Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Top ten descriptions of food in fiction

Katherine Rundell grew up in Africa and Europe and was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes that reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: It turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless. Rooftoppers, her latest book, was inspired by summers spent working in Paris, where at night, she trespassed on rooftops.

At the Guardian, she named her top ten descriptions of food in fiction. One title on the list:
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Amy's pickled limes are both enticing and puzzling. "If one girl likes another, she gives her a lime," she say. "If she's mad with her, she eats one before her face, and doesn't offer even a suck." A few years ago I found a simple 19th-century recipe for pickled limes: scrubbed limes in a jar of water and seasalt. Possibly I didn't leave them to marinade for long enough. They were not delicious.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Little Women also appears among Gwyneth Rees's ten top books about siblings, Maya Angelou's 6 favorite books, Tim Lewis's ten best Christmas lunches in literature, and on the Observer's list of the ten best fictional mothers, Eleanor Birne's top ten list of books on motherhood, Erin Blakemore's list of five gutsy heroines to channel on an off day, Kate Saunders' critic's chart of mothers and daughters in literature, and Zoë Heller's list of five memorable portraits of sisters. It is a book that disappointed Geraldine Brooks on re-reading.

--Marshal Zeringue