Publication Notes: When a Gratin Becomes a Ganache (2021)
I was writing for more than a year before I published my first story, about internet cooking culture, with its opulent food photos, live-streaming chefs, family cooking legends and recipes you're bound to find if you scroll far enough.
Mila Jaroniec, author of NETRATĀ, read and edited this tall tale. She liked the food humor and she helped me strengthen what worked and cut what didn't. Here's her website.
I submitted When a Gratin Becomes a Ganache to several publications and it was accepted by Portland's High Shelf Press for their satire section. They put out some thirty-odd issues over several years before folding, but I ended up with a few print copies of my first published story. It was printed in paperback, chapbook-style. Each issue had a graphical theme and Vol. XXVII featured vague black and white photographs, full of curve and shadow. Vol XXVII is still available on Amazon even after the High Shelf Press website shut down.
When a Gratin Becomes a Ganache pokes fun at internet cooking culture. It plays on current cooking concepts and popular online recipe services. In my personal experience, not all internet recipes work. Some seem to be missing ingredients or the quantities are wrong. It's why I always consult more than one online recipe before cooking so I can compare the ingredients list and the quantities.
By day, I'm an I.T. consultant, so I read a lot about computer security. I'd read an article about how foreign powers could hack the U.S. power grid and I had a lightbulb moment - What could be worse than hacking the power grid? If online recipes got hacked and no one could cook properly!
The underlying theme is how dependent we are on the internet and how befuddled we are without it. It's not like the old days when grandma-ma handed down her 3x5" recipe cards when it was your turn to prepare holiday dinners.
WAGBAG is also about how we consume internet content, but don't feel adequate or compelled to create it. I wanted the hero to progress from being a content consumer to being a content creator, with a push from the hacking calamity.
The story doesn't mention the Covid pandemic, but that's when I finished it and it's the calamity lurking in the background which put us all at risk, as we dived into internet life and didn't resurface for almost a year.
Back then, political disinformation was still in its infancy, but we were witnessing the foundation of a messaging apparatus designed to deceive. Folks of all stripes flocked to Q Anon like moths to a flame, fearing a future storm and seeking people and organizations to blame for their misfortune. Key players were called to Capitol Hill to explain to Congress how misinformation had spread on their platforms. They all managed to avoid the questions with careful, lawyer-approved messaging, trumpeting the moral values of their platforms and their willingness to create safer spaces for the consumed, ultimately leading to a fracturing of our culture into intellectual bubbles we couldn't see beyond, even when we all sought answers to the same problems.
I was determined to craft When a Gratin Becomes a Ganache as a humorous story, not a political diatribe, and I think I succeeded, so read it and draw your own conclusions. It's an alternate universe, but it isn't so far from our own.
Read When a Gratin Becomes a Ganache in High Shelf Press XXVII (Feb. 2021)
I edited and polished When a Gratin Becomes a Ganache even more before it's second appearance in my short story collection, Capital Disrupt (2023).
