Kitchen tale tantalizes with tasty narrative

J. Ryan Stradal has never been to northern Michigan. Nonetheless, this did not stop him from moving one of his pivotal characters to “a small house in Petoskey, outside the town of Charlevoix,” near the apex of his new novel. “Kitchens of the Great Midwest” is Stradal’s first novel, and as the unconventional love story wends toward its conclusion, Cindy, an aging sommelier at the heart of a mother-daughter divide, lands in the north to salve her wounds. “I wrote about it hoping I’d be able to come,” Stradal says with a laugh about his decision to move Cindy to northern Michigan. As the story unfolds, Eva Thorvald comes of age in Minnesota heartland country before her rise to international culinary phenom, a chef who, as the story concludes, is able to tell her life story “’through the ingredients in this meal.’” Daughter of Lars and Cynthia, Eva traverses the culinary landscape of the Midwest, angling through chapters developed around such traditional foods and recipes as lutefisk, sweet pepper jelly, and venison. Each division concerns the point of view of one or another of the contributing characters, before the story lands at “The Dinner,” where Stradal reunites several of the characters who have drifted in and out of Eva’s sometimes tumultuous but always tasty life. “When I first sat down to write I knew what the ending was,” Stradal says. “I wanted to tell the story of a dinner party through the guests and work backwards.” At that final dinner party, Eva feeds several of those pivotal characters she encounters on her trip from toddler to chef, including Will Prager, Eva’s teenage crush. In high school, Will thought Eva “a woman whose hand he could take and stride into the darkness with.” He thought, “They could fix each other without even trying,” though as with many of the characters that Eva encounters, the fix won’t work. Eva's story unfolds chiefly through the points of view of the other characters. “I decided to put her at a distant point,” Stradal says of his decision to limit Eva’s perspective. Some of these other characters, like Octavia Kincade, do not make the final sit down, but nonetheless contribute important perspective to the developing narrative. Octavia, with a soul “broken like old bread and scattered in the snow for the birds,” fails to see the promise in Eva, though after some time away, when the two meet again, Octavia realizes Eva “hadn’t grown into being a woman, she had become a woman with an exclamation mark.” “I like to write into a story and let the characters tell me what the story is,” Stradal says. Food is central to the story, as it holds the narrative in place while the characters careen through tough times and flush times. The recipes in the book are from a cookbook that belonged to Stradal’s great-grandmother. “I wanted to use old family recipes as much as possible,” he says. Recipes include pan-seared walleye, grilled venison, and dessert bars among others. Less overt but no less important to the story is Stradal’s motif of music. From small Minnesota indie bands to the recognizable strains of Radiohead, Cake, and others, the sounds add a dimension of verisimilitude that enriches the story. “Other than food I think music is the great mnemonic of our lives,” Stradal says. Will Prager’s high school bandmates in the Lonesome Cowboys even believe, “’You might just get a whole album of lyrics from just yesterday alone,’” after Eva presents him with a simple hug after a forgettable date spent walleye fishing. More than a testament on food or music, however, the story is a look at enduring ideas about family. Cindy early on realizes she’s not cut out to be a mother, though she later worries that Lars might have spent “Eva’s entire life convincing her that somewhere, her cruel birth mother still existed as distant and unremarkable as a soldier in a foreign port.” Of course, Cindy could not be more wrong, and that is to Stradal’s credit. His wide-angle blend of character and place illustrate in layers the influences that move Eva from gothic teenage kitchen helper to mysterious, but successful, culinary innovator. In the end, Eva continues to woo diners around the world, while Cindy accepts she must “just live in the world she had created.” Together, this mother-daughter duo provides a wonderful read in “Kitchens of the Great Midwest.”