A Dive into Pop Culture Cookbooks

Combining Food and Literature

So why combine the world of food with the world of literature? For Eldritch, it meant turning a solitary activity of reading into a shared one. She said, “There’s a great joy to be had in celebrating our love of literature with food, something that is usually shared. I love the idea that people might cook these recipes and enjoy them together while discussing the stories that inspired them, and I think it can also help people to rediscover favourite tales and characters and see them in a new light.” 

Anderson pointed to the sensuousness of both food and literature: “Good writing is a sensuous, sensual experience — it sharpens our experience of the thinginess of the world, the things we look at, hear, touch…and taste. So there’s a natural marriage there — ingredients and words.”

Making the Recipes

Some works of literature were a bit easier to come up with recipes for than others. “Tolkien is full of feasts and hungry Hobbits (the wonderful unexpected tea party that starts The Hobbit),” Anderson said, “Austen interweaves food into her heroines’ daily lives as well as into her letters.” But The Brothers Grimm is notable for the opposite, he explained, noting the “the starving woodsman family in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’”

The works of H.P. Lovecraft presented their own challenges. Eldritch noted, “There’s often a certain squeamishness on the occasions when food does appear in his stories — like Olmstead’s reluctance to eat anything except tinned soup in Innsmouth, or the way the fruit in the orchard turns foul in ‘The Colour Out of Space.'”

Staying True to the Books

Translating recipes is one thing, but how do the authors balance making actual recipes that retain the spirit of the book? Of course, it depended on the source material. Both authors relished the challenge. Anderson said, “You have to imagine recipes that relate in some way. Sometimes, I confess, it’s pretty tenuous, but I try to make it fun. (Sometimes the fun is the tenuousness.)”

Anderson found Austen fairly straightforward since it required some historical research and updating of some recipes. For The Brothers Grimm, he used a lot of basic ingredients like milk, flour, and potatoes that were “the staples of European ‘peasant’ cookery.” But Tolkien was more of a challenge “that well-known problem (present in the books) of using New World ingredients like tomatoes, avocados, potatoes (potatoes appear quite a lot in LoTR),” he said.

Eldritch loved the challenge, especially when creating recipes for abstract concepts. For instance, she loved coming up with “the violet truffles inspired by the purple glow of Keziah’s ‘witch light’ from ‘The Dreams in the Witch House,’” she explained.

Plus, she enjoyed playing with the food with some of the more “queasy moments.” Eldritch said,  I also enjoyed including some recipes that reflected Lovecraft’s own life as well as his fiction. He was a very frugal and somewhat fussy eater, and it was fun finding ways to reflect his preferred foods in the recipes. I particularly enjoyed the fact that he once described his wife Sonia’s bran muffins as ‘edible’ — clearly the height of culinary excellence in his eyes.”

But she didn’t want to make the cookbook scary. “It was about celebrating Lovecraft’s work and the position his creations hold in the popular imagination,” Eldritch said.

However, in addition to his contributions to horror, Lovecraft has a legacy of racism in his work. When asked how Eldritch tackled this difficult topic, she wrote: “Lovecraft was a very fearful man, and this is clear in much of his writing, with his protagonists often deeply terrified by the unknown. It is an unfortunate but undeniable fact that this attitude manifested itself in his everyday life as overt racism, and the views he expressed in some of his writings and letters are reprehensible to modern readers — and no doubt would have been to many of his contemporaries also.”