Menu for a Moveable Feast: 10 Famous Authors and Their Favorite Foods & Recipes
What food got J.D. Salinger out of the house? What is tomato-soup cake, favored by Sylvia Plath? As The Hemingway Cookbook shows, writers aren’t only hungry for life—they’re hungry, period. Here are 10 authors and the foods they loved.
Somehow
authors can always be counted on to work up tremendous appetites. What
dish did John Steinbeck cook on his day off, and what was Agatha
Christie’s favorite midnight snack?
Although Hemingway wrote some mouth-watering passages in A Moveable Feast, his appreciation for food wasn’t confined to the page. As evidenced in The Hemingway Cookbook, it seeped out in every part of his life, from cooking trout over a campfire in Michigan to mixing Papa Doubles on the beach in Cuba.
These 10 authors had similar epicurean tendencies, which nourished their writing—and often spilled into it.
George Orwell—Plum Pudding
His food writing isn’t as well known as his novels or political essays, but George Orwell was full of opinions about cooking, and wasn’t shy about expressing them. In the unpublished 1946 essay “British Cookery,”
he took the cuisine of his home country to task, and the results aren’t
pretty. British food, Orwell said, was “simple, rather heavy, perhaps
slightly barbarous.” Seafood “is seldom well cooked” and milk puddings
are “the kind of thing that one would prefer to pass over in silence.”
But
Orwell did think the British made one thing particularly well: plum
pudding. A traditional Christmas dessert, Orwell called it “one of the
greatest glories of British cookery … an extremely rich, elaborate and
expensive dish.” Deceptively, plum pudding contains no plums. Instead,
think dried fruits, nuts, and spices—a holiday fruitcake you might
actually want to eat.
Recipe: Plum Pudding
Agatha Christie—Devonshire Cream
Miss
Marple famously delighted in clotted cream, but her appetite pales in
comparison to that of her creator. Agatha Christie was so partial to
cream that she regularly kept some by her typewriter, to sip while she
wrote. As her grandson Mathew remembered, “She used to drink cream from a
huge cup with ‘Don’t be greedy’ written on the side.” Apparently, it
was a warning that went unheeded.
Christie
grew up in Devon county, where clotted cream was served as a
traditional accompaniment to scones during teatime (hence the name
Devonshire cream). But often Christie found the scone superfluous, and
just ate the cream by the spoonful instead. “So much nicer than cod
liver oil, my mother used to say,” she wrote.
Recipe: Devonshire Cream
Jack Kerouac—Apple Pie
“I
ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all
the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and delicious, of
course.” That’s Sal in On the Road, but it could have been Jack Kerouac
himself. In 1947, Kerouac bought a bus ticket from New York to Chicago,
the first leg in his journey West that would serve as the basis for his
best-known work.
Another
author whose characters’ food habits mirrored his own, Kerouac wrote to
his mother from the road, in a letter than sounds suspiciously similar
to Sal’s menu: “I’ve been eating apple pie & ice cream all over Iowa
& Nebraska, where the food is so good.” It was also one of the
cheapest offerings at diners around the country—another major point in
its favor.
Recipe: Apple Pie
J.D. Salinger—Roast Beef
Even legendary recluses have to eat, and roast beef was the thing that got J. D. Salinger out of the house. Every Saturday, he would make the drive from his home in Cornish, N.H. to the famous Saturday suppers
at the First Congregational Church in Hartland, Vt. Regulars recall
Salinger arriving early—eager to get in the first seating—and passing
the time by silently writing in his notebook.
When
the meal was served, Salinger helped himself to the all-you-can-eat
spread of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and pie. And although his
declining health eventually kept him from making the trip to Hartland,
it didn’t stop him from eating roast beef: his wife, Colleen O’Neill,
came every week to load up a plate to go.
Recipe: Roast Beef
Jean-Paul Sartre—Halva
It’s
hard to imagine Jean-Paul Sartre sitting down for a snack, but his
letters to Simone De Beauvoir reveal his sweet tooth, and especially his
love of halva. After being drafted into the army during World War II,
Sartre asks for several boxes of the nut- and honey-based
confection—then panics when it doesn’t arrive. “I got your books but no halva. Is there another package?”
Sartre
eventually got his halva, which came wrapped in individual bars and
sprinkled with chopped almonds. He didn’t contain his excitement: “We
ate the whole box at lunch,” he admitted.
Recipe: Halva with Almonds
Truman Capote—Italian Summer Pudding
Truman
Capote was himself a capable cook, learning to bake and broil after
settling down in Sicily with his partner, Jack Dunphy. He was
particularly fond of desserts, whipping up cookies and cakes to satisfy
his sugar cravings.
But
when Capote was introduced to summer pudding, while having lunch with
the Queen Mother in 1962, his eyes lit up; his friend Cecil Beaton
remembers him shouting with joy. It was “the best cake I’ve ever
tasted,” Capote wrote. “A sort of chocolate cream stuffed with fresh
raspberries.” Italian summer puddings, with layers of berries,
ladyfingers, and chocolate mascarpone, recall a lighter version of
tiramisu. Plus, there’s booze involved—another of Capote’s vices.
Recipe: Italian Summer Pudding
Sartre asks for several boxes of the nut- and honey-based confection—then panics when it doesn’t arrive. “I got your books but no halva. Is there another package?”
Walt Whitman—Coffee Cake
While
many authors favored liquor and sweets, Walt Whitman knew the value of a
good breakfast. In his daybooks, the only two recipes he noted down
were both for the morning meal: doughnuts and coffee cake. That’s not to
say he limited his coffee cake intake after noon. As he wrote in a
letter, “I was foolish enough to take a good strong drink, & eat a
couple of slices of rich cake late at night.” Even Whitman was not
immune to the allure of the midnight snack.
Coffee
cakes in Whitman’s day were not the sugary, streusel-like treats we’re
familiar with now. Instead, they more closely resembled a dense spice
cake, with coffee added right into the batter itself.
Recipe: Coffee Cake
Sylvia Plath—Tomato-Soup Cake
“How
I love to cook!” Sylvia Plath wrote in her journals, and going by the
meticulous recipe records she kept, she hardly ever stopped. After
leaving the U.S. for England, Plath asked her mother to send a copy of The Joy of Cooking overseas, which she writes of studying intently, “reading it like a rare novel.”
Baking was Plath’s specialty and she regularly made cakes from The Joy of Cooking while
writing: lemon-pudding cake, apple cake, devil’s food cake, banana
cake. But one of the most unusual was tomato-soup cake, a mixture of
savory and sweet that was one of Plath’s signature dishes.
Willa Cather—Kolaches
Willa
Cather drew much of her cooking inspiration from her childhood in Red
Cloud, Neb., where her family moved when she was 9. Red Cloud had a
large Czech and German population, and Cather became particularly
interested in her neighbor Annie Pavelka, a Bohemian immigrant who would
serve as the inspiration for My Ántonia.
Annie
was active in the kitchen, passing down her recipes to future
generations of Pavelkas as well as to Cather, who continued to visit
even after she left Nebraska for New York. Like Ántonia,
Annie baked kolaches, the yeasted pastries that were a staple of Czech
households and are still found in various forms in Nebraska and parts of
Texas. Although kolaches can be either sweet or savory, Cather
preferred sweet: In My Ántonia, they’re filled with spiced plums.
Recipe: Spiced Plum Kolaches
John Steinbeck—Posole
When
it came to food, John Steinbeck took his cues from his surroundings, in
true locavore style. When living on Long Island, he took advantage of
the abundant seafood, regularly fishing and clamming for his supper.
While on an extended stay in England, he foraged on the property for
greens he could add to a salad, or braise with bacon bits.
But
often Steinbeck was traveling across the western U.S., with no good
fishing or foraging to be had. So he made posole, according to a simple
recipe from his friend, the screenwriter Jack Wagner: just “a can of
chili and a can of hominy.” Combine, heat, and serve for a soup that’s
ideal for a writer on the road.
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