Baking with Julia

MARBLEHEAD -- You'd think that a request to spend a day baking with novelist Julia Glass would be met with a plan for coconut cake. That dessert drives the plot of this food-obsessed author's new book, ``The Whole World Over." And it was her own memory of a delectable coconut cake in Greenwich Village that gave her the idea to use the confection as a catalyst.

``We were sitting in traffic on a drive up here," Glass says, ``and I was craving that cake, and I thought, `What if my main character were a pastry chef, and what if all the events in the book came about in a way because someone tasted a piece of her cake?' "

Glass's protagonist, Greenie, makes such a delicious version that the governor of New Mexico invites her to work for him. But here in the real world, Glass hasn't been able to find a decent coconut cake recipe to save her life. So for a day of cooking at the Marblehead home she shares with Dennis Cowley and their two sons, Glass decides to demonstrate another favorite: white - chocolate pear mousse.

While Glass melts chopped chocolate in a blue Le Creuset saucepan, she admits to a passion for baking: two cakes (one for children and one for adults) at each son's birthday, seven souffles in two weeks during an attempt to master that technique, and pear-almond pie at Thanksgiving. Nonetheless, ``I'm not a great cook," she insists. ``I just love to feed people. I've never baked bread in my life, for instance. And I'm not one of those cooks who makes my own pizza dough."

The family moved to Marblehead last year after her debut novel, ``Three Junes," won the National Book Award and made bestseller lists, affording them enough financial stability to qualify for a mortgage -- but not a large enough one to buy anything other than a ``submarine" in Greenwich Village, where they had been living. Instead, they bought on the North Shore after her yearlong fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study convinced them they could return to the state where she grew up.

For food-loving readers, part of the appeal of ``Three Junes" lies in its treatment of all things edible. One of the characters is a chef whose cooking soothes his grieving family. In ``The Whole World Over," Glass goes all out: Besides Greenie, another of the main characters is a New York restaurant owner, and scenes of cooking and eating suffuse the prose. Culinary metaphors abound, from a honeydew melon of a moon to a memory like Swiss cheese.

Other than allowing herself license to always order dessert, Glass kept the pastry research to a minimum. And while some authors base their novelistic dishes on their own recipes, Glass makes it all up. In an essay she wrote for 2004's ``The Book Club Cookbook," by Needham residents Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp, Glass describes her surprise when a bookstore planned to hire a chef to re - create a ``Three Junes" menu for a special dinner. She wouldn't be able to help, really, because all of it -- vichyssoise made with buttermilk, peaches poached in creme de cassis -- was fiction.

``This was food designed for the delectation of the mind, never intended to leave the page," she wrote. But the dinner went off without a hitch, a testament not only to the abilities of the chef, but to Glass's own culinary instincts, fictional or not.

``She finds such amazing pleasure in the culinary lexicon," says Gelman. ``I just started reading her next book, and it only takes two pages to see that coming through."

When she cooks at home, Glass says, it tends to be ``wet," particularly compared to Cowley's penchant for dry-grilling meats and vegetables. That means that black cod recently went in the oven with tomatoes, capers, black olives, and herbs, creating ``lots of sauce." She improvised that dinner, no recipe required (``As I get older, I'm too lazy to get out a book"), but she does have favorite volumes, such as 1987's ``Nantucket Open-House Cookbook," by Sarah Leah Chase, which she describes as being `` a cult book on the Upper East Side" that was given to her by ``a friend who's very Upper East Side-y."

CALLING ALL COCONUT CAKES If you have a cake you think Julia Glass would love, we'd like to know about it. Send recipes and join the discussion at boston.com/ae/food.

``The food is very rich, but [Chase] likes a lot of the same foods that I like," such as white chocolate and pears, which in this treatment become an ethereal mousse layered with puree. While beating the egg yolks or melting the chocolate, Glass deprecates her own technique as she goes.

Growing up in Lincoln, Glass says, her worst high school subjects were gym and home economics; she remembers her teacher scolding her for her peeling method. As she uses an Oxo vegetable peeler to skin pears the way her teacher wanted , she says, ``I didn't succumb to this method until I was in college [at Yale] and finally started to get into cooking."

She learned, like so many others, from Julia Child's ``Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and had pangs of jealousy when Julie Powell's ``Julie and Julia" came out, documenting Powell's attempt to make every recipe. When Glass studied painting in Paris and lived with a French woman, she says, ``Everybody thought I was the silliest person, you know? How Americans need their cookbooks, blah blah." Then an elegant Frenchman who lived upstairs returned from a hunting trip bearing venison, wanted to make a classic sauce with it, so sheepishly asked Glass for a peek at Child's book. ``I converted it back to the metric for him, and nobody ever made fun of me again," she says.

In Marblehead, as Cowley and a contractor come in and out to work on an attic renovation, Glass has difficulty getting the eggs and sugar to ``ribbon" in a shallow bowl. She transfers them to a deeper one and keeps beating, then into a double boiler, and finally lets the mousse cool while she beats egg whites, then cream. Then she asks for a lesson in folding, which she says ``terrifies me."

She pulls out a selection of funky glassware, layering mousse with pear puree and topping each with mint from her garden before setting them in the refrigerator. It's no coconut cake, but once it sets, it will be positively dreamy.

In ``The Whole World Over," the coconut confection bookends the story, opposite a tiered wedding cake in the final chapter. The book's original title, in fact, was ``A Piece of Cake," a tongue-in-cheek reference to the difficulties of marriage, until her editors discovered an upcoming memoir of the same name.

Glass, 50, knows firsthand the irony of the original title. Her own life seemed charmed until her mid-30s, when she divorced, she was diagnosed with cancer, and her only sister committed suicide. She has lived with Cowley, a photographer, for 15 years, and their two boys, Alec and Oliver, were born in 1996 and 2000 after hard-won pregnancies. It's been five years since she beat back a recurrence of cancer, and she's juggling parenthood with book tours and writing, which she does in a third-floor study with a view of the harbor.

Even though one critic has complained that the novel's wedding cake doesn't carry any metaphorical resonance, Glass doesn't see it that way. The cake's structure, she says, echoes the novel's, but beyond that, it demonstrates a universal struggle.

``Greenie creates this very eclectic, grand, perfect cake that's her masterpiece, which is in a way what we all want our lives to be, you know?" she says over the playful shrieks of her sons and a friend in the next room. ``We want to build a life that's rich and complex and varied in texture and flavor, and we want it all to stand up just perfectly. But that's spun sugar. That's a fairy tale."

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.