Literatarianism

As I mentioned, Geoff Nicholson's essay about books he's read with descriptions of disgusting meals sent me into a reverie about foods I've read about that left me salivating -- not in books that were otherwise about food necessarily (that's too easy) but in which the world created by the author is so richly imagined that you're given smells, tastes, even textures that draw you in, so deep.

The first book (or rather, series) that came to mind was Harry Potter, so remarkable because so much of the food, drink, and sweets are completely imaginary, and yet J.K. Rowling leaves you craving a warm, comforting mug of butterbeer or the adventure in every box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans (includes spinach, liverwurst, and ear wax, but also sweet flavors like "a nice toffee"). Let me say, this is moreover a feat because the "real" food mentioned in the books is of the heavy, bland, British variety, like Yorkshire pudding, steak and kidney pie, and treacle tart (except when the Beauxbatons students are in town, and the house elves make bouillabaisse and blancmange appear). And yet somehow cauldron cakes washed down with pumpkin juice sounds enticing; I would even sample gillywater or take a gulp of Ogden's Old Firewhisky. I'd probably skip Hagrid's cooking, though -- rock cakes don't tempt me.

The sweets! What variety: Drooble's Best Blowing Gum, chocolate frogs, pumpkin pasties, the aforementioned cakes and jelly beans, Licorice Wands, Pepper Imps, Sugar Quills, tooth flossing string mints, Fizzing Whizbees, peppermint toads, fudge flies, Acid Pops...

Finally, I love that so much of the food served at Hogwarts is made with the vegetables from the patches near the greenhouses and that Hagrid raises chickens. A school after Alice Waters' heart!

From my childhood (much of which was spent reading, and the rest of which was spent eating and cooking, I think), Anne of Green Gables's terrible mistakes in the kitchen got across how painfully eager she was to belong and shed her status as an uncivilized, not-to-be-trusted orphan. Two incidents stand out.

Anne accidentally gets her bosom friend Diana drunk by serving her currant wine, thinking it's raspberry cordial, at a time when there is a growing prohibition movement and Diana's mom Mrs. Barry anyway doesn't trust Anne. The understanding Marilla isn't too hard on Anne, and says, "I should think Mrs. Barry would better punish Diana for being so greedy as to drink three glassfuls of anything!"

Anne also lets a mouse get into the pudding sauce because she gets carried away imagining she's a nun ("of course") and forgets to cover it. "I'm a Protestant, but I imagined I was a Catholic taking the veil to bury a broken heart in cloistered seclusion, and I forgot all about covering the pudding sauce. I thought of it next morning and ran to the pantry. Diana, fancy if you can my extreme horror at finding a mouse drowned in that pudding sauce!" (Anne does, of course, voice the thought that drowning in pudding sauce is relatively a rather nice way for a mouse to die.)

Literatarian feasting is aplenty in Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik. Aside from all the mouth-watering, perfect food Gopnik and his family enjoy during their five years of cafe life in Paris, there is an adorable scene in which, just before returning to their home town of New York, their son has an interview with a New York kindergarten and, when asked what his favorite breakfast is, he answers (suitably for a child who has spent his first five years of life in Paris), "Croissant et confiture."

Growing up vegetarian, I could not help but being equally fascinated and repulsed while reading The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. Maxine's Chinese mother cooks 'coons, hawks, skunks, city pigeons, wild ducks, wild geese, black-skinned bantams, "turtles that crawled about the pantry floor and escaped under refrigerator and stove" and "catfish that swam in the bathtub." And she allows absolutely no waste, so use is also made of the strange innards of all of these unlikely creatures.

If you love this sort of thing, just read the chapter "The Literary Glutton" in Anne Fadiman's adorable book of essays about loving reading, Ex Libris. She writes, "In Anna Karenina, all the essential differences between Oblonsky and Levin are laid out in the Moscow restaurant scene during which the former orders three dozen oysters, vegetable soup, turbot with thick sauce, capon with tarragon, and fruit macedoine, while the latter longs for cabbage soup and porridge." Nothing more need be said, and we understand the Oblonskys and Levins of the world.