Counting calories in literature

However delicious food is, it comes with one significant downside for some of us, namely weight gain. The anxiety about eating – and putting on weight – is one usually (though not exclusively) experienced more by women than men, as a result of the societal pressures placed on women to maintain a particular body weight and shape. Continue reading “Counting calories in literature”

A Woman’s Lot in Renaissance Italy

In my previous existence as a secondary school English teacher I frequently taught Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess to my GCSE classes – click here to read the poem.

Continue reading “A Woman’s Lot in Renaissance Italy”

From blog post to plate

Whilst my blog is grounded in cooking that I actually do, inspired by the plays, novels and poems I have read, I suspect that, for the vast majority of my readers, my blog provides them with reading matter (rather than with recipes). Continue reading “From blog post to plate”

Food and memory loss

On more than one occasion I’ve blogged about the role of memory in accounts of food and eating in literature. From the narrator’s memories of delicious childhood teas at his best friend’s house in Michael Frayn’s Spies, to Flora Thompson’s memories of the food practices of her native Oxfordshire in the early 20th century in her autobiography Lark Rise to Candleford, food plays a significant role in writers’ and characters’ memories of the past. Continue reading “Food and memory loss”