The sensory experience of food
Because Alim is a famous chef, Emezi made sure to work in descriptions of his food that leap off the page. We can thank the author’s obsession with cooking shows (and guidance from a real chef) for that.
A lot of the creative process is asking questions and then having the answer just show up: “Who would be a good match for Feyi? Who has the qualities that would balance her out in a way and still be sexy?” And so when I imagine like, okay, what would this hot DILF look like, the answer is a chef. A chef would be great, because who doesn’t love a chef [laughs]? Who wouldn’t want to be with somebody who’s like, “Yeah, I have two Michelin stars and I can make you anything”?
It worked really well because it’s such a sensory experience, working with food. Because there’s sights, like you can see it, you can taste it, you can feel textures, you can smell it. It engages so many senses at the same time. A lot of my work is very sensory in a way, where it’s descriptive. And the reason for that is because whenever I’m writing, it’s visual first, like I can see it in my head. The way I write is meant to try and capture as much of the visual as possible. If I see a room, then I have to write what it looks like, what it smells like, what that person felt—it’s immersive. And all of my work is meant to be immersive because I’m trying to replicate the experience I’m having in my imagination of being immersed into an actual landscape. Food is a great way to do that because you get to use so many descriptors that engage so many of the senses. I did watch a lot of cooking shows. I’m also obsessed with cooking shows in general, so it really wasn’t a leap.
I think, honestly, I might have been watching cooking shows and been like, “I want an excuse to write about this.” But the first draft of the book had all these descriptions of the food that I had kind of cobbled together. However, if there’s going to be art in my book, it has to be good. And it has to be good enough to meet the standards of not laypeople, but people who actually work in that industry. The food, in the same vein, had to be good enough where a professional chef would read that and say, “Oh, that sounds solid.”
I’m not a professional chef, so what I did was I commissioned one. I took out all the sections that had food in the book and showed them to him and he was like, “This does not make any sense. At all.” He’s like, “These are not coherent dishes.” And I was like, “I know that. I just put together a bunch of stuff. That’s why I’m asking you.” So he rewrote every single meal in the book and wrote an entire menu of everything and added, “Hey, this is what it would smell like. These are the aromas that would be in the room. This is what the color would look like. These are the plates that the food should be on. These are the drinks that go along with the seven-course dinner that Alim makes.” And then I just incorporated everything he wrote into it. And he was also thinking about Alim as a character: “Okay, this middle-aged Caribbean man.” Because all the food has the mark of the chef on it, it shows their personality. So all the meals that are in the book now that Alim makes are reflective of his personality, his heritage, his interests in terms of his work. They speak as strongly to who he is as Feyi’s art does to who she is.
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