How to Cook a Tart (Women's Fiction Series)

Amazon.com
Everything about How to Cook a Tart, the debut novel from Washington Post food writer Nina Killham, is too much. Its heroine, cookbook author Jasmine March, is a rotund creation, a lover of cream and butter and pork and all manner of excess. Food governs her. She's given to ruminations along these lines: "of all the herbs, Jasmine thought, basil was her soul mate. Basil was sensuous, liking to stretch out green and silky under a hot sun with its feet covered in cool soil." Her husband Daniel is having an affair with a woman of the opposite extreme: an actress named Tina who's a skinny-limbed disciple of the Zone diet. Jasmine's daughter Careme is--what else?--an anorexic. Killham pushes these characters off the precipice of probability when Tina is found dead in Jasmine's kitchen, a brownie stuffed in her mouth. This could be a rich comic stew, but though Killham has a firm grasp of cookery, she has poor control over her tone. We're never sure if what we're reading is satire or romance or grotesquerie. It doesn't help that she lifts her conclusion from Roald Dahl. Still, foodie fans of Bon Appétit-style purple prose will find much to admire in the descriptions of Jasmine's kitchen adventures. --Claire Dederer


From Publishers Weekly
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.


From Library Journal
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., MICopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
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


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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


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