For a description of a luscious Thanksgiving feast, turn to the luncheon that Eve prepares for Archangel Raphael in Book V of “Paradise Lost.”
The blog “Hairpin” came up with the a series of book titles which, altered slightly, becomes delicious food puns.
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On Sunday my Jane Austen First Year Seminar students came to my housefor a meal that we took out of the “Jane Austen Cookbook.” The meal took two days to prepare and four people to serve.
Inspired by “foodie novels” such as “Like Water for Chocolate” and “Fried Green Tomatoes,” student Julia Rocha discovered that beans and rice brought back a sense of home and her Brazilian heritage.
There are many similarities between the act of reading and the act of eating. In literature about food, words are dishes to be savored
A playful passage in a recent New Yorker story by Julian Barnes (“Homage to Hemingway”) has me imagining author food preferences.
“Babette’s Feast” is about a sumptuous banquet that descends upon a querulous community like an act of grace, thereby allowing the spirit to flow again. In other words, it’s a good film to watch these days when our own communities are troubled and having difficulty coming together.
Homer gains Fielding’s admiration by his ability to move seamlessly between epic grandeur and “the shameless dog of the belly.” Perhaps it is Homer’s dexterity that gives Fielding the idea for his own contribution to “Great Eating Scenes in Literature.”
My son’s marriage proposal to his Trinidadian girlfriend has become bound up in my mind with a Mary Oliver poem about blackberries.
In my experience, no two people respond to William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say” in the same way. More than most short poems, it seems to function as a Rorschach test, with reactions telling us more about the reader than the poem itself.
Writing about her mother’s blueberry muffins in her “Books that Cook” class, student Melanie Kokolios came to understand in a new way her own passage into adulthood.
Sink your teeth into Lee Young-Li’s poem about peaches and let it carry you into a sensation that is so deep that it banishes death.
Poetry, with its eye on what really matters, can help us taste food again. Mary Oliver’s “Plum Trees” reminds us to eat with full awareness.
Jennifer Cognard-Black notes that food, being perishable, presents museums and historians with a challenge. To study what and how people ate, we must look for related artifacts, including written recipes.
The focus on secrets in novels like Secrets of the Tsil Cafe and Fried Green Tomatoes led St. Mary’s student Nona Landis to look at the way that “secrets played out in my own family, especially with regard to recipes and dishes.” The following article is about her father’s “Seafood Bisque” and how it is “intimately but mysteriously connected to my family and to me.”
My wife was sitting at a stoplight a few years ago when she heard a National Public Radio story about a fifth taste, the other four being sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Often we know it by the name given it by the Japanese, who first identified it early in the 20th century, although [...]
Thanksgiving may be my favorite holiday because it involves holding a feast in the face of on-coming winter. I read this as a sign that we believe the harvest bounty can carry us through the hard times. To accentuate the symbolism, I like my Thanksgivings to be cold and even a bit wet. Sir Gawain [...]
Jennifer Cognard-Black As I am out of town this week, I am asking colleagues in the St. Mary’s English Department to contribute articles to my website. Jennifer Cognard-Black teaches a course called “Books that Cook” that is so popular that it has a two-year waiting list of students who want to get into it. You [...]
