Boy, do the contestants on The Great British Bake Off have it easy. In Jennifer Ryan's beautifully executed novel The Kitchen Front, the four Englishwomen competing in a BBC radio cooking contest during the summer of 1942 must cope with Nazi bombers flying overhead, a scarcity of ingredients and rigidly defined gender roles.
The women, who are vying to become the show's cohost, are as different as their reasons for competing, which become clear as the novel's point of view roves from contestant to contestant. Audrey, a recent war widow and mother of three, is barely getting by with her small baking business. She's up against (and in financial debt to) her sister, the self-important Lady Gwendoline Strickland, who suffers the indignity of competing against her own skittish young kitchen maid, Nell. The fourth contestant is Zelda, who misses no opportunity to boast that before "four hundred pounds of Nazi cordite" demolished the Dartington Hotel, she was its deputy head chef--a job for which, as a woman, she had to fight mightily. An aspect of her life that the unmarried Zelda isn't broadcasting: she's pregnant.
With The Kitchen Front, Ryan (The Chilbury Ladies' Choir) delivers a scrupulously researched entertainment full of unexpectedly scintillating discussions about wartime food strictures and substitutions. There are few stiff upper lips on view in the novel, which frequently takes maudlin turns. If readers want to cry into some elderberry wine, they can follow the recipe provided--one of 20 period recipes scattered throughout the book. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer