From a pioneering 1940s ‘gastrography’ to a recent novel about a real-life 18th-century French peasant cursed with an appetite to eat just about everything
Food in books has a way of lodging in the memory. For some it might be the kidneys on Leopold Bloom’s mind in Joyce’s Ulysses. For others, it’s the hard-won German sausage that Ratty finds at the end of Wind in the Willows. The book may be rich or grotesque, stark or sickly sweet, but we, the reader, are always invited to ask ourselves why, and how, we choose to take it in.
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