The greatest marriage of food and literature I know of is Babette's Feast, the short story by Isak Dinesen, but there are other intersections of good food and literature. I've been reading "My Antonia" by Willa Cather. It is a story about pioneer life on the prairie and the relationship of young Jim, the protagonist, with Antonia one of the daughters of an immigrant family, the Shimerdas. In the section below it is the first winter for the Shimerdas and they have sunk into a deep poverty and are in danger of starving. Jim's family visits and leaves them with a good supply of food. In gratitude, they receive something in kind...
As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and brought out a bag made of bed-ticking, about as long as a flour sack and half as wide, stuffed full of something. At sight of it, the crazy boy began to smack his lips. When Mrs. Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent, even among the other odours of that cave. She measured a teacup full, tied it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously to grandmother.
`For cook,' she announced. `Little now; be very much when cook,' spreading out her hands as if to indicate that the pint would swell to a gallon. `Very good. You no have in this country. All things for eat better in my country.'
`Maybe so, Mrs. Shimerda,' grandmother said dryly. `I can't say but I prefer our bread to yours, myself.'
Antonia undertook to explain. `This very good, Mrs. Burden'--she clasped her hands as if she could not express how good--'it make very much when you cook, like what my mama say. Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken, in the gravy--oh, so good!'
[....]
That night, while grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package Mrs. Shimerda had given her. It was full of little brown chips that looked like the shavings of some root. They were as light as feathers, and the most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odour. We could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.
`They might be dried meat from some queer beast, Jim. They ain't dried fish, and they never grew on stalk or vine. I'm afraid of 'em. Anyhow, I shouldn't want to eat anything that had been shut up for months with old clothes and goose pillows.'
She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner of one of the chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively. I never forgot the strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so jealously, were dried mushrooms. They had been gathered, probably, in some deep Bohemian forest....
"My Antonia" Chapter 10, Willa Cather
How very strange and exotic European mushrooms would have been in the middle of Nebraska in the deep of winter.
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