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Published on May 27, 2017 23:16

Missing Persons – The New York Times

This content was originally published by CHELSEA CAIN on 26 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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I FOUND YOU
By Lisa Jewell
344 pp. Atria, $26.

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Jewell’s novel explores the space between going missing and being lost. Alice Lake, a single mother of three, has a soft spot for strays and a history of bad judgment. So when she encounters a handsome stranger on the beach — a man who claims to have no memory of who he is or how he got there — she takes him home to her cottage on the British coast and calls him “Frank.” Meanwhile, in a London suburb, a young Ukrainian woman, freshly married after a whirlwind courtship and new to the country, is searching for her missing husband, an Englishman old enough to be her father. A third story line unfolds more than 20 years earlier and centers on a teenage boy, on holiday with his family, who becomes alarmed when a handsome stranger takes an interest in his sister.

How these three plots intersect and finally collide is one of the great thrills of reading Jewell’s book. She ratchets up the tension masterfully, and her writing is lively. A cottage has “nicotine beige” walls. A view through a window consists of “a necklace of fat white lights, and beyond that the silvery shadows of the sea.” Alice is particularly winning: vulnerable and funny and self-aware. Inviting an amnesiac home for dinner with the kids can, of course, be awkward: “The four of them standing around eating pizza with a big scared man in a teenager’s hoodie. Hard to know what to say really.”

THE TEA GIRL OF HUMMINGBIRD LANE
By Lisa See
371 pp. Scribner, $27.

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We meet Li-yan as a small, hungry child in a superstitious, dystopian world. She is simply called “Girl,” and when she dares to eat a bite of stolen scallion pancake, she must be cleansed by the village ruma, a scary spiritual healer in a ceremonial cloak heavily decorated with “feathers, bones and the tails of small animals.” This is 1988, and Li-yan lives in Yunnan, China. She is an Akha, an ethnic minority so isolated and remote they “didn’t hear about the One Child policy for almost 15 years.”

See’s novel reads like a folk tale or a fable. Li-yan is headstrong and good-hearted. Although she goes to school, she abides by the curses, bad omens and taboos of her local culture. But when custom requires that she kill her newborn baby, Li-yan can’t go through with it, and instead smuggles the child to an orphanage, along with a tea cake made from the tea grove that has been handed down her matriarchal line for 33 generations. Li-yan’s life takes new turns as she moves to the city and resumes her education. But her daughter has been lost to her.

In a parallel narrative, we see the child, Haley, as she is raised in Southern California by an American couple, Dan and Constance. We glimpse her life through doctor’s notes, school assignments and emails.

The book is steeped in tea: its medicinal and cultural value but mostly its nifty symbolic value. See is one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot: “As A-ma said, every story, every dream, every waking minute of our lives is filled with one fateful coincidence after another.”

THE SHADOW LAND
By Elizabeth Kostova
478 pp. Ballantine, $28.

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Alexandra Boyd, a young American still grieving over the death of her brother, arrives in Bulgaria to travel and teach. As is so often the case with international trips, there are some snafus. The taxi drops her off at the wrong hotel. Oh, and she ends up with a strange bag of human remains. “The sight of it went through her like a whisper of voltage — plain black canvas, long black handles, the upper side closed with a black zipper. She touched it. No, it was not one of hers.”

Inside the bag, she finds an urn of ashes and bone and a wooden plaque engraved with a name: Stoyan Lazarov. Alexandra is exceedingly polite. So she takes off on a road trip through the Bulgarian countryside, aided by a shockingly accommodating taxi driver, in an attempt to track down the bag’s owners.

It’s not a bad way to see the country.

Kostova is a clearheaded, elegant writer with a sneaky gift for incorporating the history and culture of a place into the nooks and crannies of a book that never feels bossy or expository. She also knows how to turn a phrase. “This book is a train with many cars,” she writes in a prologue, “the old kind, moving clumsily along a track at night.”

One thing is sure as the bereaved Alexandra motors through a foreign country looking to unload her burden of ash and bone: Kostova isn’t afraid of a good allegory.

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Published on May 27, 2017 21:13

Sales Are Up In Q1

This content was originally published by on 26 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Sales at HMH, S&S, Lagardère, and HarperCollins are up in the first quarter compared to a year ago.

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Published on May 27, 2017 20:12

The Gulf of Mexico in the Age of Petrochemicals

This content was originally published by PHILIP CONNORS on 26 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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America’s southern lip is almost entirely flat where land meets water, with none of the cliffs that here and there greet the Atlantic and Pacific. But it was once ringed with mounds of discarded mollusk shells, middens of the Calusa people whose size and robust health astonished the early Spaniards. Davis quotes the Texas naturalist and writer Roy Bedichek, who said, “There remains the unimpeachable evidence of ancient oyster production along the coast which staggers the imagination.” Centuries after the Calusa’s disappearance, Americans quarried the mounds and crushed the shells for road bed material, pillaging antiquarian monuments for the paved expressways of the petroleum age.

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Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

It was the rumor of gold and silver that caused the first Europeans to probe gulf waters. Many met with shipwreck and starvation, even as a native culture thrived along the coastal estuaries, feasting on that bounteous supply of seafood. Despite their complex communication networks and endlessly renewable source of protein, the natives were destroyed in the blink of an eye. Mostly it was the newcomers’ pathogens that did them in, although some were victims of an attitude that viewed them as “artless and lazy” for not exploiting their material abundance for purposes of commerce.

Charismatic fauna of the human variety abound in the region’s lore, and Davis gives many of them cameos. Ponce de León took a fatal poisoned dart in the thigh during a bad day at the beach. John Muir took ill from malaria and geeked out on the flora while he convalesced. Winslow Homer took a hankering to the light, Rachel Carson took an interest in the ecology, and Ernest Hemingway took trophy fish from the deep.

Although the gulf region harbored no gold, it possessed astonishing riches of bird life. Davis, the author of “An Everglades Providence,” recounts “one of the bloodiest crimes committed against wildlife in modern times,” the slaughter of plumage birds for feathered hats in the 19th century. The killing got so out of hand that the gulf’s population of snowy egrets dipped below the population of the endangered American bison. Five million birds annually fed the hat business, leaving the gulf with a mere 10 percent of its previous number of plume birds by the beginning of the 20th century.

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Catering to the sporty types: Fishing for tarpon in the gulf off Sarasota, Fla.

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Education Images/UIG, via Getty Images

Likewise, oyster beds were scoured and permanently damaged, and shrimp populations were hit hard by the introduction of innovative seafood-harvesting methods like the seine net. New laws and a dawning environmental consciousness helped curtail the worst abuses of commercial fishing, but in Davis’s reckoning, one practice in particular changed the gulf forever: the pursuit of tarpon. Sport fishing brought waves of tourists to the water, all of whom required hotels, restaurants and waterside pavilions for dancing, drinking and swapping tall tales of grappling with the great silver monsters of the sea. First railroads and later highways conveyed sporty types to and from the gulf. The balmy weather and brilliant coastal beaches added their own charms, and the shabby baubles and ticky-tacky architecture of modern industrial tourism were born.

The 20th century accelerated the changes. On the gulf’s eastern shores, developers dredged and filled marshes and estuaries in order to sell a slice of spoiled paradise to Northern transplants. On the western side, industry took hold with the discovery of oil in 1901 at Spindletop in Texas, and oil soon became a major gulf resource. By the end of the century 181,000 wells had been sunk on- and offshore in Louisiana alone, and more than 70,000 miles of pipeline right of way had been secured to transport oil and gas through the state’s marshes. Denuded of its wetlands and mangrove forests from Texas to Florida, much of the coastline started slumping into the sea.

A place that brought explorers to its shores in search of precious metals is now inundated with toxic metals thanks to rivers carrying industrial wastewater. Barrier islands and coastal marshes threaten to disappear because of global warming. Each year Midwestern farm runoff, awash in nitrogen fertilizer dumped on fields of corn, wheat and other crops, creates a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Because of the dams along its course, the river no longer carries its prodigious load of sediment to the sea — the building material of the Louisiana coast. Future hurricanes promise to swallow more of the unstable edge.

It is a sad story well told — although I should confess I began the book skeptical of being entertained and edified by 592 pages about a body of water that has come to be used like a sump for the wastes of industry. My doubts proved unwarranted. Davis has written a beautiful homage to a neglected sea, a lyrical paean to its remaining estuaries and marshes, and a marvelous mash-up of human and environmental history. He has also given us the story of how a once gorgeous place was made safe for the depredations of the petrochemical age. How it was made safe from petrochemicals is a book I look forward to reading.

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Published on May 27, 2017 19:11

This Week's Bestsellers: May 29, 2017

This content was originally published by on 26 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Books by two sports legends debut in Hardcover Fiction. Plus a pair of beach reads brighten up our Hardcover Fiction list, and small press Cemetery Dance waltzes onto our Hardcover Fiction list with a book coauthored by Stephen King.

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Published on May 27, 2017 18:10

Jem Lester, Author Of ‘Shtum’ : NPR

This content was originally published by Scott Simon on 27 May 2017 | 11:59 am.
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Shtum is a Yiddish word that means silence. It’s also the title of a novel that centers around three generations of men who get thrown together in a small space and can’t talk to each other. Jonah, the little boy, has the best reason: He’s profoundly autistic and can’t speak. The story has a personal resonance for author Jem Lester, who says that while he bears no resemblance to the father in Shtum, Jonah’s story has parallels to his own son. “A lot of the behaviors and the feelings that he inspires in the book, Jonah, are very very close to my feelings, because I couldn’t really see the point of reinventing an autistic character when I had one so close to home.”

Interview Highlights

On the portrayal of autistic people in popular culture

Things are improving, but certainly, down the years — I think my first introduction to autism, really, along with a lot of people’s, was Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal in Rain Man. And I think since then there has been this perception that an autistic child has some kind of special gift … well, that’s just a tiny tiny percentage of the thousands of millions of autistic people in the world. It doesn’t in any way reflect the 30% of autistic people who have no language, and sit in a very very different place on what people like to describe as the autistic spectrum.

On Jonah

… there has been this perception that an autistic child has some kind of special gift … well, that’s just a tiny tiny percentage of the thousands of millions of autistic people in the world.

Jem Lester

Jonah is ten when we meet him in the book, with no language. And because of that, and because of the frustrations, he can suffer from bouts of self-harm — he will bite down on his hand, and has a big scar on the base of his thumb where he bites down through frustration. He is doubly incontinent, which means he’s a ten-year-old that has to wear nappies during the day, and at night. And yet, there is such a level of innocence to him. There is no anger in his face. There is something pure about the way that he looks, and the sparkle in his eyes …

He posesses, as a lot of autistic children do … an almost superhuman strength. And so when he does have a meltdown he is virtually impossible to control. This is something I know very well. And people have asked me questions about, did you really need to provide that much detail? Was it really necessary? And I say, to be honest with you, I toned it down.

On what he’s learned from his own son

My son Noah has taught me patience, compassion. He’s taught me to understand the things in life that really should be important to everyone.

Jem Lester

My son Noah has taught me patience, compassion. He’s taught me to understand the things in life that really should be important to everyone. And they’re the kind of life lessons that you only really learn by being around people that have no axe to grind. So it’s made me far more aware of just how many things in this world that have no bearing on my life and should not upset me or drive me mad, just are worthless and pointless and not worth thinking about. And on that basis I suppose, despite everything else, there is — I find a contentment in my own life that doesn’t require me to search after goods and services, and all the other things that maybe at some point when I was younger, I’d have been trying to fight for. Now I understand, and that’s through someone who’s never actually told me that. He’s never sat me down like a wise old man and given me the talk. He hasn’t had to say anything, he’s just had to be him. And I think that’s a massive gift.

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Published on May 27, 2017 17:09

Bringing One of Burma’s Lost Histories to Life

This content was originally published by EMMA LARKIN on 26 May 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Sally Deng

MISS BURMA
By Charmaine Craig
355 pp. Grove Press. $26

“We are bewildered most of the time and doomed to be lost to history,” says Benny, one of the central characters in Charmaine Craig’s “Miss Burma.” “And yet we find that there are others who are unlike us in every conceivable way, yet to whom we are bound.” His musing gives voice to the notion of otherness that lies at the center of this historical novel inspired by members of Craig’s own family.

“Miss Burma” spans nearly 40 years of Burmese history, from 1926 to 1965. The story begins when Burma is still a British colony and unfolds over the course of World War II and the Japanese invasion, the country’s tumultuous early years of independence from colonial rule, and the subsequent military dictatorship that seized power in 1962. Given this backdrop, it is, of necessity, a novel of big themes — of identity, belonging and trust.

Benny (based on Craig’s own grandfather) is lonely from the outset. He was born in Burma, as a member of the sizable Jewish community living in the capital, Rangoon, and he feels like a perennial outsider. An orphan by the age of 7, shipped off to indifferent aunts in Calcutta, he no longer speaks Burmese when he returns to Rangoon in 1938. After marrying Khin, a woman of Karen ethnicity, he opts to be counted as a Karen himself.

Khin is only 18 when she and Benny are wed, but she already knows too much about trust and betrayal. She grew up hearing her mother’s songs of age-old Karen enslavement at the hands of the Burmese, the country’s majority ethnic group (“They took our alphabet and holy books”), and saw her father disemboweled by Burmese bandits in their village home. Indeed, the dead-weight melody that resonates across these pages is that of Karen history — one not widely told or realized, either within Burma or beyond its borders.

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Karen history is, in itself, a tale of trust and betrayal. After centuries of Burmese hegemony, the Karen welcomed British colonial rule and ended up fighting bravely on the side of Allied forces in World War II. British officers promised them an independent nation; instead, Karen territory was formalized into one of the seven ethnic states included in the Union of Burma (today called Myanmar). In 1949, Karen forces began an armed rebellion against Burmese rule that became one of the longest lasting civil wars in recorded history. A cease-fire signed more than six decades later, in 2012, has paved the way for peace talks. Now, as fighting has been reignited in other ethnic states battling the central government and Myanmar’s multiethnic peace process seems more precarious than ever, “Miss Burma” is a timely exposition of trust after trauma.

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Published on May 27, 2017 16:08

Remembering ‘Jesus’ Son,’ From Denis Johnson : Monkey See : NPR

This content was originally published by Nathan Englander on 26 May 2017 | 3:53 pm.
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Writer Denis Johnson.

Cindy Johnson/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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Cindy Johnson/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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Writer Denis Johnson.

Cindy Johnson/Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Award-winning writer Denis Johnson died Thursday at 67, according to his publisher, Farrar Straus and Giroux. The prolific writer explored many forms during his career, and in 2007, novelist Nathan Englander wrote about Johnson’s short story collection Jesus’ Son for NPR.

If you’re only going to read one book this year about getting stabbed in the eye and crushing tiny, helpless bunnies, then I’d run right out and get Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.

Denis Johnson, Author Who Wrote Of The 'Painfully Beautiful,' Dies At 67

There are so few books that I go back to again and again, and fewer still that were written in the last 20 years. But I can never get enough of Jesus’ Son. It’s a small volume of 11 short stories. And it is brutally honest and painfully beautiful. It’s set in a down-and-out world of drugs and drink. But wait — don’t turn that dial — Mr. Johnson succeeds at this where so many others fail. He doesn’t ever romanticize these dark settings while leaving his narrator open to the fact that, despite it all, we may live in a heartbreakingly romantic world.

Just because Mr. Johnson doesn’t romanticize, doesn’t mean I can’t: because I came to these stories in the most wonderful way. Someone — I can’t remember who, and don’t remember when — gave me a Xeroxed copy of the first story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” If you look at the book, you’ll see the author’s name is absent from the margins, and not even the whole title of the story is there. So I read what I thought was called “Car Crash,” and loved it and was moved by it. And then, in the way good reading makes you feel like your connection to it was fated, I soon ended up with a copy of the book in my hands. When I started it, I knew: This is that guy. And I read on and on, and thought, This guy is that good.

I was living in Iowa City at the time, and this book, for my friends and me, became sort of a young writers’ bible. This is the kind of thing that could be done. With dialogue that feels like you’re getting it verbatim and stripped-down prose, he writes simple, honest stories that have the bigness of great work. The plots go like this: A man shaves his roommate in the hospital, the shave-ee having survived being shot three times by two different wives; there’s one about a hospital orderly mopping a floor that’s already clean, and another with a guy out on bail drinking at The Vine (a bar I could see from my apartment window, which once again, is me romanticizing).

And, even better, when you read them, the stories might sound like this: “I went out to the farmhouse where Dundun lived to get some pharmaceutical opium…”

Or like this: “We lay down on a stretch of dusty plywood in the back of the truck with the daylight knocking against our eyelids and the fragrance of alfalfa thickening on our tongues.”

Getting back to “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” that painful, stunning and — to me — ultimately hopeful story about death, the narrator finds himself back in detox and at rock bottom. He’s hearing voices, seeing things, and, acknowledging his pitiable state, he addresses us, his dear readers. He says quite frankly, “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” But we do, Denis Johnson, we do.

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Published on May 27, 2017 02:51

Educational Publishing Execs at HMH, Cengage Leaving

This content was originally published by on 26 May 2017 | 4:00 am.
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As educational publishers continue to deal with dramatic changes in the college and school markets, two high-placed executives at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Cengage are leaving their jobs: Mary Cullinane, executive v-p and chief content officer at HMH, and John Leahy, chief financial officer at Cengage.

In a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission on Thursday, HMH reported that Cullinane will step down by the end of July.

According to the filing, Cullinane’s departure is the result of HMH’s reorganization of its product planning, development and marketing function, which Cullinane oversaw.

Cullinane joined HMH in 2012 from Microsoft as senior v-p of corporate global responsibility. She was later promoted to her current role. Her departure comes as the publisher is engaged in a wholesale revamping of its organizational structure, which has resulted in a series of layoffs, the most recent of which took place at the end of April. Overall, HMH could layoff up to 450 employees.

At Cengage, Leahy will step down from his position at the end of the year. Leahy has served as CFO since December 2014 and during his tenure Cengage credited him with “transforming the company’s finance organization” and refinancing its debt.

Cengage said his departure is tied to the company’s decision to “align our financial leadership with changes in our strategic focus.” It added that the shift is “a multiyear” project that will, ideally, turn Cengage into “a true digital learning company.”

Leahy, Cengage said, will remain “fully engaged in his CFO role until his departure.” Cengage also expect that Leahy will “help ensure a smooth transition to his successor.” A search for his replacement has already begun.

The announcement of Leahy’s exit comes a week after Cengage reported that revenue for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017 fell 10.5% from fiscal 2016, dropping to $1.46 billion. The company did manage to cut its operating loss to $43.1 million, from $72.4 million in fiscal 2016. Cengage blamed the revenue decline on “lower enrollments and continued pressure on print products.” which were partially offset by increases in its core digital product sales and growth in its international businesses.

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Published on May 27, 2017 01:50

A Barbecue Legend Shows Us How To Master Smoked Chicken Wings : The Salt : NPR

This content was originally published by Ari Shapiro on 26 May 2017 | 6:15 pm.
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Mike and Amy Mills’ famous smoked chicken wings, as prepared in Ari Shapiro’s backyard.

Ari Shapiro/NPR

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Ari Shapiro/NPR

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Mike and Amy Mills’ famous smoked chicken wings, as prepared in Ari Shapiro’s backyard.

Ari Shapiro/NPR

Mike and Amy Mills are a father-daughter team from southern Illinois.

Mike was trained as a dental technician. “I made false teeth — crowns, bridges, partials — this type of thing. It’s what I did as a trade,” he recalls. “Later on, I started barbecuing just for the fun of doing it.”

And that’s what made him famous.

Mike is 75 now. Along with a pen and glasses, he carries a meat thermometer in his shirt pocket. He doesn’t like to brag, but he has won numerous international barbecue competitions. He is even in the Barbecue Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Mo.

Mike and Amy Mills

Courtesy of Ken Goodman/Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Courtesy of Ken Goodman/Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In short, the guy standing on my porch on a recent rainy day is a barbecue legend. With his daughter Amy, he runs a place in Murphysboro, Ill., called 17th Street Barbecue, where they spread “the gospel of barbecue,” as Amy puts it. Hence the title of their new cookbook, Praise the Lard: Recipes and Revelations from a Legendary Life in Barbecue. It has simple recipes like pimento cheese and tangy coleslaw, as well as more ambitious projects — like instructions on how to select and prepare a whole hog.

We didn’t get in that deep. I asked Mike and Amy to show us something people can make in their own backyards: smoked chicken wings finished on the grill. These barbecue evangelists preach that you don’t need fancy equipment to make great meat.

To prove it, they set to work on a well-used and very basic Weber charcoal grill. For heat, Mike likes a natural lump charcoal — not charcoal briquettes.

The Great Charcoal Debate: Briquettes Or Lumps?

“It’s all-natural wood — it’s not got chemicals and coal and other additives just to extend the wood product. It’s 100 percent wood,” he says.

He puts the charcoal lumps in a chimney and lights them. Once the coals are red hot, he dumps them onto the grill. “You want your coals to be nice and red and charred,” he explains.

Then, right on top of the glowing coals goes an almost magic ingredient: a branch of apple wood, which Mike and Amy brought with them from southern Illinois.

“Something a lot of people don’t know: Trees have bark. Bark blackens your meat. Your apple wood has a skin. … It’s very thin,” Mike says. So apple wood won’t darken your meat, he says.

“So charcoal is the heat source,” Amy adds, “and wood is the flavor.”

As soon as the apple wood goes on, a sweet, smoky aroma fills the porch. “It smells like heaven,” Mike says — and that’s before there’s even any meat on the grill.

The wings have already gotten a spice rub. They go on over indirect heat and should sit there for about an hour and a half undisturbed. They’re not intensely cooking just yet, just slowly smoking.

That’s one of the beauties of barbecuing, Mike says — it’s “the great friendship maker,” an excuse for people to get together with no hurry and just sit around and talk. “People aren’t pushing and shoving; they know when it’s ready there’s going to be something good.”

Ribs “mopped” with barbecue sauce on the grill. “We’re not painting a house; we’re fixing a meal. That’s why we use a mop” instead of a brush, Mike explains.

Courtesy of Ken Goodman/Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Courtesy of Ken Goodman/Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Ribs “mopped” with barbecue sauce on the grill. “We’re not painting a house; we’re fixing a meal. That’s why we use a mop” instead of a brush, Mike explains.

Courtesy of Ken Goodman/Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Finally, we move on to the second step in these two-step wings: It’s time to apply a couple of different house sauces — with a tiny little mop. “We’re not painting a house; we’re fixing a meal. That’s why we use a mop” instead of a brush, Mike explains. At this point, he and Amy add more hot coals and sear the wings over direct heat.

The cookbook includes the family’s recipe for barbecue sauce, which you’ll find below.

You want to pull the wings off the grill when the internal temperature hits 165 degrees Fahrenheit, or when they look nice and charred but not blackened.

“You eat with your eyes, too,” Mike notes. “In fact, that’s the first thing you eat with is your eyes and your nose.”

At this point, I need to recruit an impartial judge to help taste these wings, so I corral my next-door neighbor, Diane Swann. She has lived in this neighborhood for decades and she loves a good wing — hot, mild or in-between. Amy hands Diane a wingette. Her verdict?

“Very delicious,” Diane declares. (Food & Wine magazine agrees — it called the Mills’ wings the best in the country.)

“There are just so many layers of flavor here — garlic, salt, dry rub, smoke, chicken itself, and then the sauce,” Amy says.

As Diane puts it with a chuckle, “Poor chicken don’t stand a chance.”

Apple City Barbecue Sauce

(Courtesy of Mike And Amy Mills)

Makes about 2 cups

3/4 cup ketchup (made with cane sugar, such as Red Gold or Hunt’s)

2/3 cup rice vinegar

1 1/2 cups apple cider

1/4 cup packed light brown sugar

1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce

2 teaspoons prepared yellow mustard

1/2 teaspoon granulated garlic

1/8 teaspoon ground white pepper

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/3 cup bacon bits (real, not imitation), ground in a spice mill

1/3 cup grated peeled apple

1/3 cup grated onion

2 teaspoons grated green pepper

Combine the ketchup, rice vinegar, apple juice, cider vinegar, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, granulated garlic, white pepper, cayenne and bacon bits in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil, stir in the apple, onion and green pepper, then lower the heat. Simmer the sauce, stirring often, for 10 to 15 minutes, until it thickens slightly. Decant into a Mason jar, cover and refrigerate. The sauce will keep for at least a month. Warm or bring to room temperature before serving.

Variation: To make this sauce a little hotter, add more cayenne pepper to taste, an additional 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon. Be careful: A little goes a long way.

Excerpted from Praise The Lard by Mike Mills, Amy Mills, and Ken Goodman. Copyright 2017 by Mike Mills, Amy Mills, and Ken Goodman. Used by permission of Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

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