cover image Reckless Appetites: A Culinary Romance

Reckless Appetites: A Culinary Romance

Jacqueline Deval. Ecco Press, $21 (196pp) ISBN 978-0-88001-322-2

A frothy, aromatic concoction of literary references to food, this first novel, although light on narrative, offers the delights of a dinner with a literate friend who is an able, quirky cook. Pomme Bouquin, the daughter of a famous chef in London, pines for a man named Jeremy. Having ``learned from cooking and literature that the finest seduction engages all the senses,'' Pomme peruses the works of Colette, D. H. Lawrence, Lord Byron and Flaubert, among others, to plan the meal that will win her Jeremy's heart. During the course(s) of their romance, Pomme plumbs literature for culinary comfort in periods of despair and rage (when she plans a menu of revenge). Readers are also treated to the slyly competitive correspondence between Pomme's father and a French chef seeking help with an important meal, and to articles written by Pomme for a food magazine (e.g., ``Company of Writers, Coffee, and the Literary Life''). Recipes from writers--English, French and a few Americans--abound in a narrative that, like some broths, is both flavorsome and thin. In her toothsome, sometimes tongue-in-cheek tale, Deval, who is director of publicity at Villard, sieves the literary canon to assign flavor and bite to the emotions of love. (Nov.)