Watch Man Vs. Food before bed and you go to sleep craving French dipped sandwiches and face-sized burgers with cheese injected into the middle of the meat. (Adam Richman, what a charmer.) Certain scenes from fiction can get your belly growling, too. When food is done right in writing, you experience it with all your senses and strange cravings are inspired. Below, some of the most memorable food moments in fiction.
New England Clam Chowder from Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Melville waxes ecstatic about a bowl of clam chowder in Moby Dick — in fact, he devotes a whole chapter of his epic novel to it.
“But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt…..we dispatched it with great expedition.”
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Where’s The Jungle??? hehe
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
— Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
*Can’t believe you missed this one!
Would it be unfair to list food-based books like A Movable Feast, Down and Out in Paris and London, Babette’s Feast… well, I guess Charlie and the Chocolate factory is food-based… the contrast of cabbage soup with well, everything else that even people who dont like candy would want. Never heard of John Fante… will have to check him out.
How about all those feasts at the Redwall Abbey? Brian Jacques FTW!
And the Banana Breakfast scene in Gravity’s Rainbow!
Hahaha, Imelda. Haha.
But really now, my stomach is now actually growling.
I’m with you on the turkish delights. Delish!
From Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River Part One”: Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier. He opened and emptied
a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan.
“I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff if I’m willing to carry it,” Nick said. His voice
sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.
I recommend “Farmer Boy” by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The Wilder family really knew how to eat!
[...] and different manual tools and equipment. This does not include the costs accrued in fuel, watering the lawn and the time spent doing it. Artificial grass is manufactured from high quality synthetic [...]
Woolf was always good at describing meals. I especially like the garden party scene in “Jacob’s Room” and the meals in “A Room of One’s Own”.
From “The Corrections”, I prefer the description of the appetizers that Denise makes for Alfred and Enid:
“From the end of a French loaf Denise had made three little crust-bottomed vehicles. On one she set shavings of butter curved like sails full of wind, into another she loaded Parmesan shards packed in an excelsior of shredded arugula, and the third she paved with minced olive meat and olive oil and covered with a thick tarp of red pepper.”
What, not a single Nero Wolfe reference? Too Many Cooks alone contains enough feasting to put your entire list to shame.
Steven Brust writes delectable food descriptions, hidden away in his engrossing scifi and fantasy novels. The best example is probably Dzur ( http://www.amazon.com/Dzur-Vlad-Taltos-Steven-Brust/dp/0765341549/ ), a fantasy novel in his Vlad Taltos series, which opens each chapter by describing part of an elaborate meal.
Portnoy’s Complaint would do it for Liver aficandos
I am surprised that no feasting or roasting sacrifice scenes from Odyssey or, to a lesser extent, the Iliad are included. They are amazing sensory descriptions and are significant to the epics.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s descriptions, especially many of the stories in Interpreter of Maladies.
[...] Fictional Feasts: Mouth-Watering Moments of Literary Gastronomy If you’re hungry, maybe you should leave this one until later… [...]
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