Literary Food & Drink
Several of literature’s most memorable moments surround the preparation and enjoyment of food & drink. We’ve scoured the pages of great works so that you needn’t do it yourself. In honour of your limited free time, here are a few bite-sized favourites.
Recipe links included in texts.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
On the eccentricities of Maggie Tulliver’s mother’s family: There were particular ways of doing everything in [the Dodson] family: particular ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, curing the hams, and keeping the bottled gooseberries. Funerals were always conducted with peculiar propriety in the Dodson family: the hatbands were never of a blue shade, the gloves never split at the thumb, everybody was a mourner who ought to be, and there were always scarfs for the bearers. A female Dodson, when in ‘strange’ houses, always ate dry bread with her tea, and declined any sort of preserves, having no confidence in the butter, and thinking that the preserves had already begun to ferment for want of the sugar and boiling.
James Joyce, Dubliners
Maria’s musings as she prepared the tea: The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea. (From “Clay”)
The young narrator’s thoughts while listening to Mr. Cotter: I crammed my mouth with stirabout for fear I might give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile! (From the first story of Dubliners, “The Sisters”. Stirabout then makes an appearance in the last story, “The Dead”, and again in Ulysses.)
CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
On Turkish Delight: Each piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. (Turkish Delight is available from Foodstuffs)
Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
The narrator recalls a spiritual experience brought on by tea & cookies: And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (Montcrieff translation. Check out the Lydia Davis translation for a slightly more elegant reading.)
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