Curiosities of Literature: A Feast for Book Lovers

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Literary Baked Meats

‘Erst fressen’ - ‘Grub first’

Bertolt Brecht

OMELETTE LITTÉRAIRE

Many writers have their idiosyncratic gastronomic preferences. Jack London, for example, was devoted to duck, plucked but very lightly seared. ‘Raw’, others thought. His nickname among those close to him was ‘Wolf ’. One would probably not have wanted to be too close to Jack at lunch time, while wolfing his canard Londres.

Only one novelist, as far as I know, has given his name to a dish which has taken its place in classic cuisine. Arnold Bennett, the bestselling middlebrow novelist, about whom highbrow Virginia Woolf was frequently rude, dined - when not on his yacht or in the south of France - at the Savoy, off the Strand, in London. He could afford to; Bennett sold a lot more books than Mrs Woolf. Almost as much as fellow south-of-Francers E. Phillips Oppenheim and Somerset Maugham.

Bennett was a big man at the Savoy. The waiters were circulated with his photograph, so that they would recognise him, and treat him as the honoured guest he was. And, as the highest mark of that honour, the Savoy master chef, Jean Baptist Virlogeux, created a dish in the master novelist’s name: omelette Arnold Bennett. It’s a rather gooey thing in which a baveuse (‘runny’) mess of eggs is artfully mixed with haddock, cheese and herbs.

The dish is still proudly on the Savoy menu, along with such concoctions as M. Stroganoff ’s beef and M. Benedict’s eggs. It is also on the menu of other top hotels and restaurants in London’s West End, such as the Wolseley in Piccadilly, where the waiters jestingly call it Omelette Gordon Bennett, or Omelette Alan Bennett.

Alas, although his dish remains in print among metropolitan bills of fare, Bennett’s novels have fallen out of print - even his return compliment to the Savoy, Imperial Palace (in which Virlogeux figures as ‘Rocco’). For those curious to taste omelette Arnold Bennett, and short of the fifty quid or so they’ll charge you in its home base, the recipe for the dish can be found on the food recipes section of the BBC cookery website. As for le roman Arnold Bennett? Try eBay, or the nearest Oxfam bookstore.

Curious Literary Grub

Those seeking colourful taste thrills in literature might start with J.K. Huysmans’ À rebours (roughly translates into rough Anglo-Saxon as ‘arse about face’) in which the dandy hero, Des Esseintes, creates a dinner party comprising all black food, served by negresses, on black china. A change of tone could be introduced with the ‘white soup’ which is served up by Charles Bingley’s servant in Pride and Prejudice. The whole thing to be finished with the chocolate-coated lemon-flavoured latrine disinfectant tablet, Patrick Bateman playfully serves up, as a postprandial sweetmeat, to his girlfriend, in American Psycho (‘it tastes minty’, she merely observes, innocently). The heroic literary eater must, however, go thyestean. Thyestes is the luckless prince in ancient Greek mythology, unwittingly served up a pudding made of his own sons for supper. It has become a favourite theme in literature. Seneca wrote a revenge play on the subject, much translated and imitated in the English Renaissance. Shakespeare introduces a thyestean feast into Titus Andronicus. So gothic are the horrors in that play, that it ranks as among the least blood-curdling the audience is made to endure. Swift, mockingly, argues in his ‘Modest Proposal’ that Ireland’s perennial famine can be solved by Hibernian parents consuming their too-many offspring, ‘stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassée or a ragout.’ In modern literature, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief discovers, the night after a drunken revel with savages, that he has unknowingly feasted on his girlfriend, in what he took to be a peculiarly savoury stew. He handles the news without so much as a regretful belch. The ne plus ultra is in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, where the monster of the title induces a drugged victim to consume slices of his own brain, lightly sautéd in a wok: ‘Hey, that tastes pretty good,’ says the auto-thyestean.

DR JOHNSON’S GULOSITY

‘Gulosity’ is not a word in current use even at the high tables of Oxford, where the best words are usually to be found. It has a fine Johnsonian ring to it - appropriately so, since Dr Johnson invented it. Gulosity is defined in the Great Dictionary as a noun indicating ‘greediness, voracity, gluttony’.

These words, alas, attach adhesively to the word-maker himself. He had a lust for food which, if contemporary accounts are to be credited, offended those of delicate disposition who happened to be in the Great Cham’s fallout area. This is Macaulay’s description (writing, it should be said, from historical accounts, fifty years after Johnson’s death):

The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at the wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans.

Boswell, on his first meeting with Johnson, was immediately impressed with the great man’s appetite. ‘Some people,’ Johnson informed the (then) slim young Scot, ‘have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.’

He was, Boswell reverently thought, in the presence of ‘Jean Bull philosophe’. At least, when talking. When actually guzzling, our philosophical John Bull was something else:

When at table ... his looks seemed riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.

Plates, one must assume, were lucky to survive Samuel Johnson’s table-time assault unbroken.

Otherwise an uncritical admirer, Boswell confessed to an un-Boswellian disgust at his idol’s table manners. And total amazement. Was not Johnson a ‘philosopher’ and a ‘moralist’? Weren’t these roles normally associated with moderation? Moreover, Boswell had heard the great man, ‘upon other occasions, talk with great contempt of people who were anxious to gratify their palates; and the 206th number of his Rambler is a masterly essay against gulosity.’

If one turns to that piece (published in the Rambler on 7 March 1752) one is minded to concur with the faithful biographer. The essay is a meditation on one Gulosulus - a character invented for the occasion by Johnson. For thirty years, this fictional parasitic gourmand has managed to eat magnificently at the expense of others:

Gulosulus entered the world without any eminent degree of merit; but was careful to frequent houses where persons of rank resorted. By being often seen, he became in time known; and ... he was sometimes taken away to dinner ... when he had been met at a few tables, he with less difficulty found the way to more, till at last he was regularly expected to appear wherever preparations are made for a feast ... When he was thus by accident initiated in luxury, he felt in himself no inclination to retire from a life of so much pleasure.

By artful sycophancy, Gulosulus feeds on twenty dishes a day, every day, and dies rich. And very plump.

‘Gulosity’ is a fine neologism, and the character is an amusing moral invention. But it is clear that when the great lexicographer looked into his mirror he did not see Dr Samuel Gulosulus. He was the least parasitic of food gobblers. He filled the Johnson belly with his own tucker: or, if entertained, he entertained back with the currency of the best table talk in history. But he did like his grub.

KNORR AND A NICE JELLY

The first three-course fast-food meal in literature is introduced (with dripping contempt) by E.M. Forster, in chapter 6 of Howards End (1910). The square meal (all too literally) is served up by Len Bast, to his lady-love, Jacky:

They began with a soup square, which Leonard had just dissolved in some hot water. It was followed by the tongue - a freckled cylinder of meat, with a little jelly at the top, and a great deal of yellow fat at the bottom - ending with another square dissolved in water (jelly: pineapple), which Leonard had prepared earlier in the day. Jacky ate contentedly enough . . . And Leonard managed to convince his stomach that it was having a nourishing meal.

The novelist, one gathers, would not be so persuaded.

The soup is, one may assume, a ‘Knorr Cube’. The brainchild of the German culinary inventor Carl Heinrich Knorr in the early nineteenth century it was originally, and rather unhappily, called ‘soup sausage’. ‘Bouillon cube’, a term which came into use at the time Forster was writing, rolls more easily off the tongue and down the throat. Conceivably, of course, Leonard may prefer the rival brand Maggi (introduced, with great fanfare, in 1908). Oxo cubes did not come onto the market until 1910, the year of Howards End ’s publication and are unlikely.

The canned tongue, or ‘luncheon meat’, with its layer of jelly at the top and yellow fat at the bottom is, in all likelihood, from a Fray Bentos tin, the Argentinian firm which, in the midnineteenth century discovered so profitable a sideline for the cattle they were slaughtering for their hides that by the time Leonard and Jacky sat down to supper, processed meat was their principal product.

The jelly square, with which the feast is crowned, is, indubitably, one of Mr Rowntree’s cubed ‘table jellies’, launched with huge success into the marketplace in 1901. All the products mentioned above are still to be found on your local supermarket shelves.

As, one is happy to say, is Howards End on the local bookshop shelves. Time is the ultimate test of quality, whether literary or gastronomic.

COME AND GET IT

Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) is a pioneer text of contemporary science fiction - although not, alas, as well known as it should be nowadays. Bulwer-Lytton’s narrative pivots on the ‘Hollow Earth’ idea. Grotesque as it now seems, this was something seriously pondered by geologists of the time, particularly, in America.

The leading proponent of hollow-earthism, John Cleves Symmes, Jr, was keen that the US government should actually sponsor a voyage of exploration to the depths, via the ‘North Pole hole’ and plant the Stars and Stripes. A small (underground) step for man (or, more likely, underwater - since there is no ground under the Arctic permafrost).

Hollow Earth theory postulated the possibility of a habitable world, and perhaps even an alien civilisation, beneath our unconscious feet. Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a rather more famous exploitation of the idea, as is Edgar Rice Burroughs’s long-running Pellucidar series. Modern geology (see, e.g., the 2003 movie The Core) confirms that any subterranean civilisation would need to be 99 per cent asbestos to survive the magma and 100 per cent stupid not to come up for air every now and then.

In Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, a bumptious American engineer drops through a crack in the earth’s crust to find himself in an alien civilisation - aeons more advanced than even Queen Victoria’s. This subterra is ruled by giant, quasi reptilian flying females (poor Bulwer-Lytton had a very unhappy married life). These über-fems are possessed of a powerful quasi electrical ‘fluid’ called ‘Vril’.

Bulwer-Lytton’s novel was a hit in its day. Never averse to jumping on any passing bandwagon, commerce saw an opportunity and seized it. The French war against Prussia was currently raging across the channel and the French commander-in-chief, Napoleon III, wanted a nutritious convenience food for his troops in the front line.

What Napoleon had in mind was a precursor of MREs (‘military meals ready to eat’) as they are called today and consumed by frontline soldiers in the sands of Iraq and the hills of Afghanistan. What was it Napoleon’s great namesake had said? ‘An army marches on its belly.’

A Scottish manufacturer, John Lawson Johnston, made a successful bid, and duly came up with what was initially called ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef ’. A million servings were commissioned. This nutritious, delicious, ‘beef tea’ would, it was fondly expected, do for the French soldier what spinach does for Popeye. Alas, it didn’t: France lost the war to the solid-sausageeating Hun.

It would be nice to speculate that the dripping, and ineradicable, contempt which the French have to this day for British cooking originates in those million doses of ‘Fluid Beef’ which John Bull (and ‘les rosbifs’) inflicted on the luckless poilu.

Johnston’s was a nifty invention, but a terrible brand name. ‘Fluid Beef ’ did not do anything for the palate. The company duly came up with ‘Bovril’ - from the Latin ‘bos’ (‘of the ox’) and ‘vril’ (from the novel). Bulwer-Lytton got no acknowledgement on the distinctive jars and to this day the Unilever website does not mention the novelist by name in their official history of the product, noting only that:

The name Bovril comes from an unusual word Johnston found in a book. ‘Vril’ was ‘an electric fluid’ and he combined it with the first two letters of the Latin word for beef ‘Bos’.

Fortunately for Mr Johnston, the novelist, who was very litigious, died in 1873 and did not live to see the vulgar, un-Bulwer-Lyttonian Bovril jar arrive on the shelves of the British shops. He would have certainly been on the phone to whomever the top lawyer was in London at that time. Authors too march on their belly, as none knew better than the author of The Coming Race. ‘A book, forsooth!’ ‘My book, sir!’

POST SCRIPT: Although his novels have fallen out of print, Bulwer-Lytton still lives in popular culture as the creator of Knebworth, the Gothic pile in Hertfordshire, which is familiar as the location of numerous horror films. A lady who has slept at Knebworth assures me that ‘he walks’, and that the clammy Bulwer-Lytton hands still grope, furtively, from the other side.

BOVRIL: AND WORLD DOMINATION

It was not just the beloved little British pot (and the failed French grub) which Bulwer-Lytton’s novel inspired. In Germany in the early 1930s, the ‘Vril Society of the Luminous Lodge’, was directly inspired by The Coming Race. The Lodge was, reportedly, a pioneer in establishing the mystical Aryan ‘swastika’ as the symbol of Nazism.

Allegedly (things get very paranoid, and not a little improbable, at this point), Hitler himself was a founder member of the Lodge. In power, in addition to sending teams of scientists to Tibet to determine the origins of the Aryan race (whose time had clearly ‘come’), the Führer dispatched pot-holers (that word ‘pot’ again) into caves and mines - and even across the snowy wastes of the Antarctic - in search of the portal to Bulwer-Lytton’s underground civilisation.

On the lunatic fringes of the web there is much speculation about whether those explorations might not have been successful, and that Vril (and the Lodge) are behind the UFOs which have speckled the post-war sky. The race, it would seem, may yet still be to come.

Bovril in Space

The first three-course meal eaten in space (we’re talking science fiction here, of course; and French cuisine, of course) is in Jules Vernes’ Autour de la lune (All Around the Moon). It is eerily bovrillian:

In escaping from the Earth, our travellers felt that they had by no means escaped from the laws of humanity, and their stomachs now called on them lustily to fill the aching void. Ardan, as a Frenchman, claimed the post of chief cook, an important office, but his companions yielded it with alacrity. The gas furnished the requisite heat, and the provision chest supplied the materials for their first repast. They commenced with three plates of excellent soup, extracted from Liebig’s precious tablets, prepared from the best beef that ever roamed over the Pampas.

To this succeeded several tenderloin beefsteaks, which, though reduced to a small bulk by the hydraulic engines of the American Desiccating Company, were pronounced to be fully as tender, juicy and savoury as if they had just left the gridiron of a London Club House. Ardan even swore that they were ‘bleeding,’ and the others were too busy to contradict him.

Bon appetit, bon voyage, astronautes.

MILK OF KINDNESS; GRAPES OF WRATH

In putting together the ‘Curious Literary Grub’ piece (see pp. 4-5), I toyed with including Steinbeck’s ‘Milk-Shake Joad Flavoured’, but decided against it as, so to speak, tasteless. The following will, I hope, not offend.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ends with one of the more famous scenes in American literature. Sheltering from the pitiless storm, the remnants of the shattered Joad family find themselves in a barn, with a starving man. They have no food, and have had none for some time, but the daughter, Rose of Sharon (deserted by her rat of a husband) is lactating, having just lost her baby:

For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. ‘You got to,’ she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. ‘There!’ she said. ‘There.’ Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.

Most readers, in my experience, read that last moment symbolically: only the poor can give sustenance to the poor. Dives will never help Lazarus; another Lazarus, however, might. John Ford’s 1940 movie rewrites and re-scripts the end of the narrative to make just that point about the poor helping the poor. As Ma and Pa Joad bounce around in their jalopy, she tells him:

Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on for ever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.

It’s false to Steinbeck’s novel, but right for the time - that time being Roosevelt’s populist New Deal, America-coming-out-of-the-slump 1940s.

John Ford’s ending works. Audiences have always loved it. Does Steinbeck’s ending work? More specifically, even if it works as literary