My Fine Fellow
My Fair Lady meets Master Chef in this surprisingly entertaining confection. Set in an alternate Georgian England, in which George IV’s daughter Charlotte has inherited the throne instead of her uncle William, this gender-flipped reimagining of Pygmalion features a pair of precocious Royal Culinary Academy students, Helena Higgins and Penelope Pickering. In this idealized version of the 1830s, Queen Charlotte has sponsored a new and lucrative professional class of Culinarians, who set the fashion for fine dining and food science and who now have an entrée (pun intended) into the halls of social power and status. A chance encounter with a humble pie seller, Elijah Little, inspires the bossy Helena to make him her senior project, attempting to transform a talented but lower-class cook into a sought-after Gentleman Chef. Although he resists Helena’s grandiose schemes, he can’t resist Penelope’s kindness, and the young cook decides to hide his true origins and take the opportunity presented to him.
Readers who suspend any desire for historical accuracy in terms of the history of cuisine will be rewarded with a witty reworking of Shaw’s rather patronizing fable. The cooking lessons and competitions that compose the bulk of the narrative feature delicious menus that are more consistent with today’s foodie culture than the still mostly medieval cookery of pre-Victorian England, but they are described so appetizingly that readers will forgive their improbability.
Cohen also infuses this comedy of manners with some thoughtful observations on the British aristocracy’s troubled legacy of sexism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, without becoming too heavy-handed in the process. Such lessons are familiar to adult historical fiction readers, but the intended young adult audience—especially Bridgerton fans who are attracted by this novel’s marketing—will appreciate its unflinching look at the barriers facing even the most talented of outsiders to High Society.
