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Recipes from THE GREAT MAN
When I wrote the The Great Man, it struck me that the people in the book were constantly cooking, eating, or ordering things in restaurants, most of which food I'd never made or ordered myself — for some reason, my characters tend to use different recipes and order different food from what I would choose. I made up these recipes and menus on the page with no idea whether or not they would actually taste good; they all sounded good to me as I wrote them down, and that was all that mattered in the moment. But when the book was finished and about to be published, I started to wonder — what did all this stuff actually taste like?
Using the food descriptions in the novel as a blueprint, I invented and devised, one by one for various willing guinea pigs, the chicken tagine and lentil-merguez stews Teddy cooks for the two biographers, and the omelet she makes Lewis; the cantaloupe soup and salade Nicoise Abigail almost makes for Samantha; the dinner party chef-made meal of primordial soup, water babies, and land babies Maxine ruminates on, and the tuna sandwich she offers Jane, the love of her life, the one she let get away. I even tried my hand (with success) at the trout meuniere and puffball cockles Abigail orders in the restaurant at lunch with Ralph.
Throughout this experiment, each recipe surprised me with its unexpectedly easy inevitability, as if they were all dishes I had subconsciously been waiting to make but hadn't got around to yet. The lentil stew, which I've now made three times, is one of the best of the bunch — simple and very satisfying and warming, perfect for a chilly late-fall night. The cantaloupe soup is robustly flavored and sweet and goes well as a dessert after Abigail's homey, unpretentious twist on the classic Nicoise salad. Maxine's much-vaunted tuna salad sandwich, "the best to be had in Christendom and Jewry," is, in my opinion, pretty damn good. Maxine's dinner-party vegetal consomme and water-baby salad followed by marinated grilled lamb chops with chickpea-mint salad makes a very satisfying meal...As for those popcorn cockles with mango salsa and asparagus, they're now a permanent fixture in my repertoire.
Note: I am an unapologetic user of short cuts such as canned chicken broth (College Inn is my hands-down favorite; I highly recommend the full-sodium, full-fat variety), chickpeas, and tomatoes. You can of course make your own chicken broth, boil your own dried chickpeas, and stew your own fresh tomatoes, but I don't find that this makes the dish better enough to justify all that extra work. But there are two very different kinds of cooking styles, fast and slow; I'm as speedy as they come, so it occurs to me that slow cookers might want to take the time to make things entirely from scratch. I respect that the way a sprinter respects a marathon runner — you're totally nuts, but I gotta tip my hat to you.
Second Note: These recipes are portioned for people who like to eat a lot.
Bon appetit!
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