Literary Feasts

The theme for this month's Epitourists started with spring and then morphed to literary greens and settled in nicely to literature.

I was trying to decide on the dish I would bring to Wolfe Island when I realized Rob and I also had a commitment to visit friends in Ottawa/Quebec. Darn! I know this will be a great feast and it would be wonderful to see the Island greening in the spring.

Still I have been participating in spirit and trying to choose my dish.

Green eggs and ham? A tea party, a la Alice? Dare to eat a peach?

One of the first literary foods that sprang to mind was from David Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, when he wrote about slicing the circles of an orange and placing them on his younger brother's plate, to brighten up a canned food dinner and add some vitamin C. Funny how that image has stayed with me for so many years!

In my research I came across a book called Pleasures of the Table, A literary anthology compiled by Christina Hardyment, and spent a few hours at virtual feasts: Roman bacchanals, domestic dinners, picnics with Peter Rabbit. A "spare feast! a radish and an egg" savoured by the fire in The Task by poet William Cowper.

Memorable: MFK Fisher writing in Serve It Forth about the secret pleasures of crisped tangerine sections:

Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.
...It was then that I discovered little dried sections of tangerine. My pleasure in them is subtle and voluptuous and quite inexplicable. I can only write how they are prepared.
In the morning, in the soft sultry chamber, sit in the window peeling tangerines, three or four. Peel them gently; do not bruise them, as you watch soldiers pour past and past the corner and over the canal towards the watched Rhine. Separate each plump little pregnant crescent. If you find the Kiss, the secret section, save it for Al.
Listen to the chambermaid thumping up the pillows, and murmur encouragement to her thick Alsatian tales of l'intérieure. That is Paris, the interior, Paris or anywhere west of Strasbourg or maybe the Vosges. While she mutters of seduction and French bicyclists who ride more than wheels, tear delicately from the soft pile of sections each velvet string. You know those white pulpy strings that hold tangerines into their skins? Tear them off. Be careful.
Take yesterday's paper (when we were in Strasbourg L'Ami du Peuple was best, because when it got hot the ink stayed on it) and spread it on top of the radiator. The maid has gone, of course - it might be hard to ignore her belligerent Alsatian glare of astonishment.
After you have put the pieces of tangerine on the paper on the hot radiator, it is best to forget about them. Al comes home, you go to a long noon dinner in the brown dining-room, afterwards maybe you have a little nip of quetsch from the bottle on the armoire. Finally he goes. You are sorry, but -
On the radiator the sections of tangerines have grown even plumper, hot and full. You carry them to the window, pull it open, and leave them for a few minutes on the packed snow of the sill. They are ready.
All afternoon you can sit, then, looking down on the corner. Afternoon papers are delivered to the kiosk. Children come home from school just as three lovely whores mince smartly into the pension's chic tearoom. A basketful of Dutch tulips stations itself by the tram-stop, ready to tempt tired clerks at six o'clock. Finally the soldiers stump back from the Rhine. It is dark.
The sections of the tangerine are gone, and I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp just after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.
There must be someone, though, who understands what I mean. Probably everyone does, because of his own secret eatings.

And this recipe from the 1770s, To Raise a Salad in Two Hours, from The Art of Cookery made plain and easy:

Take fresh horse dung hot, lay it in a tub near the fire, then sprinkle some mustard seeds thick on it, lay a thin layer of horse dung over it, cover it close and keep it by the fire, and it will rise high enough to cut in two hours.