Will Read for Food

Trust any fiction with no scenes of meals? Of course not. Pâté, Turkish delight, and venison pies don’t just appeal but also reveal, notes the Boston Globe.

From the article...

“Island of the Blue Dolphins’’ makes us think of harvesting abalone, “Heidi’’ of the goats’ milk that helped cure Klara, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’’ of Turkish delight, the world’s most disappointing candy. What I imagined as a child to be some sort of intoxicating nougat is instead a powdery gumdrop that tastes like a urinal mint smells. This confection aside, one wonders how much the food we read about in childhood shapes what we want to eat today. In “Little House on the Prairie,’’ for a special dinner the family eats “stewed jack rabbit with white-flour dumplings and plenty of gravy. There was a steaming-hot, thick cornbread flavored with bacon fat.’’ Rabbit with dumplings and bacon cornbread sounds like something that might appear in any of today’s crop of farm-to-table, nose-to-tail restaurants. Is the craze for urban foraging a product of children who read “My Side of the Mountain’’ one too many times?

Food is no less important an illustration in books for adults, of course. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, for instance, it connects characters to their homeland and each other. Perhaps no one has written so grimly of food as Jonathan Franzen, whose “Corrections’’ is full of miserable meals that limn one family’s dysfunction. (No one who reads it will ever hear the phrase “mixed grill’’ again without feeling simultaneously depressed and hysterical.) Everything we need to know about the dandy Eugene Onegin is revealed when he dines at a restaurant on “roast beef, red and gory, / and truffles, which have ever been / youth’s choice, the flower of French cuisine: / and pâté, Strasbourg’s deathless glory, / sits with Limburg’s vivacious cheese / and ananas, the gold of trees.’’ Likewise the Cratchit clan in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol’’ when they exclaim with delight over a dinner of goose “eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes’’ so that it feeds the whole family. Food reveals all - class, character, culture.