Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame

Throughout Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame, protagonist Jenny Quinn uses baking to communicate her love for the people in her life. The novel suggests that food has the power to convey love to people in the present and across time.

One of the most prominent examples of this theme, Jenny’s tiffin recipe, features in both the Prologue and the Epilogue. In the Prologue, teenage Jenny copies the recipe for her father’s tiffin, a British no-bake dessert, into a book she plans to give to her unborn child. She fantasizes about watching this child “sinking their teeth into her father’s tiffin, just as she had done” (2). The passage suggests that, for Jenny, sharing the tiffin recipe with the son she will never know is an act of love equal to her father sharing the tiffin itself with her every year at Christmas. Jenny is separated from her son William weeks after his birth, but in the Epilogue, they are reunited by that same tiffin recipe. William’s son Andrew, who “had used the recipe book as a child” (362), recognized both the tiffin recipe and the name Jenny, attached to another recipe in the book, and realized that Jenny Quinn may be his father’s birth mother.