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Author Robert B. Parker by bradsearles, on Flickr

Robert B. Parker died yesterday, sitting at his writing desk in Massachusetts.

I grew up believing that time spent reading fiction is time wasted. It won’t teach you anything, it’s just fairy stories. My wonderful husband introduced me to the books of one of his favorite authors, Robert B. Parker, early in our marriage. I was laid up with knee problems and going just as stir crazy as a girl can go. He brought home a little paperback of The Godwulf Manuscript and I was sold. I had watched Spenser for Hire on TV in the 1980s, and had a huge crush on Robert Urich, so hubby knew the path to my heart had already been blazed.

I was hooked. Between his old-fashioned “code” of right and wrong, his struggle with the women’s movement, the steamy scenes with his committed girl Susan and his prowess at the stove, Spenser became a real person to me. Every new book was like meeting an old friend for drinks. Many of the books were read aloud to me by my ever-so-patient and velvety-voiced husband while I was in labor with one child or another. We joked about how we hoped the new book would be released before the next child was due! I eventually read and enjoyed most of his other novels, including Appaloosa, from which the 2008 movie of the same name was made. But Spenser was my first love, and played no small part in my culinary education.

From Early Autumn:

I cut the eyes out of the pork chops and trimmed them. I threw the rest away. Patty Giacomin appeared not to have a mallet, so I pounded the pork medallions with the back of a butcher knife. I put a little oil into the skillet and heated it and put in the pork to brown. I drank the rest of my Schlitz and opened another can. When the meat was browned, I added a garlic clove. When that had softened, I added some juice from the pineapple and covered the pan. I made rice with chicken broth and pignolia nuts, thyme, parsley and a bay leaf and cooked it in the oven. After about five minutes I took the top off the frying pan, let the pineapple juice cook down, added some cream and let that cook down a little. Then I put in some pineapple chunks and a few mandarin orange segments, shut off the heat, and covered the pan to keep it warm. Then I set the kitchen table for two. I was on my fourth Schlitz when the rice was finished. I made a salad out of half a head of Bibb lettuce I found in the refrigerator and a dressing of oil and vinegar with mustard added and two cloves of garlic chopped up…

“You cook this?” he [Paul] said.

“Yes.”

“How’d you know how to do that?”

“I taught myself.”

“Where’d you get the recipe?”

“I made it up.”

He looked at me blankly.

“Well, I sort of made it up. I’ve eaten an awful lot of meals and some of them were in places where they serve food with sauces. I sort of figured out about sauces and things from that.”

“You have this at a restaurant?”

“No, I made this up.”

“I don’t know how you can do that,” he said.

“It’s easy once you know that sauces are made in only a few different ways. One way is to reduce a liquid till it’s syrupy and then add the cream. What you get is essentially pineapple-flavored cream, or wine-flavored cream, or beer-flavored cream, or whatever. Hell, you could do it with Coke, but who’d want to.”

“My father never cooked,” Paul said.

“Mine did,” I said.

“He said girls cook.”

“He was half right,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Girls cook, so do boys. So do women, so do men. You know. He was only half right.”

This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted by Cheeseslave, because real food takes place in fictional kitchens, too.