Literary Feasts: Recipes from the Classics of Literature Book

A collection of insightful essays on food accompanied by a host of recipes, Literary Feasts explores the significance of food in literature. Each featured meal--from Madame Bovary's wedding feast of chicken fricassee, to Doc's beer milkshake from Cannery Row --has been set down in recipe form as authentically as possible so readers may duplicate them at home.

Drawing on the culinary traditions of the times and cultures at the center of each novel, the author serves up an eggplant epiphany from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, jam tarts from D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, to Mrs. Ramsay's famous boeuf en daube dinner in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and much more. Accompanying thought-provoking essays define the role of food in each work: as a part of a larger metaphor, in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; as a way of depicting character, like the bland diet of the dull Mr. Woodhouse in Jane Austen's Emma; as a means of adding vivid detail in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.