Writing as enticing as pie by Thea Atkinson

I still remember my first Christmas present from my mother-in-law, a bulky stainless steel roasting pan one and a half a feet all the way around and eight inches high. It looked like a huge square box without a cover.

"You said you wanted to try making a rappie pie," she said, looking at me through her glasses with obvious worry that she'd given me an unsuitable present.

My husband had requested the meal repeatedly, but as an Anglophone, I'd never made one.

I'm a native Nova Scotian, and because I live in an area heavily populated with Acadian French, rappie pie, or rapure, is a common delicacy. Like most delicacies, it doesn't always look appetizing to folks who have come from away. Like my Scottish relatives who visited a few summers ago.

“What’s rabid pie,” is about as close in dialogue as I can come to their response when asked if they’d like to try some. We set about trying to describe the dish and failed miserably.

“It's a dish made mostly of grated potato and meat,” we explained, leaving out critical details.

 

An old-fashioned rapure is prepared by first grating raw potatoes and then removing the liquid. My mother-in-law once piled the mash into a pillowcase and used the spin cycle of her washing machine to pull out the moisture. I don't even want to envision how she managed before that.

The moisture is then replaced with a meat stock boiled with a hefty dose of salt and onions.  The most common meat is chicken (although some add hare, beef, clams, or pork: truth is: any meat will do.) Then the potatoes and meat and seasoning are baked for three hours into a shiny, glutinous dish, that if you've done the job right, sports a thick crust on the top tasting suspiciously of browned potato chips. It deftly avoids apt description and it just as stubbornly refuses to look appetizing in photos. In fact, its mere appearance has turned away many would-be eaters. But the aroma, the taste: Ah. You can't beat it.

It's weird but this dish reminds me of writing somehow: there's a mystery at times with how a writer can manage to make an enticing tale out of spare bits of inspiration. And if they try to describe the process it ends up sounding as appetizing. There's just no substitute for the whole package, seen, tasted, smelled, and savoured.

Sometimes the results of our efforts defy description. What made you write that? Where did the inspiration come from? How do you make a character so real you think you know him?

But we do it and if we've done the job well, the result can be as mysteriously appetizing as an entire rapure: bland sounding by description, but a whole and complete taste sensation when cooked to perfection.

Here's to delectable writing in all its forms.

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Thea Atkinson is a writer of character driven fiction; call it what you will: she prefers to describe her work as psychological thrillers with a distinct literary flavour. As in her bestselling novel, Anomaly, her characters often find themselves in the darker edges of their own spirits but manage to find the light they seek.

She has been an editor, a freelancer, and a teacher, but fiction is her passion. She now blogs and writes and twitters. Not necessarily in that order.

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