Yeah, Sex Is Cool, but What Are They Eating?

Photo by Andrea Scher, cover design by Vikki Chu/Berkely Publishing

Romance writer Jasmine Guillory finally injects food and eating into the bodice-ripping genre

Food is an important part of falling in love. First dates spent nervously staring at each other across meal laden restaurant tables; going to your partner’s familial home for the first time and attempting to fit in as the family bonds over peeling potatoes or arguing about the exact blend of spices that makes the perfect chicken curry; weddings, we know, are nothing without cake.

And so it seems obvious that food should play a big role in any love story, but somehow it’s often left out of romance novels. The star-crossed characters meet for a dinner, but you rarely hear what they eat. Or they’re so caught up in whatever fantastic plot of events will eventually seal their affections that they seem to forget to eat at all. Between sex scenes, can’t a bodice-ripper let its heroine bust out of her bodice thanks to a nice meal for a change?

Yes, it turns out. Beloved and prolific romance author Jasmine Guillory makes a point of including food in her novels, which include The Wedding Date, The Proposal, Royal Holiday, and more. Her next next novel, Party of Two, even centers around chocolate cake. In Guillory’s world, love happens over take-out pizza on the couch, while cooking enchiladas, post-sex while snacking on room service, and making plans for afternoon tacos. It’s there to the point where fan and author Roxane Gay commented that the characters ate “CONSTANTLY” in The Wedding Date. For Guillory, that’s the point. How are we supposed to tell who these people are if we don’t know what they eat? Guillory spoke to Eater about writing food that’s worth bonding over, the trickiness of making food sound vibrant and enticing, and why being covered in taco grease might be the key to romance.

Eater: When you started reading romance novels and getting into the genre as a reader, did you find a lot of food scenes? Has that traditionally been a part of the genre?

Jasmine Guillory: No, that’s a good question. Nothing comes to mind. There are definitely a number of romances that I’ve read in the past few years that include great things about food, like Pride, Prejudice and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev. It’s a modern, Indian-American take on Pride and Prejudice, and one of the main characters is a chef. This book came out in 2019, and every moment that I read it I deeply wanted to be eating Indian food. But it’s always the recent books that come to mind. I think about food so much when I’m reading. If the author writes about them eating somewhere, I want to know what the characters are eating. I always want to know that.

Tell me a little bit about your love of food in general. What inspired that and what made you want to make it such a big and intentional part of your narratives?

I grew up in families that really prioritized food and cooking. When we would have family meals, they were like a celebration always. Even when it was just “Grandma’s making gumbo on Sunday, everybody come over.” That was a celebration, you know? I think of wanting to cook for people I love because I love them. And then feeding someone is a way to show your love. I learned to think about cooking for people as a thing you do for people that you love.

As any food writer can tell you, no matter how much you love food it can sometimes be extraordinarily difficult to describe it in an enticing way. How do you go about writing in a way that gets at the culinary pleasures that the characters are experiencing?

I think what is it that I loved about a specific dish? And what is it that I think my characters will love about it? Usually if I’m talking about food in books, it’s because people are eating together or thinking about why they love to cook something or why they love to eat something. And so I want to dig deep and explore that. Is it the sharpness of the dish that you love? Is it how crunchy it is? Is it that the spiciness makes you cry a little and takes you out of your daily life? What is that thing that makes you come back over and over again?

Are there any food-related words that you won’t use or that you think are totally overused?

What’s funny is that I don’t mind most of the food words that people don’t like, but I don’t use them because I know readers hate them. Like I don’t mind “moist” at all. It’s descriptive! How else are you going to say that you want a cake to be like that? But I know people hate that, they hate it. So I try to avoid using it for that reason. I just try to get specific when it comes to certain things because most words I actually like. Unless they’re the ones that are trying to be too fancy, like, utilize instead of use. Most food words I find interesting just because I do find them descriptive. Some of them are overused, but that’ll kind of cycle in and out, you know?

Do you have a favorite food-based scene that you’ve written?

There are two. Both come from The Proposal. I think all of my books talk about food but The Wedding Date and The Proposal probably do the most. And in The Proposal, Carlos, who’s the main character, really likes to cook. Both of the scenes that I really love in this book are about him cooking. In thinking of this character, I considered why he loves cooking. He’s a busy doctor. Why is he coming home and cooking?

There’s one scene where he’s on the phone with his sister and he’s making pasta for himself and it’s just his break from the world while he’s doing that. I find it to be a very soothing scene. It’s like, I want to make exactly what I’m in the mood for, what will make me happy. And then there was another scene that I love and it makes me laugh because I sort of ripped it from my own life. Which is a scene where he and Nik, his love interest in the book, are making enchiladas. They’re making enchilada sauce and she touches the chilis too much and then touches her face and her face is on fire. And that exact thing happened to me. I was making enchiladas with my mom and I touched my face and my face felt on fire. My sister was frantically Googling what to do to help and I ended up spreading sour cream all over my face, which is what Nik does in the book to fix it. FYI, it works!

In your most recent book, The Royal Holiday, there’s a scene where the two main characters are sitting next to this obnoxious cocky diner who insists that he wants really spicy food. His meal is clearly too spicy for him and he doesn’t want to admit that he can’t handle it, and he’s just losing it. The couple ends up bonding over their annoyance at this guy, because he’s just so bad. What made you think a moment like that could be something to bond over?

When I think of big moments in my life, and sometimes it’s not even a big moment, it’s the deep conversations you have with people, the ones where you realize at the end, “Oh, we’re friends now.” A lot of times when I think about moments that my characters will share in the books — not just the “we’re falling in love” or the big fight moments, but just the quiet ones where they realize, I really liked this person. I think about what table would they be sitting around. Where would they be? What would they be eating? And that helps tell me the story, and I hope that tells a story to the audience of who these people are and why they started loving and liking one another.

The women in your books never feel guilty about what they’re eating. Everyone’s eating pizza and enchiladas and this hearty, messy food that women are still really discouraged from eating, especially around men or on a date. Was that intentional?

That was definitely very intentional. There are so many things that women are supposed to feel guilty about in this world, and I don’t want women to read a book and think “Oh no, I shouldn’t be eating this.” I like to push back against this whole idea that there are bad foods and good foods, and I want women to feel free to eat whatever they want, whether it’s a kale salad, or enchiladas, or tacos, or a hamburger, and not feel like there’s something wrong with them for doing so.

In my books, I really wanted to have people eating meals together and not feeling like there was something wrong with them. To a certain extent, that is a little bit of a fantasy. But I do know plenty of women who love to eat and don’t have a source of anxiety with food. I want food to be joyful and fun no matter what it is. I mean, I also hate it when people talk about vegetables in a way that makes vegetables seem depressing. I love vegetables! I eat salad all the time. Don’t talk about them like it’s punishment. There’s so many great things about food and what we can do with it and for it in our lives. And I hate that people turn it into this binary, good/bad, clean/dirty thing. I just want people to see more joy in food.

Have your readers picked up on your food scenes?

I didn’t quite realize that I was putting so much food into my books. I just think about food all the time. And so when I’m writing a book and I think they’re going out to dinner, I’m obviously going to describe what they’re eating and where they’re going. So it was very funny that in an early review of my book from Roxane Gay, she said lovely things about it, but then she was like “these people eat all the time.” And I was like, “Thank you, Roxane you’re wonderful, but I also feel like they eat the normal amount of food that people eat!”

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