Dear Friends,
Food and cooking have been an important part of my life since I was a child. Is there such a thing as gay food? I think those days are long gone. But I’ve heard stories about entertaining habits among sociable gay men in the Fifties and Sixties—before I was out there on the hosting front.
Apparently, men who wanted to have friends over for dinner were faced with the fact that no one knew how to cook. So they prepared mostly the kinds of meals that post-WWII housewives prepared: Lots of “convenience” items in cans and bags and freezer packs combined in sometimes unlikely ways. With the occasional rib roast added in.
We have the “home economists” at the big food companies to thank for those inventions. And the most ubiquitous dish—in gay and straight households—was probably Tuna Noodle Casserole. To the point that it became known, by gays anyway, as Fairy Pudding. In case you haven’t heard of it, I can assure you it is a relic of the past best left buried.
Oh, all right, if you insist, I’ll walk you through it. Take a bag of egg noodles and boil them in some water until they’re overdone. Drain and combine in a baking dish with a can of Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup. I can’t remember whether you have to dilute it with milk or not. Stir in two little cans of tuna—well drained—and top the mixture with crushed potato chips or fried onion rings. Bake in a moderate oven until heated through and lightly browned on top. Serve with pride.
Gradually though, the example of Julia Child and James Beard and other influencers began to waken the American kitchen from its post-war slumber. Beard himself was a gay host, of course, but not of the Fairy Pudding variety, presumably. By the Seventies, I was poaching trout and serving them en gelée. In 1976 I preserved a goose for a giant cassoulet. And I stuffed a whole filet of beef with foie gras and truffles.
I grew more sensible as time went by, I hope. But those mid-Seventies honeymoon years were lovely—at the time and in memory. When I decided to write about the summer of ’76, I realized it couldn’t be a memoir, exactly, because real life seems too random to hang a story on. So I invented half the characters and situations for my Love Trilogy. But I couldn’t resist peppering my stories with lots of food. As I often do now.
So that’s how I happened to write a cookbook companion to YOU’RE SURE TO FALL IN LOVE. It contains recipes for nearly every dish mentioned in the book. The ebook is on sale for $.99 through the end of March at amazon.com and the other platforms—Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, among others. Let me know if the sale pricing isn’t in place yet. I’d like to hear your thoughts on the recipes! I love them all. Thanks for joining me.
Bruce
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