Monday, April 25, 2011

Literary lunches(and dinners, and breakfasts)

No I don't mean the expensive sort you go to where you have to be careful not to rattle the cutlery in case you miss a pearl of wisdom falling from a (usually) best-selling author's lips. I mean those literary lunches--and every other kind of meal--that you find for free within the pages of a good novel: meals that are lovingly or even glancingly described and that through sheer imaginative power make you salivate or bring 'l'eau a la bouche' as the French more appetisingly puts it.
As a kid I loved it when authors described what their characters ate and drank. From sumptuous fairytale feasts to the Famous Five's ginger pop and cakes, food always added an extra dimension for me, especially when it was exotic(like ginger pop, for example!). In my own writing at that age I always had at least one scene in which there was some tasty meal of some sort to tuck into before a big adventure; and the diary I kept as a12 year old(which I still have) is punctuated by descriptions of the meals we'd had that day, complete with a beaming sun for things I'd loved and a weeping face for things I hadn't: thus broad bean soup got a tear while Gateau Moka glowed with radiance. And all I can remember of the story I was writing at one point of that year apart from the title which I carefully wrote down in my diary--(the cheerfully Blytonish-derivative title of 'The Twins' Highland Holiday') was that it featured a big sausage feast, barbecued on top of a hill somewhere. Oh, and ginger pop!
Well, I grew up and I tasted ginger pop and was no longer quite so enthralled by it. And these days I'd put a smiling sun beside broad bean soup as much as moka cake. But I still love descriptions of food in novels, and in my own books for kids I don't forget about how much as a young reader I loved licking my lips over those literary meals. And so along with the excitement and the action I also make sure to serve up a tasty helping or two of food fit for the imagination.

9 comments:

  1. remember the broad bean soup Dad made us when Maman was in hospital with Bertrand ?Black liquid that certainly didn't inspire us.

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  2. Yes I certainly remember that one, put me off broad beans for years! Love them now though fresh out of the garden--and broad bean soup is great when it's made with fresh young beans. I think Dad must have used really tough old kochkers as Louis would say!

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  3. Love this post! I will forgive a multitude of sins in a book if there are lavish descriptions of the meals... and I can't write without including those in my work, no matter what the genre. Gone With the Wind has always been one of my favorite novels because of the descriptions of food and clothes...

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  4. Love writing food in my novels, and love reading about food! The novel I'm reading now is based around a bakery - oh the bread descriptions! (WU author "how to bake a perfect life") - last night I wanted a piece of home baked bread so bad after reading! :-D

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  5. I realize this is not a book, but my favorite tale with food is the film Babette's Feast.

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  6. The only thing better than reading delicious descriptions is being able to make what the author has described because they've included a recipe!

    Kathryn, yes, Barbara O'Neal's novels--The Lost Recipe for Happiness, The Secret of Everything, and How to Bake a Perfect Life--are made for foodies and contain recipes. So does WU contributor Jael McHenry's gorgeous debut, The Kitchen Daughter.

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  7. Those books sound scrumptious, Therese, Kathryn. Will definitely be ordering them! And yes it's great when authors include recipes--but even when they don't but describe the meals, I've often been inspired to create a dish just as it's described in a book!

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  8. I've read and reread food passages in books since I was a kid. Laura Esquival's Like Water for Chocolate comes to mind, and a book I reviewed a few years ago that made me ravenous: Nichole Mones's The Last Chinese Chef. Jael McHenry's The Kitchen Daughter is wonderful. There are so many!

    And of course, movies like Babette's Feast are irresistible!

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  9. Glad to hear that I'm not the only person inspired by the food in a novel. I've not only tried to re-create a dish, but sometimes entire meals. I'm still trying to find the right red pepper based sauce for the dinner described in Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop.

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