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 (21 page)

Note:
Tapioca pudding is delicious either warm or cold. Warm pudding is very good topped with a little heavy cream.

Use less sugar if you prefer a less sweet pudding.

1
Place eggs in a medium bowl. Add sugar and tapioca and beat by hand, or with an electric mixer until light and creamy.

2
Place milk in a large saucepan. Pour egg mixture into milk and allow to sit for 5 minutes. Turn heat to medium and stir constantly while mixture comes to a full boil.

3
Remove mixture from heat, add salt and vanilla, and stir. Pour into serving dish. Cool for 20 minutes. Serve warm or cold. (To serve cold: chill for several hours in the refrigerator, covered with plastic wrap.)

Herman Esteves

SELECTED WOEKS

In Season
(2012)

Backseat Saints
(2010)

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
(2008)

Between, Georgia
(2006)

gods in Alabama
(2005)

Inspiration
I'm Southern to the bone, and there is such a strong oral tradition here. I grew up listening to all the storytellers in my family telling and retelling tales that got taller and wider and more epic every time. I think it soaked in.

Readers Should Know
When people ask me what kind of books I write, I am very often flummoxed. Certainly I have been influenced by Southern gothic writers, but my books are published as “mainstream fiction.” That can mean a huge range of things. I think the best way to describe my work is to call it book club fiction. By this I mean, my novels are character driven, but I love plot. I like twists and turns, but there are also things going on under the story, themes and tropes and images, that can fuel good discussions.

I write the kinds of books I like to read, and I am a rereader. You could take any one of my novels down to the beach with a rum drink and race through and have a grand time. And if that's all you want, more power to you. Underneath the kissing and the gunplay — and I like to have both, especially within a few pages of each other — I am often asking questions about identity: What makes us who we are? Genes? History? Our choices? I am consistently interested in exploring redemption, the role of women in the arts, and the effects of poverty, be it spiritual or literal.

Readers Frequently Ask
Book clubs often ask if all the things that happen to my characters have actually happened to me. No, of course not. If I'd lived through everything that happens to all the people in all my books, I would be in a small soft room with sleeves that wrap around and fasten in the back.

Influences on My Writing
I love Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee, though I hesitate to say they have influenced me. It feels presumptuous. I certainly hope the profound impact their work has had on me shows in my own.

Makes 1 (9-inch) pie; 8 servings

Down here in the South, we have a story about how Chess Pie came into its name. I'm not sure what the country mouse version of an urban legend is — a rural legend? But the story goes, a Yankee fella had a big slice of it at a Southern boarding house, and he liked it so much he asked what the pie was called. The lady of the house said something that sounded to the fella's Connecticut ears like, “It's chess pie.” He went home with the recipe and the wrong name. She was actually saying that it wasn't any kind of pie in particular. It was “just pie.” With her thick accent, she said it like, “jess pie,” and he heard it as “chess.”

“Just” Pie is an accurate name for this Jackson family favorite … it isn't any specific kind of pie, exactly. It has no fruit or chocolate or any sort of leading flavor. It's just a sweet, rich, gooey, basic pie. Pie reduced to its lowest common denominator.

My narrator in
Backseat Saints
, Rose Mae Lolley, is walking calmly in bow-tipped ballet flats and a swirly cotton skirt toward Death by Marriage. She's lost her brave, fierce self — the one we see in
gods in Alabama
— inside a girl she calls Ro Grandee. Ro is the perfect wife. Cooking is one of the few things she controls, and she makes a version of Chess Pie for her husband while trying to negotiate a truce with him.

The book begins when Rose meets a gypsy at the airport, one who shares her past and knows her future. The gypsy lays out the tarot cards and tells Ro that her beautiful, abusive husband is going to kill her. Unless she kills him first.

That pretty much puts the kibosh on any more baking.

I chose a chess pie for the scene because Rose is from small town Alabama and it is such a quintessentially Southern dessert. My mother always serves it with black coffee to “cut the sweet.” It's a simple pie and all recipes for it are pretty similar, but this is the way my great aunt Gladys always made it, and her Chess Pie is the very best I have ever eaten.

Note:
I mix this pie by hand, with a wooden spoon for true great aunt Gladys authenticity, but an electric mixer works fine too. I only do it that way because I hate cleaning the mixer.

1
Preheat oven to 425°F.

2
Mix the butter, both sugars, and the vanilla in a large bowl. Stir in the eggs. Add the cornmeal, buttermilk or evaporated milk or cream, and vinegar. Stir until smooth.

3
Pour batter into pie shell, filling to ¼ inch from top of rim. (You may have some extra batter.) Bake for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 300°F and bake until the pie sets up. (The pie is done when the top is golden brown and the filling is not loose anymore. A little center wiggling is okay since this is a very gooey pie. Don't shake too hard because the bad news is a chess pie can “fall.” The good news is that fallen chess pies taste great!) Some ovens will do the job in 30 minutes, others will take closer to 45.

4
Let cool. Serve with strong black coffee.

William Coupon

SELECTED WOEKS

Mudbound
(2008)

Inspiration
Mudbound
was inspired by stories about my grandparents' farm, but the novel grew into something much larger than the family drama I'd originally envisioned once my black characters started to speak. Race is America's great unhealed wound, and I believe that the only way to heal it is through fuller understanding. I wanted to paint a vivid picture of how things really were during the Jim Crow era by showing it from multiple points of view: black and white, male and female, educated and illiterate, oppressor and oppressed.

My second novel is set in a right-wing dystopia thirty years in the future. It was sparked by a conversation I had with my uncle about the criminal justice system, but it really caught fire for me during the George W. Bush years. It's about crime and punishment, but also about the erosion of civil and reproductive rights, the dangers of blurring the lines between church and state, and the inevitability of environmental catastrophe if we don't pull our heads out of the sand and act to stop it.

Wherever the Next Word Takes Me
I don't outline my books, and half the time I don't know what's happening in the next paragraph, much less the next chapter. I basically pull it out of my brain a sentence at a time.

Readers Frequently Ask

Q:
Why did you choose to tell
Mudbound
in six different voices?

A:
I wanted to make the process of writing my first novel as difficult as possible.

Q:
Do you believe in writer's block and, if so, how do you get past it?

A:
We all have days when the writing comes slowly, badly, painfully. Sometimes you have to step away and go refill the well; take a walk somewhere beautiful, see a play, go shoe shopping. But in the end, there's no cure but sitting down with that pristine white page and mucking it up with words.

Q:
Did Ronsel Jackson, the black soldier who is victimized upon his return from WWII, really pull through and lead a happy life as you suggest at the end of
Mudbound?

A:
What do you think?

The Great Storytellers Who Have Influenced My Writing
The writers I love are first and foremost great storytellers who grab hold of you on page one and don't let go till THE END. To name a few: Austen, for her ability to create perfect snow globes, vivid encapsulations of her world filled with indelible characters. Flannery O'Connor, for the way she uses dark comedy to tackle huge themes and shed light on the human condition. Shakespeare, for the magnificence of his prose and the breadth of his understanding. Faulkner, Barbara Kingsolver, Marilynne Robinson, Styron, Ishiguro, James Baldwin and a host of others have made me the writer I am today….

To my knowledge, nobody on my mother's side of the family has ever been thin. This is the Southern side, the side that wore gray in the war (which is pronounced “woe-wah” and refers as a matter of course to The War Between the States). My maternal forebears were Kirkwoods and Betheas and Morrisons and Scarboroughs who hailed from places like Talledega and Charleston and Oxford, Mississippi and who always kept a can of bacon grease on the stove, because almost any Southern recipe that's not a dessert starts with “Heat two tablespoons of bacon grease in a skillet.” These were Deep Southerners, people who loved to cook and eat.

Cliché though it may be, it's almost impossible to overstate the Southern zeal for food — especially the rich, luscious, waist-thickening, artery-clogging kind — or the passion we bring to the act of cooking. I remember the tender look on my grandmother's face when she set a platter of fried chicken on the table in front of my grandfather, and how ardently she watched him take that first bite. In my family, cooking is a form of lovemaking.

How much more so, then, must it have been to cook three meals a day on a wood stove in a shotgun shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing? These were the dire circumstances my grandmother found herself in shortly after World War II, when my grandfather moved her and their two young daughters from the comfort of the city to a ramshackle farm in rural Arkansas. Mudbound was inspired by stories about that farm and the tumultuous year they spent there. And because it's a Southern story, food (along with floods, family discord, forbidden love, and dead mules) figures prominently in it.

Makes 1 (9-inch) pie; serves 6 people with self-restraint, 4 in my family

The peach chess pie mentioned in the first chapter narrated by Laura — the heroine of
Mudbound
who ends up rebelling against the traditions of Southern womanhood in which she was raised — is one of the most prized recipes in my family. It comes from Aunt Faye, a genteel Southern lady known for her highly caloric dishes. She wasn't a blood relation, but her husband, Bob Poole, was my grandfather's doctor. This man convinced my grandfather to have stomach surgery after thirty years of painful ulcers and, as a result, allowed him to enjoy food again. Including Aunt Faye's famous pie.

I like to serve this pie when it's slightly warm but not hot, though it's also excellent at room temperature and makes a deliciously naughty breakfast straight out of the fridge.

Note:
When separating the eggs, take care not to contaminate the whites with any yolk. If you do, try to fish it out with a piece of eggshell or small spoon. Don't use your fingers; the oil on them will keep the whites from expanding properly. Even a drop of yellow will ruin the meringue so, if you're not sure you've gotten every last bit of yolk, throw out the whites and start over. After separating the eggs (reserving 2 yolks and discarding the third), set the whites aside to come to room temperature. Chilled egg whites won't achieve their full volume, and meringue is all about volume. Aunt Faye held a very dim view of any cook who couldn't make her meringue stand tall.

1
Set rack in middle of oven. Preheat oven to 350°F.

2 To make the filling:
Peel and pit the peaches and cut into wedges about ½-inch thick. Set aside.

3
In large bowl of electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar. Add egg yolks and beat to combine. Add flour and salt and beat to combine. Add sliced peaches and stir in by hand (batter will be thick). Spoon evenly into frozen pie shell.

4
Place pie in oven. Cooking time is about 50 minutes. The pie is done when it's golden brown on top, there's no liquidy jiggling, and a knife stuck in the center comes out clean.

5
When the pie is almost cooked, make the meringue: Beat the egg whites at medium speed until frothy. Add the cream of tartar, increase speed to high, and beat until stiff. Add the sugar a tablespoon at a time, beating continuously. The meringue is done when it makes stiff, shiny peaks (check by lifting up the beaters) and doesn't feel grainy when rubbed between your fingers.

6
Remove pie from oven. Spoon the meringue onto the piping hot pie and sculpt it using a small spatula or the back of a spoon so that you have tall, magnificent peaks (they may curl over slightly, but that's just fine). Bake for an additional 10 minutes or so, until the meringue is lightly browned overall, and the peaks are a darker brown.

7
Allow to cool on a wire rack. When you slice the pie, the meringue will be at least twice as tall as the filling if you've done your job right, and you'll stand a little taller too, knowing that you would have earned Aunt Faye's respect.

Makes 4 servings

The Delta is almost as renowned for catfish as for cotton, and this fish is mentioned several times in
Mudbound
. Laura, the heroine of
Mudbound
, would have fried it (and you can't go wrong with fried catfish), but I wanted a more modern twist. So I asked my friend Brian Kaywork, the very talented chef of the Rhinecliff Inn, to create a recipe. He may be a Yankee, but the Catfish Benedict he came up with can only be described as heaven on a plate.

Note:
Preparation time for this dish is about 1 hour.

Clarified butter is pure butterfat, made by removing the milk solids and water from butter. To clarify butter: Melt 1½ sticks of unsalted butter slowly in a small saucepan. Remove from the heat and allow to cool a bit; the milk solids will sink to the bottom. Skim any foam off the top and discard. Pour off the clear liquid — this is the clarified butter — and leave behind the milk solids.

White Lily all-purpose flour, long a staple of southern baking, produces light, fluffy biscuits. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find outside the South. You can substitute a combination of ½ cup all-purpose flour, such as Pillsbury, and ½ cup cake flour.

If you can't find crawfish, you can substitute ½ pound medium shrimp in the shell or 1/3 pound precooked, shelled shrimp. (If you use precooked shrimp, skip the poaching process and just add the shrimp to the completed hollandaise sauce.) For frozen, precooked shrimp or crawfish, defrost in advance, allow to reach room temperature, and pat dry thoroughly before adding to sauce.

Time this recipe carefully. I use one double boiler working for the hollandaise, one pan for the poached eggs, and one sauté pan for the spinach
cooking at the same time
. That should mean that everything will be finished at the same time.