What are your favorite food descriptions? Suttree has some good ones:>The steaks arrived on iron platters sizzling in their own juice and there were steaming baked potatoes with pithy cores to melt the butter over and there was sour cream with chives and hot rolls and coffee.>She set before them each a white platter. Sliced turkey and dressing pooled over in thick gravy and steaming creamed potatoes and peas and a claretcolored dollop of cranberry sauce and hot rolls with pats of creamery butter. Harrogate’s eyes were enormous.
>>25166265I think we will begin with a Caesar salad, he says. And then a bowl of soup with some extra bread and butter, if you please. The lamp chops, I believe, he says. And baked potato with sour cream. We'll see about dessert later. Thank you very much, he says, and hands me the menu.— Raymond Carver, ‘Big’
>>25166265>>25166601These aren't descriptions at all. They're just lists of food.
>>25166265None. I've always hated this, it always comes across as cringeworthy. When I think of descriptions of food, I think of reading that hack George RR Martin when I was a teenager and still read slop. Endless descriptions of feasts and referring to characters "drinking deep." I can just picture the greasy slob licking his lips and rubbing his bulbous belly while typing away his third meal of the chapter. I prefer the Homeric method where the meal is glossed over as unimportant outside of communicating the information that a meal took place: >And then they put their hands to the good things before them. >When they'd put away their desire for eating and drinking...Ultimately most food descriptions are superfluous, food is not beautiful like nature or a person, buildings, objects, things that merit vivid description and which resonate with the reader. Food is a means of nourishment, it's nice if food tastes delicious and is well presented in life but that's an aspect of life that doesn't well translate to the page, it sounds sickening and gluttonous, it's like watching a Mukbang and thinking "oh me hungry, me want that yummy food." It is essentially like sex, hard to describe well without coming across as pornographic. The lustful desire that we have for food is often sickening and verbose and flowery descriptions of food does not read well.
>>25166708>I prefer the Homeric method where the meal is glossed over as unimportantI'm pulling this from my ass but I'd bet those are improv points where the orator gets to make up whatever he wants for the audience. Someone should really look up whether that's true.
>>25166733That's an interesting idea, if it is true and if I were in an Ancient audience I would have covered my ears when the speaker started free styling the dinner descriptions.
>>25166265I must confess to enjoying that supper. For about ten days we seemed to have been living, more or less, on nothing but cold meat, cake, and bread and jam. It had been a simple, a nutritious diet; but there had been nothing exciting about it, and the odour of Burgundy, and the smell of French sauces, and the sight of clean napkins and long loaves, knocked as a very welcome visitor at the door of our inner man.We pegged and quaffed away in silence for a while, until the time came when, instead of sitting bolt upright, and grasping the knife and fork firmly, we leant back in our chairs and worked slowly and carelessly — when we stretched out our legs beneath the table, let our napkins fall, unheeded, to the floor, and found time to more critically examine the smoky ceiling than we had hitherto been able to do — when we rested our glasses at arm’s-length upon the table, and felt good, and thoughtful, and forgiving.— Jerome K. Jerome, ‘Three Men In A Boat’
>>25166708Food pornApparently reading about foods and smells can pass the prefrontal cortex and go straight to the limbic system so no critical factor process happens
ulysses chapter 8
>>25166265He squatted on the ground and tried to lift out the bowl but it was too hot. Con permiso, she said. She reached down and took the bowl from the pail and lifted off the saucer and set the bowl in the saucer and handed it to him. Then she reached down and took out a spoon and handed him that.Gracias, he said.She knelt in the grass opposite to watch him eat. The ribbons of tripe swam in the clear and oily broth like slow planarians. He said that he was not really sick but only somewhat crudo from his night in the tavern. She said that she understood and that it was of no consequence and that sickness had no way to know who’d caused it thanks be to God for all of us.He took a tortilla from the pail and tore it and refolded it and dipped it in the broth. He spooned up a piece of tripe and it sloughed from the spoon and he cut it in two against the side of the bowl with the edge of the spoon. The menudo was hot and rich with spice. He ate. She watched.The children rode up on the horse behind him and sat waiting. He looked up at them and made a circling motion with his finger and they set off again. He looked at the woman.Son suyos?She shook her head. She said that they were not.He nodded. He watched them go. The bowl had cooled somewhat and he took it by the rim and tipped it up and drank from it and took a bite of the tortilla. Muy sabroso, he said. She said that she had had a son but that he was dead twenty years.He looked at her. He thought that she did not look old enough to have had a child twenty years ago but then she seemed no particular age at all. He said that she must have been very young and she said that she had indeed been very young but that the grief of the young is greatly undervalued. She put one hand to her chest. She said that the child lived in her soul.He looked out across the field. The children sat astride the horse at the edge of the river and the boy seemed to be waiting for the horse to drink. The horse stood waiting for whatever next thing might be required of it. He drained the last of the menudo and folded the last quadrant of the tortilla and wiped the bowl with it and ate it and set bowl and spoon and saucer back in the bucket and looked at the woman.Cuánto le debo, señora, he said.Señorita, she said. Nada.— Cormac McCarthy, ‘The Crossing’
>>25166265I hate McCarthy and his "prose"I hate Americans and their "art">There was her face, mouth agape with her ripe breasts hanging over her ribcage and there was skin, covered in goosebumps under his big hands, and there was wetness that clung to her skin and it swallowed his thick member and her eyes seemed to lap at his lips, but her lips were stuck between his teeth.
>>25166265A pan of fried trout can’t be bettered and they don’t cost any more than ever. But there is a good and bad way of frying them.The beginner puts his trout and his bacon in and over a brightly burning fire; the bacon curls up and dries into a dry tasteless cinder and the trout is burned outside while it is still raw inside. He eats them and it is all right if he is only out for the day and going home to a good meal at night. But if he is going to face more trout and bacon the next morning and other equally well-cooked dishes for the remainder of two weeks he is on the pathway to nervous dyspepsia.The proper way is to cook over coals. Have several cans of Crisco or Cotosuet or one of the vegetable shortenings along that are as good as lard and excellent for all kinds of shortening. Put the bacon in and when it is about half cooked lay the trout in the hot grease, dipping them in corn meal first. Then put the bacon on top of the trout and it will baste them as it slowly cooks.The coffee can be boiling at the same time and in a smaller skillet pancakes being made that are satisfying the other campers while they are waiting for the trout. With the prepared pancake flours you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour and as soon as the lumps are out it is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in and as soon as it is done on one side loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.While the crowd have taken the edge from their appetites with flapjacks the trout have been cooked and they and the bacon are ready to serve. The trout are crisp outside and firm and pink inside and the bacon is well done — but not too done. If there is anything better than that combination the writer has yet to taste it in a lifetime devoted largely and studiously to eating.— Ernest Hemingway, ‘Camping Out’
>>25166708Based
