Michael Baron | The Journey Home

My new novel, The Journey Home, talks about food a great deal. One of the three viewpoint characters, Antoinette, was a sensational and extremely creative home cook when she was younger. Another viewpoint character, her son Warren, is troubled by his elderly mother’s fading away, and though he has never done much cooking, he decides to attempt to recreate her greatest dishes in an effort to keep her rooted in this world.

I’m a relatively serious foodie myself, and I had a tremendously good time writing the food scenes in this novel. I think I might have enjoyed doing that more than any writing I’ve done so far. Partly, it was because I found it an exciting challenge to create brand new recipes on the page (I wanted Antoinette’s dishes to be entirely original). Partly, it was because writing about food and romance at the same time allowed me to engage with the characters at a higher level than I’ve ever engaged with characters before.

A big reason why I enjoyed writing this novel so much, though, was because it reminded me of my own experiences recreating family recipes. My parents were both excellent cooks, so I grew up with a reverence for food and fascinated with how different combinations of ingredients tasted together. When I started cooking for myself, though, I didn’t attempt to make the food that my parents made. Instead, in what I guess was some form of rebellion, I decided to explore the food of other cultures. As a result, I didn’t get nearly as many cooking lessons from my parents as I might have. They were both much older than me, and it wasn’t until they died that I realized that I’d always been assuming that one day I would have them teach me their classic recipes. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, that day never arrived.

When my father died, I decided to pay tribute to him in the way that seemed most appropriate to me. I had a family of my own at this point, and for the next week, I cooked nothing but my dad’s best. The challenge here was that I didn’t know how to make most of it. I’d eaten this food long enough, and I knew enough about cooking, that I could piece together the ingredients. The key, though, was getting it to taste like his.

I waited until the end of the week to make his legendary lemon chicken. People literally talked about it for weeks after trying it for the first time. I’d had lemon chicken in dozens of restaurants, and it never tasted the way my father’s tasted. How he got it to taste that way, though, was a complete mystery. When the day arrived, I tried to envision him making it. I’d seen him do so on numerous occasions, but I’d always watched him casually. If there was some culinary magic trick involved, I’d missed it.

The lemon chicken I made for my wife and kids that night was a pallid facsimile of my dad’s. My family was very polite about it, but we all knew that I’d swung and missed. I took this as a challenge, though. Every few weeks, I’d try again, employing different techniques. Eventually, I created something that tasted very much like his. However, it involved methods I know he never employed. I’d lost his magic trick to the annals of time.

But at least I had a way of conjuring the flavor and, in some little way, bringing him back.