Food in Fiction: Let's Dish!

By Laurie Sanchez

I was talking on Twitter the other day with a new friend who told me that she purchased the new Debbie Macomber book because it was positioned next to a companion cookbook. The combination, she said, intrigued her.

I didn’t fully understand what she meant until I was in Target shortly afterward and saw it myself: Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Creek Cookbook, positioned there next to Macomber’s latest fiction novel set in Cedar Creek, 92 Pacific Boulevard. Huh. …

I looked it up later on Macomber’s blog. She explains that she wrote the cookbook because so many readers had requested recipes from her romance novels, particularly the nine books in her Cedar Cove series. “Preparing and serving a meal is probably the ultimate expression of hospitality and friendship, comfort and love,” she says. And this is why so much food makes it into her stories.

It prompted me into a few conversations this week about food and fiction. They do go hand-in-hand, as far as I’m concerned. And no, I don’t mean the red pistachio stains you get on your fingers as you read and distractedly eat pistachios under the grapefruit tree (although that’s a wonderful memory of mine) – but I mean the use of food inside a story. Food in fiction can represent a way of giving love, a way of keeping (or losing) control, a tie to regions, a tie to traditions, an emblem of an era, basic substance, a baby’s life, or a woman’s body image. Several romance writers do a wonderful job of incorporating food into the themes of their books. (Shirley Jump is known for this, incorporating her recipes, and Jenny Crusie does a good job of weaving people’s perceptions about food into her themes.) Food stands for so many things in real life, and I believe we easily recognize – and identify with – so many of those same themes and issues in fiction.

Sometimes we wish we could simply be sitting at a table with our characters for a memorable meal, like Lady Brett and Jake and the gang slouching in various outdoor cantinas in Pamplona in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Or perhaps Nick and Daisy out on the veranda the first night Nick visits in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby – I would like to have been there, with the candles flickering, enjoying dessert and tea with Nick and Daisy. I always wanted to meet Nick.

Other times we might just want to try a food item named in fiction, like the river of chocolate in Ronald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Or -- speaking of chocolate -- how about that thick, foamy cocoa described in Joanne Harris' Chocolat? And who didn’t want to try the “Turkish delight” when they read C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe?

My book club takes this food-and-fiction fascination to its logical end by planning our meeting menu around each book we’ve read. We tried the Lane cake from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the onion-and-Rice-Krispies concoction Gogol’s mother makes when she’s pregnant in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, and the honey butter from Sue Monk Kidd's Secret Life of Bees. It really makes the book come to life for us, and trying the recipes has become half the fun of the book club. I even bought The Book Club Cookbook by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp to help us along.

What about you? What food item in fiction stands out in your memory? Or which fictional meal would you like to have attended?

Laurie Sanchez lives in Southern California with her hubby and three kids and is putting the polishing touches on her first contemporary romance novel. She also blogs as Mizwrite and blogs over at Health Bistro on Fridays. Tonight she had a margarita, although it had nothing to do with the Eloisa James historical novel she’s currently reading. …

Photos:

92 Pacific Boulevard -- DebbieMacomber.com

Cedar Cove Cookbook -- DebbieMacomber.com

Doughnuts -- BusinessWeek

Nick and Daisy -- Cornell Cinema

The Book Club Cookbook -- Amazon.com