Guest Post – Fantastic Food by Gaie Sebold

When I was still commuting, I used to love the days the restaurant reviews came out in the free paper.

Not because I go to restaurants that much, bar a few pub lunches, and the odd birthday meal out – but because the reviews were a joy to read. There’s something about a well-written description of good food that has my inner sensualist rolling around like a cat in catmint. From Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, with its lush paeans of praise to confectionary and cooking, to Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamorra – pears and sausages in oil, ginger scald cocktails, astonishingly subtle and expensive brandies – this is one of the great pleasures of fantasy.

And it’s not just descriptions of good food, or drink, which add to the delights of a fantasy world. Who can forget C.M.O.T. Dibbler’s sausages from the Discworld series? Anyone who ever, in desperation, got a dodgy kebab from a grimy van on their way home from the pub can taste the wretched things. While researching Shanghai Sparrow, I discovered the delightful but worrying slang name for street-vendor’s sausages in the Victorian period – bags o’mystery. Which…tells you all you need to know, and possibly rather more than you wish to contemplate in any depth.

I talk about food quite a lot in my own writing. This is partly because I have, in recent years, developed a love of cooking, and your own obsessions tend to find their way into your work, intentionally or otherwise. And food and drink are simply fun to write about.

But there is, of course, more to it than that. In George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, the luxury foods of the rich point up the miserable necessities of the poor – and the seventy-seven course feast for Tyrion Lannister’s wedding contrasts notably with the stringy beef at Rob Stark’s. It can be speculated that the stringy beef was a suitably unpleasant appetiser to the death of appealing characters, while the lavish spread of the Lannister feast has something to say about both the wild extravagance of the court – and the prospect of a particularly unlikeable character getting their comeuppance. In the Discworld series, C.M.O.T. Dibbler’s sausages are part of his character, and Dibbler himself part of Pratchett’s brilliant world-building, which is both epic and intimate. The diets of numerous races, human and otherwise, are part of the cultural mix that make up Ankh-Morpork and add resonance to Pratchett’s echoes of our own big, multicultural cities. The tale of Rashad the cook in Mike, Linda and Louise Carey’s brilliant City of Silk and Steel, with its recipes and focus on food as a comfort and a sign of love, gives depth and perspective to the brutal asceticism of the new regime.

Evvie from my Gears of Empire series is very conscious of food, from many years spent without enough of it. Anxiety makes her hungry, and hunger, or even the prospect of it, makes her anxious. In the Babylon Steel series a lot of time is spent in kitchens and at dining tables. It isn’t the bedrooms that are the heart of the Red Lantern brothel that Babylon runs, but the kitchen – because the inhabitants are a family, and they eat and squabble and plan there together. Babylon appreciates good food and drink, because she is a sensual being and that is part of her character.

To me this is an important aspect of the stories. Some readers may not even notice it, but others will – and I hope those that do will find it enhances their experience. The use of food by other writers has certainly enhanced mine.

What we eat and drink, and how we respond to it, are part of our culture, our background, and our experience. What characters eat, or don’t, the dishes that they encounter, and how they approach both feast and famine, are not merely a glaze on the fictional pie: they can be a spice that helps give the whole meal its savour.

Gaie Sebold

July 2015

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on LinkedIn