From the endlessly feasting warriors of Beowulf to Bridget Jones and her doomed diets,
food and fiction have gone together hand in hand. Kevin Gould looks at foodie fiction, and suggests his own reader's digest for you to try.
Food has been exalted and evoked, described and debunked in literature ever since words were first written down. The Bible evokes the gastronomic longing of the Jews in their wilderness: 'We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely, the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks and the onions and the garlic' (Numbers 11).
Dr Samuel Johnson, our greatest lexicographer, took a different attitude to his salads. 'A cucumber' he sneered, 'should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.'
Edward Lear's fertile imagination could, no doubt, have found plenty of uses for Johnson's despised cucumber in his typically idiosyncratic recipes. These 1870 instructions for amblongus pie employ the rhetoric of the kitchen to peculiar effect, although the result is similar to Johnson's cucumber: 'Take 4 lbs (say 4½ lbs) of fresh Amblon- gusses, and put them in a small pipkin. Cover them in water, and boil them for 8 hours incessantly, after which add 2 pints of new milk, and boil for 4 hours more.'
It carries on, with the addition of powdered gingerbread and curry powder, and the instruction to shake the pan violently until the Amblongusses have become a pale
purple colour. 'Then having prepared a paste, insert the whole carefully, adding at the same time a small pigeon, 2 slices of beef, 4 cauliflowers and any number of oysters. Watch patiently till the crust starts to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time. Serve up in a clean dish and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.'
The great tradition of European cuisine is a frequent topic for writers with access to the better things in life. In The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse rapturously describes the haute cuisine dishes created by the Provençal-born chef Anatole - Bertie Wooster regrets that he has but one stomach to put at his disposal. Anatole's Dinner of Legend and Song consisted of 19 flamboyant courses, one of which - the mignonette de poulet petit duc - was fondly recalled by Bertie as 'Le Bird of Some Kind avec Chipped Potatoes'.
Unsurprisingly, Ernest Hemingway was a foodie of a very different flavour from Wodehouse. Meals are often a focus and a call to action for his characters, from Pilar's rabbit stew in For Whom The Bell Tolls to an artichoke vinaigrette enjoyed on the terrace of the Gritti palace in Venice in Across the River and Into the Trees. Here he is at his best in 1958's
A Moveable Feast: 'as I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans'.