A literary feast
Food can often be much more than sustenance when it comes to travelling, and storytelling.
For a vagabond on the road, or anyone travelling for that matter, food is never far from your mind. Once you’re ensconced in any new destination, time exploring can be equated to how might you spend time between meals. That is, what to eat, when to eat, and where to eat constitute a good part of your thinking, planning and daily itinerary.
And quite often, it’s the ‘foodie experiences’ that linger longest in your memory post trip. Take Syracuse in Sicily, and its extraordinary old town on the island of Ortigia, where antiquity hangs heavy in the air, including the 5th century Greek theatre. Its cavea (or seating capacity) is one of the largest ever built with 59 rows accommodating up to 15,000 spectators.
But it was the bucatini con sarde (pasta with sardines) that I remember most, as I lingered at a waterfront cafe sipping glasses of local rosé one sunny but brisk winter afternoon.
I’m no food writer, but I do acknowledge how food, and all its manifestations, can be an actual character, cultural signifier, plot ploy or symbolic vessel for authors. Be that fiction or non-fiction. Which is why in my peripatetic existence, food references in literature can act as a guide and incentive for so many adventures.
Take Babette’s Feast, Karen Blixen’s 1950 novella:
The boy once more filled the glasses. This time the Brothers and Sisters knew what they were given to drink was not wine, for it sparkled. It must be some kind of lemonade. The lemonade agreed with their exalted state of mind and seemed to lift them off the ground, into a higher and purer sphere … General Loewenhielm again sat down his glass, turned to his neighbour on the right and said to him: “But surely this is a Veuve Cliquot 1860?”
Here, food plays an integral part in both plot and character development. Which is hardly surprising when eating is such a fundamental human activity, an activity that is both necessary for survival and inextricably linked with culture.
Dining rituals often provide a framework that both reflects and expresses human desires and behaviours. And on one level, such expression could arguably be the bedrock of any successful fiction.
Or even non-fiction, for that matter, as George Orwell illustrates during a stint when he was Down and Out in Paris and London:
You discover what it is to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones.
Food choices and preferences can also reveal a lot about a character. And a character's relationship with food can expose their social status, personality traits, and even their emotional state. Is a character a picky eater or someone who savours every bite? Do they eat to live or live to eat? Think of Gatsby's extravagant parties showcasing his desire for wealth and status, or Jane Eyre's meagre meals reflecting her disadvantaged position.
Writing during the Second World War, Evelyn Waugh confessed to it being a personally bleak period following a minor parachute accident and the privations of wartime. This invariably explains why Waugh admits that Brideshead Revisited is infused with a kind of gluttony for food and wine. Here, the narrator, Charles Ryder outlines a menu he’s to share with Rex Mottram in Paris:
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.
In this way, food descriptions can transport readers to different cultures and times. By detailing meals, ingredients, and customs surrounding food sourcing and preparation, authors can create a rich and immersive world.
Imagine sinking your teeth into a Tolkien description of hearty hobbit stew or the opulent feasts in Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Food becomes a window into a society's traditions, social structures, and even its history. And as such, can serve as a tasty incentive to inspire one’s travel plans, including what restaurants to seek out.
Then there’s Stubb, the second mate on the Pequod as it chased Ahab’s white whale on the high seas in Melville’s Moby Dick. Stubb knew a thing or two about eating whale meat and he lets the ship’s cook know how it should be prepared:
Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go.
Reminds me a bit of Dean Martin’s recipe for the perfect martini; just show the label of Vermouth to the gin and that is all.
But arguably, one of literature’s most inventive food moments belongs to Proust, and his “plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell.”
I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake [petite madeleine]. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.
In more contemporary times, Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series – chronicling the adventures of a ‘cereal’ killer in Miami – often has the main character fantasising about food (a Cuban sandwich being a particular favourite) while he waits, sometimes hours, to mete out his own brand of vigilante justice:
… the crackle of the bread crust, so crisp and toasty it scratches the inside of your mouth as you bite down. Then the first taste of mustard, followed by the soothing cheese and the salt of the meat. Next bite - a piece of pickle. Chew it all up; let the flavors mingle. Swallow … Sigh. Sheer bliss.