From The Page To The Plate: 5 Memorable Recipes From Literature
By Adam Krause
With the US Thanksgiving fast approaching, you might be looking forward to seeing your cousin from out of town or watching the game on TV. But the biggest draw to the holiday, as far as we’re concerned, is eating, whether you like dark meat drumsticks or creamy mashed potatoes. Fortunately, the long Thanksgiving weekend provides time to not only eat and digest, but also to read. So that you don’t go too hungry waiting, here is a feast of five memorable meals from literature.
Salmon, “The Corrections” 
In a scene from Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections (one of Time magazine’s 100 best twentieth-century novels) failed college professor Chip is hosting his parents for lunch at his apartment in New York. He hasn’t yet told them he has been fired for having an affair with a student. Broke and desperate to impress them, he winds up in a gourmet grocery store where he misreads the price of a piece of line-caught Norwegian salmon that turns out to be $78.40. He shoves it into his pants and has to stand in the store, chatting with an acquaintance, before he can go home and serve it to his parents.
“That a salmon filet was now spreading down into Chip’s underpants like a wide, warm slug did seem to have everything to do with his brain and with a number of poor decisions that this brain had made. Rationally Chip knew that Doug would let him go soon… that there would come a moment when he was no longer standing amid pricey gelati with lukewarm fish in his pants, and that this future moment would be a moment of extraordinary relief – but for now he still inhabited an earlier, much less pleasant moment from the vantage point of which a new brain looked like just the ticket.”
If you want to serve salmon sans pants, check out these more conventional recipes for olive oil poached salmon at the New York Times and creamy salmon pasta at Salmon Recipes.us.
Madeleine and Tea, “Swann’s Way”
One of the most famous food scenes in literature appears in Swann’s Way, the first volume in Marcel Proust’s enormous seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time. The narrator bites into a type of French pastry called a madeleine, which he has not tasted since childhood. The sensory memory provided by the taste triggers a floodgate of reminiscences. The scene is considered an important early use of stream-of-consciousness, a writing technique which tries to reproduce the rhythms of actual thought.
“She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.”
(Translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)
If you want to try to reproduce this transcendent experience at home, here is a recipe for lemon madeleines at Epicurious.com and an investigation in the online magazine Slate.com into whether Proust actually got the details of his madeleine right.
Every Flavor Beans, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
These beans made their first appearance in the first Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling, where Harry, Ron and Hermione marveled at the array of flavors in the enchantingly gross candy. The ones they tried tasted like toast, coconut, baked bean, strawberry, curry, grass, coffee, sardines and pepper.
There is no known recipe for these magical beans, but the chemistry wizards at Jelly Belly briefly tried a product called Bertie Botts’ Every Flavor Beans, with flavors like dirt, snot and vomit. These were, understandably, not a hit, and the company discontinued them in 2007. Now the closest equivalent is BeanBoozled, available from the Jelly Belly website in such flavors as toothpaste and skunk spray.
Miscellaneous Organ Meats, Ulysses
In James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, his protagonist Leopold Bloom is a traveling salesman whose day walking around Dublin parallels the long voyage of the mythic hero Ulysses. The first thing we learn about Leopold Bloom is that he enjoys eating organ meats that many cooks would throw away. This tells us not only something about the economic situation in Ireland at that time – Bloom is well-off, but he can only afford organ meat – but begins to characterize the complicated Bloom, who is Jewish but does not keep kosher.
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes.”
Recipes for many of these late nineteenth-century dishes are available at The Old Foodie. In particular, the mushroom ketchup needed to garnish the fried liver sounds quite good. You may even want to leave out the liver entirely.
Turkish Delight, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
In C.S. Lewis’ classic children’s novel, young Edmund ventures through a magical wardrobe to discover a wintry forest presided over by a beautiful witch in a sleigh. She makes friends with the boy by giving him the hard candies known as Turkish Delight, which he immediately becomes addicted to.
“The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle onto the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious.”
According to Slate.com, which investigated Turkish Delight in addition to Proust’s madeleine, the candy tastes like
“soap rolled in plaster dust” or “deep-frozen grandmother’s perfume,” a far cry from the ultimate sweet treat that made Edmund a devoted follower of the White Witch. If you want to try to improve on the recipe yourself, you can find it here at World Recipes.
The common theme to many of these foods seems to be that they are less delicious than the average Thanksgiving dinner. Perhaps a truly satisfying bite of food can never entirely be captured with words, just as a recipe won’t give the same experience as reading seven volumes of Proust. The solution might be to combine the twin pleasures of reading and eating. But watch out for gravy stains on the pages.
