Food 26: food and fiction

eating the books, feat. Nabokov's eggs

The scene at the end of every single Asterix book: Romans defeated, the bard Cacofonix and his lyre trussed up out of the way, boars roasted to juicy, burnished perfection - finally, the village feasts.

I love food in novels, and I think significantly more highly of the novelist if she or he writes about it well. Taste is a sense, and we only have five - ideally you want all of them to be fully engaged if you’re going to say something about the human condition.

I have various notions for extreme old age. One of them is to go back to university to write a paper on food and character in fiction, so I keep a list of people who write well about food in my head. It includes the Astérix books, Georges Simenon, Charles Dickens, Nora Ephron, Barbara Kingsolver, Marcel Proust, PG Wodehouse, Laurie Colwin, Émile Zola, Barbara Pym, Amy Tan, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Anita Desai, Charles Dickens, Laurie Lee, Guy de Maupassant, Jane Austen, Khaled Hosseini, Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ian Fleming, Min Jin Lee, Laura Esquivel, Gerald Durrell, Enid Blyton, AA Milne, James Joyce, Naguib Mahfouz, CS Lewis (religious allegory, yes, but also sausages: ‘spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt’), Louise Penny, Ann Cleves, Haruki Murakami, George RR Martin, Virginia Woolf, and Philip Roth, whose entire oeuvre suggests he was a tremendous greedyguts in terms of both food and sex, as is often the way. In The Divine Comedy, the gluttons are in the same circle of Hell as the sexually incontinent. Relatedly, there exist drooling descriptions of food by both the Marquis de Sade and Casanova.

(Virginia Woolf said one of my favourite things about food at a talk she gave at Newnham in 1928: ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the soul does not light on beef and prunes’).

Obviously there’s also Flaubert, who uses food to underline Emma Bovary’s rampant social ambition and disappointment at having married a provincial bore. Here she is at a grand dinner at the house of a local marquess:

Emma, on entering, felt herself wrapped round by the warm air, a blending of the perfume of flowers and of the fine linen, of the fumes of the viands, and the odour of the truffles. The silver dish covers reflected the lighted wax candles in the candelabra, the cut crystal covered with light steam reflected from one to the other pale rays; bouquets were placed in a row the whole length of the table; and in the large-bordered plates each napkin, arranged after the fashion of a bishop's mitre, held between its two gaping folds a small oval shaped roll. The red claws of lobsters hung over the dishes; rich fruit in open baskets was piled up on moss; there were quails in their plumage; smoke was rising; and in silk stockings, knee-breeches, white cravat, and frilled shirt, the steward, grave as a judge, offering ready carved dishes between the shoulders of the guests, with a touch of the spoon gave you the piece chosen […] Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pineapples. The powdered sugar even seemed to her whiter and finer than elsewhere.

My absolute favourite is the food in The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, my favourite novel (with Her Lover by Albert Cohen, also on the food list). It appears throughout the book: here a minestra, there a rum jelly, but the one that sticks most in the head is the macaroni pie, produced for a dinner for local grandees (sort of). There are servants in ‘green, gold and powder,’ each of them holding an enormous silver dish ‘containing a towering macaroni pie’:

… the aspect of those monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked. The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a spice laden haze, then chicken livers, hard boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.

Here’s how Antonio Carluccio made it - it’s as elaborate as it sounds. There is a simplified and much more user-friendly recipe in Skye McAlpine’s excellent cookbook A Table For Friends. And here is a piece with recipes about cooking the food from the film. (While we’re here, Luchino Visconti’s 1963 movie is almost as good as the book and I can’t think of a better thing to do with a wintry Sunday afternoon than to hunker down with it - it’s on Amazon Prime in the UK).

From Visconti’s The Leopard, 1963

Nearly as interesting is the question of what eminent authors ate in the privacy of their own homes. If you can tell a great deal about a fictional character by what they consume, it follows that you can tell even more from what their real, living creator has for lunch and dinner. Or doesn’t have, as with Joan Didion, who of course was not a writer of fiction but who leaps to mind in this context because I find it so odd that people love her kitchen to this day but make no mention of her painful thinness - as indeed neither did she, for all her candour.

(I just read a book called Didion & Babitz, in which Eve Babitz - guest link - says to Didion, ‘Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?’. She saw Didion’s extreme slightness as a ‘disguise’ and called her ‘a predator who passed herself off as prey’).

Still, Didion was by all accounts an excellent cook, and turned her kitchen into a perfect expression of west coast cool. (Joan Didion understood personal branding at least 50 years before anyone else).

Joan Didion’s kitchen in Malibu, photographed by Henry Clarke for Vogue in 1972.

All of the above is by way of alerting you to a new book called Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake, which is a collection of recipes by eminent authors (deceased). Aside from anything else it is the perfect stocking filler for anyone both bookish and foody you might have on your list.

Sylvia Plath perfectly understood what food can semaphore - in The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, mentally precarious and heading back to madness, eyes up the caviar at a feast laid on by the magazine she’s won a summer internship to:

Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silver ware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn’t ooze out and eat them.

[…] When I finished my first plate of cold chicken and caviar, I laid out another. Then I tackled the avocado and crabmeat salad. Avocados are my favourite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and French dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce. The crab meat tasted bland in comparison.

Esther finishes the meal by scarfing down a double helping of meringues and brandy ice cream. Later everyone has terrible food poisoning from the crab.

As per the title, Plath’s own recipe is for tomato soup cake, but I wanted to share these three others, reproduced here from the book by kind permission of Faber. All the recipes in the book are like their authors’ voices, but these ones particularly so I think.

Nabokov dreaming of boiled eggs in 1970. Photo by Gertrude Fehr.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Eggs à la Nabocoque

Boil water in a saucepan (bubbles mean it is boiling!). Take two eggs (for one person) out of the refrigerator. Hold them under the hot water tap too make them ready for what awaits them.

Place each in a pan, one after the other, and let them slip soundlessly into the (boiling) water. Consult your wristwatch. Stand over them with a spoon preventing them (they are apt to roll) from knocking against the damned side of the pan. If, however, an egg cracks in the water (now bubbling like mad) and starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an old-fashioned séance, fish it out and throw it away. Take another and be more careful. After 200 seconds have passed, or, say, 240 (taking interruptions into account), start scooping the eggs out. Place them, round end up, in two egg cups. With a small spoon tap-tap in a circle and then pry open the lid of the shell. Have some salt and buttered bread (white) ready. Eat.

V.N., November 18 1972.

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The author of Cold Comfort Farm 🙌🏼 in 1989. Photo by Robert Goldstein via Curtis Brown

Stella Gibbons’s Savoury Rice

It is extremely filling, says Miss Gibbons. It’s cheap, and men love it.

Method: Fry a clove of garlic in margarine until it is brown. Then put into the pan a breakfast-cupful of cooked rice that has been washed before cooking (more rice can be used if you want more, of course) and keep on stirring it until it has absorbed the fat. Then put in curry powder to taste, the pulp and seeds of three tomatoes, and a third of a cupful of currants and sultanas (well washed, of course). A dash of salt, pepper and lemon juice improves it. (You need to be careful and choice with the seasoning, or there is a risk of the dish becoming merely rich and sticky).

If the average housewife is scared of garlic, she can use onion.

The dish goes well with a plain salad of lettuce leaves dressed sharply with vinegar and salt (but you might as well say a plain salad of gold leaf, with the prices lettuces can be during wartime).

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Elizabeth Jane Howard, who could cook. Photo by STANLEY DEVON for THE SUNDAY TIMES. How weird, it won’t let me use lower case

Elizabeth Jane Howard and Fay Maschler’s Devils on Horseback

Unexpected courses provide a luxury of their own. After a light meal, a savoury is a great treat and a reason to keep going with the wine and wit.

On the Russian doll principle of cooking, this version of Devils on Horseback is fun. For 4 people, take 8 large prunes and pour boiling water over them. Leave them for half an hour and then simmer them in this liquid until tender. When cool, carefully stone the prunes and stuff them with the sort of olive that, in its turn, has been stoned and filled with pimento.

Take a half-rasher of thinly sliced bacon for each prune. Stretch and flatten it and wrap it around the prune. Set on a baking tin and bake in a hot oven until the bacon is crisply cooked - about 10 minutes. Let each Devil on Horseback ride on a piece of thin, hot buttered toast.

[Howard and Maschler co-wrote a cookbook. Maschler was the London Evening Standard’s incomparable restaurant critic for nearly 50 years, until 2020. Her own solo cookbook, Eating In, is wonderful].

There are lots more recipes in the book, including George Orwell’s plum cake, Noel Streatfield’s Filet de Bœuf aux Bananes (non merci), Tennessee Williams’s grits (‘Yankee diners remain recalcitrant’), Ursula K Le Guin’s Crab Nebula (brrr), Beryl Bainbridge’s Instant Mince, Katherine Mansfield’s orange soufflé and Angela Carter’s potato soup.

Thank you for reading! These food posts are free to read and are going monthly. They alternate with shorter picture posts, which are also free and are also going monthly. Both take me ages to write, research and organise, and one free post a fortnight - one food, then one painting - feels more manageable.

Everything else I write is for paid subscribers, so do consider that if you’d like to. Here is a free sampler. Either way, have a wonderful Sunday and if you liked this post then do please really kindly hit the ❤️ button - it makes it more visible. Thank you!