ABSTRACT
One of the notable publishing trends of the past ten years has been the rise of the popular, hybridized genre, the ‘literary cookbook’: collections of recipes inspired by famous meals in literature. While some of these titles – Cooking with Shakespeare (2008), Dinner with Mr Darcy (2013) – focus on the culinary repertoires of individual authors, others, such as Literary Feasts: Recipes from the Classics of Literature (2005), A Literary Feast: Recipes Inspired by Novels, Poems and Plays (2015) and Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books (2015), reimagine dishes from an eclectic mix of canonical and non-canonical sources, many of which are also analyzed in the present volume. Collectively, literary cookbooks bear witness to the prevalence of food in literature, while extending to its logical conclusion the long-standing figurative association of cooking and story-telling, reading and eating – an association that has emerged repeatedly in this study, in texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Canterbury Tales (Chapter 1), The History of Tom Jones (Chapter 3) and Midnight’s Children (Chapter 6). Literary cookbooks also share a sense that evocations of food in literature enrich the reading experience, providing a tangible link to the imaginary world of the text. In the preface to Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books, Cara Nicoletti confesses: ‘I fell in love with cooking through reading … I connected deeply to the characters in my books, and cooking the foods that they were eating seemed to me a natural way to be closer to them’ (2015, xi). This sentiment is echoed by Dinah Fried, creator of Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals: ‘many of my most vivid memories from books are of the meals the characters eat. I read Heidi more than twenty years ago, but I can still taste the golden, cheesy toast that her grandfather serves her, and I can still feel the anticipation and comfort she experiences as she watches him prepare it over the open fire’ (2014, 11).
