The Traveling Round Table Fantasy Blogs – 8
Way back in 2012 six specfic writers, including me, decided to set up a monthly circulating blog series: one unifying topic, fantasy, and one post each per month, on each member’s site in turn. Eventually it was named, partly in jest, “The Great Traveling Round Table Fantasy Blog,” and it lasted for most of three rounds.
My own posts are the only ones I can now retrieve, but some of them still strike me as interesting, if somewhat out-of-date. I’m therefore aiming to re-post them here for those who may be interested. I’ve also included the image that became our leit motif: The Arthurian Round Table, from a picture in Winchester, UK.
And the 8th topic was/is:
Stay Me With Apples, Comfort Me With Flagons: Food in Fantasy
Once upon a time, food must have been the most important thing in our lives. Millions of Australopithecoid generations didn’t need shelter, expected seasonal sex, and maybe drew moisture from food, as gorillas still do. But food? If the food ran out beyond finding, you fell off the human family tree for good.
Without food storage, Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, though their lives and diets are now idealized, were little safer. Nor were Neolithic farmers. Those enormous stoneworks speak as much fear as reverence: any year could be a famine, if the sun did not return. When the climate changed in Orkney, they opened the top of the Tomb of the Eagles and filled in the centuries-old community temple, a mute testament to the despair of people who felt themselves abandoned, literally, to death.
Before the Industrial Revolution, very little changed. William Langland’s great medieval poem, “Piers Plowman”, is vague if dour about vanity and lust. To the sin of gluttony it speaks with passionate and specific detail, invoking a society where spring doesn’t mean admiring the pear blossom but hunting desperately for the first green vegetable shoots.
Nowadays, at least in the First World’s enclave, we have a negative food fetish instead. For most of us food is far too available, far too tempting, far too dangerous. One reason I originally chose this topic for December is that, though the US has filled its minds and shops and bellies at Thanksgiving, Australia has only one major food-based festival. Having largely excised religion, and often present-giving, only in December do Australians (invoking their diets hourly) begin an orgy of food-buying, preparation and consumption calculated to send their nearest and dearest to an early grave.
Curiously enough, our Desire-Taboo attitude to food matches that of the oldest (Western) fantasy. Right back to the myths of the Judeao-Christian apple and Persephone’s six pomegranate seeds, Elsewhere’s food has been the easiest and most tempting way to get lost precisely where you DON’T want to be. The sense endures through later folk and fairytale. Fairy feasts, from those of the Irish Sidhe to the story of Thomas the Rhymer and the Wood King’s revels in The Hobbit, promise eternal pleasure and deliver eternal loss, death, starvation. And the lure of Elsewhere food reappears in modern fantasy, from Patricia McKillip’s Solstice Wood back to the magnificently Overfat Feast in The Once and Future King, the fruit in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and of course, Jadis’ Evil Turkish Delight in Narnia.
But safe or wholesome food? As Ursula Le Guin remarked ruefully elsewhere, “It is hard to make a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another…” (“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”). It seems equally hard for myth, romance or fantasy to invent desirable food that isn’t taboo.
Most often, good food in modern fantasy marks a temporary safe halt: the desert inn in Diane Duane’s The Door into Fire, the old woman’s farmhouse in Diana Wynne Jones’ The Spell Coats, Beorn’s house in The Hobbit. But overall, earthly fantasy food should aid the verisimilitude, hence prohibiting chips and hamburgers in Pre-Industrial secondary worlds. Thanks to writers’ scant research or imagination, the scathing entry for “Food” in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland reads: “See STEW, SCURVY, STEW, WAYBREAD … and STEW” (79) A ruling that covers most noble and courtly menus too.
There is a standout exception: once again, Patricia McKillip’s The Book of Atrix Wolfe,
where the missing heroine is spell-hidden in the castle kitchen. While the story bangs about upstairs through wizardry, succession worries, prince-abductions and scorched-earth hunts, its progress is recorded below through a prolonged array of unenchanted but inspired food.
The standard is set at first appearance. For hall lunch, “a proud flock of liveried servants” carry “trays of cold beef, whole poached salmon, loaves of braided bread, salad, fruit dipped in chocolate, cakes of cream and walnut chopped as fine as flour” (27.) Supper, in contrast, is “a prolonged drama of great pies of hare and venison with hunting scenes baked in dough on their crusts, vegetables sculpted into gardens, huge platters layered with roast geese, woodcocks and pigeons, and crowned with hummingbirds made of egg white and sugar” (28).
As the narrative cogs engage, Prince Talis, summoned home from mage school, nearly kills the King with a misspelled thunderbolt. In counterpoint, “Servants bearing trays of spiced wine and hot brandy had flung them into the air, splashing themselves; goblets rolled among the hounds” (48). Ruffled if coping, the kitchen dispatches the scullion heroine with a tray for the prince, now sequestered as a dangerous magician in the old keep. When she drops the tray, the prince reassembles, “’Salmon swimming in gravy, roast beef on a bed of broken meringue … The bread is only slightly damp …’”(61). This slightly comic contre temps underpoints the larger derailments taking place abovestairs.
Next time, the kitchen is coping with a punitive hunt. “’Twenty-six quail,” the fowl cook said… ‘Eighteen woodcock, thirty grouse, eleven lark, thirteen wild duck.’
‘Pluck them,’ the head cook said. ‘Spit the grouse and woodcocks, braise the lark and quail in butter, stuff the duck with sliced oranges before they are spitted. They will be served with an orange-and-brandy sauce.” (77).
The kitchen offers the prince a tray of “game hens seasoned with rosemary, tiny potatoes stuffed with mushroom, soup of leeks and cream, a braided loaf of dark sweet bread, a compote of cherries in brandy” (86), and this time he remembers the bearer. But next time it’s crisis. The fanfare for supper fails to sound.
Hall-mistress and servants wait beside “steaming silver bowls of soup with tiny saffron biscuits shaped like fish floating in it” while “Haunches of ham crackled and split on the spits” (97). The soup threatens to spoil, the head cook begins to throw things, and dire news comes from the hall. The prince has been lost in the magic wood. Beans scorch, meringue swans burn, the undercooks open a brandy bottle. But the King plans a night hunt, and the kitchen jerks back to work.
“‘Reheat the soup,’ [the head cook] commanded, “Remove the fish. Chop green onions to float in the bowls with a pinch of paprika ‘… [His] eye fell on the brandy bottle. ‘Take hot brandy and spiced wine to the hunters in the yard, and thin slices of apple and game pie – quickly!’” (101)
When the hunt returns in the small hours for a “cold supper,” “Hams were sliced, and cold roast fowl, and long loaves of bread; a simmering soup of shredded beets was ladled out … to cool. Lettuces and boiled potatoes and scallions were chopped and mixed with vinegar, pepper, rosemary and dill. Dark, dense cakes heavy with nuts and dried cherries, redolent with brandy … Whipped cream and flaked, toasted hazelnuts frosted the cakes … Undercooks funneled rosettes of minced pear onto the soup” (119).
But the prince stays lost. When Atrix the mage arrives, breakfast includes “pale wine scented with spices .. a plate [of] pastries stuffed with nuts and cream, cold salmon, a swan carved out of melon with its wings full of strawberries “(150). But soon both king and kitchen feel the brunt. “The king had retired in fury and despair to his chamber … Supper – roast, peppered venison, tiny potatoes roasted crisp, hollowed and filled with cheese and onions and chive, cherries marinated in brandy and folded into beaten cream – sailed over the bearer’s head and splashed … a hundred-year-old tapestry” (155).
Next day, “’Hunt,’ the head cook said tersely … ‘Again. Take up bread and cheese, smoked fish and cold, sliced venison. Mince the rest of the venison for pie. Also onions, mushrooms, leeks. Take up spiced wine’” (155).
The hunt’s next return “filled the kitchen with feathers, as grouse and pheasant and wild duck … were plucked, beheaded, stuffed and spitted. Hare, squirrel and deer were skinned, gutted and left in the cold-meat pantry,” and the head cook improvises again: “‘The venison can be smoked, the small game will do for cold pies for the hunters.” (155-56).
A normal (castle) breakfast, “silver urns of chocolate, trays of butter pastries, hams glazed with honey and sliced thin as paper, eggs poached in sherry, birds carved out of melons and filled with fruit” (156) segues into disaster: tray bearers come back “white as cream”, and then with ultimate disaster, trays of uneaten food. The head cook’s “face is tight” as he copes:
“’Cook the eggs until they harden, and roll them in minced sausage. The ham will keep for when the King hunts again. Mash the melon in sweet wine and strain it for cold soup –‘“ (160). Later, things worsen. Wine is all drunk, but food ignored, and “’what is this dent in the bronze tray’?
‘The King kicked it,’ a servant said morosely. ‘He’s boiling and about to froth’” (161).
The head cook carries on more composedly than the King. “’Nonsense. Cold ham, herb bread, mince pies, red wine. The King may throw it to the dogs. At least it will get eaten’” (161). And when the hunt returns with even more kills, he sends up “stew and game pies … salads of spinach and radish and bacon, hot black bread, simple heavy fare” (161). The only time this culinary tour de force ever mentions stew.
Meanwhile the heroine rediscovers magic, the prince meets the Queen of the Wood, and hall-servants bring back “bones and cold broken fragments of salmon wrapped in pie crust, roast venison seared over flames and simmered in wine, garlic and rosemary, carrots and onions fried in butter and ale, baked apples stuffed with cabbage and cream, baskets of fruit woven out of egg-white and drizzled with chocolate flavoured with brandy” (176).
For a last time the heroine takes up the prince’s tray: “onion soup with a melting crust of cheese, a loaf of dark bread, a flagon of wine, a tart of oranges sliced into thin bright circles glistening under a glaze that smelled of ginger” (206). This time, meticulous, imaginative culinary detail dovetails with war and magic’s culmination: the prince remembers the scullion heroine, enters the kitchen to discover her, and the narrative’s eclaircissement begins.
Later, with the magic over, the mysteries folded away, the heroine, restored to her Wood princess status, brings the prince another tray, and this time the food goes undescribed. But the story ends as she re-enters the kitchen where she knows “the tray–mistress would be counting scratches, and the plate-washers would still be at the sinks, and the head-cook debating tomorrow’s meals, and everyone picking at leftovers,” and says, “’Tell me all your names’” (247).
It is uncommon, even in modern fantasy, for a secondary world novel to end belowstairs. It is a fitting finale that the focus should here move from the amazing food to its makers. The food itself is not particularly Elsewhere, in terms of high-end modern cuisine, but that this parade of lushly detailed dishes is never shown as magic, evil, or a temptation justifies its makers’ place in the final spotlight. Unlike the mages or kings or Faery folk, their power has never produced anything but good.
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Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published twelve fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies. Some of her books can be found in the Bookview Cafe online store: