Trail of Broken Hearts and Recipes

Why would anyone put together a collection of recipes left behind by castoff lovers? It’s the rare boyfriend, after all, who has the skill to whip up a romantic repast. Unless he’s dating Erin Ergenbright or Thisbe Nissen.

The two friends recently wrote “The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook: They Came, They Cooked, They Left ... (But We Ended Up With Some Great Recipes).” A great concept, and it’s amazing that two 30-year-old women have amassed enough exes and their recipes to fill a 175-page cookbook.

“I tend to think that it might have something to do with the fact that we’ve both lived in weird bohemian communities,” Nissen says. “I’ve spent a lot of time living in co-ops and working on organic farms. I think you tend to find more men in that environment who cook than in investment banking.”

Plus, they lived in Iowa City, Iowa, and “a culinary mecca it’s not.” The “strange, artsy, hippie boys” Nissen and Ergenbright dated shared recipes like “Quesadilla Things” and “Popcorn Cake.”

The authors met at the University of Iowa’s Writing Workshop. As graduate fellows, they lived together four years ago, where one day before a party, Ergenbright said, “I should make Davis Haggerty’s spicy barbecue sauce!” and the book idea was born.

As Nissen says, people who browse a bookstore’s cookbook section “are not looking for ‘The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook,’ they’re looking for someone who can teach them how to do something, like Julia Child or James Beard.” Although they say the book, released in June, has been selling well, the authors would prefer the book to be shelved somewhere else.

With fiction, perhaps?

A vignette about the boy and the breakup accompanies each recipe. Many of the stories are fake, though the recipes aren’t. The gazpacho that Lucas Amarati made on the organic vegetable farm? “It’s actually my mother’s gazpacho recipe,” Nissen admits. “And it’s really good.”

Ergenbright says she isn’t much of a cook, but “I can make everything that goes into this book. I use this book, it has every recipe I love.”

. The authors arranged the layout of the cookbook “artistically,” based on color schemes in the elaborate collages that decorate each page. “It’s hard to find things sometimes,” Ergenbright admits, “because it might be spicy and slippery.”

That’s right, the six chapters are “Sweet,” “Sort of Fluffy,” “Savory,” “Spicy,” “Slippery” and “Substantial.”

“It’s a lighthearted book; it’s not vindictive,” Nissen says. “In a lot of ways, working on the stories for this was the antidote to writing serious literary fiction. We got to save our angst and fear of everything that one can be fearful of when writing. That gets relegated to our serious projects.”

It’s chick-lit, but the anti-”Nanny Diaries”--not biting or vengeful. “We just have to get our book on “Sex and the City’ and we’d be set,” Ergenbright says.

Urban Outfitters, that hip repository of inflatable chairs and tiki shot glasses, will stock the book. Ergenbright and Nissen speak fondly of their many “exes.” They changed all real names except for Vito’s--the chef was dating Ergenbright when they sold the book, and insisted on having a recipe included.

“My task was to write our [fictional] demise,” she writes, “without mentioning that it was rather ridiculous that we were even together at all. I don’t think we even made it one more week, but Vito got what he wanted.” For the record, Ergenbright is now single and hopeful, while Nissen has a boyfriend (who cooks, but not for her).

The full-color glossy pages display mementos of the two women’s lives and loves (if there’s a photo of someone whose eyes aren’t blacked out, it’s one of the authors). As a matter of fact, Nissen says publishers weren’t actually interested in the book until they had seen the collages. “They all said, ‘We don’t publish cookbooks by unheard-of cookbook authors. Thanks anyway.’ ... I think people just respond to the collages. That was the part that took the most time and that we enjoyed the most.” They even sought out recipes and tall tales to suit their favorite visuals.

The process of making collages meshed with the process of storytelling. “I would fly out to Portland [Ore.]”--after Ergenbright moved there--”and we would collage madly and drink wine for a week,” says Nissen, who still lives in Iowa City. “We’d call up friends and say, ‘Tell us the craziest date you’ve ever been on.’ ”

That’s how they got the story of Gary the cocaine addict, who sent one of the authors his mother’s recipes from jail. “I think it’s much more fun that there are lots of actual people who are collaged into it,” Ergenbright says.

And it saves the rest of womanhood from thinking they’re missing all the great chefs.