The Recipe Challenge - War Cake!

Today I am rising to Rick's food-in-novel challenge, an easy challenge for me to meet, for thirteen years ago, I was not more than ten pages into the first draft of the first book in my Alafair Tucker series, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, when I realized that I was going to be writing a lot about food, and not just any food, but American farm food–heavy, caloric, abundant meals made almost exclusively from what you could grow or slaughter yourself. Because if like Alafair you live on a horse farm in Oklahoma in 1912, and you have ten kids, you’re always thinking about what’s for dinner.

It occurred to me even then that readers would probably be interested in the recipes for these old country dishes that were so common and everyday for my parents and grandparents, so from that very first Alafair novel I have included several recipes mentioned in each story. And not just the recipes themselves, but the food lore that goes along with them. For instance, there are specific ways to eat beans and cornbread, and everyone has her favorite. There are also very wrong ways to make, say, cornbread, (which is bread, Dear Reader, and not cake) if you intend to call yourself a bona fide Southerner.

Thanksgiving is next week here in the States, and I have many fabulous pie recipes from which I was going to choose for this entry, but since the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I has just passed, I'm going to include here a recipe out of my eighth Alafair novel, All Men Fear Me, which takes place in 1917, at the beginning of the American involvement in the war.

The book is not about the life of a soldier, though, or what is going on in Europe, or trench warfare. It is about the American home front. My grandparents were all in their early twenties at the time, and as much as they all loved to talk and tell tales, none of them told me anything about life in the middle of America during World War I. So for most of my life, I’ve had the mistaken impression that the war didn’t have much impact on daily life over here.

Oh, there was impact galore, Dear Reader. But today I’m restricting myself to the impact on dinner. The United States Food Administration, headed at the time by a young man named Herbert Hoover, was charged with making sure that all American housewives were doing their part for the war effort. “Our problem,” said the USFA, “is to feed our Allies by sending them as much food as we can of the most concentrated nutritive value in the least shipping space. These foods are wheat, beef, pork, dairy products, and sugar. Our solution is to eat less of these…and to waste less of all foods.”

So every housewife was encouraged to use as little of the aforementioned foodstuffs as possible. There are several surviving war cookbooks that the USFA distributed to show women how make meals for their families without using wheat, or meat, or sugar, and these are the recipes that I’ve been trying out on my long-suffering friends. To tell the truth, some of them are pretty good.

I found the recipe for War Cake in a 1918 USFA publication called War Economy in Food. Now, I’ve tested out many old recipes in the course of writing this series, and more than once the results have been less than satisfactory. Our modern tastes are different from our ancestors’, and sometimes the old dishes are so heavy and rich that a bite or two is all we can take. Of course we don’t plow the back forty after dinner like Grandpa did.

But the reviews of War Cake were very good, which surprised me a bit because this cake has no wheat, no sugar, and no eggs. It’s dense and moist and even though it has no ginger, it reminds me of gingerbread, or Boston brown bread. Here’s the recipe directly from the booklet. It’s easy to make and delicious. But I warn you, Dear Reader. Low in calories it is not.

War Cake
1 cup molasses (not blackstrap)
1 cup corn syrup
1-1/2 cup water
1 package raisins (exact quantity according to preference)
2 TB fat (vegetable oil)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
3 cups rye flour
1/2 tsp soda
2 tsp baking powder

Boil together for 5 minutes the first nine ingredients. Cool, add the sifted dry ingredients and bake in two loaves for 45 minutes in a moderate oven. (I baked it at 350º F. – Donis)

I like to use golden raisins because they are tender and look nice. I use a 1/2 pound package from Trader Joe’s. The corn syrup I’ve used is plain old white Karo, but I’ve also used maple syrup (which is delicious), agave syrup, honey, and a combination thereof. It’s all good.

Set to Launch and Reading Reviews

My newest Alafair Tucker novel, Forty Dead Men, has finally been released into the world—at last! It seems to me that this book was a LONG time coming. I turned in the final revised manuscript months ago. A few years back I went to a book launch for a novel that was number 12 in a series, and the author said he was currently working on number 14 and could hardly remember what number 12 was about! I’m not that bad, but I have moved on and sometimes have to remind myself that such and such an event happened in this novel and not that one.

I’ve been gearing up for the personal appearances that go with a launch. This always entails a new outfit and a new hair color. I always plan on it entailing a 20 pound weight loss as well, but as yet that goal has never been accomplished.

Forty Dead Men has been released both in paper and as an ebook. If you would like to check it out, I invite you to breeze over to my website where I have have posted the first couple of chapters. I hope you will find yourself intrigued. This week Barnes & Noble has chosen to feature Forty Dead Men on the first page of B&N Press Presents.

The early reviews have been excellent, I am happy to say. I don’t read my reviews as religiously as I did early in my writing career. I like it when the review strokes my ego. I try not to let it bother me if someone is less than enthusiastic. Of course, having said that, I can get dozens of five star reviews and one three star review and the less effusive one is the one I remember. I think that reviews tell me quite a bit about the reviewer. In fact, they may tell me more about the reviewer than they do the book itself.

Readers will often love something about your writing that you never anticipated. They’ll make connections that you didn’t even realize you had put in there, or attribute something to a character’s motives that you didn’t mean AT ALL. Still, once a book is published it isn’t yours any more, it’s the reader’s, so you can’t really complain. (Well, you can, but you shouldn’t) Sometimes reviews are on the nose. A review of one of my early books said, “The writing style is humorous, and odd.”  That pretty much summarizes my view of humankind. All it’s members are very humorous and odd.  That includes reviewers.

My official book launch will be in a couple of weeks. It won’t be a media event, but it’ll be fun and I hope you’ll come if you’re in the area. Here’s your invitation:

Please join me for the launch of my tenth Alafair Tucker Mystery, 
Forty Dead Men

 February 24, 2:00 p.m. at Poisoned Pen Bookstore,
1404 N. Goldwater Blvd, Suite 101, Scottsdale, AZ 85251

I’ll be joined by authors Dennis Palumbo and Priscilla Royal, and Dana Stabenow will join us for a tribute to the late, much beloved Frederick Ramsay.

Please come.

Forty Dead Men is a tragic, bittersweet story of a returning veteran and PTSD. While there’s a mystery, the story actually revolves around Gee Dub. Even if you haven’t read the previous Alafair Tucker mysteries, you can pick up this book. And, if you’re a fan of the Ian Rutledge mysteries, you might want to meet another veteran of World War I. Lesa’s Book Critiques, February 5, 2018

Doomed to Repeat It?

Ah, May already. A beautiful month in much of the country, and very nice here in Arizona as well. Until the end of the month, when the desert summer begins to rear its ugly head. So I, Donis, shall enjoy the relative cool while I can and try not to complain too much when June arrives. At least I no longer live in tornado alley.

Already I digress. Writing is what we wish to to discuss today. Last time I posted here I wrote about having to cut my latest manuscript from 91,000 words to a manageable 85,000 before I sent it in to the editor for her approval. I've noticed that my books are getting longer. The first installment of my Alafair Tucker series came in at just a little over 60,000, which is really short. But with that tale I felt that I said all I need to say. With this book, I had a lot to say, and I hope I didn't oversell the story. I never know. Here's the new cover:

The book was accepted for publication with hardly any editorial changes to the story. I'm doing corrections on the ARC (advanced reading copy) right now. Lots of minor copy editing--a misplaced comma here and an inappropriate italic there. Other than that, the story is in its final form and will hit the shelves in November. The book is called All Men Fear Me, an Alafair Tucker Mystery, and it is set in Oklahoma at the beginning of World War I (for the Americans. The rest of the world had been at war for three years.) The title is lifted from an American propaganda poster that said: I am Public Opinion. All Men Fear Me.

It was interesting and rather difficult to do the research on the American home front. There is a lot of literature about the European home front and about the battle front, but what life was like for ordinary Americans during the war was not as easy to find, much to my surprise. I ended up doing a huge amount of research in contemporary newspapers.

My grandparents were all in their early twenties during WWI, but none of them ever told me anything about life while the war was on. Neither of my grandfathers went. I fear I grew up thinking that the distant European war didn't have much of an effect on folks buried deep in the hills of Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Was I ever wrong. There was a tremendous backlash in Oklahoma when the U.S. declared war on Germany, and when a draft was instituted there was nearly a civil war. Thousands of tenant farmers, workers, socialists, and Native Americans gathered in enclaves in Central Oklahoma and planned to march all the way to Washington D.C., gathering "soldiers" as they went, take the city, arrest President Wilson, and put an end to the war. The group was infiltrated by spies, and before they could put their plans into effect, a huge posse rode on the camp and scattered the rebels. In the end, some 500 people were arrested and 250 arraigned. Only a few dozen of those particular rebels ended up in prison, but some were given thirty year sentences for sedition. The last of them was pardoned by President Taft in 1921, after the war was over and everyone had calmed down.

The uprising came to be called the Green Corn Rebellion, and it helped lead to a big government crackdown on dissension. The laws that were passed at the time to limit civil rights make pretty scary reading.

Forty to fifty years later, I went through the public school system in Oklahoma and was never taught a word about the Green Corn Rebellion, among other unsavory things that had happened during the state's history. At the turn of the 20th Century, the Spaniard George Santayana said, "those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it." Does that apply to trying to erase the shameful past by not teaching it to our children?

An Ugly World

Donis here. Men are outside painting my house. All the windows are covered in opaque plastic and I can't see what's going on. Is it cloudy? Sunny? I am feeling creepily encased in a kind of half-light. But to business...

The gender debate that has been...well, let us not say "raging", but perhaps simmering along for the past few days, has made for interesting reading. I've also found it a bit depressing. Barbara's post on Wednesday nicely summed up a lot of my feelings on the matter so I won't add my two cents.

But if we ever get together for coffee and you'd like to hear what I think, Dear Reader, I'd be glad to give you the entire dollar's worth of my opinion. I've been around a long time and have had a lot of experience being an American woman of all ages and throughout several eras.

In the meantime, let us discuss writing for a bit. I've been working steadily on the eighth installment of my Alafair Tucker series, which is set in the American West during the second decade of the Twentieth Century. The new book, All Men Fear Me, should be published in the fall. The first book in the series, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, came out in July 2005, which means that I've been writing Alafair's story for ten years come this summer.

Writing series characters over a long period of time is like living with real people. When you first meet them, it takes a while to get to know how they think and act, to understand their peccadillo;and to know how they are going to behave in any given situation. But as in any relationship, your characters will surprise you, no matter how well you think you know them. If they don't, you haven't written real people.

Every book I write surprises me. Alafair is raising ten children, and I'm amazed at how each of them is turning out. I mean, I had no idea that this one would grow up to be such a hothead, or that one would be an intellectual, or a tease. Or so self-destructive. Alafair is changing as she gets older, too. She used to be so sure of herself. But then things are happening in the world that affect her and her family, and she has no control over any of it. It's like she said:
"When the kids were little, I thought that if I could just keep them from killing themselves until they were big enough to take care of themselves, then I wouldn’t be worrying about them so much. Turns out I had it backwards. When they were little, I had more charge over what happened to them. But now they’re all about their own affairs, and there’s nothing I can do about it."

It was an ugly world in 1917. I've thought before that writing historical fiction or science fiction is a way for an author to comment on the society he lives in by drawing parallels to the past or future. The more I research what life was like for ordinary people in the early 20th Century, the more I realize that as a species, we humans don't seem to learn anything.