If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Get Out of the Kitchen Survival during wartime means doing without, but those who endure discover how to get what they need. For most of the characters in my dystopian novel The Kitchen Brigade , this revolves around food. Food is love. Food is culture. Food is community. For this group of women who have made cuisine their passion and their livelihoods, food is everything. When we first meet Valerie, a former culinary student, she’s cooking with whatever she can scrounge in the mess hall of a refugee camp. To bear the nightmare her life has become since a war-torn America was occupied by Russia, she draws on memories of learning to cook as a child. She recites the names of the French “mother” sauces like a mantra; she recalls the aromas of licorice and vanilla that keep her father alive in her mind. Again she calls upon her childhood comforts when she’s imprisoned and forced to cook for a Russian general. In his kitchen she’s thrown into a brigade responsib...
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