Yummy story & poetry suggestions please!

[Luxdarling]

Hello everyone! I was wondering if anyone can help me with something...

I'm looking for any literature, short stories and poems in particular, that have food featured in them. The types of classic, beautifully written stories and poems that use wonderfully descriptive language to paint a mouth watering picture for the reader of the way the food is prepared, the way it smells and tastes, and how the people eating it are feeling etc. The types of descriptions that make your tummy growl, and make you crave that exact food there and then! Stories that really capture you and describe the food in such a way that you are transported there and you can almost taste it!

If anyone has any recommendations, I'd like the story title, and the author(s) please so I can track them down. I'd like to find out as many as I can, and get a good cross section.

Thank you for your help. I look forward to reading the suggestions!!

[librarius_qui]

Well, I don't know ... I'm in the beginning of the Satyricon, by Publius Petronius ... Maybe if you take a look at it, I think I heard that there's banquets, in the middle of it ...

But honestly I don't know, I haven't gotten there yet.

[Bitterfly]

Gerald Durrell is particularly gifted when it comes to evocations of food - plus he's very funny. I think maybe one of the stories in The Picnic and suchlike Pandemonium might whet your appetite!

[JBI]

The Eve of St. Agnes by Keats has a food verse:

XXIX.

Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon
Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set
A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon 255
A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet:—
O for some drowsy Morphean amulet!
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion,
The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarionet,
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:— 260
The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.

XXX.

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; 265
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon. 270

[mayneverhave]

There are exceptionally vivid descriptions of food and eating (whether delicious or disgusting) throughout James Joyce's Ulysses - especially the [Lestrygonians] and [Calypso] episodes.

[JBI]

Heh, I just want to point out - Keat's Porphyro sets a vegetarian menu, which is somewhat interesting.

[andave_ya]

haha, you might like the Savannah Reid books by G.A. McKevett. Murder mystery cozies, but a lot of fun and a lot of food! I consider them my frivolous reading .

Also, the Quilliam books by Caroline Bishop. Murder mystery cozies too, but lighter and more country-setting than the McKevett books.

[Scheherazade]

Some poems with bananas in them:

I know a monkey who likes bananas
She eats a lot her name is Anna
She ate too much and got a tummy ache,
How much medicine tablets did it take?



The Uncertainty of the Poet

I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.

I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.

I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond.

A fond poet of 'I am, I am'-
Very bananas.

Fond of 'Am I bananas?
Am I?' - a very poet.

Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?

Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a 'very.'

I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?

Wendy Cope