From Page To Table

Military Suicides Come Home Quote For The Day

From Page To Table

Popova recently excerpted Dinah Fried’s new book Fictitious Dishes, which features still life photography of 50 culinary scenes found in literature. How Fried thinks of the connection between reading and eating:

Reading and eating are natural companions, and they’ve got a lot in common. Reading is consumption. Eating is consumption. Both are comforting, nourishing, restorative, relaxing, and mostly enjoyable. They can energize you or put you to sleep. Heavy books and heavy meals both require a period of intense digestion. Just as reading great novels can transport you to another time and place, meals — good and bad ones alike — can conjure scenes very far away from your kitchen table. Some of my favorite meals convey stories of origin and tradition; as a voracious reader, I devour my favorite books.

Reviewing the book, Laura Miller explains the project’s charm:

The foods a character consumes often convey something about his or her identity and station in life, whether it’s Oliver Twist’s gruel or the dainty lemon cakes loved by the unworldly Lady Sansa Stark in “A Game of Thrones.” But I suspect that for me literary meals speak most eloquently to that old, buried childish desire that the story I’m reading be “really real,” that the people and events in it not be just the arbitrary products of some writer’s imagination. If the characters demand to be fed before going on to do whatever it is the author has lined up for them, then they seem to have some sort of independent existence.

In an interview, Fried discussed the challenges of one shoot in particular – the apple pie and ice cream from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road:

I had to create it quite quickly because the ice cream would melt. I think I probably went through a few plates. But I wanted this photograph, naturally, to feel very American, as is the novel and apple pie and ice cream itself. So I went for a red diner place mat and wanted it to feel really classic and simple.

Once I had those elements in place, then it was about baking this pie, which was my first apple pie that I’d ever baked. I’ve never really been a baker. I’m more of an improvisational cook, and usually that doesn’t work so well for baking. So I baked the pie, and I set it all up. Like I said, the ice cream was quick to melt. I think it’s just the right amount melty in the photo. The pie was delicious.

Helen Rosner notes Fried’s caption for the photo featured below, drawn from John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces:

In A Confederacy of Dunces, a hot dog sets the protagonist’s heart aflutter. “It’s sort of a disgusting scene,” says Fried of the photograph’s inspiration. “The protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a grotesque character, a slovenly guy who lives with his mother. In this particular scene, he follows his nose to the hot dog, inspired by the scent of it on the air. The book takes place in the late 1970′s, so the prop styling was a challenge: I wanted a Coke can that didn’t have the pop-tab that we have now, which could have been quite a search. But my husband has a lot of stuff that used to be in his grandfather’s basement, and we happened to find in a cabinet a Coke can that was from this precise era. I kept stumbling upon things that felt just right. I’d find myself collecting different types of paper napkins wherever I went, and among them were the perfect napkins. I want the props to feel time- and place-appropriate. My favorite thing about this whole project was fixating, being obsessed with finding something, and then discovering exactly what I was looking for.”