The Love Goddess’ Cooking School

by Melissa Senate

  Camilla’s Cucinotta Risotto al salto

  Leftover risotto alla Milanese

  1 pat butter

  1 sad memory

  1 fervent wish

  Melt butter in skillet. Spread risotto on bottom of pan, forming a pancake. On low to medium heat, cook until gilded a golden brown, then cover pan with a lipless lid. Flip pan and lid—risotto should now be on the lid. Return pan to the burner. Slide the risotto from the lid back into the pan and cook other side until gilded.

  If the dish does not turn out as you expected,

  you simply try again.

  DELICIOUS PRAISE FOR

  THE LOVE GODDESS’ COOKING SCHOOL

  “The Love Goddess’ Cooking School reads like a recipe for reinvention, filled with hope and seasoned liberally with forgiveness. But the real magic here is Melissa Senate’s writing, which laps rhythmically against your heart like gentle waves along the coast.”

  —Claire Cook, bestselling author of

  Must Love Dogs and Seven Year Switch

  THE CRITICS ARE JUMPING FOR

  MELISSA SENATE’S “WARM, WINNING”

  (Booklist) NOVEL THE SECRET OF JOY!

  “Engaging.”

  —The Free Lance-Star (VA)

  “Senate’s page-turning comfort read is descriptive and contains a suitable mix of wit and romance. Her characters exemplify the universal need we all have to belong.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Now and then, a book appears that is so absorbing, you portion it out to yourself chapter by chapter because you don’t want it to end. The Secret of Joy is that kind of book … a big-hearted book with an ending you’ll never guess.”

  —The Portland Press Herald

  “Enjoyable characters and a story about finding one’s self apart from men, this book is great for women who love to while away a few hours with a good book and a cup of tea.”

  —York County Coast Star (ME)

  “I loved, loved, loved this book. The story was captivating, the narration fresh, the characters fun. I flew through it. The characters were relatable, and the subplot was just as interesting and segued well into the ending for Rebecca and Joy. I don’t think you can go wrong with Melissa Senate.” —Bellas Novella

  “The Secret of Joy is a beautifully written novel that will have the reader crying one moment and smiling with happiness the next. … Senate weaves together many tales of love and in so doing discusses, through a brilliant array of characters, what it means to love and be loved.” —Rundpinne

  “A special story by a special author. The Secret of Joy opened my heart, made me laugh, cry, and smile all at the same time. A don’t-miss read.”

  —Carly Phillips, New York Times bestselling

  author of Kiss Me If You Can

  “A warm hug of a book. Insightful, wise, and romantic, it’s as inviting as the small-town life it depicts.”

  —Claire LaZebnik, author of

  The Smart One and the Pretty One

  “A wonderfully heartfelt story about hope, possibilities, and the yearning for real connections. The Secret of Joy will take you on a much needed vacation, while sneaking vital life lessons in when you’re not looking.”

  —Caprice Crane, international bestselling

  author of Family Affair

  “The Secret of Joy is a heartwarming story that hits all the right notes. Senate has you cheering for more.”

  —Cara Lockwood, USA Today bestselling

  author of I Do (But I Don’t)

  “A wonderful story that encouraged me to take a deeper look at love, relationships, family, disappointment, and most important, forgiveness. With a smooth and enjoyable writing style, Melissa Senate whisked me into the lives of Rebecca and Joy.”

  —Beth Hoffman, New York Times bestselling

  author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

  Gallery Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Melissa Senate

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Gallery trade paperback edition October 2010

  GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

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  Designed by Renata Di Biase

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Senate, Melissa.

  The love goddess’ cooking school / Melissa Senate.—1st Gallery Books trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Cooking schools—Fiction. 3. Maine—Fiction. 4. Chick lit. I. Title.

  PS3619.E658L68 2010

  813'.6—dc22

  2010021190

  ISBN 978-1-4391-0723-2

  ISBN 978-1-4391-8674-9 (ebook)

  In memory of my grandparents,

  Ann and Abe Steinberg

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my agent, Alexis Hurley, whose insight, especially at the idea stage, was invaluable; my editor, Jennifer Heddle, for yet another brilliant, thoughtful revision letter; my family and friends (Lee Nichols Naftali, I am particularly talking to you) for their cheery support; and my dear son, Max, who turned me from the takeout queen into a cook in constant training. (Note: Max is proof that the recipes at the back of the book are kid-friendly.)

  I was thirty-two when I started cooking;

  up until then, I just ate.

  —Julia Child

  THE

  LOVE GODDESS’

  COOKING SCHOOL

  One

  According to Holly Maguire’s late grandmother, revered on Blue Crab Island, Maine, for her fortune-telling as much as her cooking, the great love of Holly’s life would be one of the few people on earth to like sa cordula, an Italian delicacy. It was made of lamb intestines and stewed with onions, tomatoes, and peas in a savory butter sauce that did little to hide the fact that it looked exactly like what it was.

  “So I’ll know if someone is ‘the one’ if he likes stewed lamb guts?” Holly had asked repeatedly over the years. “That’s it? That’s my entire fortune?” She’d kept hoping her grandmother would say, Just kidding! Of course that’s not it, bella. Your true fortune is this: you will be very happy.

  Holly would be satisfied with that.

  Not that Camilla Constantina would ever say just kidding. Or kid, for that matter.

  “That is it,” was her grandmother’s response, every time, her gleaming black eyes giving nothing away. “The stones have spoken.”

  A month ago, her hand trembling, her heart hoping, Holly had set a plate of sa cordula in front of John Reardon, the man she loved. As she’d been living in California, thousands of miles away from her grandmother in an attic apartment with no oven, she’d paid the Ital
ian butcher’s eighty-six-year-old great-aunt to prepare the dish. Holly and John had been a couple for almost two years. She was practically a stepmother to his four-year-old daughter Lizzie. And more than anything, Holly wanted to become part of their family.

  Why had her grandmother saddled her with this fortune? Who could possibly like sa cordula? Holly had tasted it three times before, and it was so . . . slimily awful that even Holly’s grandfather, who, per legend, ate even more reviled “delicacies,” had hated it. But the love of Camilla’s life wasn’t supposed to like it. Her Great Love was to have blond hair and blue eyes, and when in 1957 twenty-two-year-old single Camilla had turned down another eligible, dark-eyed, dark-haired man in her small village near Milan, everyone worried she was crazy like her spinster aunt Marcella, who muttered in a back room. But some months later, the dashing Armando Constantina, with his butter-colored hair and Adriatic blue eyes, had come to town and swept her off her feet all the way to America, and Camilla’s reputation as a fortune-teller had been restored.

  Holly’s father, Bud Maguire, had taken one bite of sa cordula during Thanksgiving dinner in 1982 and forever refused to taste anything his mother-in-law cooked unless he recognized it and knew what it was. Bud liked plain old spaghetti doused with jarred Ragu and a piece of garlic bread, which was just fine with Holly’s mother, Luciana Maguire, who went by Lucy and had no interest in her heritage or cooking. Or fortune-telling. Especially because Camilla Constantina’s supposed source of knowledge was a trio of small, smooth stones she’d chosen from the banks of the Po River as a three-year-old. “I’d sooner believe in a crystal ball from the clearance aisle in Walmart,” Holly’s mother had often said with her usual disdain.

  It had taken Camilla Constantina until Holly was sixteen to tell her granddaughter her fortune. As an adolescent, Holly had asked her grandmother over and over to sit her down with the stones and tell Holly what she was desperate to know—would Mike Overstill ever ask her out? Would she do okay on the American history test worth 85 percent of her final grade? Would her mother ever stop being such a killjoy? Camilla would just take both her hands and tell her all would be well. But finally, on Holly’s sixteenth birthday, when Mike Overstill had not shown up at six thirty to escort her to the junior prom (he had called twenty minutes later to say, “Sorry, um, I forgot I asked someone else”), her grandmother, who was visiting, reached for her white satin pouch (out of eyesight of Holly’s mother, of course) and said si, it was time. Camilla took the three smooth stones from the pouch and closed her hands around them. As Holly held her breath in anticipation, her grandmother held Holly’s hand with her free one and closed her eyes for a good half minute.

  And the long-awaited revelation was that the great love of Holly’s life would like lamb intestines tossed with peas. In butter sauce.

  This, from a woman who’d rightly foretold the fates of hundreds of year-rounders and summer tourists on Blue Crab Island and the nearby mainland towns, who’d drive over the bridge to pay twenty-five dollars to sit in the breakfast nook of Camilla Constantina’s famed kitchen and have their fortunes told.

  Holly had said she was sure there was something else. Perhaps her grandmother could close her eyes a bit longer? Or just do it all over again? Camilla would only say that sometimes the fortune could not be understood readily, that it held hidden meaning. To the day Camilla Constantina had died, just two weeks ago, the fortune had not changed. Nor had the meaning become clear. Holly had been taking it literally from the first time she’d fallen in love. At nineteen. Then again at twenty-four. And yet again two years ago, at twenty-eight, when she fell in love with John Reardon.

  Because she couldn’t, wouldn’t serve lamb intestines to a guy she was crazy about, she’d wait until she knew she was losing him, knew from the way he stopped holding her gaze, started being impatient, started being unavailable. And unkind.

  And so to console herself that this man was not her Great Love, she would serve him the sa cordula as an appetizer—a small portion so as not to tip the scales in her favor (who would like a big portion of sheep guts?). And each time, bittersweet success. The love she was losing was not her Great Love. He was just a guy who didn’t like sa cordula—and didn’t love her. It made it easier when he broke up with her.

  This time, though, this love, was different. Despite John’s pulling away. Despite his impatience. Despite the way he stopped calling her at midnight to tell her he loved her and wish her sweet dreams. She loved John Reardon. She wanted to marry John Reardon, this man she’d fallen for on a solo vacation to San Francisco, where she’d gone to get over a lesser love. This man she’d stayed for, uprooting herself from Boston, hoping to finally find her . . . destiny, what she was meant to do with her life. And she thought she’d found it in this mini family of two. She wanted to spend the rest of her life baking cookies with Lizzie every other weekend during the child’s visitation with her father; she wanted to shampoo those golden curls, push her on swings, and watch her grow. Everyone, namely her mother, had told her she was crazy for dating a newly divorced man with a kid. But Holly adored Lizzie, loved almost-stepmotherhood. And she loved John enough to wait. Though the past few months, he’d stopped referring to “some day” altogether.

  And the past few weeks, he was more distant than ever. They always got together on Wednesday nights, so there Holly was, changing Lizzie into her favorite Curious George pajamas after her bath while John avoided Holly. He was on his cell phone (first with his brother, then with his boss), texting a client, emailing a file, looking for Lizze’s favorite Hello Kitty cup. He was everywhere but next to Holly.

  She sat on the brown leather sofa in the living room, Lizzie cross-legged next to her as Holly combed her long, damp, honey-colored curls and sang the ABC song. Lizzie knew all her letters except for LMNOP, which she combined into “ellopy.” Usually when Holly gave Lizzie her bath before dinner and brushed out her beautiful hair and sang silly nursery rhymes that made Lizzie giggle or they got to the “ellopy,” John would stand there with that expression, the one that always assured Holly he loved her, that he was deeply touched at how close she and his daughter were. That one day, some day, maybe soon, he would ask her to marry him. And that this wish she walked around with, slept with every night and woke up with every morning would come true.

  This wasn’t a fairy tale, though, and Holly knew in her heart that John wasn’t going to propose. Not in the near future and probably not ever. She knew this with 95 percent certainty, even though she wasn’t psychic like her grandmother.

  But how was she supposed to give up on John? Give up on what she wanted so badly? To marry this man, be this child’s stepmother, and start a new life here in this little pale blue house on a San Francisco hill? Yes, things were strained between her and John, though she wasn’t sure why. But that didn’t mean things could not be unstrained. A long-term relationship went through lulls. This was a lull, perhaps.

  There was only one way to know.

  And so, when Lizzie was occupied with her coloring book and a new pack of Crayolas, Holly went heavy-hearted into the kitchen to make the dinner she’d promised Lizzie, cheeseburgers in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head (the only food she cooked really well) and to heat up the Great Love test. With the cheeseburgers in front of them all, a side of linguini for Lizzie in butter sauce with peas (which looked a bit like the sa cordula) and two small plates of sa cordula before her and John, Holly sat down beside this pair she loved so much—and waited.

  If John liked the sa cordula, she could relax, accept what he said, that he was just “tired, distracted by work.” Etcetera, etcetera. He was her Great Love. If he didn’t like it, then what? No, she wouldn’t let herself go there. Her breath caught somewhere in her body as John placed his napkin on his lap and picked up his fork, eyeing the sa cordula. In one moment, everything between them would change because of hope or lack thereof, and yet John looked exactly the same as he always did, sitting there at the dinner table in front of the ba
y window, so handsome, his thick sandy-blond hair hand-swept back from his face, the slight crinkles at the edges of his hazel eyes, the chiseled jawline with its slight darkening of five o’clock shadow.

  Holly sucked in a quiet breath and took the quickest bite, keeping her expression neutral—despite the gritty, slimy texture of the sa cordula. The intestines of a lamb did not taste “just like chicken.” Did not taste like anything but what it looked like. Savory butter sauce or not. And as if the peas could help.

  John forked a bite and stared at it for a moment. “What is this again?” he asked.

  “An old-world Italian dish my nonna sometimes makes,” Holly said, trying not to stare at his fork.

  Lizzie twirled her fork in her linguini the way Holly had taught her. “I wish I had a nonna.”

  “You do, pumpkin,” Holly said, treasuring the idea of Camilla Constantina showing Lizzie how to roll out pasta with a tiny rolling pin. “You have two. Your mom’s mother and your dad’s mother.”

  “But if you and Daddy get married, then I’ll have a nonna Holly too.”

  Out of the mouths of babes. Holly smiled. John stiffened. Lizzie twirled her linguini.

  And then, as if in slow motion, John slid the fork of lamb intestines, topped with one pea, into his mouth. He paled a bit, his entire face contorting. He spit it out into his napkin. “I’m sorry, Holly, but this is the most disgusting thing I ever ate. No offense to your grandmother.”

  Or me, she thought, her heart breaking.

  Maybe her grandmother was wrong.

  But forty minutes later, after Holly had helped Lizzie brush her teeth, pulled the comforter up over her chest, read half of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and then kissed the sleeping girl’s green-apple-scented head, John had come right out and said it. That he was sorry, it-wasn’t-her-it-was-him, that despite not meaning to, he’d fallen in love with his administrative assistant, and she had a young son, so they really understood each other. And no, he didn’t think it was a good idea if Holly continued to see Lizzie, even once a month for a trip to the playground or for ice cream. “She’s four, Holl. She’ll forget about you in a couple of weeks. Let’s not complicate anything, okay?”