Manners and modernity in I Capture the Castle
I recently finished I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, a 1949 novel that is littered with scenes of eating. The narrator Cassandra is the middle child of the eccentric Mortmain family: […]
Category Archives: Novels
The Dinners of Wolf Hall
I’ve been watching Wolf Hall (again!) with a friend who recently picked up the novels. Both the books and the television adaptation are very dense with detail, so there’s always […]
Winter chestnuts and other literary comforts
I’ve been reading Lolly Willowes, a 1926 novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner set at the turn of the 20th century. The story reminds me a lot of the pastoral 19th century novels […]
Search Term Sampler: Food of the future
Some bloggers love looking at and posting about the strange poetry of search terms that bring internet searchers to our sites. It’s satisfying to see how visible we are in […]
Lunches and Dinners in Wives and Daughters
I’ve been on an Elizabeth Gaskell kick this spring: once I’d fallen in love with North & South, I downloaded everything else I could find. Food often functions to convey […]
Link Buffet: Cooking the Books
Dinah Fried is shortly releasing a book called Fictitious Dishes, which features photographs of meals she has styled after notable meals from literary classics: a pretty tea set from Alice […]
Eating, enjoyment, and The Middlesteins
Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins has been making a bit of a splash in the book business, not least because one of its main characters is morbidly obese. Though I suspect (perhaps with premature […]
What would James Bond eat?
Eggs, according to Elizabeth Hale, whose article in Winter Gastronomica describes a multitude of egg dishes enjoyed by the agent in Ian Fleming’s series. Apparently Bond eats eggs in every one […]
Sweetrolls and soupe aux choux in Anna Karenina
The new Anna Karenina film is absolutely gorgeous–which anyone can plainly see from the trailer–but it is also quite sharp. I read the novel over the summer and was enthralled, […]
Lean and sinewy: Imagining writing as a fit body
In A Moveable Feast, the chapter “Birth of a New School” begins with Hemingway-as-narrator evoking the coolness and the cleanness of a café early in the morning, a seemingly pure […]
