Food, glorious food, and wedding strife

By Philippa Tracy

I was hooked before I opened the book. I read a review in which the writer said that if she owned a book shop, she would, “hand-sell Piglet to everyone.” And so, I was convinced to read this first novel from Lottie Hazell.

It is a book about relationships, class and mostly food. The protagonist, known only as Piglet for most of the novel, has a difficult relationship with food, as you might suspect from her nickname. There are early references to Nigella Lawson and many rich descriptions of the food she craves, she cooks and she eats. When the book opens, we meet her in Waitrose, planning a dinner party for friends. She tells us it all has to “look and taste exquisite.” She follows Nigella’s maxim that a chicken in the oven elevates a house into a home.

Piglet is apparently living a dream life in Oxford, close to her posh in-laws-to-be. She edits cookbooks for a living and is soon to be married to Kit, a man with money and class, who apparently adores her. Is there a lie at the heart of this apparent idyll though? They are only in Oxford because of “Cecelia and Richard’s conditional house deposit.” And Piglet and Kit are from very different backgrounds. She comes from a working-class family in Derby, where her parents still live, and still serve “yellow custard in a Pyrex jug” and are not embarrassed to eat mint Viennetta, while Piglet is now only too painfully aware that the only way to serve a Viennetta is “ironically.” The question is: will she ever really fit in or will she always be an “impostor”?

Piglet has moved so far away from her childhood home, physically and metaphorically. She now hosts dinner parties where she makes a dessert from one of the cookbooks she is editing: “an espresso semifreddo with warm caramel sauce and glinting shards of praline.” She corrects her mother’s speech, cooks in orange Le Creuset pots and is planning to make her own wedding cake, a French desert known as a croquembouche. But when Kit reveals some sort of deception (we are never told exactly what) 13 days before the wedding, it seems that the life she has “so smugly shared” begins to fall apart.

The novel is structured around the countdown to the wedding. There is a growing rift between Piglet and her best friend Margot, who is preparing for the birth of a first child. Piglet is encouraged to apply for a promotion at work but she hesitates. And the miscalculations in her cooking of the caramel custard for the croquembouche seems to be symbolic of how the facade of her carefully curated life is falling apart. Piglet has “isolated herself from so many people, detaching from her support network in favour of a sense of superiority, perfect coupledom, bliss. And for what?” What will she do? Will the wedding go ahead? How will it end?

I am not sure I totally agree with the level of enthusiasm of the original review I read. But it is definitely an easy read and the descriptions of food are delicious.