JOST A MON

In the centre of the square stood a statue of a lady September knew well by now, patted together from cream-colored crumpets. Below her benevolent gaze, a long table groaned with food: apple dumplings and apple tartlets and candied apples and apple chutney in big crystal bowls, huge roasted geese glistening brown and gold, giant potatoes and turnips split and steaming, rum cakes and blackberry pies, sheafs of toffee bundled together like wheat, squash soup in tureens shaped like stars, golden pancakes, slabs of gingerbread, piles of hazelnuts and walnuts, butter domes carved like pine cones, a stupendous broiled boar with a pear in his mouth and parsley in his hoofs. And pumpkin, pumpkin everywhere: orange pumpkin soup bubbling in hollowed-out gourds, pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, frothy pumpkin milk, pumpkin trifles piled up with whipped cream, pumpkin-stuffed quail, and pumpkin pies of every size cooling on the clean tablecloth. 

No one ate at the table or guarded the feast.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own, by Catherynne M. Valente.

On the table the appetisers were waiting: eggs stuffed with mushrooms and mayonnaise, red and black caviar canapés, beetroot and prune salad, the Olivier salad mandatory at every Soviet feast, home-made marinated roast peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers, herrings and dill pickle, thinly sliced yellow cheese and various kinds of sausage, with larger or smaller lumps of fat. On the windowsill stood bottles of wine and champagne, vodka and brandy, Borzhomi mineral water and orangeade.

Don walked back into the living room and announced that dinner was ready. A full course Chinese dinner, family style, prepared by Don's father. Cornish hen, Chinese broccoli, beef stir fry, sautéed shrimp, vegetable medley, pan-roasted sea bass. And of course, steamed white rice. A meal is never a meal without steamed white rice.

- Angela S. Choi, Hello Kitty Must Die.

I stood marvelling for a long time in front of a blackboard on which all the delicious fare one could order was listed in chalk. I was bewildered by the abundance of food and drink bearing names with literary associations. Printer's Ink Wine and Blood and Thunder Coffee; Sweetpaper Sandwiches (they could not only be eaten but also written on); Muse's Kiss Cocoa and Liquid Inspiration (the latter a brutally high-proof spirit); Horror Candies (to be eaten while reading thrillers, many of them with surprise fillings of vinegar, cod liver oil or desiccated ants); and seventeen types of pastries named after various classical poets, for example, Bethelzia B. Binngrow Buns and Ardelf Nennytos Cookies. Those in need of more substantial fare could gorge themselves on dishes named after popular novelists or their heroes, for instance Prince Sangfroid Pie or Risotto a la Avisko Dosti, but there was also a light Syllabic Salad incorporating alphabet spaghetti and trombophone mushrooms. It was enough to make your head spin.

Having pulled myself together at last, I ordered a big jug of Midnight Oil Espresso and a pastry known as a Poet's Ringlet.

- Walter Moers, The City Of Dreaming Books, translated from the German by John Brownjohn.

From the Economist's Prospero blog:

Trii padéj de risòtt giald
quatter mastèj de lasàgn cald
ses cavagn fra uga e pêr
e quatter navasc de caffè ner.

Compared to this, almost every word is spelt and pronounced differently in Italian:

Tre padelle di risotto g[i]allo
quattro mastelli di lasagna calda
sei cesti di uva e pere
e quattro fiaschi di caffè nero.

In English, the feast included

Three pans of saffron risotto
four trays of hot lasagna
six baskets of grapes and pears
and four large jugs of black coffee.

Dominique Sylvain, The Dark Angel.

‘Turtle, Fish, Venison of the best quality’ washed down with ‘Champagne, Hock, Burgundy, and Claret’ as well as ‘Vin de France and Hermitage drunk in copious libations.’

'There isn't any vodka,' the waiter said gruffly. 'Is that so hard to understand, comrade?' 

'Bring me a bottle of cognac, then. Cognac will do nicely.' 

When he'd got his plate of vobla and his cognac he took a long swig, grinned, and bit off some of the dry fish. 

'Now we can order some food,' he said. 

The waiter looked at him wearily. 

'A bowl of selyanka to start with. For the main dish fifteen blinis, shashlik, some boiled tea sausage, salad, and a bottle of cognac.' 

Instead of shashlik they got some dry chicken legs and instead of salad some potatoes fried in margarine.

After that, he feeds me. For years, I didn't know there was anything for breakfast but sugar pops. These days, I get eggs turned over easy in deep butter, slabs of juicy ham, fried mush, porkchops, buckwheat cakes, country sausage, hashbrown potatoes. What I got yesterday was cornbread fresh out of the oven with melted butter and molasses. 

"You'd think you wanted to marry me," I said, and Catch said, "You'd be right."

For three whole days the bride's home became an ants' nest of relatives and neighbours coming and going with baskets full of fresh ingredients and borrowed trays on which the finished cakes were laid. The Listru sisters worked almost without a break, alternating tasks to bring miraculously to life an army of capigliette decorated with sugar lace, kilos of tiliccas swollen with saba, baskets full of aranzadas with their spicy aroma, tin boxes full of crisp little sugar dolls, and hundreds of round almond gueffus, individually wrapped like sweets in white tissue paper with its edges fringed like the battlements of the Guelph towers. There was not a room in the house with space in it for anything more, and Giulia and Regina had to move basketfuls of finished delicacies off their beds before they could fall asleep in the gentle fragrance of orange-flower water.

He brought us a litre of white wine. Then we each ordered a salad with octopus and fried whitebait as a starter, followed by spaghetti with mussels in tomato sauce, and for a main course marinated anchovies with broccoli rabe.  

Riccardo poured the wine. 

'To us,' he said, raising the glass. 

'And sod the others,' I said.

By the time Nils Holgersson turned forty-eight, he already lived very far north, in Jokkmokk, the capital of Swedish Lapland, which could only with the utmost pretension be called a capital city, since it was no more than a small, remote village upon which, as Tacitus wrote, the sun never shone in the winter and never set in the summer. He worked as a custodian at the only local high school, which had three classes for each grade and a dormitory so that students who lived as far as 100, 200 or even 1000 kilometers away would have a place to stay. The school menu was standard for Sweden: mashed potatoes with butter and strips of bacon on Mondays, fried fish and potatoes on Tuesdays, pea soup and pancakes with jelly on Wednesdays, tuna salad on a roll on Thursdays, and noodles with ground beef on Fridays, which was the children’s favorite. He knew all this from his wife, Maria, who was the cook in the school where he worked as the custodian.

From The Princess, by Alit Karp, translated from the Hebrew by Ilana Kurshan, The Guardian, February 2, 2016.

We took our leave of Sóstófürdő with a modest lunch. In the square where the pub was, a wilds how advertising Sprite. Gangsta rap over loudspeakers while Hungarian kids on skateboards slalomed in and out of giant green bottles imagining themselves black brothers. At a table nearby, the father of the family called to the waiter in Polish,"Kotlet scshabowy z fryktami! Veal cutlet with fries! Veal cutlet, dummy!" No matter how much the man raised his voice, however, the Hungarian dummy didn't understand a word.

My primary objective was to go and eat cod in the Viana do Castelo. No, not à la Margarida da Praça, nor à la Gomes de Sá. In the end what I had, let's see if I remember, was "sliced cod with maize bread on a bed of baked potatoes and salted turnip tops."

They were Bradford anarchists who survived on food recovered from supermarket skips... They would bring back their catch and improvise exquisite meals: trout with poached eggs and roasted beetroot; pork with bruised peaches and goat's cheese; serrano ham and celeriac hash; all washed down with a chablis lifted from the Tesco Metro.

"I want you to try this piece of Roquefort, Madame Turki," said Marie-Claire's mother as she leaned over a big plate full of various cheeses. "All these cheeses are from our country." My mother devoured a piece of cheese and presented her plate immediately to Marie-Claire's mother, who was happy to see my mother's unexpected appetite for her cheeses. 

"And now, how about a small piece of Pont-l'Évêque?" 

"Delicious," said my mother as she passed her plate back again. 

"Have a piece of this Chaussée Aux Moix; and this piece of Camembert; and this piece of Brie de Meaux; and this and this .... "