Review: The Kitchen Front

The Kitchen Front by Jennifer Ryan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two and a half stars.

Four women compete in a wartime cooking competition, with the winner getting the chance to be the first female presenter of the BBC's radio programme The Kitchen Front.

Audrey is a young impoverished widow with three sons, working herself to the bone making pies in order to repay the loan her sister gave her. Lady Gwendoline, Audrey's younger sister who married money and now lords it over the countryside as the wife of black marketeer Sir Reginald. Nell is Gwendoline's kitchen maid, extremely shy she is supposedly helping the cook, Mrs Quince, but in reality it is Nell who does the majority of the cooking these days. Finally Zelda, born in poverty in the East End of London, she worked her way up to sous-chef in some of the grandest restaurants in London until she was called up to be head chef at a meat canning factory owned by Sir Reginald.

Each of the women must create a delicious dish, whilst observing rationing, and hopefully utilising some of the food stuffs which were in good supply (like whale meat or powdered eggs).

This was very slow going for me. I was over a quarter of the way through the book before it started to pull together, before that point we bounced from one woman to the next, not really building a story or any connection with the women. Audrey was a bit of a drip, Gwendoline was spiteful, Nell was a mouse and Zelda was aggressive and shouty. I was giving the book one last try , determined to get at least one-third of the way through, when suddenly the book came together.

Some of the chapters are prefaced by old recipes such as potato peel pie. Unfortunately, in Kindle format they don't really add much, I'd rather have seen a copy of the old government leaflets or newspaper cuttings to give historical heft rather than all the recipes looking the same. Also, they didn't really add to the story, because the chapters described the cooking and preparation (although not in depth) so I would have preferred to have them at the back in an Appendix, maybe with a hyperlink in the ebook, rather than cluttering up the novel.

Sadly the biggest issue with this for me was that it read like a text book narrative, you know the way in which school books could take the most exciting and interesting events in history and turn them into dry recitations of facts? Like that. And don't even get me started on the Hallmark style HEA.

I suppose this might be successful as a way to introduce some of the privations of war and the misogyny of the era to school children, sort of an interactive experience, but I didn't really enjoy this faction.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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