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)
Author: rebecca.selman@btinternet.com
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”
Simnel Cake
Then on Mid-Lent Sunday, instead of furmenty we eat Simnel cake: a cake made variously, but always with saffron for its principal ingredient. This I should fancy was a relic of Papistry, but I wonder how it originated. Lambert Simnel the imposter in Henry the Seventh’s time was a baker’s son, I think. The shop windows are filled with them, high and low eat them. (Elizabeth Gaskell, letter to Mary Howitt, 18th August 1838) Continue reading “Simnel Cake”
Food and the crime novel
I love a good crime novel. Whether it be the detailed recounting of the evidence that leads Sherlock Holmes to his identification of the villain; the list of suspects in an Agatha Christie novel who all have a motive for committing the crime or the dark criminal underbelly of John Rebus’s Edinburgh in Ian Rankin’s contemporary fiction, crime novels have been a staple of my reading since my teenage years. Continue reading “Food and the crime novel”