I’m making him cook better. Absolute ban on frozen food. I must have fruit, green vegetables. I have steak. Salmon. (John Fowles, The Collector) Continue reading “Food and obsession”
Category: 20th century literature
Sibling rivalry
They sat down to a lunch of eggs au gratin and baked apples. Unspoken, the challenging testing exchange went on beneath the ripple of superficial commentary and question, the small bursts of laughter that exploded between them like bubbles released under pressure. They were meeting to be reconciled after fifteen years. (Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove) Continue reading “Sibling rivalry”
Growing up
Joanna brought back … some small slices of cake. It was cake with two colours. Half yellow, half chocolate. Mama called it marble cake, but Joanna had some other name for it.
(Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls)
Cooking in a bedsitter
By the time John came back with a strange concoction, the room really looked quite a lot better. … John gazed round approvingly and pronounced judgement: ‘Smell bad, but look good.’ The exact opposite could have been said of the meal, but with the important addendum that it tasted delicious. (Lynne Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room)
In my teenage years, as I transitioned from reading children’s to adult fiction, I would spend many an hour looking through my parents’ novel collection. Continue reading “Cooking in a bedsitter”