A recipe for a tart seems as though it should be fairly straightforward instructions for how to make a pastry. However, Nina Killham’s take on the subject in her debut novel, “How to Cook a Tart,” has much darker undertones and involves a not-so-smooth mixture of family dysfunction, butter, mouthwatering food and murder.
Murder, you ask? How does murder fit into an innocent tale of a lively foodie’s devotion to butter and high-calorie recipes? I asked myself the same thing, and unfortunately I have yet to figure out a satisfying answer.
“How to Cook a Tart” seems, at first glance, to center simply around Jasmine March’s crusade to convert the rest of the world to her love for high-fat, high-butter recipes one cookbook at a time. A pleasantly plump author, Jasmine’s greatest love in life is food — and lots of it.
It was her unabashed passion for gourmet dining at every meal that initially drew her and her husband Daniel together, but when he falls in with a Zone-dieting 20-something, it seems things will fall apart.
Daniel, an almost-40-year-old acting coach, is going through a fairly typical mid-life crisis. He begins an affair with a health-food-obsessed young student that quickly escalates from “just once” to her plotting marriage within a three-week time span.
This is just one example of the freight-train speed that governs a majority of the plot line. When Jasmine finally conquers the public’s (and her publisher’s) fear of fat-based recipes, she skyrockets to fame in next to no time, again with little explanation.
When Careme, Jasmine’s anorexic, rebellious teenage daughter decides she wants to lose her virginity to the nerdy boy-next-door, their relationship, if it can be called that, moves so quickly that it is hard to keep up.
Besides the unrealistic pace of the novel, the plot line itself seems to jump around with such irregularity that it is sometimes impossible to figure out how the characters got where they are, let alone why.
The subtext of the novel is unquestionably dark, but Killham leaves so many loose ends that I could not put my finger on what point she was actually trying to make. The cooking of the tart (i.e., Daniel’s girlfriend, Tina) becomes quite literal in the end of the novel when Tina’s dead body appears in Jasmine’s kitchen without explanation, and Jasmine makes the inexplicable decision to dispose of the body the best way she knows how — through cooking.
This unexpected Sweeney Todd-esque turn of events left me taken aback and more than a little disturbed. Killham’s foray into the realm of murder is taken so lightly, I had to wonder if I was missing something, or if that was truly the end of the novel. Though the plot line was thin to begin with, a conclusion based around a practically meaningless murder and its near-heartless treatment was the last nail in this novel’s coffin.
Despite the unsettling and somewhat muddled story, one shining bright spot in the novel is its rich, decadent food commentary — an area in which Jasmine March undeniably excels. Though even this borders on the absurd at times, the descriptions of the dishes Jasmine concocts will undoubtedly leave your stomach growling more than once.
“How to Cook a Tart” has potential, but it fails to follow through. Both the narrative and the subtext leave the feeling that something has not quite been resolved. Really, the only thing the reader can be sure of is that Killham has something to say about foodies and philanderers alike — we just don’t know exactly what that is.