All of the above can be found in Joanne Harris’s novel Five Quarters of the Orange. You may not recognize the name Joanne Harris, but you know her work.  She wrote the novel that the sweet little movie Chocolat (starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp) is based on. I don’t know about you, but I adore that movie (especially the Johnny Depp moments), so when Ellen recommended Five Quarters of the Orange to me, it was just extra incentive to read something by Joanne Harris.

Five Quarters of the Orange is set in German-occupied France, specifically in a small village called Les Laveuses near the city of Angers in the Loire valley. Harris’s narrator and main character Framboise narrates the story of both her present life (she’s now 50 and just moving back to Les Laveuses) and the tragic event that occurred in her village during WWII when she was only 9 years old.  I don’t want to give away the story, but I will say that part of what makes this novel so wonderful is Harris’s ability to blend this tragic tale of war, German occupation, and a mother’s mental illness with beautiful (and kind of sensual) descriptions of the French countryside, farm life, and mouthwatering French recipes.

Here’s an example of a particularly wonderful recipe for cherry liqueur.  It’s given near the beginning of the novel, and it stuck with me all the way through.  I also started craving some cherry liqueur…

The secret is to leave the stones in. Layer cherries and sugar one on the other in a widemouthed glass jar, covering each layer gradually with clear spirit (kirsch is best, but you can use vodka or even Armagnac) up to half the jar’s capacity. Top up with spirit and wait. Every month, turn the jar carefully to release any accumulated sugar. In three years’ time the spirit has bled the cherries white, itself stained deep red now, penetrating even to the stone and the tiny almond inside it, becoming pungent, evocative, a scent of autumn past. Serve in tiny liqueur glasses, with a spoon to scoop out the cherry, and leave it in the mouth until the macerated fruit dissolves under the tongue. Pierce the stone with the point of a tooth to release the liqueur trapped inside and leave it for a long time in the mouth, playing it with the tip of the tongue, rolling it under, over, like a single prayer bead. Try to the remember the time of its ripening, that summer, that hot autumn, the time the well ran dry, the time we had the wasps’ nests, time past, lost, found again in the hard place at the heart of the fruit…

(pg. 9)

See what I mean when I say that the writing is a bit sensual? The recipes, for the most part, come from the diary that Framboise’s mother kept as she was going mad.  Seemingly meaningless notes are scribbled between lines of recipes which Framboise works to decode.

As for the dark secret bit, you’re just going to have to read the book to find out about that…because I’m not telling.

P.S. For those of you who read my last blog about my New Year’s resolution to read fifty books this year, I’m actually ahead of myself.  It’s only January 22, and I’ve already read six books.  So far, so good!  -Kaycie

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