The Recipe Club Novel Inspired Me to Cook and Reconnect

During my summers in France, I used to spend evenings talking to my grandmother, asking her to describe over and over the world of her youth, a world without all the conveniences I took for granted. I felt like I was living the future with my color TV, my VCR, and my shiny yellow waterproof personal cassette player. I would close my eyes and try to imagine living in her world with its big noisy cars and the threat of the Nazi invasion.



When I wasn't poring through my grandmother's photo albums, I wrote letters to my friends back home, tightly scribbled notes on soft airmail paper that crinkled like fragile butterfly wings as I bruised it in my haste to spill my secret crush for some French boy. I waited for the mailman every afternoon at the bottom of her garden, waited for him to come whistling down the lane, hoping he would hand me a rainbow bordered letter addressed to me, filled with the latest school gossip. Those letters were precious, and I ripped them open without even waiting to get back to the house, sitting on a hard rock under the burning sun of the South of France.



I'd love to read those letters today, to remember what I was so passionate about twenty five years ago, to catch a glimpse of that teen me. But they're gone, long gone, and all I remember is the sound of that paper crinkling as I wrote and the sickly sweet taste of licking those envelopes closed.



I just read a wonderful book called the Recipe Club that made me regret losing those letters even more. It's a novel told entirely through a lifetime of letters between two friends who, like me, loved food since they were children.







Writing a book entirely through letters between two people can be tough. How do you create convincing characters, make the reader care for them, without any dialogue, any scenes, other than those described through letters? It's a tricky way to write a novel, and only skilled writers can pull it off.



Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, the authors of the Recipe Club are definitely talented writers. They not only managed to create an engaging story using decades of letters between two friends, they also weaved in dozens of mouth-watering recipes in the novel, engaging not only the imagination, but also the appetite of their readers.



The Recipe Club is the story of Lilly and Val's friendship, two very different girls brought together by their parents' relationship. The story begins with a few letters exchanged between the two as adults, after a long estrangement. The letters quickly become heated as the incident that caused their long silence comes up and stop abruptly, after hinting at a painful betrayal years ago.



The next part of the book goes back in time, back to where their frienship began, in the mid 1960s when the girls were in elementary school. Lilly is flamboyant and self-confident. Val is brilliant but gawky. Although they live in different boroughs of Manhattan, and attend separate schools, they connect and share a love of food. Weeks, sometimes months go by without them seeing each other, and they stay in contact through innocent letters through which their personalities shine. At the end of each letter, each girl gives the other a recipe with names like Mighty Math Muffins and Starry Night Scampi.



Reading the girls' letters is a little like peeking into someone's diary. Lilly's letters are filled with her eagerness to lose her virginity and her mother's many affairs through the exotic recipes they pass on to her to share with her friend. Val's letters are filled with her painful insecurities, even including graphs of all the reasons boys don't like her. When Lilly does lose her virginity, Val sends her a questionnaire with questions like, "Did you get totally naked or did you leave some clothes on?" and "Do you look different?" Lilly is more than happy to answer Val in detail, boasting that she is a natural.



I was charmed by the Recipe Club, hooked by the narrative and enticed by the recipes. It made mewish that I'd kept better track of old friends or at the very least, hung on to our letters to remember who we were and how our friendships ebbed and flowed. Somehow, reconnecting on Facebook as middle-aged moms, posting something on their wall, even tagging old pictures, has none of the charms of those long-lost letters with their passion for forgotten boys and heartfelt apologies for long-forgotten fights.



The Recipe Club is a fun and easy read. I'm sure it will inspire you, as it inspired me, to try a few recipes and reconnect with some old friends.



This review is the first stop for the Recipe Club's TLC Book Tour. Head on over to TLC to see what Cafe of Dreams and others had to say.