Has the fad of lists created our awareness of food in literature or have great writers always known the importance of describing foods? Sifting through information online, it looks as though good writing has dollops of food descriptions.
There is no dearth of food quotes from Shakespeare. There are lists of these all over the Internet.
The eggplant and peach emoji are standard code for racy thoughts these days, but people have been using food as sexual innuendo for centuries. Shakespeare was a pro at the gastronomic double entendre.
In a most enticing post, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings arranges a wholesome spread of examples where great writers have used descriptions of food.
Food and literature have a long and arduous relationship, ... But nowhere does that relationship come alive more vividly and enchantingly than in Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals — an ingenious project by designer and writer Dinah Fried, who cooks, art-directs, and photographs meals from nearly two centuries of famous fiction.
The article is mouth-wateringly illustrated, comprehensive and rewarding in many more ways. It speaks of Ray Bradbury and Scott Fitzgerald, of Heidi and Moby Dick and others. And for each name there is an elegant and drool-worthy picture as well as well-chosen quotes and extracts.
Another piece is ungarnished by pictures but hearty in content:
There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered cocktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted.
The article brings up quite a few books that are new to me and I hope it will stimulate you to try one of them:
Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. ... Ginny retreats to the kitchen.
The article also tells us about
Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes.
When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee
Cooking in the Books: Cookbooks and Cookery in Popular Fiction also introduces us to
Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work
As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel.
While Cooking in the Books: Cookbooks and Cookery in Popular Fiction did not focus on works of great literary works, it was important to re-introduce the more comfortable kind of novels that most people read and enjoy. After all, it is only tomorrows which can sift through the chaff.
To return to our theme, there is a short piece, Food in Fiction: Hot Peas and Vinegar in ‘Two Gallants’, that focuses on James Joyce.
And we round that filling meal with a very academic look at Dahl and food:
This study considers debates related to food issues from the period in which Dahl was writing as well as the influence of children’s texts from a wide range of genres, including folk tales and fantasy literature, on food’s function in Dahl’s children’s fiction.
After all these feasts, we return to a more basic mode. The next post offers a review of a translated work.
No comments:
Post a Comment