The Memory of Lemon - Softcover

Fertig, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 042527795X ISBN 13: 9780425277959

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The author of The Cake Therapist returns with another sweet and emotional tale featuring Neely, the baker with a knack for finding exactly the right flavor for any occasion...
 
A crisp tang of citrus that is at once poignant and familiar, sharpening the senses and opening the mind to possibilities once known and long forgotten...
 
Claire “Neely” Davis is no ordinary pastry chef. Her flavor combinations aren’t just a product of a well-honed palate: she can “taste” people’s emotions, sensing the ingredients that will touch her customers’ souls. Her gift has never failed her—until she meets a free-spirited bride-to-be and her overbearing society mother. The two are unable to agree on a single wedding detail, and their bickering leaves Neely’s intuition frustratingly silent—right when she needs it most.
 
Between trying to navigate a divorce, explore a new relationship, and handle the reappearance of her long-absent father, Neely is struggling to make sense of her own conflicting emotions, much less those of her hard-to-please bride. But as she embarks on a flavorful quest to craft the perfect wedding celebration, she’ll uncover a family history that sheds light on both the missing ingredients and her own problems—and illustrates how the sweet and sour in life often combine to make the most delicious memories...

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Judith Fertig, author of The Cake Therapist, is an award-winning cookbook author whose food and lifestyle writing has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including Bon Appétit, Saveur, and the New York Times. Judith attended Ecole de Cuisine  La Varenne in Paris and the Graduate Summer Workshop at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She teaches cooking classes across the country and lives in Kansas City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Judith Fertig

Chapter One

Neely

Millcreek Valley, Ohio

Late March

Lydia, the twenty-something bride-to-be, sat stony faced on the settee in my front parlor.

This was not the way I wanted to start the week. Since I’d opened my bakery in Millcreek Valley’s bridal district in January, I had learned a lot about wooing, in the business sense. When I did wedding cake tastings, I took potential clients away from the cheerful light and beveled glass cases of Rainbow Cake and drew them quietly, seductively into the more intimate setting of my home right next door.

Here, I hoped they would be charmed by the French gray walls, the glint of heavy hotel silver serving pieces, the fire in the late Victorian hearth, and the little cakes, buttercream frostings, and mousses I had made for them.

But this bride was unmoved.

We had tried tiny cakes in chocolate, browned butter yellow, poppy seed, white with a faint hint of almond. We’d sampled blood orange, fleur de sel caramel, pomegranate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, pistachio, raspberry, and countless other frostings and fillings. I’d even offered a lemony cupcake with its surprise-inside blueberry filling—our signature flavor combination for March—but to no avail.

Lydia would take a tiny, polite bite and put each miniature cupcake aside on her plate. The more we tasted, the more the reject pile grew, and the more rigid her posture became.

Lydia’s mother had put a substantial deposit down and reserved the date for her daughter’s June wedding—she was lucky that I had just had a bride cancel for that exact day. Booking a wedding cake, a wedding anything, only a few months out was iffy. But money talks loudly enough. The only problem was trying to find a time when Lydia’s “wedding team” could interview her about the millions of details that went hand in hand with a society wedding.

Roshonda Taylor, wedding planner to the stars, was gorgeous as usual in her salmon sheath dress that showed off skin the color of her favorite caramel macchiato. Gavin Nichols, gifted interior designer and space planner, sipped his coffee, careful not to spill on his pristine starched shirt, navy blazer, and khaki pants. If someone had told us back in our blue-collar high school days that as thirty-somethings we would be planning a high-style wedding together, we maybe would have moved our prom from the rickety Fraternal Order of Eagles hall to somewhere more expensive and glamorous. But probably not. We learned early: You have to work with what you’ve got.

And what we had here was a crisis. Somehow we had to navigate the choppy waters between what the mother wanted and what the bride envisioned.

The bride had been putting us off for weeks. And now this.

As a new business owner, I could not afford to have unhappy high-profile clients. Word of mouth was everything to wealthy mothers and brides. Who did your flowers? Where did you get those antique lockets for the bridesmaids? Don’t use so-and-so. You never wanted to have your business name fill in the blank for so-and-so.

I refilled Lydia’s teacup with a chamomile blend and poured more French press coffee for her mother and the other wedding team professionals, who must feel like I looked. My reflection in the silver teapot cast back my auburn hair tied up in a fraying topknot, wide green eyes expanded to extra wide from anxiety, and a now-familiar Claire O’Neil Davis expression—a duck seeming to stay afloat effortlessly while paddling furiously underwater.

I just couldn’t get a read on the bride, other than the obvious.

She didn’t like my cakes.

This was a first.

I was a pastry chef with tons of haute cuisine experience, and I had enjoyed my fair share of success in New York before bringing my skills and myself back home to Millcreek Valley. Just a few short months later my signature desserts were gracing society functions, private dinners, corporate events, and glamorous galas. My wedding cakes were sought after.

So I wasn’t entirely convinced I was the problem here.

I knew that my little sample cakes and the fillings and frostings were delicious, even if Lydia couldn’t recognize it.

But I also knew that my abilities in the kitchen were only part of the secret to my success. It was my other gift, the way I could use my intuition to “read” a client through flavor, that helped me win over the crankiest and most difficult of brides. The ones like Lydia. But something was preventing me from working my usual miracles today.

Every time I tried to turn on my internal flavor Wi-Fi, I got no signal.

This was also a first.

My slightly magical palate was the way I made sense of the world. It revealed an inner state, an emotional core. Sometimes flavor answered the question I didn’t know I had. Just like Gran and my dad, I knew flavor was both a way to read people and a way to understand myself.

Should I have left my New York life behind to start again here in Millcreek Valley? A few weeks back, the comfort of sweet cinnamon had reassured me: Yes, it whispered. One step at a time.

Yet it always seemed easier to pick up on someone else’s flavorful inner state than on my own.

When I sat with clients and opened my mind to them, a taste usually came through. It might be sweet, sour, salty, or bitter. After a moment, it would blossom into a full flavor. The sweet ripeness of apricot, the sourness of a Key lime, the earthy saltiness of Mexican chocolate, the aromatic bitterness of nutmeg.

In a flash, a feeling would follow the flavor. Joy. Skepticism. Lust for life. Quiet acceptance.

And from that feeling would come a memory, a scene called back to present day. A moment whose real meaning and importance I might never fully know.

And I didn’t really need to know everything. I used my gift to see my clients’ stories so I could design desserts—in this case, a wedding cake—to fit each customer like a couture gown, not an off-the-rack dress in desperate need of alterations.

If I got the cake and filling and frosting flavors right, they would resonate with my clients, reaching them in those down-deep places where they would begin to feel that everything really would be all right.

If I got the flavors right.

I couldn’t get them right if I didn’t get an initial impression. What was the deal with Lydia? Why couldn’t I read her?

Usually, by this part of a wedding cake tasting, I’d be casting images of wedding cakes on the smooth plaster walls with my laptop, casually dropping a few celebrity client names from my New York days, and my current clients would be choosing a design.

But we weren’t there yet. And I was beginning to fear that we wouldn’t get there. I looked over at Lydia again, who sat stiff and silent.

“Sweetheart, what do you think of the lemon with the lavender? For a hot summer night, that might be very refreshing,” Mrs. Stidham asked. Her expensively cut and streaked hair and the whiff of $350 perfume from Jean Patou were at odds with her too-tight, too-short leather skirt and the animal print top. Her French manicured nails were immaculate, if impractically long.

The mother had remarried, I assumed, as Lydia’s last name was Ballou.

Lydia moved her plate, piled high with discards, from her lap to the tea table. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. Where her mother was groomed and flashy, Lydia looked like a sixties folk singer. She wore no makeup and her long, curly, mouse brown hair was parted in the middle. She had on a shapeless lace...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 042527795X
• ISBN 13: 9780425277959
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 305
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland