Table of Contents: From Breakfast With Anita Diamant to Dessert With James Patterson - a Generous Helping of Recipes, Writings and Insights From Today's Bestselling Authors (20 page)

Note:
This is a rich cake. If you find, as I do, that the chocolate icing seems a little too much of a good thing, try drizzling the warmed apricot jam over the cake just before serving. The sharp tang of the fruit makes a wonderful contrast to the dark chocolate. Bliss!

1 To make the cake:
Preheat oven to 300°F. Line the bottom of a 10″ springform pan with parchment paper. Chop the chocolate into small pieces and melt in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Remove from heat and cool until tepid.

2
In an electric mixer's large bowl, blend the butter and sugar until soft and creamy. Add the melted chocolate, ground almonds, and egg yolks and beat until evenly blended.

3
In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff. Add to the cake mixture, and use a rubber spatula to quickly fold in until evenly mixed. Pour batter into the prepared pan and bake for 35–40 minutes. A light crust will form on the top and the middle should still be a little squishy.

4
Leave to cool for a few minutes before carefully removing the sides. Cool cake on a wire rack. Slide a long knife underneath the cake to release the parchment from the bottom of the cake pan, but leave the cake on the paper.

5
To make the icing: Melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. Stir. Spread evenly over the top of the cake and leave to set. Slide the cake off the paper and onto a serving platter. Drizzle apricot jam over the cake just before serving, if desired.

Laura Dandaneau

SELECTED WOEKS

The Scrying Glass
(2011)

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
(2009)

Inspiration
In 2005, my husband and I moved into the second floor of a little fisherman's house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, that was first built in 1705. I was studying for my PhD qualifying exams at the time, and I started telling myself stories as a distraction from the stress of my academic work. Historical fiction is rather magical that way; who among us hasn't wondered what it would feel like to be transported to a different time? As I wiled away hours at my desk in this funny antique house, where no angle was ever at ninety degrees, I started imagining myself in that same room at different moments in time. What would be in the room with me? How would it smell? Who would be there, and what would they be doing? The story for The
Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
started in just these kinds of ruminations. Someone in that very room, when it was brand new and still smelled like freshly cut pine, had probably been present at the Salem witch trial. What kind of world had that person lived in? How did that world feel different from mine? Most of my work evolves from thought experiments just like this one.

Readers Should Know
I am currently at work on another novel which, like
Physick Book
, will be a story of one of the more macabre corners of New England's past. The novel will take place in Boston in the nineteen teens, a time when the city was starting to look like its modern self but was still very much locked in the nineteenth century. Horse-drawn carts jostled with new electric automobiles; Bostonians poured into the subway to get to work, but still traveled across the ocean by steam ship. The face of the city was changing, growing more crowded, vibrant, and diverse. It was also the end of the spiritualist movement, when many people were passionately curious about the nature of consciousness, of death, and the state of the soul in the afterlife, questions that would grow even more acute after our entry into the Great War.
The Scrying Glass
will visit one Back Bay family caught in the middle of this historic upheaval, and will ask: if you can see death coming, what do you choose?

Readers Frequently Ask
By far the most common question that I am asked, perhaps because
Physick Book
is such a magical story, is whether or not I myself believe in magic. Unfortunately, I have a rather opaque response, which is that there are a number of different points of view represented in the book. There are characters who believe fully in magic; there are characters who are devoutly Christian; there are characters who believe only in the power of the human intellect and will; and there are characters who are still making up their minds. I have had the pleasure of meeting readers who respond to each one of these points of view. My fear is that sharing my own opinion would somehow imply that there is one way of reading the story that is more correct than others. For me, the most wonderful thing about fiction is that it creates so many opportunities for discussion, for thought, and for debate, while also having the power to transport us to a different time and place. Different readers experience books differently. I'm much more interested in hearing what my readers have to say.

Influences on My Writing — Unexpected and Otherwise
My favorite author by far is Edith Wharton, which might surprise some people. But it's not as surprising a choice as you might think. Her Pulitzer Prize winning novel,
The Age of Innocence
, is in effect a work of historical fiction. It is set in the 1870s, but was written in the 1920s. I admire Wharton's ability to select the one specific detail that can then completely illuminate a given scene, and her facility with writing whole characters who are deeply flawed, even unlikable, but with whom we nevertheless sympathize. I also appreciate that Wharton, like a lot of her contemporaries, also wrote ghost stories.
Physick Book
moves across a number of different genres of fiction, and seeing Wharton do the same makes me feel emboldened to add a fantastical twist to the historical novel.

For my next project, I have been reading other novels of old Boston, such as John P. Marquand's
The Late George Apley
. This story was so moving that I cried at the end despite knowing, from the title, that the main character will die. I have also been revisiting Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The House of the Seven Gables
is another tale that deals with the lasting aftershocks of the Salem witch panic, and which has a decrepit old house acting as one of the main characters.
Physick Book
's Milk Street house is in some ways like the impoverished little cottage version of Hawthorne's grand, imposing haunted mansion.

Makes 12–16 servings

The colonists who settled North America did not much care for water, as a rule. They drank it when they had no alternatives, but usually preferred something harder, and plenty of it. Apple cider, peach brandy, beer, corn mash, and rum all served to make life a little more pleasurable, and to turn “training days” into very festive occasions indeed. These different liquors would often be served in different combinations. A good example of this is “flip,” a concoction of sweetened beer spiked with rum and then heated with a hot iron. But the most long lasting, and infamous, of these recipes dates from the sociable Schuylkill Fishing Company of Philadelphia, circa 1732. When, in
Physick Book
, Prue Bartlett meets Robert Hooper in a Marblehead tavern in 1760 to sell her recipe book, they doubtless sealed the deal with something rather like Fish House Punch.

My mother found this recipe when she was working at the New Haven Historical Society in the seventies, and we make it every year on New Year's Eve. It is delicious and is guaranteed to keep your guest room occupied. I include my own preparation instructions.

Note:
Leftovers can be preserved in the refrigerator for at least a few weeks.

1
Fill a medium sized plastic container (approximately 4 cups) with water. Place in the freezer to make ice to serve with the punch.

2
Bring 1½ quarts of water (or water and pineapple juice) and brown sugar to boil in a saucepan. Reduce heat and gently simmer, stirring frequently, for 5 minutes or until the sugar is fully dissolved. Remove the pan from the heat and cool until ready to use.

3
Cut lemons in half. In the most enormous bowl you can lay your hands on, squeeze the lemons, leaving juice, seeds, and most of the rinds in the bowl and set aside. Pour sugar syrup over the lemon juice and rinds.

4
Add rum and brandy. Dash liberally with peach brandy “to make it mellow.” Float block of ice in the middle of the punch. Punch should be served cold. Watch out for sudden outbreaks of dancing.

Makes enough for 4 salad-loving people

When Connie and Liz, the graduate student protagonist of
Physick Book
and her closest friend, first arrive at the strange little house on Milk Street in Marblehead, Massachusetts, they are struck by the wide variety of herbs and plants growing in what is essentially a wild kitchen garden. In colonial America, kitchen gardens and forage would have supplied fresh foods to supplement the heavily salted and preserved staples needed for much of the rest of the year. This first recipe is a kitchen garden and forage salad from the seventeenth century, which will nevertheless be appealing to a modern palate.

Note:
Fresh edible flowers such as marigolds, violets, and carnations are available at specialty grocery stores in the produce section. If you can't find edible flowers, you can prepare the salad without them and it will still be delicious. The flowers add a special touch.

Amounts of mint and sage can vary according to taste; don't be afraid to experiment.

1
Rinse lettuce, arugula, and spinach and pat dry. Combine with chopped herbs and set aside in a salad bowl.

2
Rinse the flowers well, drain, and pat dry. Place them in a small mixing bowl.

3
Peel the cucumber, slice it in half lengthwise, and remove the seeds. Cut cucumber into wafer-thin slices and add to the flowers until they are about equal in proportion. Squeeze fresh lemon juice on to the flowers and cucumbers, just enough to moisten them.

4
Sprinkle sugar over the cucumber and flower mixture and add the mixture to the greens. Toss thoroughly with oil and vinegar.

5
Arrange egg slices around the rim of the salad bowl as a garnish, if desired, and serve with salt and pepper to taste.

Makes 4 servings

There is no dessert that speaks of New England more to me than pudding. Connie Goodwin, the protagonist of
Physick Book
, passes a tense lunch with her dissertation advisor Manning Chilton at the Harvard Faculty Club, and prods listlessly at that institution's famous bread pudding. A “hasty pudding,” made notorious by the Harvard theatrical club of the same name, is really just a term for boiled cornmeal like a polenta, which can either be eaten warm with molasses or maple syrup, or left to set while cold and then fried in butter. Even our local waterside breakfast spot in Marblehead has a rotating selection of daily puddings, ranging from standards like chocolate to regionalisms like Grape Nut. My great grandmother Nana, a firm New Englander frowning her way through many family pictures, has left behind her armchair in my living room and her recipe for tapioca pudding in my kitchen. (My grandmother on the other side, also a New Englander, detested tapioca pudding, calling it “fish eyes and glue.” I rather like it, it must be said.)