Food and Fiction
Last night I had a baked potato for dinner and it made me think of The Accidental Tourist, the novel by Anne Tyler. The family the book revolves around eats baked potatoes constantly, and the baked potato acts as sort of a metaphor for the character of the family - bland, boring, wholesome. Although I don't think baked potatoes are always boring (mine was quite delightful last night), I now associate baked potatoes with that book.
What foods do you associate with certain books?
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16 Comments:
The strongest singular food element that I can think of successfully threaded throughout an entire book is coffee, in Mark Helprin's Memoir From Antproof Case.
From Publishers Weekly
His usual mixture of flamboyant fantasy and concrete detail animates Helprin's (Soldier of the Great War) latest work, a tour de force that combines adventure, romance and an overview of the 20th century into a bittersweet narrative. This "memoir" is being composed in humid, insect-ridden Brazil, and its pages are preserved in an antproof case. How the elderly narrator ended up there after his birth in New York's Hudson Valley, an adolescence in a Swiss lunatic asylum (he killed a man and was deemed insane), college at Harvard, a perilous stint as a fighter pilot in WWII, a career as an investment banker in Manhattan and other eventful episodes, is the burden of the convoluted, intriguing story. It's an old man's tale, plangent with remorse and regret, yet vibrant with robust memories of sexual and aerial escapades. It's also somewhat farfetched, since the narrator has waged a lifelong, maniacal crusade against coffee, an obsession whose origin is only revealed in the novel's affecting last pages.
Karen Resta at 4:51PM on 09/20/07
Strawberries:
(describing a woman's toes): "her toenails are painted red like the wild strawberries we ate for dessert, with a little sugar on top...They're so incredibly sweet. I'm sure they taste heavenly."
From "Before You Sleep" by Linn Ullmann.
And that's only part of the passage that describes her toes, it evokes rich imagery and now I think of strawberries (and toes) in a different way.
Chau at 6:15PM on 09/20/07
Crisp apples and "Little Women"
Smoked salmon and bagels (with the WASP-y accoutrements of capers and sliced tomatoes) and Laurie Colwin's "Family Happiness," in which the heavily assimilated, old-money Jewish siblings regularly "build sandwiches."
Raw fish being gutted by a gloriously happy man at the end of Laurie Colwin's "Happy All the Time"
"24 Century Butter Pie" and Diana Wynne Jones' "A Tale of Time City" (I imagine this to be something like a vanilla ice-cream sundae with hot butterscotch sauce)
Hamburgers with onions and Diana Wynne Jones' "Archer's Goon"
PIckles and "All of a Kind Family"
Not surprising that so many of the books on this list are kids' books -- good children's writers know that yummy-sounding food is a great way to draw kids into a story. And Laurie Colwin, of course, wrote cookbooks.
maggiesara at 6:50PM on 09/20/07
Not that this is fiction, but whenever I eat or think of fast food, I think of Fast Food Nation or the movie Supersize Me! I know this is quite obvious but it sticks in my head!
Chew on That at 7:13PM on 09/20/07
Ham and The Jungle.
pbisNOTmyname at 12:14AM on 09/21/07
Eudora Welty's "Delta Wedding." All the great Southern food, it took days to prepare. I think there was a coconut cake. There's always a coconut cake.
KatherineWilliamson at 4:56PM on 09/21/07
I second the 24-century butter pie!
Also, meat pies and "A Little Princess."
tacroy80 at 7:33PM on 09/21/07
In 'Some Hope' by Edward St. Aubyn, there is a rather disturbing anecdote concerning a sadistic man (David Melrose), a masochistic woman (Eleanor Melrose) and a fig tree. There is also a great description of perhaps one of the most unpleasant dinner parties ever hosted.
'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' by Kate Atkinson also has some great food moments, from the greasy cakes and finger sandwiches at the Lennox coronation tea party, to the vile pre-pantomime dinner that Bunty serves on the night of Gillian's death, to Ruby's doomed relationship with an Italian chip shop owner and Bunty's funeral tea.
caley at 6:26AM on 09/23/07
The phrase "Italian chip shop owner" brought to mind to British books, then Jay Rayner's recent release The Oyster House Siege. Not a food but rather a fine silver fork resonates throughout the book in my mind, because of the use of that fork in a specific manner near the start of the story. :)
Karen Resta at 10:41AM on 09/23/07
your analogy reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from eating, a movie by henry jaglom. one of the characters says she's never met a man who excited her as much as a baked potato.
cybercita at 2:23PM on 09/23/07
my favorite piece of food writing is in ruth reichl's first memoir, tender at the bone, where she describes eating lunch at the home of a very wealthy classmate from her canadian boarding school -- she takes one sip of carrot soup -- it tasted like a million chickens had gone into making the stock -- and instantly she understands that she has "never really eaten before". her sensuous description of that meal is so vivid that i always want a cigarette after i read it!
cybercita at 2:28PM on 09/23/07
Heh...cybercita, your post reminded me of one of my favorite food-moments in movies. It's from "The Seduction of Joe Tynan," and Alan Alda, a clean-cut junior senator, has just had (adulterous) sex for the first time with a spectacularly sexy Meryl Streep, the daughter of a mover-and-shaker senator from the South. He bounds out of bed, disappears, and reappears shortly thereafter with an enormous tray of food -- cut up fruits and vegetables, with dip, and bread, and salami and cheese, and I dunno what -- and Meryl, still in post-coital languor, takes one look at it and drawls "Why can't you just smoke, like normal people?"
maggiesara at 4:37PM on 09/23/07
Winnie the Pooh and honey!
srhcb at 8:31AM on 09/24/07
Barbara Pym and cauliflower cheese
Lilla at 1:05PM on 09/24/07
Picnics - the best sort, from Wind in the Willows.
Fresh shrimp and oysters - tasting of pride and pain, fromThe Prince of Tides.
Karen Resta at 1:15PM on 09/24/07
"floury potatoes" mentioned many times in Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt.
thegreatlumpia at 6:39PM on 09/24/07