Category: 20th century literature

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”

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”

Food and Identity

In my last post I wrote about the fried food eaten at the Jewish festival of Hannukah; the food laws and various culinary traditions of Judaism provide a key way in which Jews signal their identity to the wider world.

But you don’t have to follow strict food rules and practices to tell people who you are via the food you eat. Like the clothes we wear and the music we listen to, the food we eat sends out clear signals about our identity. Continue reading “Food and Identity”

Force feeding

‘Gordon,’ she said, ‘a cake.’
He shook his head and said softly, as if soothing her, ‘Oh, no, no.’
‘Yes, Gordon. It is full of goodness.’ And she made him eat a Chester cake…

(Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)

If you’re anything like me, then the idea of being ‘forced’ to eat cake – with the justification that ‘it is full of goodness’- is a very appealing one! In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie that is exactly what happens.  Continue reading “Force feeding”