[Iowa Szathmáry Culinary Arts Series 01] • Books and My Food · Literary Quotations and Recipes for Every Year

In her preface to the 1904 Books and My Food, reissued for the first time in facsimile, the American literary and art critic Elisabeth Luther Cary declares that it is “impossible to read English novels without realizing how important a part food plays in the mental as in the physical life of the Englishman.” This appealing literary/culinary daybook provides 365 recipes along with literary quotations that prompted their creation.

Beginning on January 1 with a recipe for traditional English wedding cake referenced to Jane Austen's Emma and ending on December 31 with a recipe for wassail attributed to none other than Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Books and My Food provides readers the occasion to experience the gastronomic delights that inspired novelists, poets, and playwrights.

Drawn almost entirely from British sources, the literary catalyst for these recipes include citations from Charlotte Brontë, William Shakespeare, William Makepeace Thackeray, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, and others. Recipes range from across familiar British fare from mutton chops, leg of lamb, and meat pies to teas cakes, custards, puddings, porridge, and crumpets. Equally intriguing are the instructions for more obscure sustenance such as rum omelets, sago-cream pudding, Shrovetide pancakes, furmety, syllabub, dulcet creams, and an adaptation for curds and whey. Finally, for the literary buff whose tastes run bravely to the authentic dinners of old England, there are recipes for tongue and spinach, frog leg patties, fried eels, and stewed snipe.