The food we read ...

Made-up meals and such.

Perhaps you have heard of Kate Young? She writes The Little Library Cafe detailing the recipes she stumbles across in the fiction she reads. Things like the tomato sandwiches from Harriet the Spy and the sausage rolls from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and the plum cake from Five Go Off in a Caravan.

Clever Kate also has three cookbooks under her belt, each themed in a foodie fiction way, reminding us how evocative these made-up meals can be … how firmly they can implant into our memory.

For me the Turkish Delight in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is quite unforgettable (and I don’t even like Turkish Delight!) The sausages being cooked over a little caravan stove in Danny the Champion of the World are another instant go-to if anyone asks me about fiction and food. And the pancakes made by Pippi Longstocking, of course. And the cakes and sandwiches and pies and lashings of ginger beer that featured in many an Enid Blyton story.

If we’re talking grown-up fiction I’ve recently loved way the food is described in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years (although there are some very arresting scenes in what at first glance seems like a rather jolly book, I should warn you!) The food in this book is a whole character in itself, with much scraping of butter on toast and cramming of berries into mouths. Pure delight!

Here’s a few foodie snippets …

“The boys were all right, they were good at swimming from school, but the girls were afraid of going out of their depth, hobbled over the pebbles, waded a few steps, swam two or three strokes again and again, until she made them come in, teeth chattering, cold and slippery as fishes, to have their backs rubbed, to be given pieces of Terry’s bitter chocolate or hot Bovril.”

***

“The larder was cool and rather dark with a window covered with fine zinc mesh, in front of which hung two heavily infested fly papers. Food in every stage of its life lay on the long marble slab: the remains of a join under a cage made of muslin, pieces of rice puddings and blancmange on kitchen plates, junket setting in a cut-glass bowl, old, crazed, discoloured jugs filled with gravy and stock, stewed prunes in a pudding basin and , in the coldest place beneath the window, the huge, silvery salmon, its eye torpid from recent poaching, lay like a grounded zeppelin.”

***

“Her bark, however, was far worse than her bite, at least where Dottie was concerned, as a stream of tempting little snacks was slapped onto a round, painted tray with two parrots on it, and lugged upstairs by one of the maids to her sick room. A custard tartlet, some toast and dripping, the junket set the previous night, a coddled egg and the end piece of a baked sultana roll found their way there at frequent intervals where they silted up, since poor Dottie felt too ill to fancy very much.”

***

“She was going through the grown-ups’ rooms looking to see that the drawers had clean lining paper, that the quilted biscuit boxes by the bedside tables contained Marie biscuits, that the bottles of Malvern water were full, that the hanging cupboards had a fair number of coat hangers - all things that, when she returned from Battle, she could tell the Duchy had been done and thus save her from fussing. The biscuits had become quite silent, crumbly and unappetising. She collected the boxes and took them down to the pantry to be refilled.”

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Today I wanted to ask you about the food that’s most memorable in fiction for you, too!

Perhaps you’d tell me in the comments section, pal?

xoxo pip