Deborah Crombie on the Tastiness of Research

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I've always loved learning about things in the novels I read, whether it's about history, a profession, or an unfamiliar part of the world. So I suppose it's only natural that the same curiosity worked its way into my own novels, and I've had a blast researching all sorts of things for my books, from Cambridge poets to scotch whisky to rowing to guitars to--well, it's a long list.

But not many of these things have been useful in my personal life. As much as I loved writing about whisky distilling in Scotland, I don't actually drink much scotch. Nor have I taken up the guitar (thank goodness), or trained my big lugs of dogs to do search and rescue.

However, in A BITTER FEAST (a.k.a Kincaid/James #18) I actually learned some things that may come in handy!

I have for years been interested in food and professional cooking, and especially in the role of women as professional chefs. 

So I interviewed chefs. I signed up for Masterclasses. I watched cooking shows. And I read, not just cookbooks, but lots and lots and lots of books by and about chefs and restaurants.

Here's a fraction of my research stack.

Not that I've read all of every book, but what I learned was fascinating, and I hope it informed my characters. 

We meet chef Viv Holland in the present day in the very first scene in the book. But in this excerpt, we see her in the first of a series of flashbacks that occur more than a decade earlier.

May, 2006

The first thing Viv did every morning when she arrived at O’Reilly’s was clean the vent hoods, which had been left in the sink to soak. Ibby had mocked her, saying, “Women’s work,” but she was used to that and she didn’t care. Any kitchen she worked in was going to be clean.

“You think any Michelin-starred restaurant has greasy vents?” she asked.

She’d been in enough London kitchens. At eighteen, she’d left her home in Evesham, having saved up the money she’d made working at the cafe next to her mum’s antiques shop, and set off for the city she knew mostly from television shows.

For her mum, the good life had meant her shop. For her dad, a former London banker, it was a smallholding, raising chickens and pigs and his own veg. Viv had helped him in the farmhouse kitchen for as long as she could remember, and the older she grew, the more she loved it. When her friends were listening to The Spice Girls, Viv was glued to MasterChef on the telly and daydreaming about what she could make for dinner.

For her sixteenth birthday, her parents took her to the Michelin-starred Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham. The food had been sublime, beyond anything she had even imagined, as if every component tasted somehow more itself. She’d spent weeks afterwards trying to recreate the things she’d tasted, crying in frustration when she couldn’t duplicate what she’d eaten.

Now, she saw that meal as the moment her future crystallized. She knew then that she was going to cook.

In the five years she’d been in London, she’d worked her way up from restaurant to restaurant, dishwasher to line cook, in some of the best places in west London. A year ago, she’d set her sights on O’Reilly’s in Chelsea. It had the up-and-coming buzz, and Fergus O’Reilly was the chef everyone was talking about as the next Marco Pierre White or Gordon Ramsay. When a job came up on day prep, she’d jumped at it, even though she knew she was good enough to be on the line.

When she sat down for an interview across from O’Reilly in the tiny basement room that served as the restaurant’s office, she’d found herself unexpectedly tongue-tied. She’d seen him in photos, and in cookery and interview segments, but none of that had prepared her for his height, or for how stunningly good-looking the man was in person. With his curly dark blond hair and deep dimples, he was reputed to have women swooning over him, but none of that charm was wasted on her that morning.

“I don’t like women in my kitchen,” he’d said bluntly, with his Belfast accent. He must have seen her start to bridle because he added, “I don’t mean women can’t cook, so don’t go getting all flustered. But women cause problems in the crew and I won’t have any of that emotional shite on my patch, understood?”

“Yes, chef,” Viv had managed to mumble. She was glad she’d worn a t-shirt and kitchen overalls and not a stitch of makeup.

“Good. My day prep cook quit because he said it was too hard. Can you freaking believe that?” He glared at her as if it was her fault. “You’d better tell me now if it’s going to be too much for you.”

“No, chef. I can do it,” she’d said, looking him straight in the eye. She’d started the next day.

It was hard, she found out soon enough, ten hours a day of working her bum off. The job was as much about organization as physical labor, but she liked that, liked the routine and the sense of accomplishment, liked that everything that came off the line at dinner service depended on how good a job she’d done.

Fergus O’Reilly, however, she thought as she dumped twenty pounds of roasted veal bones into a stock pot, was another kettle of fish.

He was mercurial, prone to shouting at the staff over the least little detail, while ignoring things that drove her bonkers, like the dirty vent hoods. But when he cooked, he was absolutely bloody brilliant, making the kind of food she’d dreamed about since that sixteenth birthday dinner. And lately he’d been listening to her suggestions and a couple of her ideas had turned up on the menu.

But she wanted to be back on the hot line—she missed the adrenaline rush of service and the challenge of getting the plates up. When a spot opened up on the line, she was going for it, no matter what it took.

For more about Viv, you'll have to read A BITTER FEAST.  But the question is, did all this learning actually make me a better cook?

Maybe, just a bit. I'm certainly a more educated diner, and I have a huge appreciation for the work that goes into turning out a top-notch restaurant meal. And I had a lot of fun.

Reds, has any of your research come in handy in real life? And readers, have you put to use things you've learned reading novels?

Do tell, AND I'll give an advance copy of A BITTER FEAST to one lucky commenter!

A BITTER FEAST, from William Morrow, October 8th, 2019