Bookish Tuesday: Food, Glorious Food

by Jeanette O'Hagan

I WANT TO EAT MAIZE-BREAD!
But seriously, everyone in Akrad’s Children eats it and it sounds delicious.  

Michael, Goodreads review.

I had to chuckle when I saw this review on Akrad's Children - not because seeing new reviews brings a smile of pure happiness to my face (mostly); okay not only because I love seeing new reviews, but because it was such a great way to start a review. And it got me thinking about memorable mentions of food in books I love.

After all, food tells us so much about the characters, the setting, the occasion. It grounds us in the story, gives us warm feelings and makes our mouth water (or our stomach curdle).

One of my short stories starts this way:

Dana snatched a food packet and shoved it into the rehydrator, keying in the sequence.

Not a mouth-watering meal perhaps, but in one sentence we've learnt something about Dana, about where she is likely to be, about the genre of the story.

Are you surprised to learn the title is Space Junk* and that this is a science-fiction story?

So what are some memorable food moments in literature that you remember?  Here are some of mine.

Blueberries in The Palace Thief, Ruhanna's Flight and other stories

Oliver Twist 

Who can forget in the book and the film, when Oliver draws the short straw.

"Please, sir, I want some more."

With only three small bowlfuls of oatmeal gruel per day, an onion twice a week and a bread roll on Sunday, the boys in the workhouse are ravenous. The empty bowl; Oliver's pale, wane face; the outrage on the well-fed master's face says it all. We feel Oliver's hungry and wonder how anyone could treat children this way. (Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens) 

Anne of Green Gables

Do you remember Marilla's famous raspberry cordial which poor Anne (unaware that it's alcoholic) gives to her best friend Diane in a wonderful tea party full of cake and cherry preserves. The results are catastrophic. Diane greedily guzzles three glasses and goes home tipsy. Her mother is rightly incensed and bans her daughter from ever seeing Anne again. Anne learns a hard lesson, but luckily for the bosom friends, Mrs Barry eventually relents. (Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery)

Lucy Pevensie in Narnia

Two food scenes stays with me in C S Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  - one is Lucy's brother Edmond gobbling down the wicked White Witch's enchanted Turkish Delight. Her flattering words, false promises, his own jealousies, and the addictive sweetmeat all lure him into betraying Aslan, his siblings and all of Narnia.

In contrast, there is the cosy meal Tumnus the fawn offers Lucy- lightly boiled eggs, sardines of toast, honey on toast, sugar-topped cake. While this did seem a bit ordinary to my seven-year old self (but probably not to war-torn rationed Brits), I loved the homeliness of the meal. For sure, Tumnus was attempting to lull Lucy to sleep so he could hand her over to the White Witch, but he repents and he risks his life to save hers.

Two meals, two temptations, two different outcomes.

Hobbits and Elves

As a teen devouring J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, I loved the idea of Lembas - the Elven waybread (a gift to Frodo and his companions from the Lady of Lothlorien). It was wrapped in leaves, nutritious, long-lasting, and delicious - and sustained Frodo and Sam on their epic journey into the horrors of Mordor in their quest to save the world. The gifts of friendship and fellowship make their heroic deeds possible.

And then there is the feast Bilbo unwillingly provided to his unexpected guests of twelve dwarves and Gandalf at the start of The Hobbit. Bilbo's pantry seemed endless, full of cakes, and cold meats, and tasty delights, though by the end of the night, it was pretty much empty - and Bilbo found himself going on an adventure into the unknown. The hilarious scenes tells us a lot about dwarves - and hobbits - and the need at times to let go of our familiar comforts.

Mina Improvises

In Stephen Lawhead's Skin Map (Bright Empire series), Mina is separated from Kit Livingstone and is lost in an alternative earth, in seventeenth century Bohemia. Fortunate for her, she meets up with a baker and together they create the best (and only) coffee shop in Prague with delectable pasties. While her talents languish in the ordinary world, the new situation brings out her ingenuity and grit.

Ruhanna's Flight

And before I leave, I'd love to share another food scenes from my recent release Ruhanna's Flight and other stories.

In the first story Ruhanna's Flight* - Ruhanna prepares for her father's homecoming with a gift - and a special meal.

From the little kitchen came tantalising smells fit for the palace in Silantis. Mariam had surpassed herself with Baba’s favourite dishes—turtle and seaweed soup, baked fish, baby tomatoes and sea-sage, oysters and rock crays with a creamy dill sauce, stuffed quails and fresh wave-berries with yarma cheese to finish off. Everything was ready by late morning.

Ruhanna sank down on a cushion in the reception room, stroking the carved albatross on Baba’s box, and waited.

I have fun thinking up food appropriate for the different people and places in my fiction.

What meals do you remember in your favourite books? I'd love you to share them in the comments.

* Space Junk - first published in Mixed Blessings: Genre-lly Speaking (Breath of Fresh Air Press, 2016), also included in Ruhanna's Flight and other stories.
* Ruhanna's Flight first published in Glimpes of Light (edited by Jeanette O'Hagan and Nola Passmore: By the Light Books, 2015), and also included in Ruhanna's Flight and other stories.

Giveaway  Ruhanna's Flight and other stories

Ruhanna's Flight and other stories by Jeanette O'Hagan (By the Light Books, 6 March 2018)

Tales of wonder, romance, adventure - dip into the world of Nardva with this exciting collection of stories. It includes Ruhanna's Flight,  Before the Wind, Heart of the Mountain, The Herbalist's Daughter, Moonflame, Rendezvous at Alexgaia and many other stories. A delightful introduction to Jeanette O'Hagan's fantasy world of engaging characters and stirring adventures.

Available from amazon.com

Jeanette O'Hagan is giving away a e-book copy of Ruhanna's Flight and other stories. To enter the giveaway, on this post and/or ICFW's March New Releases post on March 19. Receive two entries in the drawing by commenting on both posts. I'll draw a winner from the comments on Saturday, March 30.

Jeanette recently published a collection of fantasy and sci-fi Nardvan stories, Ruhanna's Flight and other stories. She started spinning tales in the world of Nardva at the age of eight or nine. She enjoys writing secondary world fiction, poetry, blogging and editing.

Her Nardvan stories span continents, time and cultures. They involve a mixture of courtly intrigue, adventure, romance and/or shapeshifters and magic users. She has published numerous short stories, poems, two novellas and her debut novel, Akrad's Children.

Connect with her: website | facebook | pinterest | twitter

Creating Worlds - Jeanette O'Hagan

By Jeanette O'Hagan

For me one of the joys of reading —and writing— is being transported to another place and time. Maybe to encounter ancient or not so ancient societies and cultures (Medieval, Egyptian or Incan). It might be to a strange dystopian future or across the universe in a FTL spaceship. Or it might be the streets of New York or Sydney, the vast Australian Outback or the green hills of England. Books have whisked me away to all these places – and fired my imagination.

Creating Nardva

I changed schools in the middle of grade one, the first of many such shifts. The playground became a lonely place until I discovered the school library. My imagination was already fired up as each night my parents read from the pages of Narnia. Enriched by story-worlds, I began creating my own and this world grew and grew and grew. The result was Nardva – a planet in many ways like our own, but with two moons, strange cultures, shape-shifters, special magical gifts and epic and every-day challenges.

As a teen, I moved from recording my world-building (maps, languages, genealogies, customs, art, images) to writing down the stories. Most of my fiction, from the underground adventure of Heart of the Mountain, to courtly the intrigue of Akrad’s Children to my futuristic cyborg story in Project Chameleon (Quantum Soul anthology), happens within this fictional world.

Worlds with Depth

Even the most fantastical world draws inspiration from our world. As writers, we walk in the steps of our own Maker who spoke the cosmos into being. I find this thought both inspiring and very, very humbling.

Setting is important. Stories without sense of place result in ‘white space’ and ‘talking heads’ — boring, paper-thin worlds and characters. Just as we are shaped by our environment, our ‘where’ and ‘when’, so too are our characters and so are their motivations and the challenges they face. For me, the best stories have a sense of history, the sense that the world stretches to the horizon, the sense that if you peeked behind you’d find more than two-dimensional set pieces of plyboard and badly applied paint. A fictional world should be complex, dynamic and interactive. History, geography, ecology, economics, cultures all interact, yet are rarely monolithic, and are always changing. A fictional fantasy world, even more than the real world, needs to be consistent and coherent, with believable conflicts and power struggles.

Engaging Worlds

On the other hand, as my editor reminds me, I need be careful not to clutter my story-telling with too much detail, too much back-story, too much description, too much history and legend. I’ve spun and woven my world into existence over many decades and, as a result, my Nardvan stories are interconnected and occur in different time periods, geographical locales and among different Nardvan peoples. Writing whole scenes of tangential backstory or lengthy description of customs and architecture is a temptation that must be resisted.

We live in an age where readers become inpatient with huge slabs of description or information dumps. Our fictional worlds can be woven in through telling details in the narrative, fused with the point of view of our character, through their thoughts and reactions, through their interaction with the world, and through their speech. We need to make descriptive detail work for us.

Here Ruhanna (from Ruhanna’s Flight, in Glimpses of Light anthology), waits for her father to arrive at her island home.

From the little kitchen came tantalising smells fit for the palace in Silantis. Mariam had surpassed herself with Baba’s favourite dishes—turtle and seaweed soup, baked fish, baby tomatoes and sea-sage, oysters and rock crays with a creamy dill sauce, stuffed quails and fresh wave-berries with yarma cheese to finish off. Everything was ready by late morning. Ruhanna sank down on a cushion in the reception room, stroking the carved albatross on Baba’s box, and waited.

In contrast, the twins Retza and Delvina (from the novellas Heart of the Mountain and Blood Crystal) live deep under the mountain, their diet and perception of the world is very different from Ruhanna’s or indeed, Zadeki, a young shapeshifer whose people live in the forests.

Though Delvina’s stomach grumbled with hunger at the savoury fragrance, her fingers hovered over each bowl offered to her. Some looked like cooked leaves or roots, others held rolled up balls of white stuff sprinkled with seeds. Only when she saw the snails in a green tinted broth and a bowl of fried mushrooms, did the tension release in her shoulders. At last, something she understood in this strange land.

Whereas, Dana (features in Space Junk, Mixed Blessings: Genre-lly speaking, and Rendezvous at Alexgaia, Futurevision anthology) lives in Nardva’s space-age.

Dana snatched a food packet and shoved it into the rehydrator, keying in the sequence. Red lights flashed as the mechanism whined. She gave it a brisk shake. A sharp hiccough, it hummed, green lights winking on.

A close point of view and telling details help conjure world setting even in a few words.

I firmly believe that desire to create reflects the image of our Maker and Saviour. Writing immersive fictional worlds with stories of hope can fire the imaginations of our readers and open their minds to His grace.

Jeanette O’Hagan first started spinning tales in the world of Nardva at the age of nine. She enjoys writing secondary world fantasy, science fiction, poetry, blogging and editing. Her Nardvan stories span continents, time and cultures.

Recent publications include her debut Novel Akrad’s Children and novellas Heart of the Mountain and Blood Crystal. She also has over a dozen stories and poems published in different anthologies such as Glimpses of Light, Futurevision, and Quantum Soul.

Jeanette has practised medicine, studied communication, history, theology and a Master of Arts (Writing). She loves reading, painting, travel, catching up for coffee with friends, pondering the meaning of life and communicating God’s great love. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and children.

Find her at her Facebook Page, Goodreads, Twitter, Amazon or on her website Jeanette O'Hagan Writes.