Grilling with Homer
April 27, 2022 7:18 PM Subscribe
Eat Your Words: Valerie Stevens (of the Paris Review) cooks from literary classics.
A few columns:
Grilling with Homer
Cooking from Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison
Cooking from Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
Thanksgiving with Laura Ingalls Wilder
Cooking from Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers
A few columns:
Grilling with Homer
Cooking from Dorothy Sayers' Strong Poison
Cooking from Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
Thanksgiving with Laura Ingalls Wilder
Cooking from Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers
Ooooooh, this is so much up my alley, I love cooking from books (or video games, or movies). I did Great Gatsby and Anne of Green Gables teas with my book club. For my family, I've done festive meals based on Anne McCaffrey's Pern, the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the musical Hamilton, the movie Frozen ... some others I can't think of. It's SO much fun to go back through the book (or movie, or game) and see what foods are mentioned, and then go research online to see what other people have hit on, and then start assembling recipes into a coherent meal.
From experience, sweets and starches translate well across time and space, but meat and vegetable preparations can be pretty weird. Like, for our Hamilton meal, we used all historically-accurate recipes, which mostly were great, but the method of cooking the brisket was just ... quite bleh to modern tastes. It tasted underseasoned, but also the seasoning was quite off-kilter to what I expect, sweeter than I usually prepare meats. (Kids liked it, though, so it's fine I guess.) The most godforsaken thing I've made had me toss roast potatoes in basically a simple syrup? I found them nearly inedible, and also? bizarre, and also? WHY DO YOU HATE POTATOES?
The writing is so good, I'm going to devour them all, no pun intended.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:40 PM on April 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
From experience, sweets and starches translate well across time and space, but meat and vegetable preparations can be pretty weird. Like, for our Hamilton meal, we used all historically-accurate recipes, which mostly were great, but the method of cooking the brisket was just ... quite bleh to modern tastes. It tasted underseasoned, but also the seasoning was quite off-kilter to what I expect, sweeter than I usually prepare meats. (Kids liked it, though, so it's fine I guess.) The most godforsaken thing I've made had me toss roast potatoes in basically a simple syrup? I found them nearly inedible, and also? bizarre, and also? WHY DO YOU HATE POTATOES?
The writing is so good, I'm going to devour them all, no pun intended.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:40 PM on April 27, 2022 [3 favorites]
What a wonderful idea—I have read all these books but this cooking plan has never occurred to me before! Looking forward to much planning and experimenting before enjoying the results
posted by librosegretti at 9:57 PM on April 27, 2022
posted by librosegretti at 9:57 PM on April 27, 2022
These are really excellent. But I feel like she rarely reviews her own work - that is to say, she says she made them, and gives the recipes, but never says "this was surprisingly good" or "there's a reason this dish was lost to time." Guess we just have to make them and find out ourselves.
Incidentally lots of great drinks are found in literature as well. Although not all are great. Pink gin, good lord!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:49 PM on April 27, 2022
Incidentally lots of great drinks are found in literature as well. Although not all are great. Pink gin, good lord!
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:49 PM on April 27, 2022
Oh hurrah, she’s done Lampedusa. I’ve been wondering about the giant macaroni for years, and that was not the search term needed.
Also my library list just got longer, oh well.
posted by clew at 11:11 PM on April 27, 2022
Also my library list just got longer, oh well.
posted by clew at 11:11 PM on April 27, 2022
Reminds me of the Mme Bovary’s cake project, which you can see documented here
Full disclosure - this was led by a colleague of mine, but I had no role in it at all, and it’s pretty amazing!
posted by melisande at 2:03 AM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
Full disclosure - this was led by a colleague of mine, but I had no role in it at all, and it’s pretty amazing!
posted by melisande at 2:03 AM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
This feels like the right place to mention that the corn soup recipe sort of embedded in Louise Erdrich’s latest (The sentence) is easy and delicious.
The book is pretty good too.
posted by thivaia at 4:17 AM on April 28, 2022
The book is pretty good too.
posted by thivaia at 4:17 AM on April 28, 2022
Mmmmm, barbecued meats....
posted by stevil at 7:58 AM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by stevil at 7:58 AM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
I think it is possible to experience the ancient identity "meat + fire = dinner" without obsessing over the count of tines on the skewers or the precise composition of the marinades and rubs. Grilled meat, in other words, is grilled meat, and if you have eaten a kebab you have eaten like a hero from the Illiad.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:41 AM on April 28, 2022
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:41 AM on April 28, 2022
Barbecue enthusiasts around the world just felt a familiar little tickle of indignation. Fortunately they know how to put it to good use.
The impossible cake and the Flaubert-Romanticism-technology-kitsch through line is great, thanks!
posted by clew at 10:28 AM on April 28, 2022
The impossible cake and the Flaubert-Romanticism-technology-kitsch through line is great, thanks!
posted by clew at 10:28 AM on April 28, 2022
A blogger doing a similar series here.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:09 AM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:09 AM on April 28, 2022 [1 favorite]
I went straight to the Laura Ingalls Wilder column and busted out laughing partially through because of the error that placed De Smet in Nebraska (it's in South Dakota). A few years ago, I read Cara Nicoletti's Voracious, which has a similar premise--and caught a similar mistake that my Goodreads review of the time excoriates:
One egregious mistake (right in the first essay, unfortunately!) nearly put me off the whole book and it took a while to regain my trust: Ma and Pa INGALLS, NOT WILDER (and the "Ingalls girls," not the "Wilder girls") appear in "Little House in the Big Woods"! This misnomer was repeated a number of times and I would think any editor worth their salt should have caught it--sad commentary on the state of publishing these days.
I don't know, maybe reading Laura Ingalls Wilder just gets readers so into the food (with good reason) that they miss the other details. (I liked Stevens's choices of Little House dishes and applauded her use of The Little House Cookbook, which I also loved.)
posted by dlugoczaj at 11:56 AM on April 28, 2022
One egregious mistake (right in the first essay, unfortunately!) nearly put me off the whole book and it took a while to regain my trust: Ma and Pa INGALLS, NOT WILDER (and the "Ingalls girls," not the "Wilder girls") appear in "Little House in the Big Woods"! This misnomer was repeated a number of times and I would think any editor worth their salt should have caught it--sad commentary on the state of publishing these days.
I don't know, maybe reading Laura Ingalls Wilder just gets readers so into the food (with good reason) that they miss the other details. (I liked Stevens's choices of Little House dishes and applauded her use of The Little House Cookbook, which I also loved.)
posted by dlugoczaj at 11:56 AM on April 28, 2022
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posted by eponym at 8:30 PM on April 27, 2022 [1 favorite]