From the earliest times stories have been translated into other languages, adapted into different contexts and rewritten to suit a new place, time and readership. From Chaucer borrowing from the works of the Italian writers Boccaccio and Petrarch for many of his Canterbury Tales to Shakespeare’s plundering of historical records and ancient tales, where stories are concerned there is ‘nothing new under the sun’.
And that energy and enthusiasm for retelling old stories has particularly resurfaced in novels in the last 20 or 30 years. Ancient Greek literature has been a common inspiration: for example, Madeleine Miller’s 2012 Women’s Prize Winner The Shield of Achilles; Colm Toibin’s House of Names (2017), Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and The Women of Troy (2021. Shakespeare has also proved influential: Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (a 2015 recasting of The Winter’s Tale) and Howard Jacobson’s 2016 Shylock is My Name (after The Merchant of Venice), amongst others. And the great Victorian novelist Charles Dickens has motivated spin-offs: the Australian novelist Peter Carey retold Great Expectations in Jack Maggs (1997) and – the focus of this post – in 2022 the American writer Barbara Kingsolver translated David Copperfield into a 21st century setting in Demon Copperhead.
David Copperfield, which was published in serial form between 1849 and 1850, is a semi-autobiographical coming of age story, narrated by the eponymous protagonist looking back on his life as a content and successful middle-aged man. Opening with David’s birth to his young recently widowed mother, the reader follows him on his journey from infancy to maturity, from naivety to self-knowledge and fulfilment. Along the way David encounters a multitude of unforgettable and varied characters, and experiences joy and sorrow, brutality and kindness, mistakes and awakenings.
In Demon Copperhead, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2023, Kingsolver takes Dickens’ characters and plot and transplants them to the United States, to the Southern Appalachian mountains of Virginia. David Copperfield becomes Demon Copperhead, born in a trailer to a poverty-stricken drug-addicted single mother. The child’s vulnerability to harsh social conditions and the cruelty of the adult world sadly resonates as much in 21st century America as in 19th century England. At the same time, Demon, like David, is a survivor, and his quest for love and compassion enables him to navigate his way through his challenging childhood towards happiness and fulfilment.
Food is a preoccupation for both David Copperfield and Demon Copperhead, reflecting their poverty-stricken and vulnerable childhoods. I’ve written previously about food in David Copperfield: an episode where David is forced to sell some of his clothes to buy food , two occasions when he is coerced into giving away his food to others , but also a positive experience when he enjoys spending his own earnings from his work at the wine warehouse on eating out. The food David enjoys – and gives away to others – is typical English Victorian food: a saveloy (a type of sausage), beef and bread and cheese, chops and potatoes, batter pudding and almond cakes.
In Demon Copperhead the same hunger – and interest in food – is expressed. Demon tells of the crippling hunger he feels which leads to obsessive dreaming and drawing of food, much of which has a distinctly English bent: ‘I was hungry at all the hours, but nights were worst. I drew pictures of food, pages and pages. Roast chickens with their drumsticks. Pork chops, mashed potatoes. I spent hours getting the shading right. Putting highlights on the gravy.’
He drools over the content of classmates’ packed lunches: ‘This one girl at school, Maisie Clinkenbeard, probably thought I liked her due to me sitting as close to her as I could. But it was to see what was in her lunch box. … I guarantee you a mom packed these lunches, and we’re talking something amazing every day, thick slices of ham, potato salad, homemade desserts. Peach cobbler cut in a little square.’
Whilst I have written about peach cobbler for an English novel , a cobbler is a traditional American dessert, comprising fruit topped with a scone-like mixture and baked. And unsurprisingly much of the food that Demon dreams about or salivates over is typically American: ‘burgers’, ‘fries’, ‘apple cobblers‘, ‘blackeye pea soup‘ and ‘ham biscuits‘.
It was the last item in that list – ‘ham biscuits‘ – that caught my attention, having never heard of them before reading Kingsolver’s novel. The first time Demon mentions them they are made by Mrs Peggot (Mrs Peggot’s amazing ham biscuits), a kindly neighbour and the 21st century counterpart of Dickens’s Clara Peggotty.
The first entry that came up when I put ‘ham biscuits’ into Google was a recipe for Virginia Country Ham Biscuits, on a blog by a Virginian blogger Blair Lonergan who writes about the recipes she cooks for her family in her farmhouse kitchen in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. She describes ham biscuits as a Virginian speciality which would be great for breakfast, a snack or an appetiser with drinks. Whenever you eat them, they’re delicious – a bit like a mini-scone sandwich. I’ve converted Blair’s measures into UK measures and made a couple of tweaks to reflect English ingredients and my personal taste. I’m not surprised that Demon enjoyed them so much!
AMAZING HAM BISCUITS
Ingredients (makes 16 small biscuits):
270g plain flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
60g butter chilled butter, diced
200-220ml buttermilk (or 220ml milk and 1 tablespoon lemon juice – leave to stand for 5-10 mins)
2 tablespoons melted butter
thinly sliced ham
Method:
Sieve the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt and sugar into a mixing bowl.
Add the diced butter and rub in using your fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Then add the buttermilk (or milk and lemon juice) to make a soft but not overly sticky dough.
Knead the dough on a floured surface for 1 minute until smooth.
Pat out the dough to a thickness of about 2 cm. Flour your smallest cutter – mine is 4.5 cm in diameter – and cut out rounds. Place these on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper and brush with the melted butter. Place in the fridge whilst the oven heats up.
Preheat the oven to 220C / 200C fan / Gas mark 7. Bake the ‘biscuits’ for 10-15 minutes until golden brown on top. Remove from the oven and place on a wire rack to cool. Once cool, split or cut in half, spread each half with butter or mustard and add the ham. Place the top back on and eat.
