novels, and 100 pages of the next already written, accomplished is exactly how Nicole Kelby should feel.

We will be in conversation with Nicole Kelby again later in the month to talk more about her latest novel, White Truffles in Winter. If you haven’t yet joined the delicious debate, it isn’t too late to join, check out our participation guidelines for more information.

The interview has been edited for readability.