Food In Books

Two of my favorite books are Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They’re full of hunger and weather and wonderful food. There seems to be something about being honestly physically hungry that goes with being young. And so nothing gives the feeling of young vital life in a book like food and a lot of it.

In Farmer Boy there’s that scene where mother makes pancakes, and on each pancake she puts butter and brown sugar and then stacks on another and another, and the melted butter and brown sugar drip down the sides. There are great slabs of ham and sausage. There are homemade donuts—simple twists, not those new-fangled circle-shaped kind. And then they have pie.

And in A Moveable Feast there’s that day when he stupidly tries to save money by not eating, and then he walks through the cold Paris streets and ends up having cold beer and potatoes and probably something else, but the part I remember is how he uses the potatoes to soak up the olive oil. And on another day he has oysters, the cheap Portuguese kind, with cold white wine. And what about the eau de vie at Gertrude Stein’s—liqueurs that are the essence or raspberry or pear.

The books I read as a kid are lodged in my mind in a way that feels biological. The trance-like reading of childhood is different from anything else. I read Farmer Boy many times. Our mom read it to us many times. I re-read it recently, and it was still good. I first read A Moveable Feast in college. It was assigned for a class, and I read it right through and then right through all over again. I was nineteen or twenty. Already it was rare for me to fall into a book the way I used to as a kid, and I fell into this one. It was wonderful.

I keep trying to say something about being young and how touching it is to look back on some parts of it. (I’d rather hang myself than actually be young again.) For me reading and eating are two things I did better then than I do now. I did both with true hunger, and I miss that.

I am writing this from memory. I haven’t looked up the food scenes in those books, and I probably got a few things wrong. But the food is what I remember best. In A Moveable Feast there’s such a strong feeling of memory and sadness—nostalgia, I guess. There’s that scene where Hemingway’s older artist friend asks him if food still tastes good. Hemingway says that it does, and you know that for his friend it doesn’t. The food all through the book seems to be remembered with such vividness and also sadness, as if he’s remembering when food still tasted good. It sort of breaks your heart, but in a good way.