Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, "Proserpine"
Summer Food Series
A playful passage in a recent New Yorker story by Julian Barnes (“Homage to Hemingway”) has me imagining author food preferences. See if it sparks you as well.
The story is about a creative writer who is leading a summer writing workshop in Greece. Here’s the account of their final meal:
On the last evening, he cooked a gigantic stew and provided so many bottles of wine that they didn’t need the pub. Responding to their praise, he told them his theory of writers and cooking. Novelists, who were in it for the long haul, were temperamentally equipped for stewing and braising, for the slow mixing together of many ingredients, whereas poets ought to be good at stir-fry. And short-story writers? someone asked. Steak and chips. Dramatists? Ah, dramatists—they, the lucky sods, were basically mere orchestrators of the talents of others, and would be satisfied to shake a leisurely cocktail while the kitchen staff rustled up the grub.
This went down well, and they started fantasizing about the sort of food famous writers would serve. Jane Austen and Bath buns. The Brontes and Yorkshire pudding. There was even an argument when Virginia Woolf and cucumber sandwiches were put together. But without any discord they placed Hemingway in front of an enormous barbecue piled high with marlin steaks and cuts of buffalo, a beer in one hand and an outside spatula in the other, while the party swirled around him.
I was thinking cucumber sandwiches for Oscar Wilde, maybe because of Importance of Being Earnest—but okay, I’ll allow Virginia Woolf, or at last Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares for her party, the cucumber sandwiches. How about quail or ortolan for Wilde? Henry Fielding would eat a tranche of beef, Christina Rossetti grapes and pomegranates, Thomas Hardy a leg of lamb, Herman Melville whale steaks (of course), Nathaniel Hawthorne a soufflé, Charles Dickens a roast goose, James Fenimore Cooper venison, Christopher Marlowe pickled herring and Martin Martlemas Beef (at least that’s what Gluttony wants in Doctor Faustus), Rudyard Kipling an Indian curry, Emily Dickinson passion fruit.
And Walt Whitman? The poet who contains multitudes will eat anything in reach.
Your turn now.
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