Literary Food Journey

Berenstain Bears: No Girls Allowed by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain

How This All Started:

I told Jenn about “How I Write” by George Orwell, which I was reading as I tried to write my personal statement for grad school.

The next day, Jenn told me about George Orwell’s Christmas pudding recipe.

This got me thinking – what a great idea for a blog! Food from literature! This was particularly exciting to me because years ago, I started writing down (and eventually typing up) the descriptions of food in books I read. Some were passing references, and some were full-on literary masterpieces. A few descriptions from my collection:

“Vegetarian spring rolls, mushroom risotto with crème caramel to finish.” – Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code

“The first course was a native asparagus with a white truffle sauce, followed by a consommé with delicate morsels. After that came a saddle of lamb with an assortment of fresh vegetables. A crisp endive salad was next. For dessert there were individually molded ice-cream servings and a silver epergne, piled high with petits fours. Coffee and brandy came last. Cigars were offered to the men, and the women were given Joy perfume in a Baccarat crystal flacon.” – Sidney Sheldon, If Tomorrow Comes

“The main course was fish, but fish that had escaped the usual Caribbean death of suffocation by batter. It had been fried–lightly fried, in a coating of pumpernickel bread crumbs, garnished with slivers of fresh lime and served with pommes allumettes that snapped in the mouth in the most delicious and satisfying way.” – Peter Mayle, Chasing Cezanne

“The hardest thing to learn was how to make Miss Marva’s chicken and dumplings, which she didn’t have a recipe for. They were so good, so rich and gummy and melting, they could almost make you cry. She started with a little hill of flour on the counter, added salt and eggs and butter, and mixed it all up with her fingers. She rolled it out into a flat sheet, cut the dough into long strips, and added it to a boiling pot of homemade chicken stock. There is hardly an illness that chicken and dumplings can’t cure. Miss Marva made a pot of them for me right after Hardy Gates had left Welcome, and they almost provided a temporary’ relief from heartache.” – Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy

But it all started when I was seven, and I read The Berenstain Bears No Girls Allowed. First of all, I loved this book from start to finish. The boys had a clubhouse with a moat and a DRAWBRIDGE. Then Sister Bear got her TREEHOUSE. And then Papa Bear made “barbecued honeycomb and salmon,” and I salivated over the page with salmon and honeycomb perched on a stick. It was the first description of food I remembered.

Berenstain Bears: No Girls Allowed by Stan Berenstain and Jan Berenstain

Google search tells me that it is possible to eat honeycomb, and apparently, many people recommend it as tasting even better than the processed honey. Some people eat the wax; others eat the honey and then spit out the wax. I’m going to assume one can barbecue honeycomb since generally speaking one can grill just about anything. (Whether it’s done well and tastes good after is a different issue.)

Since I have no idea where I can find edible honeycomb, I will instead work on an “inspired by” version. Which will happen as soon as I finish applications to grad school!