Fictitious Dishes Read online

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  • The Corrections won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002.

  • The first known mention of the cupcake was in 1796, in a recipe for “cake to be baked in small cups” from American Cookery by Amelia Simmons.

  • The classic Hostess CupCake debuted in 1919 when two sold for five cents, but it wasn’t until 1947 that its cream filling and signature squiggly line of white icing across the top were introduced.

  LOLITA

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV, 1955

  THE SUN MADE ITS USUAL ROUND OF THE HOUSE as the afternoon ripened into evening. I had a drink. And another. And yet another. Gin and pineapple juice, my favorite mixture, always double my energy. I decided to busy myself with our unkempt lawn. Une petite attention. It was crowded with dandelions, and a cursed dog—I loathe dogs—had defiled the flat stones where a sundial had once stood. Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons. The gin and Lolita were dancing in me, and I almost fell over the folding chairs that I attempted to dislodge. Incarnadine zebras!

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  • Thanks to the novel’s cultural impact, “Lolita” has become a term in the popular vernacular, defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “a precociously seductive girl.”

  • An avid lepidopterist, Nabokov wrote Lolita while on one of the butterfly-collecting trips he took every summer.

  • Nabokov attempted to burn the manuscript halfway through writing it, but his wife, Véra, intervened.

  • Due to its dark and disturbing sexual nature, Lolita was initially turned down by several American publishers, including Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Doubleday, and Farrar, Straus. It was eventually published in France in 1955, but it wasn’t until its 1958 release in the United States that it received recognition as a great literary work.

  REBECCA

  DAPHNE DU MAURIER, 1938

  THOSE DRIPPING CRUMPETS, I can see them now. Tiny crisp wedges of toast, and piping-hot, flaky scones. Sandwiches of unknown nature, mysteriously flavored and quite delectable, and that very special gingerbread. Angel cake, that melted in the mouth, and his rather stodgier companion, bursting with peel and raisins. There was enough food there to keep a starving family for a week.

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  • Du Maurier drew inspiration for her gothic tales from her own family history and from the haunting legends of Cornwall, England, where she lived with her husband.

  • Alfred Hitchcock adapted the novel into an Academy Award–winning film in 1940, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.

  • An English favorite, crumpets are made of a simple batter of milk, flour, salt, and yeast and are traditionally cooked on a cast-iron griddle with a special metal “crumpet ring.”

  • The first known recipe for this cake using the name “angel cake” was published in Mrs. D. A. Lincoln’s The Original Boston Cooking School Cook Book in 1884. It is also called angel food cake (a name first used in Fanny Farmer’s 1896 edition of the Boston Cooking School Cook Book).

  THE BLUEST EYE

  TONI MORRISON, 1970

  FRIEDA BROUGHT [PECOLA] FOUR GRAHAM CRACKERS on a saucer and some milk in a blue-and-white Shirley Temple cup. She was a long time with the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face. Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn’t join them because I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me. Instead he was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those little white girls whose socks never slid down under their heels.

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  • In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  • Invented in 1829 by minister Sylvester Graham, graham crackers were originally considered a health food. They were part of the “Graham Diet”—a regimen meant to curb sexual appetite through the consumption of bland foods.

  • Hazel Atlas Glass Company and US Glass Company produced millions of cobalt-blue glass mugs, bowls, and pitchers featuring the sweet face of child star Shirley Temple. In the 1930s and 1940s, these keepsakes were given away with the purchase of boxes of breakfast foods like Wheaties and Bisquick.

  • The novel’s protagonist, Pecola, is obsessed with Shirley Temple and loves to drink milk—both symbols of the whiteness she idealizes as a result of the intense racism that permeates her world.

  THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

  MARK TWAIN, 1884

  I HADN’T HAD A BITE TO EAT since yesterday, so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage and greens—there ain’t nothing in the world so good when it’s cooked right—and whilst I eat my supper we talked and had a good time.

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  • Ernest Hemingway loved the novel and believed it was the seed of all American literature that followed it.

  • Despite the book’s extreme historical success, it has elicited a lot of controversy both in its negative depiction of the South and in its use of derogatory and racist language. It is, though, undeniably antislavery despite its use of certain terms that were socially acceptable at the time of its writing.

  • Corn dodgers—similar to hush puppies (in the South) and johnnycakes (in the North)—are small cornmeal cakes that were a staple of early American cuisine.

  • It is a Southern tradition to eat cabbage and collard greens on New Year’s Day, as they are believed to ensure wealth in the coming year.

  THE NAMESAKE

  JHUMPA LAHIRI, 2003

  ON A STICKY AUGUST EVENING two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space inside her, it is the one thing she craves.

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  • In the novel’s first scene, Ashima—pregnant and homesick—assembles a savory mixture similar to bhelpuri, an Indian snack made of puffed rice, chopped vegetables, and tamarind.

  • Kellogg’s Rice Krispies made their debut in 1928. The recipe for ever-popular Rice Krispie Treats first appeared on cereal boxes just over a decade later.

  • The names for the cereal’s elf mascots, Snap, Crackle, and Pop, come from a 1933 radio jingle, “Listen to the fairy song of health, the merry chorus sung by Kellogg’s Rice Krispies as they merrily snap, crackle, and pop in a bowl of milk. If you’ve never heard food talking, now is your chance.”

  • Planters was founded in 1906 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, by fruit vendor Amedeo Obici, who built a peanut roaster out of parts he found at a local scrapyard.

  • The Namesake’s title refers to its protagonist, Nikhil, whose family’s intended private pet name for him, Gogol (after Russian author Nikolai Gogol), becomes his official birth name by default.

  THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY

  PATRICIA HIGHSMITH, 1955

  MARGE AND THE MAID CAME OUT of the kitchen carrying a steaming platter of spaghetti, a big bowl of salad, and a plate of bread. Dickie and Marge began to talk about the enlargement of some restaurant down on the beach. . . . There was nothing Tom could contribute.

  He spent the time examining Dickie’s rings. He liked them both: a large rectangular green stone set in gold on the third finger of his right hand, and on the little finger of the other hand a signet ring, larger and more ornate than the signet Mr. Greenleaf had worn. Dickie had long, bony hands, a little like his own hands, Tom thought.

  “By the way, your father showed me around the Burke-Greenleaf yards before
I left,” Tom said. “He told me he’d made a lot of changes since you’ve seen it last. I was quite impressed.”

  “I suppose he offered you a job, too. Always on the lookout for promising young men.” Dickie turned his fork round and round, and thrust a neat mass of spaghetti into his mouth.

  “No, he didn’t.” Tom felt the luncheon couldn’t have been going worse.

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  • It is at this meal that Tom first notices Dickie’s rings, as well as the physical similarities between himself and his friend—two major factors that enable Tom to take on Dickie’s identity.

  • Highsmith’s Ripley novels are often referred to collectively as the “Ripliad.”

  • It is estimated that Italians eat an average of sixty pounds of pasta yearly—a large bowl of pasta six days a week.

  HOPSCOTCH

  JULIO CORTÁZAR, 1963

  “IF MY MATE RUNS OUT I’VE HAD IT,” Oliveira thought. “My only real conversation is with this green gourd.” He studied the strange behavior of the mate, how the herb would breathe fragrantly as it came up on top of the water and how it would dive as he sucked and would cling to itself, everything fine lost and all smell except for that little bit that would come up in the water like breath and stimulate his Argentinean iron lung, so sad and solitary. It had been some time now that Oliveira had been paying attention to unimportant things, and the little green gourd had the advantage that as he meditated upon it, it never occurred to his perfidious intelligence to endow it with such ideas as one extracts from mountains, the moon, the horizon, an adolescent girl, a bird, or a horse. “This mate might show me where the center is,” Oliveira thought. . . . The problem consisted in grasping that unity without becoming a hero, without becoming a saint, or a criminal, or a boxing champ, or a statesman, or a shepherd. To grasp unity in the midst of diversity, so that that unity might be the vortex of a whirlwind and not the sediment in a clean, cold mate gourd.

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  • Mate is a popular South American infused beverage made by steeping dried leaves of the yerba maté plant in hot water, traditionally served in a hollowed calabash gourd with a metal straw, especially in Uruguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil.

  • Hopscotch is written in a unique format, wherein the chapters can be read through consecutively or in a seemingly random order according to a table of instructions provided by the author. The book also has several alternate endings.

  GONE WITH THE WIND

  MARGARET MITCHELL, 1936

  “SOME FOLKS THINKS AS HOW AH KIN FLY,” grumbled Mammy, shuffling up the stairs. She entered puffing, with the expression of one who expects battle and welcomes it. In her large black hands was a tray upon which food smoked, two large yams covered with butter, a pile of buckwheat cakes dripping syrup, and a large slice of ham swimming in gravy. Catching sight of Mammy’s burden, Scarlett’s expression changed from one of minor irritation to obstinate belligerency. In the excitement of trying on dresses she had forgotten Mammy’s ironclad rule that, before going to any party, the O’Hara girls must be crammed so full of food at home they would be unable to eat any refreshments at the party.

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  • Gone with the Wind won the National Book Award in 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937.

  • The novel has been adapted for both screen and stage many times—ranging from the Academy Award–winning 1939 film starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable to a much lesser-known nine-hour play produced in Japan in 1966.

  • Buckwheat, cultivated in Southeast Asia as early as 6000 B.C., is not actually in the wheat family, as it is not a grass. It is related to the herbaceous plant sorrel and to rhubarb.

  • In the United States, orange sweet potatoes are often mistakenly referred to as “yams,” despite the fact that the two are unrelated root vegetables. Sweet potatoes originated in Central and South America; yams are native to Africa and Asia and are usually hard to find in the United States.

  THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

  J. D. SALINGER, 1951

  I’M A VERY LIGHT EATER. I really am. That’s why I’m so damn skinny. I was supposed to be on this diet where you eat a lot of starches and crap, to gain weight and all, but I didn’t ever do it. When I’m out somewhere, I generally just eat a Swiss cheese sandwich and a malted milk. It isn’t much, but you get quite a lot of vitamins in the malted milk. H. V. Caulfield. Holden Vitamin Caulfield.

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  • Salinger’s father was a ham and cheese importer.

  • The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, a year before the first diet soda, No-Cal, was marketed. Holden would probably have considered this beverage “crumby.”

  • Malted milk is a powder made from evaporated malted barley, wheat flour, and whole milk. It is used in bread and bagel dough to help it rise, biscuits, pancakes, candy like malt balls and Whoppers, and milkshakes.

  • Salinger had very rigid and peculiar eating habits, which, according to his former girlfriend Joyce Maynard, included a breakfast of frozen peas and a dinner of ground lamb patties served very rare.

  BEEZUS AND RAMONA

  BEVERLY CLEARY, 1955

  AFTER FATHER HAD SERVED THE CHICKEN and mashed potatoes and peas and Mother had passed the hot rolls, Beezus decided the time had come to tell Aunt Beatrice about being Sacajawea. . . .

  “Last week—” said Beezus, looking at her aunt, who smiled as if she understood.

  “Excuse me, Beezus,” Mother cut in. “Ramona, we do not put jelly on our mashed potatoes.”

  “I like jelly on my mashed potatoes.” Ramona stirred potato and jelly around with her fork.

  “Ramona, you heard what your mother said.” Father looked stern.

  “If I can put butter on my mashed potatoes, why can’t I put jelly? I put butter and jelly on toast,” said Ramona.

  Father couldn’t help laughing. “That’s a hard question to answer.”

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  • Cleary’s series of eight children’s novels written between 1955 and 1999 follows Ramona Quimby from ages four through ten.

  • One of the first written records of mashed potatoes is in Hannah Glasse’s 1747 cookbook, The Art of Cookery.

  • Though food chemist Edward Asselbergs didn’t invent “instant mashed potato flakes” until 1962, freeze-dried potatoes—such as Incan chuño—date as far back as the thirteenth century.

  ROBINSON CRUSOE

  DANIEL DEFOE, 1719

  THE NEXT DAY, the sixteenth, I went up the same way again; and after going something further than I had gone the day before, I found the brook and the savannahs cease, and the country become more woody than before. In this part I found different fruits, and particularly I found melons upon the ground, in great abundance, and grapes upon the trees. The vines had spread, indeed, over the trees, and the clusters of grapes were just now in their prime, very ripe and rich. This was a surprising discovery, and I was exceeding glad of them; but I was warned by my experience to eat sparingly of them; remembering that when I was ashore in Barbary, the eating of grapes killed several of our Englishmen, who were slaves there, by throwing them into fluxes and fevers. But I found an excellent use for these grapes; and that was, to cure or dry them in the sun, and keep them as dried grapes or raisins are kept, which I thought would be, as indeed they were, wholesome and agreeable to eat when no grapes could be had.

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  • Robinson Crusoe is widely accepted as the first realistic novel, due to its use of verisimilitude, specificity of character and place, and focus on the emotional interiority and personal growth of its protagonist.

  • There have been so many iterations and imitations of the Crusoe story of shipwreck survival and island living that a word exists to describe such a tale: a “Robinsonade.”

  • Crusoe’s mythic tale has been retold and reinterpreted in countless ways—in books such as The Swiss Family Robinson and The Lord of the Flies; in films such as Man Friday and Cast Away; and in television shows including Gilligan’s
Island and Lost.

  • First cultivated in Africa, melons are shown in Egyptian hieroglyphics dating from as far back as 2400 B.C.

  A WRINKLE IN TIME

  MADELEINE L’ENGLE, 1962

  “YOU’D BETTER CHECK THE MILK,” Charles Wallace said to Meg now, his diction clearer and cleaner than that of most five-year-olds. “You know you don’t like it when it gets skin on top.”

  “You put in more than twice enough milk.” Meg peered into the saucepan.

  Charles Wallace nodded serenely. “I thought Mother might like some.”

  “I might like what?” a voice said, and there was their mother standing in the doorway.

  “Cocoa,” Charles Wallace said. “Would you like a liverwurst-and-cream-cheese sandwich? I’ll be happy to make you one.”

  “That would be lovely,” Mrs. Murry said, “but I can make it myself if you’re busy.”

  “No trouble at all.” Charles Wallace slid down from his chair and trotted over to the refrigerator, his pajamaed feet padding softly as a kitten’s. “How about you, Meg?” he asked. “Sandwich?”