Tasty Summer Reads Blog Hop!

Welcome to the Tasty Summer Reads Blog Hop! It's a good thing we are doing this during the summer, when I have a fighting chance to work off Christy English's apple pie tartlets or Prue Batten's hazelnut chocolate cookies. Sweet nibbles and a great book - heaven!

My thanks to Anna Belfrage for inviting me to play, and more thanks to Karen Aminadra for being the next to hop into the game! Here’s how the blog hop works: each author invites up to five other authors to answer five questions about their current summer releases or WIP and to add a tasty recipe to go with it. We can all find some great new recipes - and some great new books - to try!

The Reputed Wife

The Reputed Wife is my 2013 historical fiction novel about Herodias (Long) Hicks Gardner Porter. You might be able to guess from her name that Herodias was one of early New England's most colorful women, due to her messy, and highly modern marital history.

Herodias is also remembered for standing up to Massachusetts' Puritan government. She  carried a nursing infant sixty miles from her Newport, Rhode Island, through Wampanoag Indian territory, to protest the whipping of Quaker missionaries by the Puritans. For her boldness, Herodias was stripped to her waist and whipped in the public square. This bold act is what inspired me to write about Herodias. 

Now for some tasty questions:

1) When writing, are you a snacker? If so, sweet, or salty?
Sometimes I perk up my brain in the afternoon with a few cherries or grapes (no keyboard crumbs allowed!). However I have a bottle of tea beside me during most daylight hours. Cold, hot, tepid, I don't care which, just so long as there is plenty.

2) Are you an outliner, or someone who writes by the seat of their pants?
I begin with a timeline of the known facts in Herodias Long's life. She left a record of her early and mid-life - remarkable for a woman in her day - when she described her marital woes while asking for a separation from an unsuitable husband. A transcript is on my website at http://www.rebelpuritan.com/More.html.

With timeline in hand, I strike off in grand seat-of-pants fashion, and half the fun is seeing where Herodias takes me next.

3)When cooking, do you follow a recipe, or do you wing it?
I cook like I write - start with a framework, and take off from there.  We still have recipe cards written by my grandmother Gardner (7th-great granddaughter of Herodias Gardner). They tell me to add a large pinch of cinnamon, or lard (!) the size of a big hen's egg. My grandmother was a winger, and so am I.

4) What is next for you after this book?
Rebel Puritan, printed in 2011, is the first in my series about Herodias, and I'm now at work on The Golden Shore, which will conclude the Scandalous Life series - I think. My original plan for Rebel Puritan was to tell Herodias' story in a single book. I have an Indian war to cover, along with Herodias' children, some of which were scandalous in their own right. After that, I'm considering a tale from the American Revolution, along with a modern murder mystery - or both.


5) Last question… on a level of one being slightly naughty and ten being woo hoo steamy, how would you rate your book?
I have erotic scenes, but they are not explicit.  Lots of steamy sex, at least for me, can override a story line, so I prefer to leave it up to my readers' imagination. That said, I'm writing a scene in the beginning of The Golden Shore which rates at least a 6!

A kitchen scene by Strozzi

And now for the really tasty part - a recipe to share! Allow me to reach back into my genealogy again, to a recipe inherited from Priscilla (Mullins) Alden of "Mayflower" fame. Like most seventeenth-century recipes, this Partritch Stew is boiled, but it sounds pretty darn good.

Partritch Stew’d

Take marrow bones of beef or mutton, boil them well

Strayn the broth, and put it into an earthen pot

Then add a quantity of wyne thereto

Then stuffe the partritch with whole pepyr and marrow

Sow up all the vents of the burd

Then take cloves, mace and whole pepyr, and let them boil together with the partritch

When it is enough cast into the pot powder of gingyer, salt and saffron

Serve it up in broth

As stated above, there are a number of interesting recipes on this blog hop – and some equally good books! Take the time to enjoy.

Christy English
Diana Russo Morin
Nancy Goodman
Lauren Gilbert
Lucinda Brant
Prue Batten
Anna Belfrage
Ginger Myrick
Jo Ann Butler
Karen Aminadra