Dear Reader,
Jennie Goutet, today’s guest author, is an American-born Anglophile who lives with her French husband and their three children in a small town outside of Paris. Her imagination resides in Regency England, where her best-selling proper Regency romances are set. Her upcoming release The Sport of Matchmaking is full of light, witty banter and slow-burn romance. You can learn more about Jennie and her books, and sign up for her newsletter, on her author website: jenniegoutet.com.
Jennie is giving away three copies of The Sport of Matchmaking. To enter the drawing, send an email to Jennie (be sure to include your mailing address): [email protected]
Welcome to the book club Jennie Goutet…
Do you know what I love? Coffee. To be precise, I love pur Arabica black espresso (about 3-4 of them in one cup), especially when eaten with a gluten-free cake.
When I first moved to New York City as a young bohemian, I worked for an upscale wedding dress designer whose studio was located in a downscale area behind Times Square. One block over was Cupcake Bakery where Steven King was reputed to sit and write...or get coffee so he could write. (And now thirty years later, I'm questioning whether or not this was true). The designer would send me to get coffee and cake for the team, and I decided that as a fledgling New Yorker, I should learn to like coffee so I ordered some for myself. I tried it with cream and sugar but soon settled on just cream, with the sugar coming in the form of that slice of cake ordered at the same time.
From there, I discovered and latched on to the hazelnut coffee from the selection at Todaro Bros when I lived on the lower East Side for a few months; and when I moved back to Taiwan to teach English (Manhattan being the gap year for this job) I began to test sweet coffees instead of just the bubble teas. Then, following my Asian stint I moved to Paris, where I discovered from those hissing machines behind the bar the real espressos and cappuccinos that would be brought to my table with a basket of croissants and a little pot of jam. But I was not yet a purist. I would still drink coffee in powdered form with boiling water and milk, even when it was a chicory blend.
Do you know what made the great change? It was not Paris, and it was not moving back to New York with more refined tastes for the bean. It was Nairobi. My husband and I were in East Africa on a sabbatical year doing humanitarian work, and Nairobi was not by choice. It was by evacuation after 9-11. But during those four months in Kenya, we took the little matatu buses to a tiny mall called the Sarit Center. There we would order scones and the most heart-pumping little white mugs of hot coffee I have ever tasted. It was marvelous. And to this day, I seem to be trying to recreate the feeling of that delicious bitter black brew, each sip offset by the barely-sweet crumbling scones. Why?
Because culinary appreciation is part taste and part nostalgia.
-- Jennie Goutet
Jennie is giving away three copies of The Sport of Matchmaking. To enter the drawing, send an email to Jennie (be sure to include your mailing address): [email protected]
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
* This month's Penguin Classics book is People from Bloomington by Budi Darma. I have a copy of the book to share with a lucky reader, so start reading and enter for your chance to win.
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