I’ve been meaning to do this post for many months now but was unable to carve out the time. Recently, there was an Intro to Anthro With 2 Humans podcast about Roman food (“Pour Some Garum on Me“) and just like the Egyptian sex poems book, I was able to find literary crossover as a stream of books come through the house.

As I flipped through one book called Gastronomical Time Travel, I also happened to be reading The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook and I realized some of these recipes were related to famous literary works.

So I thought I would list some of them out.

Absinthe

I visited an Absinthe bar in Paris in 2008 and since then I’ve been noticing references to absinthe in paintings, novels and biographies. Painters and writers include Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Paul Verlaine, Picasso Vincent van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant and Oscar Wilde.

Absinthe recipe

The Mint Julep

The Mint Julep was made famous in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Here’s a Medium article on “The mint julep’s jaunt through literature.”

Mint Julep recipe

The Madeleine

The Madeleine is probably the most famous depiction of food’s impact on memory and the sublime, from Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way.

Madeleine recipe

New England Clam Chowder

New England Clam Chowder as depicted in Moby Dick. I’m going to Boston in early August and hope to have some thick, creamy New England clam chowder!

New England clam chowder recipe

Fried Chicken, Cold

Cold Fried Chicken appears in many novels from Pride and Prejudice to A Moveable Feast.

Make the fried chicken recipe, then refrigerate.

Haggis

From the Robert Burns poem, “Address to a Haggis.”

Poets love to write about food. Here are 10 anthologies of poetry about food:”10 tasty food poetry anthologies for hungry readers.” I have The Hungry Ear which has anthologized food poems by contemporary poets.

Haggis recipe

Oysters Rockefeller

In The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Toklas talks about Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s return to America from France in 1934-5 and their discovering the new foods Americans were eating. One of the dishes was Oysters Rockefeller and Toklas captured a recipe for it. Mark Twain was also extremely fond of oysters in any dish, including the Oysters Rockefeller.

The Decades-Long Comeback of Mark Twain’s Favorite Food

Oysters Rockefeller recipe

More Lists of Literary Foods