Topeka ? Cooking’s an adventure with Tom Averill because you never know for sure how everything’s going to taste.

Nor does he, for that matter.

Averill, author of “Secrets of the Tsil Cafe” (BlueHen/Penguin Putnam Books, 2001), cooks largely by taste, guided by a spirit of discovery and a sense of experimentation.

Today, he’s preparing one of his New World meals, in which all — or very nearly all — of the ingredients used in the dishes are foodstuffs that would have been available to native cultures in the Americas before European settlement.

Adhering to this philosophy results in cuisine that tastes lively and inventive to anyone raised with an Old World palate.

Bubbling away in pots and cast-iron pans on Averill’s gas stove are the makings of a hearty lunch: a largely improvised turkey mole, served on a homemade sweet potato tortilla with posole (akin to grits).

The mole — the name is derived from the Aztec word for sauce — is an ingenious concoction of maple syrup, cocoa, blueberries, tomatoes, roasted pumpkin seeds, mango juice, salt and Chimayo chile powder that Averill obtained in New Mexico.

His sweet potato tortillas are beautiful, pale orange discs made from flour, sweet potatoes, butter (a concession to Old World cookery), salt and baking powder.

Averill’s posole, made of mixed red, white and blue hominy — hulled and dried kernels of corn that are boiled– also carries with it a hint of chile powder.

Tom Averill, Topeka, author of Secrets

The resulting meal is unqualifiedly delicious, and a little hot, too. That undercurrent of chilies gives off a slow, mellow burn that begins with scarlet-colored ears and spreads across the diner’s face.

The effect is pleasant, like a shot of vodka on a cold, winter day. It’s a memorable lunch. After all, how often do you get to eat a dish that pairs turkey meat with cocoa, blueberries and tomatoes?

“The interest my food has generated is not because I’m a great chef,” Averill says modestly, “but because it’s a sort of creative combination of tastes that people might not have had before — like avocado-gooseberry pudding with a chocolate-chile sauce.”

Make-believe restaurant

Averill’s unusual style of cooking, and his writing, have indeed generated lots of interest.

“Secrets of the Tsil Cafe,” a novel about a fictitious Kansas City restaurant that serves only New World food, has earned favorable reviews from critics and has readers across the country rushing to the kitchen to duplicate its spicy fare.

Tom Averill, an enthusiast of New World cuisine, prepares a mole sauce of tomatoes, blueberries, maple syrup, cocoa, roasted pumpkin seeds, mango juice, salt and Chimayo chile powder.

The Tsil Cafe’s complete menu is found at the start of the book, and Averill’s real, time-tested recipes for many of those dishes are sprinkled throughout the novel.

One place his book has attracted special attention is Lawrence, where it has served as the featured work for this month’s Read Across Lawrence event, in which hundreds of the city’s residents read and discuss the same book.

The program, now in its fourth year, is sponsored by the Lawrence Public Library.

Averill, 53, an author and a professor in the English Department of Washburn University in Topeka since 1980, explains how New World cuisine came to play a role in his writing.

“I got interested in this way back in 1992, when everybody was celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus discovering the New World,” says Averill, who was teaching a folklore class at the time. “One of the most interesting things he discovered, and something that changed the whole world, was food. Europeans had never seen things like vanilla, pineapple, chilies, cranberries and blueberries.

“I’d always been interested in food, so what I did was buy as many books as I could about New World foods and ingredients. I started cooking with things that were in the New World, pre-Columbus. I just made ’em up — there are no recipes.”

One of the books Averill used as a resource is “Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World” (University of Arizona Press, 1992).

A meal of turkey mole, posole and sweet potato tortillas is among Tom Averill's specialities.

Averill quickly became known, among family and friends, for the New World dishes he was turning out from his kitchen.

“I would serve this food to people, and they would say, ‘You should open a restaurant.’ But restaurants are such a hard business, totally demanding of your time. I thought, ‘I can’t start a restaurant, but maybe I can start a restaurant in a book,'” he says.

‘Eating’ the book

“Secrets of the Tsil Cafe” is part of an expanding genre of food-centered novels that incorporate recipes. His novel was among several works of fiction featured in an article that appeared last September in the food section of the New York Times, “Have You Eaten Any Good Books Lately?”

“I almost never cook from a recipe. One of the hard things about writing this book was that I had to write down the recipes to use in it. I had to write them down and test them, so people can approximate what you have in the book for them,” Averill says.

And many readers have done so, contacting the author through letters and e-mails with queries about various cooking techniques and ingredients.

“Lots of people have cooked from the book. I hoped people would cook from it, so in a sense they could ‘eat’ the book. The kind of cooking that I was doing, with these kinds of exclusive, New World ingredients, has some tastes you couldn’t get otherwise — a very earthy, tangy taste.”

Tom Averill's book, Secrets

Averill, known to many as the voice of William Jennings Bryan Oleander of Here, Kan., in commentaries heard on Kansas Public Radio, has always liked to write about things that interest him.

Food, especially of the New World variety, was a natural subject for this avid gardener.

“I’ve always been fascinated by agriculture itself and that human relationship with it that is so old. There is this whole tradition of agriculture in the New World that’s totally different than what’s going on in the Old World,” he says.

“I think it’s fascinating that there were two completely different food traditions, and within 200 years (of Columbus discovering the Americas), they’re almost completely blended.”