Adriatic Salad and other fictional foods
March 4, 2009
When my novel The Children came out I received several very gratifying emails from readers who particularly liked the family barney in the fictional country town of Rundle’s RSL Club restaurant, which featured an escalating argument between two adult siblings, Mandy and Stephen, sparked by a dish on the menu described thus: ‘Adriatic Salad: Cajun prawns, sweet potato, snow peas and lime mayonnaise.’
For some reason, lots of people liked the sound of this dish. A couple of people even wanted the recipe. That salad actually exists, in a motel restaurant in a country town that will remain nameless, where I did a bit of research for the book – it seemed too good to be true, so I pinched it. I quite enjoyed writing that scene actually – and now I find myself scanning menus hopefully at all times now for fictional fodder. Tricky though – it would be so easy to repeat oneself, but there’s such a wealth of material out there I’m not sure I will be able to resist bad menu items for the book I’m writing now (I’ve got three words to say to you, Kimmy: Gourmet Pizza Kitchen).
On the topic of food in fiction, here is a wonderful New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik about cooking real dishes after their fictional appearances in books, with varying results. He says, for example, of the eponymous dish from Gunter Grass‘s Nobel-provoking novel The Flounder:
Eating Günter Grass’s flounder was actually like reading one of his novels: nutritious, but a little pale and starchy.
How to shuck an oyster 
nice post 🙂
That’s such a great scene in The Children, I can imagine it was fun to write. Love new blog, Charlotte!
It was a great scene. It was so beautifully recognisable. All of it. And some of my all-time best childhood memories revolve around the prawn cocktail.
Well thank you, kids. And yes, the prawn cocktail – it is so reminiscent of the RSL childhood dinner. Must write something on the prawn cocktail and its place in Australian memory. It must surely be just as redolant as Proust’s damn madeleine (she says, pretending to have read Proust), don’t you think?
Mmmm… madeleines…(she says, not even remotely caring about Proust unless he has baked goods to proffer…)
[…] Simplest lunch in the world More bad literary food May 5, 2009 I have found a fellow bad-food-in-fiction-admirer in Geoff Nicholson, with his nice piece on literary food in the New York Times this month. In […]
[…] welcome, but all suggestions will be very warmly welcomed. As we’ve discussed before here and here, I am quite keen on bad food in fiction – and not so interested in the exotic school […]