Dear Reader,
Today's guest author, Robert McKean says...
Populating my novels and stories are some five hundred characters, steelworkers and bankers, doctors and jewelers, teachers and librarians, lawyers and yardage clerks, salesmen and ballet instructors--all residents of Ganaego, a small mill town in Western Pennsylvania. I didn't set off to write solely about life in mill towns, but once I started I never seemed to finish.
Mending What Is Broken is Robert's latest title. In this bittersweet story about the families we make and we lose, about working class towns and fading dreams, Robert McKean gives us a subtle riff on The Merchant of Venice, as well as the touching and often funny story of a man creating his own second chances in life.
His short story collection I'll Be Here for You: Diary of a Town was awarded first-prize in the Tartts First Fiction competition, and my first novel was, The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts. For additional information about me and my Ganaego Project, please see www.robmckean.com.
Robert is offering five readers the chance to win a copy of Mending What Is Broken. Email [email protected].
Welcome to the book club Robert...
Chocolate Mice
Novel writing can be a foolish business. In pursuit of a character's life, writers seldom know where they may end up. In a bout of lunacy I decided that The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts, my first novel, would be partially set in a chocolate shop in a blue-collar mill town, and not just a chocolate shop but a connoisseur-level shop. What did I know of making chocolate? I'm not even that much of chocolate fancier. And so, when I noticed an announcement in a catalog from L. A. Burdick for a four-day intensive chocolate making workshop to be held inside their factory, I approached my wife.
"How would you like to spend a week making chocolate?"
"You're nuts," she said. "You've always been nuts. Sure."
Burdick manufactures exquisite handmade chocolates. The first morning, the ten of us, the majority of whom already owned shops or aspired to, were outfitted in sturdy canvas aprons and escorted into the factory, where we commenced our study of chocolate by sampling the world's renowned dark chocolates, Manjari, Grenada, Bolivian, Dominicaine, Guanaja, Caraïbe. That week we made lush ganache fillings, Poire Williams, orange-lemongrass pistachio, cherry kirsch; we learned how to temper the finicky chocolate in the heated Felchlin pots; and we tried--futilely, in my case--to hand-pipe and decorate the chocolate mice for which Burdick's is cherished, mouse ears, mouse noses, tiny beady mouse eyes. My mice looked like a genetic engineering experiment gone awry. Afternoons, as we peeled off our stained aprons, the fragrances rising from our hands were enough to induce swooning. Of everything we learned, what we learned most indelibly was, to produce gourmet chocolates, how rigorously time, temperature, and humidity must be observed, how unwaveringly one's concentration must remain.
We designed our own signature pieces. My wife's was a hand-dipped coffee bourbon truffle, a ganache of 74% cacao-content Dominicaine, crushed coffee beans, honey, cardamom, hazelnuts, Maker's Mark, finished with a garnish of salt. My piece, also hand-dipped, was a fig and cognac truffle, a ganache of 64% Manjari, dried figs marinated in port wine, cream, cognac, and garnished with golden raisins marinated in more cognac.
Commencement Day we were each presented with a five-pound box of our creations. Home, distributing our misbegotten mice and weirdly shaped truffles to friends, my wife and I arrived at two resolutions: One, given chocolate's persnicketiness and the labor-intensive process required to create each piece, we would never complain about the prices in a chocolate shop; and two, we would never try to make our own chocolates.
-- Robert McKean
Enter to win a copy of Mending What Is Broken. Email [email protected]. Be sure to include your shipping address in case you're a winner.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
Recent Comments