Animated as a family reunion, intimate as a lovers’ picnic,
American Cookery serves up tradition and innovation in a
family novel based on the joy of cooking. The story is
complete with twenty-seven recipes from the life and
tumultuous times of Eden Douglass.
Eden was born in 1920 into a contentious California tribe,
and the ingredients of her life include her grandmother’s
reserve, her aunt’s instinct for action, and her mother’s
foggy warmth. Seasoned with spicy herbs, and a few bitter
ones, simmered and stirred over time, these instincts shape
her destiny.
Two strong-willed women—her grandmother Ruth Douglass and
her aunt Afton Lance—struggle to pull Eden from the comfy
sloth of her parents’ home. Her ill-matched parents drift
toward financial collapse, and her father, pursuing phantom
wealth, takes the family to an Idaho mining town. He finds
fulfillment in Idaho, but Eden’s mother breaks down, and
Eden must shoulder the household drudgery, burdens not in
keeping with her aspirations to be a journalist.
Eden’s adventurous spirit takes her far from her faith and
family. She falls in love in wartime London and rides a
motorcycle across war-torn Belgium. After the war, still
reeling from a devastating loss, Eden returns to Southern
California and is hired by a newspaper, only to confront
insidious opposition, yet find an unexpected ally.
Then, in 1952, fate puts Eden Douglass in the path of a
runaway horse at Greenwater Movie Ranch, where they’re
filing a B-movie Western. She falls flat on her face, and
Matt March lifts her from the dust. Charming and
charismatic, with good looks, cowboy boots, and appetite for
life, and his VistaVision of the Western, Matt ignites
Eden’s passion. Three months later, they elope to Mexico.
In these exuberant California boom years, Eden nourishes
Matt’s dreams, even though they are sauced with secrets and
larded with debt. He tests Eden’s strengths and his
children’s love.
A big-cast book, American Cookery fulfills the wide embrace
of its title. The novel chronicles the stories behind
family recipes and the lives that touch Eden’s—lives of
horse thieves, ranchers, railroad men, developers, dreamers,
migrants, immigrants, natives, Latter-Day Saints, sinners,
silent-film stars, sidekicks, and stunt people.
The good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful emerge in
these pages as American Cookery serves up the whole gorgeous
banquet of life.
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