This Time Next Year

Food and meals are motifs that illustrate the themes of Transformation and Change and The Power of Family and Community Bonds. Minnie’s vocation as a professional chef allows Cousens to use food preparation as symbolic insight into her character and relationships. Minnie calls “baking a pie the perfect kind of flow” (63), and flashback sequences reveal that baking with Connie is one of her fonder memories of her mother, who was “softer somehow when she cooked” (267). Minnie finds success in her first restaurant job only to face sexual harassment at her subsequent work in fine dining. She is fired when Quinn’s then-girlfriend, Polly, finds plastic in her dessert. Quinn also has a miserable evening that night, as Polly breaks up with him due to his unavailability and preoccupation with his mother. Though Quinn and Minnie are at odds at first, his appreciation of her cooking and her business model brings them into further contact. As the two deliver pies together, Quinn tells her that he knows “people need this connection in their day, someone dropping in to see if they’re okay” (79). Though Minnie resents his support of her business as an act of unwanted charity, his support of her is rooted in the fact that her clients remind him of his mother.