A recipe for sardine pizza prompted Fresca to wonder in a comment about dishes inspired by books and movies.
I have no dish, but I now remember a childhood habit born of reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula. From Jonathan Harker’s Journal:
The Count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese and salad and a bottle of old Tokay, of which I had two glasses, was my supper.As a boy, with Dracula as my inspiration, I would add a slice of American cheese to my plate whenever we had chicken for dinner. Cheese, right?
comments: 4
American cheese--that's adorable.
They say it was invented in 1917, right?
OMG--close!
According to Wikipedia:
"After patenting a new method for manufacturing processed cheese in 1916, James L. Kraft began marketing it in the late 1910s, and the term "American cheese" rapidly began to refer to the processed variety instead of the traditional but more expensive cheddars also made and sold in the U.S."
The 1910s? Then that’s not what Jonathan Harker was eating? I will have to revise my childhood.
I just remembered another time I ate something because of a ---well, it was a movie, not a book.
Remember Elaine May's character in "A New Leaf" likes "Malaga Coolers"--Mogen-David extra-heavy malaga wine with soda water and lime juice".
I made them once.
Then I understood how desperate Walter Matthau's character was when he drank one as part of his courtship.
It makes my mouth pucker now, many years later, to think of it.
Yikes — the wine, not the movie. That is a fine movie, one of my dad’s favorites.
I have to look up one of my favorite food scenes, in a Ross Macdonald novel. A college student (I think) working as a cook (I think) is preparing breakfast, maybe at a country club. He asks Lew Archer if he’d like tomato juice: “It clarifies the palate.” That line has stuck in my head since the late 1970s.
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