About a decade ago, Macmillan published a PDF: The Nature of the Feast, a compilation of recipes linked to Louise Penny’s novels.
There isn’t a recipe, however, for Valentine’s Day; the most holiday-adjacent novel is Dead Cold [aka A Fatal Grace]. But since the novel opens at Christmas, I’m dissatisfied with claiming it for a February holiday.
But here’s a better option: although linked to The Long Way Home, the most tragic love story in the Three Pines/Gamache series, it’s a perfect Valentine’s Day dessert: a gorgeous chocolate and raspberry mousse.
And I even have Chambord on hand, absurdly. Impulse buy, last winter, for a party. The fresh raspberries are more of a challenge: ours tend to be a bit mouldy, after a long trip from southern climes; much better to wait for July raspberries on the prickly bushes. But I do have frozen.
Compromising when it comes to ingredients is crucial in February. In a few more months we will have local asparagus, and then spinach and strawberries. But for now it’s just kale. A whole herd of heads of kale: black and Tuscan and curly.
So much kale.
When I visited Knowlton, Quebec, a couple of springs ago, I’d anticipated trying Brome Lake duck. But there had a been a cull, after a contagious disease. Instead, we ate rillettes and croissants, endive salads with blue cheese, and local fish. We visited the Sutton bakery/boulangerie that inspires Sarah’s in Penny’s books. We peered into the windows of the museum (closed for the season) and wandered the empty fairgrounds nearby.
This fall, I’ll go back for a longer research sojourn, and I intend to eat my way through the Eastern Townships, starting at the annual Fall Harvest Festival, memorialized in the very first book in Penny’s now-internationally acclaimed and bestselling series.
But once upon a time, Still Life was a book that she couldn’t sell. Writers, take note.
I suspect that Penny’s ability to write about food with such evident pleasure and so little anxiety is one of the reasons that readers feel embraced by her fiction. Food, for women (especially but not exclusively), can be a challenge and a chore. But the female characters in the Three Pines novels eat just as lustily as the men, and that’s a delight. There’s no fussing over calories. Just pleasure.
And this fall I will be able to eat at the café that Louise Penny and co. have now opened downstairs from Brome Lake Books. The Valentine’s photos on Instagram are mouthwatering.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 