This post is part of Long and Short Reviews’ Winter Blogfest. Leave a comment for a chance to win an eBook edition of A Peculiar Enchantment. NOTE: Despite the cover and the title, this is a traditional romance, not a fantasy or paranormal.
Memories of Meat-and-Cinnamon Stuffing by Kathleen Buckley
For holidays most of us want the dishes we grew up with, and those traditions change slowly. When I was growing up, the basics of our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were always the same: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, mince and pumpkin pies. A very middle-America dinner…except for two things. The first was that my father cooked it because he loved to cook. The second was the stuffing. My mother hated it, having grown up with turkey dressing consisting of soggy seasoned breadcrumbs. I preferred his stuffing, which he said was more like what was used in the eighteenth century.
It was not a dish for the cholesterol-conscious, consisting of cooked ground beef and bulk pork sausage. The breadcrumbs and sauteed onion played a minor supporting role. The spices included cinnamon: a lot of cinnamon.
I still make my father’s meat-and-cinnamon stuffing,forcemeat as it would have been called two hundred years ago. Now it warms up in a casserole instead of in a turkeybecause the last few years the main course has featured a turkey hindquarter. But the rest of the menu has altered, too. Hold the mashed spuds and gravy as neither I nor my roommate care for them. Gelatine salad? Ummm, no. Waldorf salad instead. The pumpkin pie contains chile (yes, here in New Mexico that is the correct spelling) and chopped candied ginger, not pumpkin pie spice. The mincemeat pie has not changed.
I’ve added a couple of recipes for holiday treats: first Russian tea cakes and then, since moving to New Mexico, bizcochitos. They’re the state cooky and by long tradition they contain lard, brandy or sherry, anise, and cinnamon in addition to the usual cooky ingredients.
What can you look forward to when your only relatives call you ugly, unbalanced, and a scandal? What would you do if your only friend was threatened? Dependent on her half brother, the Earl of Lamburne, Adelaide knows. She wants to escape.
Gervase Ducane, invited to Lamburne’s home to court his daughter, is torn. He needs to marry well and soon but not this spiteful chit. Should he buy a commission instead? Seek a wealthy merchant’s daughter? As a marquess’s brother, he has at least a noble connection to offer an heiress apart from his good manners. And why is he only now meeting the earl’s delightful half sister?
Ordered to stay away from the house party, Adelaide rebels. She will make her unwelcome, embarrassing presence known to avenge herself and her pet. Sometimes when you least expect it, magic happens.
Kathleen Buckley has loved writing ever since she learned to read. After a career which included light bookkeeping, working as a paralegal, and a stint as a security officer (fascinating!), she began to write as a second career, rather than as a hobby. Her first historical romance was penned (well, word processed) after re-reading Georgette Heyer’s Georgian/Regency romances and realizing that Ms. Heyer would never be able to write another (having died some forty years earlier). She is now the author of eight published Georgian romances: An Unsuitable Duchess, Most Secret, Captain Easterday’s Bargain, A Masked Earl, A Duke’s Daughter, Portia & the Merchant of London, A Westminster Wedding, and A Peculiar Enchantment.
Warning: no bodices are ripped in her romances, which might be described as “powder & patch & peril” rather than Jane Austen drawing room. They contain no explicit sex, but do contain mild bad language, as the situations in which her characters find themselves sometimes call for an oath a little stronger than “Zounds!”
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