Sugar and Salt

A compassionate, moving story about two chefs from different worlds who join forces in business and love—their relationship tested by the past.

 

Lingering difficulties from the past simmer throughout Sugar and Salt, a compassionately poignant novel of domestic fiction by author Susan Wiggs.

 

Through a staggered timeline, Wiggs (The Lost and Found Bookshop) builds a romance between two characters who come from vastly different backgrounds: Margot Salton of Texas traveled a long, hard road to become an award-winning chef. As a teenager, she forged her own way in the world after her single mother--a talented cook--died. Tough, street smart and self-reliant, Margot was taken in--mentored--by a kind, hardworking African American couple, owners of an authentic Texas barbecue restaurant until a second tragedy upended Margot’s life. Determined to cut her losses and start anew, budding barbecue master Margot changes her identity and sets off, leaving Texas behind and winding up in San Francisco, Calif., where she meets Jerome Sugar, an African American baker who learned everything he knows from his warm, self-made grandmother, Ida. The single father of two operates Ida’s well-established, popular bakery, ‘Sugar.’ When Margot and Jerome work out a deal to share kitchen space, and she opens her own restaurant next door called ‘Salt,’ the two form a professional bond that leads to romance. However, when complications from Margot’s former Texas life resurface, the couple’s relationship is tested. Can love in the present survive far reaching tentacles from a sordid past?   

 

Hot-button issues from real life events inspired Wiggs to write this complex, thought-provoking novel that depicts how the power of friendship and love can overcome heart-wrenching challenges.

 

Sugar and Salt: A Novel by Susan Wiggs

William Morrow Books/Harper Collins, $27.99 hardcover, 9780062914224, 368 pages

Publication Date: July 25, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE

 NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (July 29, 2022), link HERE

The Recipe Box

The history of a family-run orchard and pie shop enlightens a young pastry chef as she re-evaluates her own life.

Nourishment--especially of the heart and soul--forms the basis of The Recipe Box, a moving novel about the inextricable bonds of family by Viola Shipman (pen name for Wade Rouse). The story is a multi-generational chronicle of the Mullins family of Suttons Bay, Mich., and their agricultural orchard nestled on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Samantha "Sam" Nelson was given her great-great-grandmother's recipe box at age 13. After high school, she chooses to leave the Mullins Family Orchard and Pie Pantry and attend culinary school. She later takes a job at a Manhattan bakery run by a demeaning reality TV chef. At work, she is befriended by Angelo Morelli, a young man who delivers organic produce to the bakery and is trying, like Sam, to chart his own path. When Sam loses her job, she retreats to the family orchard to reassess her life. There, she gains a new appreciation for the long-held family business and the cherished wisdom of her ancestors. But when Angelo arrives for a visit, Sam is torn between staying at the orchard or returning to the New York culinary scene. 

Shipman (The Charm Bracelet) traces more than a century of Mullins family history, showing how the orchard--and those who passionately tended to it--evolved and endured. The inclusion of scrumptious recipes sweeten this wholesome story where food and baking become acts of love. Shipman has sensitively crafted another tender, deeply resonant novel that readers can savor.

The Recipe Box by Viola Shipman 

Thomas Dunne Books, $26.99 Hardcover,  9781250146779, 336  pages

Publication Date: February 7, 2017

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE



NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (April 13, 2018), link HERE