When I think of those scenes in books that make my mouth water, one that pops to mine is the description in Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World, where his father comes home from the hospital and the doctor’s wife has sent a cold meat pie to eat.
I don’t know why that has stuck with me for so long, but it always seemed like a wonderful thing to eat (unless, of course, the meat wasn’t cooked), and I’ve looked for a similar sounding recipe for years. Alas, I’ve never found one, but I still look occasionally.
What food scenes in books make you hungry for a particular food?
Man, JK Rowling puts about a million food scenes in her Harry Potter books. I especially like the candy shop scenes, and I’m not even that fond of candy! The students at Hogwarts drink a lot of pumpkin juice and butterbeer. She describes them so much that I want to try some.
Chris Bunch and Alan Cole put a number of cooking scenes in their Sten novels. My favorite one involves the making of a pot of Angelo Stew, which the Eternal Emperor claims “Will either cure cancer…or give it to you. I forget which.”
The scenes are so detailed that you can reconstruct a recipe for whatever they were cooking. I have, and they are delicious!
I personally always want the Turkish Delight of my childhood imagination (from “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”) Unfortunately, the real stuff bears no resemblance to what I came up with in my head - something light, and chocolatey, and creamy, and sweet, and buttery. The real stuff ain’t that good IMO.
George R R Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series has tons of great food scenes. The most memorable is at the wedding feast for Joffrey and Margaery. They eat peacock, among other things. Seventy-seven courses in all, though Martin doesn’t list every single one.
Pumpkin juice sounds a little oogy to me, but I imagine butterbeer to be a truly amazing event.
But just yesterday I was reading HP: OOP and Hagrid offered Harry dandelion juice! Which I do personally know to be the nastiest, bitterest plant in my backyard. (Before it’s wine, of course.)
My favorite food scene(s), cliched as the preference might be, have to be all the ones from Like Water For Chocolate (the book, not the excreble movie) - the favoritest being the sister running from the table and setting the shower on fire, only to run off with the strapping young soldier riding bareback and naked on his…
One set of books makes me strangely hungry: Jean Auel’s Ayla novels. It’s bizarre.
More bizarre is how hungry what should be a disgusting litany of foods makes me: What Templeton the Rat finds to eat at the fair. I obviously have a wire loose somewhere. jiggles head violently
The UK Dopers have heard of Enid Blyton? She wrote a ton of children’s books, and one of my favorites was the Faraway Tree series. Three children found a tree in a forest so high its branches reached other lands.
Oh, the food in Happy Birthday Land, or Present Land, or Whatever You Wish Land!
There was a fairy (Goldy?) who served chocolate, and Moonface who made Toffee Shocks. And Dame Wash-A-Lot who always sent her dirty laundry water down the tree just as the children were climbing it.
I never did like the story “The Headless Horseman” all that much, but the description of the food at the party that Ichabod Crane attends, still sticks in my mind after all these years.
Just about any of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books have descriptions of food that always makes me drool. Especially Farmer Boy in which Wilder’s description of the family dinner is almost pornographic!
You beat me to it! I was DEFINITELY going to mention Farmer Boy! It all sounds soooooo delicious that I put on five pounds every time I read the book. I imagine it was only the strenuous labor they all performed working on the farm that saved them from morbid obesity!
I also love the end of The Long Winter, where the Ingalls family enjoys a huge feast, after enduring seven months of blizzards and nearly starving to death.
Every last one of the Nero Wolfe books describes meals that sound delicious.
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[li]Baby lobster salad (a cool treat on a hot summer day).[/li][li]Squabs in sauce printemps[/li][li]Saucisse Minuit[/li][/ul]
Of course, a few of them sound unbelievably gross (lamb hearts stewed in sour milk??? :eek: ).
You know that a handsome reprint of the original Nero Wolfe Cookbook is still easily available, right?
I love cold pork pie, but the traditional Canadian-style recipes always sound a little funky to me…cinnamon? Cloves? Ick.
I do something similar to your recipe, but I brown the ground (or chopped) pork first, along with the onions, chopped potato, plus minced celery and carrot and maybe turnip. I also limit the seasoning to salt, pepper, and parsley.
As to the OP, the food excerpt I can never resist is the famous Chowder Scene in the early chapters of Moby-Dick. The combination of the cold New England weather, the smell of the salt sea, and the arrival of supper in the warm rooms of Hosea Hussey’s Try-Pots Inn, Nantucket…
"…a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. 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 biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favorite fishy food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition…
I have an Indian cookbook, and several of the recipes involve lamb, yogurt, and a pressure cooker. Since it’s pressure cookeded, and the yogurt is acidic, you can get the cheapest, grossest cuts of lamb and they end up mild and falling-apart tender. I admit that I haven’t gone so far as to try organ meats, though . . .
I can’t say they’ve made my mouth water so much, but they’ve certainly given me the munchies.
Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series mentions some sort of food or meal pretty much every chapter of 8-10 books. Apparently, Cornwell eventually wrote a cookbook (which I haven’t read–I have neither the time, skill or patience to cook) with many of her main character’s recipes.
I’ve read most of her books, and always end up with a bag of chips or crackers in my hands before any given sitting is over.
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