Posted by The Times of London, UK on June 04, 2010 at 15:41:13:
A literary feast
Why eat your own words when you can consume those of some of the world’s great authors, asks the Times literary editor
By Erica Wagner
The gods, I read, dined on ambrosia. I was about 9 or 10, entranced with the Greek myths, and living in New York, where no association between the word ambrosia and the concept of rice pudding could be made. What was ambrosia? I had no idea — only, if the gods got to eat it, it must be the most delicious thing ever. At the time, my idea of the most delicious thing ever was a slab of Philadelphia cream cheese with dollops of honey on top — no bread required, just eat with a spoon and swoon. A passionate reader, I was, early on, a passionate eater too: what better than to combine the two?
Jane Green’s new novel, The Love Verb, is designed for people like me, or so you’d think. It’s Green’s 12th novel, and — like all her others — it is surely destined for the bestseller charts. Her first novel, Straight Talking, was published a decade and a half ago; it’s fair to say she is a pioneer of what’s lazily called “chick-lit”: but might otherwise be described as stories that engage with women’s lives in a way that’s appealing to a very wide audience — she’s sold more than 2.5 million copies of her books to date.
What’s different about The Love Verb is that each of the 31 chapters ends with a recipe; a recipe linked closely to what’s come before, and more often than not drawn from Green’s own family repertoire. The story, too, is drawn from personal experience: that of helping to nurse a friend, Heidi, though breast cancer. Heidi died last year.
“I’ve always shown my love for people by cooking for them,” Green tells me. “When Heidi got sick, I cooked for her every day. So when I came to write the book, because it was so much based on my experience with my friend, I thought that I had to include the recipes.” She is, she says, a cook out of “necessity” — she lives in Westport, Connecticut, with her husband, and they have six children between them: “so no one ever invites us anywhere! I cook for our children and all their friends at the weekends — I cook like a caterer, often for 20 people. I love food; I love entertaining; I’m a real nester. I want to gather people up in my kitchen and cook for them.”
Clam chowder
I am of exactly the same mind; there’s nothing I like better. But with all due respect to Green, when it came time to see if I could put together my own “literary dinner”, I wanted to work a little harder. (I always enjoy the hard work of a trawl round London’s Borough Market, certainly.) You don’t have to find a novel that comes with recipes included to enjoy the melding of two favourite pastimes; nor do you need a tub of cream cheese and a vivid imagination. Food and fiction have been woven together from time immemorial because novels are about how people live their lives; quite a lot of that life happens, perforce, at the table.
Perhaps we like to think that these days our obsession with food and its preparation — from Delia to Jamie to Nigella and Sophie and beyond — is somehow something new, but all you have to do is think of the Last Supper to know that food has always been woven intimately in to the stories we tell.
That said, these days we are especially aware of how what we eat marks us out: the critic Adam Gopnik has noted that Ian McEwan’s portrait of Henry Perowne, in Saturday, making a bouillabaisse is “obviously painting a picture of l’homme bourgeois as he is today, his hands filled with fish, his mind with intimations of terror”. Terror, because Perowne is watching the build-up to the Iraq war as he cooks, and brooding on the state of the world. However, as Gopnik rightly notes, “it’s a tribute to McEwan’s powers of persuasion that the scene would never work that way in reality. You can’t idly make a bouillabaisse while you brood on modern life any more than you can idly make a cassoulet; these are nerve-racking concoctions”.
There is, on McEwan’s refreshingly low-fi website, a detailed recipe for the fish stew if you click through to Saturday (there: now you’ll know the answer when Anne Robinson asks you, “What do Ian McEwan and Jane Green have in common?”) but, when it comes to the fictional kitchen, I’m more inclined to busk. I don’t much like recipes in the first place — well, I like to read them, but when it comes to actually cooking I’d rather follow my nose.
So much better, then, to turn to the classics. “‘Queequeg,’ said I, ‘do you think we can make a supper for us both on one clam?’ ” But there was more than one clam, it turned out, the dish served to Ishmael and his chum in the chapter of Moby-Di*ck entitled, simply, Chowder. “It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.”
Put them all together and heat for a simple, rich first course — minus, in my case, the ship biscuit, but I hope you’ll forgive. What to come after? Boeuf en daube it would not be, not least because it’s pretty clear from To the Lighthouse that Virginia Woof didn’t know much about cooking (she had servants to do that for her, after all). “The beef, the bayleaf, and the wine — all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of the question. Yet of course tonight, of all nights, out they went, and they came in late, and things had to be sent out, things had to be kept hot; the boeuf en daube would be entirely spoiled.” A beef stew you can’t keep waiting can’t be called a stew at all.
So to Anna Karenina instead. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (This from the new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, in a spiffy new Penguin RED edition that will help fight Aids in Africa too.) And each poularde à l’estragon — tarragon chicken to you and me — will be different too, since there is no more description of the dish, as served to Levin and Oblonsky at the novel’s outset. (I could have made cabbage soup and kasha, which Levin says he prefers, but I’m not sure what my guests would have made of that.)
Tarragon chicken might be a chicken roasted whole with handfuls of tarragon stuffed up its bum: certainly it is in many recipes. But I wasn’t in the mood to simply roast a bird: I liked the thought of some sauce, so I cooked up what might be considered a variation on chicken chasseur, really: roasted chicken legs with a mushroomy, tomato-and-brandy-based sauce — a big bunch of chopped fresh tarragon and plenty of cubed butter added at the last minute. I don’t think that Levin would have missed his cabbage.
Finally: pudding. Madeleines, of course, would be a possibility: but I’m too fond of the ones at Fergus Henderson’s St John to wish to attempt my own. A little gingerbread house, to end on a Tim Burton-esque, Hansel and Gretel note? Maybe not. Here’s a good rule for life: when in doubt, turn to poetry. “And still she slept in azure-lidded sleep,/ In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,/ While he from forth the closet brought a heap/ Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;/ With jellies soother than the creamy curd . . .” Keats may have perished from tuberculosis at 25, but he was clearly a man who knew his dessert. So from The Eve of St Agnes to Nigella’s Forever Summer. If “jellies soother than the creamy curd” doesn’t make you think of her fabulous “sl)ut-red raspberries in Chardonnay jelly” I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Don’t be scared of gelatine leaves (think how scared they must be of you). Simple, delicious and — we all agreed — perfectly Keatsian.
Three classic books: one meal. But wait a minute: what was that about “blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d”? Next up: housework with Romantic poets . . .
Jane Green’s The Love Verb is published on June 10 by Penguin, £16.99
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