Fictitious Dishes Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Joe

  EPIGRAPH

  I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name ’em, I ate ’em.

  –RAY BRADBURY, FAHRENHEIT 451, 1953

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  The Dishes

  Moby-Dick; or the Whale

  On the Road

  Swann’s Way

  Little Women

  The Secret Garden

  Gulliver’s Travels

  The Corrections

  Lolita

  Rebecca

  The Bluest Eye

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  The Namesake

  The Talented Mr. Ripley

  Hopscotch

  Gone with the Wind

  The Catcher in the Rye

  Beezus and Ramona

  Robinson Crusoe

  A Wrinkle in Time

  One Hundred Years of Solitude

  The Road

  Madame Bovary

  Blueberries for Sal

  To Kill a Mockingbird

  “Chicken Soup with Rice”

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  Heidi

  Middlesex

  East of Eden

  The Metamorphosis

  “Big Two-Hearted River”

  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

  American Psycho

  Anne of Green Gables

  The Bell Jar

  Oliver Twist

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

  Bread and Jam for Frances

  Heartburn

  The Great Gatsby

  Gravity’s Rainbow

  A Confederacy of Dunces

  To the Lighthouse

  The Tale of Peter Rabbit

  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

  Motherless Brooklyn

  Emma

  Valley of the Dolls

  Ulysses

  Book Summaries

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  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. I remember some meals for the moment they signify within a story: the minty cupcakes that Melissa gives to Chip in The Corrections—a marker of their love affair, which causes Chip’s professional downfall and general unraveling. Other meals have stayed with me for the atmosphere they help convey. Recently, a friend told me that after reading Lolita, he began to drink gin and pineapple juice, a favorite combination of the novel’s narrator, Humbert Humbert. I read Lolita when I was barely older than Lolita herself and was amazed that my friend’s description of the cocktail catapulted me back to the distinct world that Nabokov had created: a sticky New England summer when an intoxicated, lust-lorn Humbert Humbert mows the unruly lawn in the hot sun, pining for Dolores, who is away at camp. Likewise, Melville’s description of steaming chowder in Moby-Dick evokes a vision of Ishmael’s seafaring life: salty, damp ocean air on a dark evening; finding solace in a cozy, warmly lit inn with a toasty dining room filled with good cheer and the rich smell of fresh seafood.

  Reading and eating are natural companions, and they’ve got a lot in common. Reading is consumption. Eating is consumption. Both are comforting, nourishing, restorative, relaxing, and mostly enjoyable. They can energize you or put you to sleep. Heavy books and heavy meals both require a period of intense digestion. Just as reading great novels can transport you to another time and place, meals—good and bad ones alike—can conjure scenes very far away from your kitchen table. Some of my favorite meals convey stories of origin and tradition; as a voracious reader, I devour my favorite books.

  Which brings me to Fictitious Dishes. The book began a couple of years ago as a small design project while I was at the Rhode Island School of Design. I had the idea to cook, style, and photograph memorable meals I had read about in novels. I had a camera and a rickety tripod, a Whole Foods gift card, a cupboard full of mismatched dishes, and a fast-approaching deadline. After taking the first photos—Oliver Twist, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—I was completely hooked on the whole process. There were so many more books to read, so many more meals to make. The project had to continue; I had to keep going, and I did, long past the assignment’s due date. The result is the book you have in your hands.

  Fictitious Dishes has challenged me to cook outside of my comfort zone. An almost-vegetarian, I never dreamed I’d find myself at my local butcher, asking for a pig kidney (for Ulysses) or pulling apart a week-old chicken carcass (for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). I cooked bananas eleven ways (for Gravity’s Rainbow), including several failed attempts to mold them into the shape of a lion rampant; learned how to make Turkish delight from scratch (for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe); and made my first apple pie ever (for On the Road). Though I’m generally quite squeamish about old food, I collected weeks’ worth of rotting scraps (for The Metamorphosis).

  The book has also allowed me to indulge in a daily activity I’ve always enjoyed—setting the table—and transform it into something else. Preparing for each photo shoot was a delightful and obsessive treasure hunt. The search for props took over my life—and my bank account. I pillaged the kitchen cupboards of friends and family members; I combed thrift stores, flea markets, eBay, Etsy, and some very sketchy yard sales. My eyes were constantly peeled for the perfect tablecloth or butter knife or saltshaker or plastic doodad. I wouldn’t take my Moby-Dick picture until I could get my hands on the right pewter beer stein—a detail never mentioned in the book but that I felt had to be in the photo because it just seemed so right. I needed an old skeleton key for The Secret Garden, and my husband serendipitously found one on his grandfather’s ancient key ring. Like magic.

  I loved styling each photograph down to the smallest detail. I rarely set the meals on an actual table, though: I used wooden boards, boxes, pillowcases, a piece of Formica I found on the street, a seventy-five-year-old dish towel that belonged to my great-grandmother. I took most of the photos on my kitchen or living-room floor and lit them with a slapped-together combination of photo lights and random household lamps. “Big Two-Hearted River” was shot on a weekend trip to Big Sur. Blueberries for Sal was shot on a small patch of greenery on a sidewalk in San Francisco. I took the Robinson Crusoe photo on the beach surrounded by approximately five hundred hungry seagulls in Santa Cruz.

  Whether I worked at home or on the road, making Fictitious Dishes has brought me deeper into the books I read. Each step of the process of making these tabletop scenes—digesting the author’s words, imagining the setting and the food served, doing research, shopping, cooking, styling, and shooting—has been an extension of my own experience of the books included on the following pages. For readers who are familiar with these great works, I hope the photographs will spark a memory and transport you back into fictional worlds; to those of you who are unfamiliar with them, I offer a little taste of the stories.
r />   THE DISHES

  MOBY-DICK; OR THE WHALE

  HERMAN MELVILLE, 1851

  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 fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition . . . while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head? What’s that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people?

  * * *

  • Melville’s work is greatly influenced by the time he spent in the South Seas (1841–44), where he worked as a sailor on the whaler Acushnet, stayed with a native tribe on the Marquesas Islands, and lived as a beachcomber in Tahiti.

  • Melville dedicated the book to his friend, author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  • The 1930 Lakeside Press edition featured Rockwell Kent’s haunting black-and-white ink illustrations, now the most iconic visual representations of the novel.

  • Ishmael and Queequeg eat creamy New England clam chowder, but there are several other chowders native to their respective regions. Manhattan clam chowder is a clear, tomato-based soup; New Jersey clam chowder is known for its Old Bay crab spice and asparagus; Rhode Island clam chowder has a clear, buttery broth; Hatteras clam chowder is seasoned with lots of white and black pepper; and Florida’s Minorcan clam chowder is spicy, thanks to the datil pepper in it.

  ON THE ROAD

  JACK KEROUAC, 1957

  BUT I HAD TO GET GOING AND STOP MOANING, so I picked up my bag, said so long to the old hotelkeeper sitting by his spittoon, and went to eat. I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer.

  * * *

  • Kerouac typed the first draft of his manuscript on a 120-foot continuous scroll of tracing-paper sheets taped together, using much of what he had written in notebooks he carried with him while on the travels that inspired the novel.

  • Although almost all of the characters in the novel were based on Kerouac’s friends and acquaintances, his publisher objected to his using their real names, so Neal Cassady was fictionalized as Dean Moriarty; Allen Ginsberg as Carlo Marx; William S. Burroughs as Old Bull Lee; Joan Vollmer as Jane; and so on.

  • Apple pie has long been a symbol of Americanism; on May 3, 1902, an article in the New York Times stated, “Pie is the American synonym for prosperity and its varying contents the calendar of the changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.”

  • According to a survey of the members of the International Ice Cream Association, vanilla is America’s most popular ice cream: it’s the favorite flavor of 29 percent of the population.

  SWANN’S WAY

  MARCEL PROUST, 1913

  ONE DAY IN WINTER, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little tea. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called petites madeleines that look as though they have been molded in the grooved valve of a scallop-shell. And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of a sad future, I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.

  * * *

  • Madeleines weren’t the only cookies around in 1913; Oreos, Mallomars, and fortune cookies were all introduced within a year of the publication of Swann’s Way.

  • The “episode of the madeleine” is the most famous scene in the lengthy novel, and remains a touchstone for the power of memory.

  • It took Proust thirteen years to write In Search of Lost Time (1909–22). The seven volumes were published over fourteen years (1913–27) and feature more than two thousand characters.

  LITTLE WOMEN

  LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, 1868–69

  THE ARRAY OF POTS RATHER AMAZED HER AT FIRST, but John was so fond of jelly, and the nice little jars would look so well on the top shelf, that Meg resolved to fill them all, and spent a long day picking, boiling, straining, and fussing over her jelly. She did her best, she asked advice of Mrs. Cornelius, she racked her brain to remember what Hannah did that she left undone, she reboiled, resugared, and restrained, but that dreadful stuff wouldn’t “jell.”

  She longed to run home, bib and all, and ask Mother to lend her a hand, but John and she had agreed that they would never annoy anyone with their private worries, experiments, or quarrels. . . . So Meg wrestled alone with the refractory sweetmeats all that hot summer day, and at five o’clock sat down in her topsy-turvey kitchen, wrung her bedaubed hands, lifted up her voice and wept.

  * * *

  • Little Women was a semiautobiographical account of Alcott’s own childhood experience; the second of four daughters, she grew up in Massachusetts.

  • Raised a transcendentalist, Alcott grew up in the company of her father’s friends, including writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  • Alcott was a strong advocate of abolition and women’s rights.

  • The word “jelly” comes from the Middle English word geli, which derived from the Latin gelare, meaning “to freeze.”

  THE SECRET GARDEN

  FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, 1910–11

  DICKON MADE THE STIMULATING DISCOVERY that in the wood in the park outside the garden where Mary had first found him piping to the wild creatures there was a deep little hollow where you could build a sort of tiny oven with stones and roast potatoes and eggs in it. Roasted eggs were a previously unknown luxury and very hot potatoes with salt and fresh butter in them were fit for a woodland king—besides being deliciously satisfying. You could buy both potatoes and eggs and eat as many as you liked without feeling as if you were taking food out of the mouths of fourteen people.

  * * *

  • The once wealthy Burnett began writing at the age of nineteen as a means of earning extra money, as her family—which included two brothers and two sisters—struggled financially after her father’s premature death.

  • Burnett’s interest in Christian Science is reflected in The Secret Garden, particularly the healing “magic” that Mary believes heals both Colin and the garden.

  • The potato was the first vegetable grown in space, aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1995; NASA hired top scientists to develop extremely nutritious potatoes (called Quantum Tubers) to feed astronauts during long space voyages.

  • A hen can lay as many as 335 eggs per year—that’s one egg every twenty-six hours.

  GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

  JONATHAN SWIFT, 1726

  THE QUEEN BECAME SO FOND OF MY COMPANY, that she could not dine without me. I had a table placed upon the same at which her majesty ate, just at her left elbow, and a chair to sit on. . . . I had an entire set of silver dishes and plates, and other necessaries, which, in proportion to those of the queen, were not much bigger than what I have seen in a London toy-shop for the furniture of a baby-house. . . . Her majesty used to put a bit of meat upon one of my dishes, out of which I carved for myself, and her diversion was to see me eat in miniature: for the queen (who had indeed but a weak stomach) took up, at one mouthful, as much as a dozen English farmers could eat at a meal, which to me was for some time a very nauseous sight. She would craunch the wing of a la
rk, bones and all, between her teeth, although it were nine times as large as that of a full-grown turkey; and put a bit of bread into her mouth as big as two twelve-penny loaves.

  * * *

  • In Part II of the novel, Gulliver spends time in Brobdingnag, where the average man is seventy-two feet tall. Here, besides the large box in which he was usually carried, the queen builds Gulliver a little house, “for the convenience of traveling.”

  • Gulliver’s Travels was controversial when first published, due to the frank depiction of bodily functions, and was not published in its entirety until ten years later—offensive descriptions and all.

  • Originating in Swift’s novel, the adjective “Lilliputian” has entered the lexicons of many languages and is used in reference to those things that are “small,” “trivial,” even “petty.”

  THE CORRECTIONS

  JONATHAN FRANZEN, 2001

  “WHY ARE YOU BRINGING ME CUPCAKES?” he said.

  Melissa knelt and set the plate on his doormat among the pulverized remains of ivy and dead tulips. “I’ll just leave them here,’” she said, “and you can do whatever you want with them. Goodbye!” She spread her arms and pirouetted off the doorstep and ran up the flagstone path on tiptoe.

  The cupcakes were full of butter and frosted with a butter frosting. After he’d washed his hands and opened a bottle of Chardonnay he ate four of them and put the uncooked fish in the refrigerator. The skins of the overbaked squash were like inner-tube rubber. . . . He lowered the blinds and drank the wine and ate two more cupcakes, detecting peppermint in them, a faint buttery peppermint, before he slept.