Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown

It is 1819.  Owen Wedgewood is the household cook whose rich employer has just been shot point-blank by the red-headed pirate captain Mad Hannah Mabbot.  Mad Hannah happens to taste Owen’s food and decides to drag him captive back to her ship.  His culinary skills are tested to the limit when Mad Hannah tells him he must cook for his life, making her a fantastic meal every Sunday evening or… (finger across throat)

Just what is Owen up against?  He has to work with flour infested with weevils, horse meat, and hardly any spices to speak of.  How he collects more appropriate supplies and makes ingenious use of what he has is one part of the enjoyment of this book.  Another part, surprisingly enough, is the description of the cooking; somehow the author infuses it with a passion that is almost sensual.  A third part is how the relationship between this temperamental chef and his captor progresses.

The larger historical context of the story is depicted very well and we discover that Mad Hannah’s piracy amounts to economic sabotage aimed at the tea traders as protest for their policies of enslaving the orient in drug addiction to opium. 

The book is surprisingly clean, although it has brief mentions of prostitution, bestiality, homosexuality, and fornication.   Such is probably to be expected in a story featuring life on a pirate ship, and I am only grateful that it wasn’t worse, as much as I dislike such.

It seems as if once Owen and Mad Hannah reach a romantic understanding, the energy of the cooking descriptions and the narrative falls off, although it is probably because the character has Mad Hannah to care about in addition to cooking for her.   Still, as a reader it felt like the author’s main goal was to get them together and then didn’t know what to do afterward.   The story was there, but as a reader I just didn’t care as much.  I wish I did, though.

I was a bit disappointed by the ending.  It left me with a “What? That’s it?” feeling, although it was probably the best ending that could be expected with when Mad Hannah’s driving motives are met or removed.  Still, it left me what the impression that the romance was a fling, rather than love.  Mad Hannah deserved better, considering her deep concern for her lost family pushes her to such lengths in the story.

I will keep an eye out for more books by Eli Brown, though.