Ever ones to be drawn in by a punny title and the promise of alcohol, my literati friends clubbed together last term to buy a book entitled Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist. Not long after came designer Dinah Fried’s Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals. No puns, but painstaking and aesthetically gorgeous photographic recreations of the best literary meals, from Heidi’s cheese on toast to a rather disturbing depiction of a pile of bones and rotting vegetables from Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
The recent prevalence of these books is because, however ridiculous it may seem, the preparation and consumption of ‘A Rum of One’s Own’, ‘The Pitcher of Dorian Grey Goose’ or (brace yourself) ‘The Deviled Egg Wears Prada’, like the books they are named after, hold the promise of taking you briefly out of your world and into the world of literature — and then, fairly (Jonathan) swiftly, down into the world of the very drunk.
The link between artistic pursuits and more carnal ones is old. Since the advent of writing, food and drink (along with sex) have been among the most popular topics.
As basic needs that also must be found and prepared, and which can, on top of that, be immensely pleasurable, we are programmed to be obsessed with what we put in our mouths.
The most common themes in cave paintings are bison, deer and cattle: rarely are there drawings of human beings, but drawings of what we ate are everywhere. The Bible is a classic example of the use of food as a metaphor, with the forbidden fruit, the miracle of the loaves and fish, the ritual of the Eucharist, and countless more food references. This even continued into the first poetry: Old English texts tend to have a worrying (and hopefully metaphorical) obsession with cannibalism. Further back, texts such as Petronius’ Satyricon explore banqueting and feasting in indulgent detail. In art and literature, food becomes a cultural symbol of class, of race, of ideals.
With the emergence of a literary canon, our obsession with recording what we eat has taken a turn for the meta in the creation of imaginative cookbooks based on the food eaten by literary characters.
The world of literary cookbooks is a place where our natural obsession with food mixes with our desire to immerse ourselves in imaginary worlds. A personal favourite is Tove Jansson’s Moomins Cookbook, which is full of jam and potatoes, but there is also Dinner with Mr. Darcy, Drinking with Dickens, The Joyce of Cooking, and hundreds more.
And it’s not only books that get their own cookbooks. There is also the Artists & Writers’ Cookbook, featuring culinary suggestions from figures such as photographer Man Ray, who details his ideal “Menu for a Dadaist Day”. His “Dejuner” includes the instruction, “Take the olives and juice from one large jar of prepared green or black olives and throw them away. In the empty jar place several steel ball bearings… with this delicacy serve a loaf of French bread, 30 inches in length, painted a pale blue”.
There is also John Keats’s Porridge: Favourite Recipes of American Poets. William Cole notes in the introduction that such collaborative recipe books can be seen as a metaphor for poetry, with “the poet as creator, inventor, who makes out of a few necessary ingredients a magic potion”.
Cooking is a creative pursuit in itself (although as a side note, ‘creative’ and ‘cooking’ are words to be used together at your peril — or at the peril of whoever is eating your creation). There is also an argument that creative pursuits are recipes of a sort — after all, art is a cycle of borrowing, transformation and invention. And art is, as Oscar Wilde noted, a commodity — second only to the most literal consumer product there is: food.
It turns out, then, there is a reason we are all obsessed with instagramming pictures of our pizza with an egg on it. You are what you eat — but you also are what you read, watch, listen to and create. Combining the two is both the ultimate form of self-expression, and the ultimate in self-indulgent consumption.
