Support for WPR comes from UW Credit Union, dedicated to providing a variety of investment options paired with financial consultants members can trust.

More at UWCU.org. Your best interest always comes first.

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Today, the cook and the book.

So there are two things we learn to do with our mouths, when we're really small. Taste and talk.

Almost before we can walk, we discover that both words and food are delicious and that both tell stories.

I have a very specific memory of when my husband and I were first living together and there

was one night on like a rainy October when we both got called off work and stayed home

and roasted a chicken with lemons in it. To this day, as soon as it gets to be kind of cool outside

again, I'm like, I want to roast that chicken with lemons and I just, I can still see like

the darkness outside. I can see the warm light in my kitchen. It says, you know, 20 years of

romance in a way to me that just a roast chicken shouldn't say. Today we're talking about the

language of food with chefs who write and novelists who cook, beginning with Michelle Wilgen,

a novelist and executive editor at Tin House Literary Magazine.

She lives here in Madison, and she's written a novel called Bread and Butter,

a hilarious peak at the inside workings of restaurant kitchens, told through the eyes of three brothers with rival restaurants.

Here's how it begins.

Music others with rival restaurants. Here's how it begins. Wine sap was carefully positioned between blowout, expensive, and pleasantly upscale.

In choosing the location, Leo had ensured that no strip malls were nearby, for example.

Because it was awful,

walking into a mall and dropping $200 on lamb shank and Barolo in the shadow of a radio shack.

When the restaurant was about three years old, Leo had told the chef Kenneth to start making his own pasta,

and two weeks later, Britt entered the kitchen to find two women, one ancient, and one about 40, set up

...