Banquet for a bibliophile

It is safe to say that there is an umbilical relation between food and creativity. After all, doesn't your appetite for lemon-rubbed fish, or say, mushrooms, flushed in their wood-smoke skin, also signify your lust for life? One testament to this is the literary flourish with which authors across ages describe food, or a wistful lack of it (remember Oliver Twist and Anne Frank?) In some cases, the feasting scenes add to the richness of the text (Enid Blyton's high-teas were as magical as Harry's Hogwarts meals) and often, food is usurped for the purpose of characterization, or subterranean metaphors (The fresh halibut in Jhumpa Lahiri's Mrs Sen's is more than a dietary preference). Whatever its purpose, food, described in lush vocabulary, can be as readable as certain works of literature are edible. To credit this chemistry between pork chops and pronouns, strawberry scones and similes, we've drawn up a menu of some gaze-worthy food in literature.

The Enid Blyton books; Bacon and egg sandwiches, scones with strawberry jam, potatoes-in-jacket, tinned sardines and lemonade

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Where does one begin? As children, each time the Secret Seven or the Famous Five would run off to their next big adventure, we would fritter away entire afternoons imagining what the delicacies in their baskets—buttery scones, tinned sardines, black currant jam and lemonade—might look and taste like (most of the food being unknown to the Indian palate). Then there was the Faraway Tree series that'd leave magical images of pop biscuits, google buns, hot-and-cold-goodies and toffee shocks dancing before one's eyes. The mountains of hard-boiled eggs, mince pies and strawberry cream that Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Anne, Jack and Kiki (Jack's greedy parrot) devoured while evading delicious dangers have kept Blyton fans' bewitched on many a languid afternoons.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl; Liverwurst

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In this soul-sweeping personal account of a Jewish girl hiding out during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the rationing of food in the Secret Annex lends a graphic direness to the circumstances battled by thousands of Jewish families. In a one-way conversation with her diary Kitty, Anne talks about receiving their share of brown beans, split-pea soup, potatoes with dumplings, potato kugel and, by the grace of God, turnip greens or rotten carrots. To lend substance to the potatoes that substituted bread, the company fried it a little, often eating it with "imitation gravy". What Anne looks forward to, in such frugality, is the weekly slice of liverwurst, or liver sausage. But the wise heart reasons...we're still alive, and much of the time it still tastes good too.

The Great Gatsby; Hors-d’oeuvre and pastry pigs

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in describing one of Jay Gatsby's decadent parties, makes the narrator, Nick Carraway, talk about buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. A cue for the reader to visualise a garden of summer air, scented with savouries, sweets and casual seduction.

A Christmas Carol; Roast goose and Christmas pudding

There never was such a goose. There's a Charles Dickens sentence that has haunted me like the genteel spirits haunted Uncle Scrooge. That a petite goose, by no means sufficient for the teeming Cratchit family, could be savoured with much excitement, sums up for me, the oft-ignored happiness of sharing meals with one's family. Then the pudding could, I dare say, resemble a speckled cannon-ball, and still your heart would retain the freshness of an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that!

On the Road, Apple-pie and ice-cream

Jack Kerouak stands for the bustle of the beat generation, and to some, the grand restlessness of ice-cream on apple-pie. I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon—but I had no time for thoughts like that…I can't be the only one who lost sleep over the dusty Iowa sun making a beautiful mess of this fleetingly important ice-cream apple-pie, can I?

The Harry Potter series; Bouillabaisse, pumpkin pasties, cauldron cakes, chocolate frogs and butter beer

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While the rest of the haul comes from the spread trolley-ed around by the friendly witch from the Hogwarts Express, author J.K. Rowling uses bouillabaisse, a French fish-stew, to spark a comic scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Potterheads would remember chortling over how Ron Weasley, caught unawares by Beauxbatons student (and future sister-in-law) Fleur Delacour's Veela vibes, expresses interest in a dish that he deemed unappetising moments before. The butter beer, of course, stands witness to countless misadventures in Hogsmead, the excursion-friendly British wizarding village.

Like Water For Chocolate; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce and Cream Fritters

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This is the story of Tita and Pedro, of loving and longing and huge bouts of banquets. Tita, Laura Esquivel's protagonist, is a child of a malevolent star, one that gives with one hand and takes with another. She is doomed to a life of servility in the kitchen but has a talent to kick up a feast at short order. The story is redolent of Christmas rolls, quail in rose petal sauce and cream fritters, prepared by this wizard of a love-lorn girl, who has the power of transmitting her emotions in the food she cooks, and then transferring those very emotions and moods to the person who partakes of these feasts. Heart-aching stories and actual recipes and are stirred, stoked and kneaded into these pages. For someone who is serious about food for thought, this is the book to snack into.

The Namesake and A Temporary Matter (Interpreter of Maladies); Jhal muri and roganjosh

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With Jhumpa Lahiri, food is never just about eating. For her diaspora women in strange, cold countries, food is about holding close a wafting sense of identity. Ashima Ganguli's (The Namesake) failure to summon the pungent kick of Calcutta's mustard-oil laden jhal muri (spicy puffed-rice) by mixing Rice Krispies and peanuts embodies a rootlessness that colours many of Lahiri's protagonists. Shukumar, the alienated husband in A Temporary Matter, cooks roganjosh, an aromatic lamb curry, in an attempt to salvage his watery marriage. It is by picturing the disappointing yellow of Ashima's Krispies or the hissing hot lamb gravy that the reader can truly tap into Lahiri's characters.

Eat, Pray, Love; Fried artichokes and spaghetti all'Amatriciana

If you, like me, stumbled upon Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love at the perfect hour, you know first-hand that good food—or even good descriptions of it—is the sole antidote to a bad break-up. Gilbert too, spends the better part of her journey eating and soul-searching through far-flung locations in Italy, India and Indonesia, allowing new food to pave her path to self-love. Think, the fried artichoke she warily tries because the Romans are awefully proud of it, or the spaghetti all'Amatriciana she learns to savour, the consoling fragrance of tomatoes, pancetta, olive oil, onions and chilli peppers gliding her spirit peace-wards.

With inputs from Amy Fernandes