Food in Literature...

Hello hello. A busy weekend - hence the lack of posts! While I got up to lots of things over the weekend, one of the biggest features was... as ever... food. Spring is really trying to fight through and all I can think of now is picnics and baking and pub lunches in the sunshine. Admittedly Spring was decidedly absent from my Saturday and in true rainy-day fashion, I got baking. I made some delicious brownies and a lush ginger cake - I realise that you shouldn't complement your own baking but considering I ate so much of what I made, I choose to ignore this rule!

Anyway, the guilt of eating all this delicious food and the guilt of not writing any blog posts for a few days got me thinking. Food has always been very present in books and I don't mean simply cookbooks. Here are some of my favourite foodie moments in novels:

I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crashing among the hazels and nougatines

One book jumped to mind immediately and probably did the same in a lot of your minds as well. Regardless of whether you came to it by page or through the impossibly gorgeous Johnny Depp, Chocolat by Joanne Harris, has been making us want to gorge on chocolate for years. For anyone who regularly reads this blog, you'll know that I read Five Quarters of the Orange by Harris recently and, like Chocolat, food is a massive part.

Harry's mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and, for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs.

Potter is never short of foody moments, what with Honeydukes sweet shop, Molly Weasley's multiplying sandwiches and Slug Club feasts. My favourite, however, has to be in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone when they have their first banquet in the great hall. It makes my stomach rumble just thinking about it!

I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert has 'Eat' in the title and then explores food in Italy - what could possibly go wrong??

I remember the dinner well—soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé. At the last minute, fearing the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bère of 1904

Ahh Evelyn Waugh - one of my real favourites and what could be more iconic than Brideshead Revisited. But you can't have a big country house with lots of sexual tension without throwing in some food!

If this post wasn't quite enough to satisfy your rumbling stomachs, visit this fantastic blog. It hasn't been updated recently but there are plenty of foodie moments in its archive for you to enjoy: http://literaryfoodporn.blogspot.co.uk/

 
Happy eating!