The Spectator

Eggs and hard liquor: Spectator writers on their favourite examples of meals in literature

Passages to devour, from Dostoevsky to Hemingway

P.J. O’Rourke

I love poems but hate poetasters, love wine but detest oenophiles, love food but can’t stand foodies. Therefore my favourite passage about food in fiction is Lionel Shriver’s entire book Big Brother. In her tale of obese totalitarianism and comestible fascists Shriver destroys every pretention and abstract conception about food — starves it to death or fattens it for the kill. And she does so in prose that is poetry: ‘You have to ask yourself if there was ever a time people just ate something and got on with it. Every time I open the refrigerator I feel like I’m staring into a library of self-help books with air-conditioning.’

Taki

When Papa Hemingway was not standing up writing in longhand, or fishing or hunting, he spent his time eating and drinking with friends and followers. His last big theme was, like his first, bullfighting in Spain. It was 1959, and he called it The Dangerous Summer. In the car, ‘I kept a cold bottle of the light rosado in the ice bag and ate bread with a slab of Manchegan cheese with it’. La Pepica restaurant in Valencia (which still exists) ‘was a big, clean, open-air place and everything was cooked in plain sight. You could pick out what you wanted to have grilled or broiled and the seafood and Valencian rice dishes were the best on the beach’. At his old haunt of Casa Marceliano in Pamplona: ‘The wine was as good as when you were twenty-one, and the food as marvellous as always. The faces that were young once were old as mine, but everyone remembered how they were… Nobody was defeated.’

John R. MacArthur

We’ve all had enough of Hemingway, I know. His Moveable Feast foundered long ago on the shoals of Americans-abroad cliché. Yet my favourite literary food scene — more memorable than anything I can think of in novels of greater quality — takes place in The Sun Also Rises, when Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton go trout fishing on a hot summer day in Basque country.

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