Prairie Food in the Little House

I’ve only seen the rather melodramatic TV series starring Melissa Gilbert as the author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I don’t recall any sumptuous meals in it, although it should be said that the potatoes and meat that the family consumed in quantities always made me feel hungry. The wife grew up on Wilder’s books, however, [...]

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Bloomworld

James Joyce has a good time, lavishing gastronomic delight upon Mr Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. The man is gross but affable, fat but thoughtful, chunky yet observant. Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, [...]

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Ouolipo Grub

Christian Bök spent seven years of his life producing the minor tour-de-force he called Eunoia, in which, corresponding to the letter U, he has a page depicting the foodiness of someone called Ubu. An alter ego, perhaps? Ubu gulps up brunch: duck, hummus, nuts, fugu, bulgur, buns (crusts plus crumbs), blutwurst, bruh- wurst, spuds, curds, [...]

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Burning Pirciati

In The Scent of the Night, Andrea Camilleri’s upright Inspector Montalbano has heard of a little trattoria that has opened off the provincial road to Giardina, and betakes himself there. With some difficulty he finds the humble establishment and is not impressed with it at first. But when the heavenly smells waft towards him, he [...]

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Penne All’Arrabbiata Perfection

I think I noticed literary gastronomy for the first time in Tonino Benacquista’s Holy Smoke (which I have reviewed here). Nipped over to the library to borrow it again, just so I could excerpt the following passage for the perfect penne arrabbiata. Bianca waited for me before having supper. Without saying so, of course. “Penne [...]

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Stuffed Vegetables Constantinople Style

In Zone Defence, Petros Markaris deftly avoids the usual gastronomic trap that this blog is all about, and cunningly places a recipe for Inspector Haritos’s favourite dish at the end of the book. That is not to say that food is not mentioned at all in this very funny crime caper. Indeed, there’s a whole [...]

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Serving Up Crime, Europolarwise

The unfortunately dormant Europolar site has a collection of essays on crime fiction and the gastronome, which should be of interest to anyone who salivates at the lavish descriptions of food and drink in the midst of murder and mayhem. (I like to complain that all that gorging stops the action, but I drool over [...]

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Seafood Tartare

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s detective Pepe Carvalho is a culinary maven, and loves nothing better than to potter around his kitchen cooking up delicacies and feeding them to the constant stream of women that get in and out of his pants. A tribute, then, to the quintessential Barcelonan man. But there was no way he could [...]

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Ajiaco Sailor-Style

Right. It’s final and authoritative now. For some reason that eludes me, crime fiction authors in foreign tongues incorporate lavish descriptions of local foods and cuisine to – what’s that Wodehousian expression? – ‘add verisimilitude to an otherwise bland and unconvincing narrative.’ I’ve noticed this now in a couple of Latin authors (Italian and Spanish), [...]

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Calf’s Breast Pie, Historic Paris Style

Jean-François Parot in his The Phantom of Rue Royale falls precisely into the cliché of the modern crime writer: the work has no atmosphere unless it segues into food, preferably with the entire recipe, accompanied often by pornographic descriptions of the ensuing meal. Here, he launches into an entirely unnecessary description of a calf’s breast [...]

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