We’ve decided to do away with blog-for-a-beer and free things up so you can spend that munificent $10 Paypal payment anywhere you like!
This week, we invite commentary about fantasy meals, particularly the amuse-bouche. I remember being entranced by the idea of Turkish Delight in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and strolling through the description of the River Rat’s picnic in Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows:
“There’s cold chicken inside it,” replied the Rat briefly:
“coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwiches
pottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater–”
The ten dollar prize for the best or most entertaining comment should be spent on food — and we hope you’ll come back and describe it for us!
Here’s a starter – what sort of amuse-bouche might they serve at:
- The inn in Birds
- The magician’s party in Chemical Magic
- The face to face meeting on the plains of Subsuban in Teaching a Pink Elephant to Ski
1 • Lily Yu said:
March 27th, 2009 at 3:35 pm, permalink
Between third grade and fifth grade I remember dining at Jacques’ Redwallian banquets several times a day. He wrote of food in lists: “…tender freshwater shrimp garnished with cream and rose leaves, devilled barley pearls in acorn purée, apple and carrot chews, marinated cabbage stalks steeped in creamed white turnip with nutmeg…” I conjured the dishes out of nothing but syllables, having no knowledge whatsoever of turnips, marchpane, candied chestnuts, trifle, carp, barley, cream, leeks, watercress, etc. I read and ate what I imagined and never felt hungry afterwards. For those years I didn’t eat much besides words, which worried my parents no end.
In Ireland many years later, with a friend of mine, also Chinese, who had also invented Redwall’s flavors from air, I found and tried supermarket trifle. We took a spoonful each, held it in our mouths and considered it, swallowed, and looked at each other: disappointment. Thick-sweet ginger wine, elderberry cordial, and bland, powdery Turkish delight also fell a little short of our imaginings. Nor did I ever did understand the appeal of turnips. But marzipan was exactly as I expected; my sister brought home a little panda made of it from a confectioner’s in Quebec, and I broke off the flower it was wearing and put it in my mouth and smiled fatuously for five minutes.
I read fewer and fewer vivid flavors as I grew older, mostly because I was tasting more and more and finding life less luscious than I’d imagined. One exception was is Keat’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”:
…he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spicèd dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.
It still enchants. Although I’ve tried candied apple, plum, and gourd, too many jellies to count, cinnamon, and dates, what I taste in Keats is nothing I’ve tasted before. I’m still stirring strange flavors out of nothing but words. No idea why.
2 • Michael Gordon said:
March 27th, 2009 at 4:20 pm, permalink
Ha! As soon as I saw “fantasy meals” my first thought went to Turkish delight. I had no idea what it was when I was reading, but it sounded so foreign and magical.
3 • Cat Rambo said:
March 27th, 2009 at 4:37 pm, permalink
It’s really not as nice as the name would imply, in my opinion.
There was a fantasy-mystery book I read a while back where the protagonist was constantly describing the court food, which sounded AMAZING. It had a slightly middle-eastern flavor to it, if I’m remembering correctly. I wish I remembered the title.
4 • Rochita said:
March 27th, 2009 at 6:30 pm, permalink
Lovely. Fantasy recipes are right up there on my list of favorites along with weird and fantastic bestiaries, maps, histories and other oddities. For the Inn in Birds, it would have to be something traditional, magical herbs and white meat wrapped in dough.
For the magician’s party in Chemical Magic, I would go for something with more pit. Something spicy and exciting where, as Jamie Olivier puts it, the flavor just explodes inside your mouth. Yum.
I could come up with a number of amuses for the party on the plains, but I’m quite curious what others will make of that. Suffice it to say it would have to be something that would suit both elephant and owner alike.
As for the turkish delight, I remember wanting to know what it tasted like when I was a kid. I imagined it must taste like all kinds of heaven. So the real thing was a bit of a letdown. I couldn’t understand how Edmund could betray his sisters and his brother for something like that. I would have held out for something with chocolates.
5 • the little fluffy cat said:
March 27th, 2009 at 9:19 pm, permalink
It seems to me that there is less in the way of food in fantasy lately. Food in a fantasy doesn’t have to be so much fantasy food. I am thinking about the sibs in the Nesbit books, always stuck on top of a building or somewhere else when it was tea-time, or needing to magic up milk for cats, or — you get my drift.
I think food is one of the things that grounds us, in a fantasy. It is very real, or can be, and its presence makes a fantasy more real, as well. If I’m not stopping to think what the food might taste like, chances are I’m right there eating it. Living the fantasy.
No getting shepherd’s
pie on my pinny;
just tell the madman
in the great tall hat
that I can’t have more
when I haven’t had
any.
6 • Nalo Hopkinson said:
March 27th, 2009 at 9:38 pm, permalink
Not exactly a meal, but the four-eye monongahela that Spud and Cochise share before they begin their duel of magic in “Spud and Cochise,” by Oliver La Farge.
7 • Mary Kay said:
March 27th, 2009 at 10:19 pm, permalink
Mysteries have a long history of including food. I bought the Nero Wolfe cookbook years ago and that started me on a collection of cookbooks with literary connections.
One of the Hildebrandt brothers wife has a fantasy cookbook that would probably provide us with an appropriate amuse bouche. But it’s upstairs and I’m having a pain day.
I had a dinner at Trio when Grant Achatz was still the chef there and *that* was a fantasy meal! He’s one of those molecular gastronomy people. It was the table in the kitchen and had, like 30 courses — each just a bite or two. Of things like a powder you sprinkle on your tongue that tasted just like pepperoni pizza. Or cucumber jelly as a veg.
MKK
8 • David Steffen said:
March 27th, 2009 at 11:20 pm, permalink
I saw Turkish Delight at a World Market store a couple years ago. I hadn’t realized it was a real thing, so I had to buy it. It did not live up to my imagination.
9 • Kathy Hurley said:
March 27th, 2009 at 11:49 pm, permalink
I imagine the most amazing amuse-bouche would be something that enables people without synesthesia to experience what food might be like if all our senses were interconnected. Just one bite of this delicacy, and you’d not only taste the salt or the sweet. You’d also hear the most evocative music, and see colors you’d never dreamed existed. One bite of this magical feast, and it would explode upon all of your senses at once. There’s eating outside the box, for sure. If Turkish Delight or fairy food were like that, I could see why someone might come back for more, and pine away without it.
10 • Greer Woodward said:
March 28th, 2009 at 4:31 am, permalink
As a child I was intrigued by the White Witch’s Turkish Delight. My parents had an ancient Book of Knowledge set — with a recipe! I made a batch and it was terrible. It looked and tasted like red jello, only jello with no particular flavor, just sweet.
The other Narnian meal of note was the one that didn’t happen — the Giant’s feast which included fresh human, as a course, not amuse-bouche, though who knows what else was in that enormous cookbook.
Oz was also a favorite when I was young, and the meals I remember came from pails that grew on tress. I had to look them up: the lunch boxes — from trees with paper napkins as leaves — had a ham sandwich, a piece of sponge cake, a pickle, a piece of new cheese and an apple, each growing from a separate stem inside the box. And the dinner pail had a small tank of lemonade covered by a cup, three slices of turkey, two slices of cold tongue, some lobster salad, four slices of bread and butter, a small custard pie, an orange, nine large strawberries, and some nuts and raisins.
I wish I hadn’t written this post before dinner. My frozen pizza sounds pretty lame.
11 • Cat Rambo said:
March 28th, 2009 at 2:37 pm, permalink
From Jane Yolen on Facebook:
“Good fantasy is like good chocolate: dark, rich, and probably not good for you. But who cares, we devour it anyway.”
12 • Rochita said:
March 28th, 2009 at 6:51 pm, permalink
Oh yum. I just had to comment and say how much I love that. Dark and rich…yum…
13 • Randy Henderson said:
March 28th, 2009 at 7:50 pm, permalink
Might I recommend green eggs and ham? In today’s always-on-the-go world it seems an ideal food, as, apparently, it can be eaten in an amazing variety of locations and situations.
For the candy lovers, I would suggest Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans from the Harry Potter series, or any of the many delights from Willy Wonka’s amazing chocolate factory. Mmmm, blueberry pie!
I have always wanted to try lembas, the elven bread from Middle Earth, or aliantha berries from the Thomas Covenant series.
And another more recent fantasy series that comes to mind where the author featured food somewhat prominently throughout was J.V. Jones’s trilogy The Book of Words.
14 • Randy Henderson said:
March 28th, 2009 at 8:20 pm, permalink
I have dined at many of the finest inns, taverns, hostels and princely boards throughout the fantastic realms, and some of my favorite have been:
Deglazed mermaid on a small cake of Sam’s Famous taters. The nice thing is you can eat these in complete confidence that the mermaids were captured without the use of nets, so no selkies were harmed in their harvesting.
Personal Pickled Pixie Pizza – the trick is to get the pickled pixies. It gives the little pizzas a tart, yet mischievous, flavor. Salted pixies may as well be sardines.
Minotaur in raspberry sauce – when pan-seared, minotaur meat has an amazing earthy flavor that, when tasted, makes you want to strip off your clothes and run wild across sunlit plains.
Shredded Sacred Cow in ground unicornmeal tortillas.
Satyr cheese on lembas.
Almond Aslan. It’s absolutely divine.
15 • Michael Gordon said:
March 28th, 2009 at 9:37 pm, permalink
“Almond Aslan. It’s absolutely divine.”
That made my day!
16 • Fantasy Magazine » Blog For An Invisible Bunny said:
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:52 am, permalink
[...] Fiction, Friday, April 3rd, 2009permalink, jump to commentsLast week’s winner from the Blog for an Amuse-Bouche contest is Randy Herderson, whose menu items [...]