Greenwood, Kerry: Earthly Delights

Book cover description:

Corinna Chapman was once a high profile accountant and banker. One day she walked out on the money market and her dismissive and unpleasant husband James, threw aside her briefcase, and doffed her kitten heels forever. Now she is a baker working in her own business, Earthly Delights, in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, Australia.

Corinna is living in an eccentric building on the Roman model called Insula, composed of eight stories, sixteen apartments, and a lot of strange and interesting people. These include a retired professor of classics, Dionysius Monk; a Dutch gardener named Trudi; Mr. and Mrs. Pemberthy and their rotten dog, Traddles; a pair of disgustingly thin, would-be soapie stars Goss and Kylie; and a jobbing witch Meroe of The Sibyl's Cave.

Corinna is quite content with her cat Horatio and her shop until a junkie falls half dead on her grate, a gorgeous sabra stalks along her alley telling her that she is beautiful, and she starts receiving threatening letters accusing her of being a scarlet woman.

Then it is Goths, lost girls, fraud, late nights, nerds, and beautiful slaves suddenly making life for Corinna livelier. But she still needs to get her bread out in time for the morning rush....

Quotes from book I liked:

p. 13... My vet is Irish. There is something extra reassuring aboutbeing reasured in that buttery God-love-you accent.

p. 120... My mantra is that I am fat because I am fat and ther is not a lot I can do about it. And I have the example of Gossamer and Kyleie always before me. I could not get that thin if I starved for ten years, and that is a fact. We are famine survivors, we fat women, and ought to be valued for it. We must have been very useful when everyone else collapsed with starvation. We would have been able to sow the crop, feed the babies and keep the tribe alive until spring came. If you breed us out, what will you do when the bad times come again? At the very least, you could always eat us. I reckon I'd feed a family of six for a month. Properly pickled, salted and cooked, of course.

There was a reason why the oldest depiction of a human is the Venus of Willendorf, a huge fat woman. We were genetically designed to keep your tribe alive so that the thin people could be born. So be nice. Or at least shut up about it.

p. 159... He was so beautiful that I had to blink to stay conscious.

p. 160... "Why do you find me beautiful?"

"Because you are, " he said simply. "Think of where I have been, what I have seen. In Palestine, thin means hungry, starving, sick. In Melbourne, thin means a child, a heroin addict or an anorexic. I love your flesh, your curves." He caressed my thigh and hip. "May they never grow less," he added.

p. 186... Like an angel who has been given humanity to care for, is sick of the entire species and who is about to petition God to abolish them and try again with the Neanderthals this time.

p. 190... Don't ever tell me that men are more violent than women. They just use different methods. At school I had often thought that a nice, simple, straightforward punch in the nose would be preferable to female methods of torture.

p. 202... If birds suddenly appeared the next time I saw Daniel, I would know that I was in love. Of course, at that hour they would be owls. Or possibly bats.

Recipes from the book:

Muffins

The secret of muffins is a hot oven, a well greased muffin tin and speed. You want to have all the measured ingredients ready on the table, fling them together, give them a fast stir so that the blnd, then glop them into the trays and into the oven before they get depressed and sink. There is nothing to be done with sunken muffins except feed them to a pig or use them as mulch.

Plum Pudding Muffins

2 cups plain flour
1/2 cup sugar
1-1/2 teaspoon biaking powder
1-1/2 teaspoons bicarb of soda
1 cup chopped candied peel, sultanas, chopped dried fruit
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
pinch of allspice
1 beaten egg
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons melted butter
1 tablespoon rum or brandy

Heat the oven to 300*F. Spray the muffin tins with oil. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Mix the egg, milk, butter and alcohol together. Pour it all at once into the muffin mix, stir it with a fork and put it into the prepared tins. Bake for about 15 minutes until the smell cooked but before they are burned on the bottom.

Herb Scrolls

Yeast is a living creature. If you heat it too hot, it dies. If you let it get too cold, it will die. If you want to capture some wild yeast, chop a handful of sultanas and leave them in a jar in warm water until they start to froth. That is the beginning of your mother of bread or starter. Don't do this unless you are prepared to feed it a cup of flour a day and otherwise to care for it like a mother. You can get the same results by adding a cup of rye flour and a cup of blood-heat water to a pint of real ale and leaving it in the sun until it starts to bubble. Water is blood heat when it feels neither cold nor warm in your mouth. Never put cold water in yeast or it will turn up its little pseudopodia and die on you.

If you just want to try the recipe, you'll need:

12g sachet of dried yeast
500g of plain white flour
1 tablespoon sugar
About 300 ml water (blood heat)
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped fresh herbs

Mix everything except the herbs together for a while. If you have a mixer with a dough hook, use it until the dough has combined and starts to pull away from the sides. If you are using yor hands, keep mixing until it does that .. Flour is chancy. If it's too dry, add more blood-heat water. If it's too wet, add more flour. Flub it onto a floured board and knead until it feels elastic (this is one of those things you have to learn by doing, like sex or swimming). Then pat it out into a flattish rectangle like an unrolled Swiss roll. Cover it with a damp cloth and leave it to rise (sticking the whole thing in a clean plastic bag and putting it into a warm bed works).

Preheat the oven to 180*C. Whent the dough is all swollen, spread your herbs and a pinch of pepper on the up side, roll it up and glue the seam together with water. Lay it on the bench and cut it into slices. Cook for about 10 minutes. Tastes gorgeous even if it's not exactly round or is a bit singed at the edges.

Happy Baking!

Well, Corinna is a definite change from Phryne. I like the characters in this book a LOT. Very relatable, if somewhat slightly exaggerated. But that is great. And wouldn't we all want a Daniel in our lives, who appreciates us as we are, not preferring a stick-thin bubble head. I grew to like Phryne (her other series), but instantly liked Corinna.

I also have to say that it appears that Ms. Greenwood is a fan of American TV, like Monk, and probably CSI:Miami, amongst others, if you'll notice her character names. And I know I'm probably missing obvious ones, or maybe even some Australian ones I'm not aware of. But I do remember Charmed, Angel, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and a few others mentioned in the books.

Enjoyed this book, hope you do too.