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Literary Foods - Randal Allred
Whale Steaks in Moby Dick - Randal Allred

Literary Foods - Randal Allred
I would have to nominate Hemingway's spare way of making even unappetizing stuff make my mouth water. I cite the trout fried in bacon grease in the Nick Adams stories (can't remember which one) and the canned spaghetti and pork and beans mixed together in "Big Two-Hearted River." Or--even the cold, clotted pasta left over mixed with chunks of cheese that Lt. Henry and his companions are snarfing down during a shelling from the Austrian artillery.

Ah--and Charles Lamb's tribute to roast pork.

And--best of all--Mark Twain's description of country breakfasts at his uncle's house, along with his arguments as to why good cornbread and hot biscuits cannot be made in the North:
'It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle John's. The house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals--well, it makes me cry to think of them. Fried chicken, roast pig; wild and tame turkeys, ducks, and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie-chickens; biscuits, hot batter cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot "wheat bread," hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string-beans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, "clabber"; watermelons, muskmelons, cantaloupes--all fresh from the garden; apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler--I can't remember the rest. The way that the things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor--particularly a certain few of the dishes. For instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheat bread, and the fried chicken. These things have never been properly cooked in the North--in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is mere superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite so good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the Northern imitation of it. The North seldom tries to fry chicken, and this is well; the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe. This is not hearsay; it is experience that is speaking. In Europe it is imagined that the custom of serving various kinds of bread blazing hot is "American," but that is too broad a spread; it is custom in the South, but is much less than that in the North. In the North and in Europe hot bread is considered unhealthy.'

Whale Steaks in Moby Dick - Randal Allred
In the section for whale steaks--surely we ought to include some relevant texts, such as the passage in Moby Dick (rearing its blank, formidable head once again in the Gunroom discussions) where Stubb dines on his whale steak by night and enjoins the cook to preach to the sharks below (snapping at the whale carcass alongside) to govern their carnivorous animal natures.