Instead, Fannie Flagg has written a social protest novel for our time, as penetrating and wickedly comic about such controversial issues as race and class stratification, sexual violence, the beauty myth, rampant commercialism, and same-sex love as any Victorian novel by Charles Dickens. More provocative and complex than the film of the same name, Fried Green Tomatoes turns out not to be chick lit after all. For as Rachel tells us, cooking is “a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure.” If readers wish to cook up some of Rachel’s “sure-thing” recipes, the ones for vinaigrette, Potatoes Anna, and Chez Helene’s bread pudding are among the best.įried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafeby Fannie Flagg From the book’s first recipe for lima beans with pears (“something that looked like plain old baked beans… turned out to have pears up its sleeve”) to the novel’s pièce de résistance–a recipe for key-lime pie, which Rachel serves Mark right in the kisser–Ephron marries love to food: humans’ desire for food, delight in food, and disgust with food. Wielding her recipes as skewers, Rachel broils Mark and his lover Thelma Rice over the slow coals of betrayal and revenge. In this novel, Ephron becomes cookbook author Rachel Samstat, while Bernstein transforms into syndicated columnist Mark Feldman.

The heart does indeed burn in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a humorous roman à clef–a thinly veiled fictional account of Ephron’s disastrous marriage to her philandering husband Carl Bernstein (the journalist of Watergate fame).

Thelma rice nora ephron