INTRODUCTION

Weston Hingler's crib was in the kitchen of BuenAppeTito, his mother's catering service. There, he learned to read while tasting the pleasing flavors of his mother's culinary alphabet. But before he was allowed to enter the Tsil Café, he would have to pass his father's taste tests. Anchovies. Habanero chiles. Chipotle peppers. Food to purge body and soul. Food his loving but sometimes volatile father uses as a measure of family, friends, and enemies.

Caught between kitchens, one traditional and the other New World, Weston quickly learns that he's also trapped by his wayward parents' secret and complicated histories as well as by the café customers and employees who are all too privy to his growing up. Although Weston chooses his escapes intuitively, he discovers that it isn't easy to get away.

In this layered and savory novel, food is the reflection of life's shifting flavors—the way this singular, multicultural family communicates their deepest needs and their greatest expressions of love. When Thomas Fox Averill serves us the family's feasts of reconciliation, complete with recipes, readers everywhere will want to raise a toast.

ABOUT THOMAS FOX AVERILL

Thomas Fox Averill has published two story collections, Passes at the Moon and Seeing Mona Naked. In addition, he is the editor of the anthology, What Kansas Means to Me and author of Oleander's Guide to Kansas: How to Know When You're Here, a collection of radio commentaries gleaned from his ten plus years as a Kansas commentator on public radio.

Mr. Averill earned both his BA and MA in English at the University of Kansas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an O. Henry Award winner, he is writer-in-residence and a professor of English at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas.

Praise

"Hot stuff: it is completely satisfying food fiction. The recipes are intriguing and delicious-looking, the revelations are many and scandalous, and the story itself leaves you feeling sated but not stuffed....Welcome to Thomas Fox Averill's New World."—Calgary Herald

"A tour de force of the palate."—Wichita Eagle

"...a tasty coming-of-age story laced with family secrets and peppered with spicy recipes...his wistful, peculiar characters are engaging....Fans of food-as-metaphor-novels such as Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate will savor Secrets of the Tsil Café."—The Rocky Mountain News

"...a coming-of-age story that delves—with rich, succulent detail—into the lore of New World and Old World cooking...Recipes look...mouthwatering."—New Age Magazine

AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS FOX AVERIL

In the middle of writing Secrets of the Tsil Café, I celebrated my 50th birthday. Knowing that my restaurateur, Robert Hingler, would make his 50th an extravagant experiment in culinary pleasure and odd appetite, my agent suggested I do something similar for myself. I did. My self-indulgence was to pretend Hingler's Tsil Café was catering my birthday dinner. I invited nearly twenty friends and family members to a dinner selected from that menu. My wife thought it odd that I wanted to spend my birthday cooking a five-course dinner for twenty, but I called it a "gift" to both myself and my work-in-progress novel.

Our invitation included the dinner menu: Black Bean & Gooseberry Enchiladas and Chips with Sweet Habanero Salsa for appetizers; then Potato and Green Chile Soup; then the salad course, Watercress with Roasted Sunflower Dressing; and finally the main dish—Buffalo Tongue with Chipotle Barbecue Sauce—and sides, Quinoa and Squash. My wife catered the dessert, a non-Tsil Lemon Meringue Pie. I organized, shopped, cooked happily for an entire day, and we all ate well.

By putting myself in Hingler's shoes for a day, I learned something of exotic appetites. I received both compliments and occasional silence depending on the tastes of my guests. Most of all I had the best gift this novelist could receive: a deeper well for writing Secrets of the Tsil Café.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why is food such an apt metaphor for love and conflict? What makes food literature as a whole work?
   

2. Is food literature a trend?
   

3. How does weaving recipes into the novel affect the telling? When authors introduce recipes, art, and other non-narrative elements into text, does this enhance the reading experience?
   

4. Although place and geography are key to this novel, particular cities and places are described only in broad strokes. Why do you think the author makes this choice? What terrain matters most in this novel?
   

5. Is Wes always likeable? Does liking characters matter to the reading experience? Is "connecting" with characters the mot important part of the reading experience? Do you believe this interest in "connecting" to characters in general reflects a change in reading habits?
   

6. How does Averill play with metaphor in this novel? What does his focus on the "New World" achieve?
   

7. In what ways is this novel addressing political and cultural issues?
   

8. A theme in this book is "challenge." For instance, Averill obviously challenges our food tastes. In what ways does he challenge concepts of family?
   

9. In the end of the novel, memory is experienced as a taste—an appropriate closing to the novel. In what others ways does the ending bring the various themes and motifs full circle?
   

10. Averill's use of humor is integral, but subtle. Does he use it like cooks use flavorings? Is his whole approach to the novel—the way he wrote the book—almost a recipe in itself? Does the telling advance the story as much as the plot?
    

11. There are secrets to the recipes and even deeper secrets within the family. How do the mysteries of food and family combine to shape and affect Weston's childhood and his life as a whole?