Which foods in books made you hungry when you read about them?

[ABowlOfPorridge]

Heidi always made goat’s cheese and goat’s milk sound so good but I hated them when I finally got to try them as an adult.

The feast at the Beavers’ house sounded so good especially the marmalade roll.

Which literary culinary delights appealed to you?

Even though it’s biscuits (that must have been going stale after such a long trip from Burnet) and fruit cake and fruit — but I agree, it’s incredibly evocative!

Agree also with everyone who said the Narnia books and The Wind in the Willows!

I used to love the sound of the food in the Famous Five — all those convenient farmers’ wives providing giant hams and pork pies, salads and apple tarts and cream. I even thought ‘potted meat sandwiches’ sounded delicious when I was little.

The midnight feasts in the school stories I was less keen on — too much sardine and tinned pineapple chunks.

Ha! I never had goats milk or cheese...but I think every time I've ever read Heidi (aa a child or adult) i've had a snack of bread with thick butter, a chunk of cheese and huge glass of milk 😂

I would love to try a Forty-two Century butter-pie from A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones. Her description is mouthwatering:

“Wonderful tastes filled her mouth, everything buttery and creamy she had ever tasted, with just a hint of toffee, and twenty other even better tastes she had never met before, all of it icy cold…

…she bit through into the middle of the butter-pie. And it was hot. Runny, syrupy hot.

’It’s goluptuous when you get to the warm part, isn’t it? Sam said, watching her with keen attention. ‘You want to let it trickle into the cold.’

Vivian did so and found Sam’s advice was excellent. The two parts mixed were even better than the cold part alone. It sent her rather dreamy again.”

Mr Tunmus and the sardines on hot buttered toast in Narnia. Had my dad make it for me as a kid as it sounded so lovely and I found it delicious. Still do though husband thinks its rank

Oh the pie!!! 😍

Pickled limes in Little Women. Amy takes / eats them in her school and the description of the sour juiciness was really evocative. I finally tried them when we moved to Hounslow and ate so many I was worried I was going to give myself a stomach ulcer!

I think what struck me in What Katy Did At School was that the school put on nothing for Christmas at all from what I remember— no special meal or fun?

And that if the Carrs hadn’t shared their Christmas box with everyone else, the others would have had no treats at all, because their boxes didn’t arrive.

(I just looked up jumbles and Wiki says they travelled well because they were so dense and hard, so that they could be eaten up to a year after being made. They seem to have started off in Europe as sort of sweet pretzels flavoured with fruit and spices, but by 19thc America, they were more like thin crisp cookies flavoured with lemon peel.)

“Oh stop, stop!” cried the mole in ecstasies. “This is too much!”
Have always wanted to recreate that picnic and eat it by the riverside on a sunny day.

There’s a scene in Birds Without Wings by Louise de Bernieres where a couple have a meal which I swear is the sexiest thing I have ever read. It’s all garlic and spices and oils and … yeah, might have to go and read it again 😂

Oh yeah and I also really wanted to eat the food!

Couldn’t read Animal Farm as a teenager without snacking on an apple and a glass of milk.

100% Mr Tumnus tea

Tiger that came to tea - cafe dins at the end

my naughty little sister - trifle

hobbit - big old dins at the start

stone soup - any version but I listened to the story teller one

Oh puttanesca in series of unfortunate events

@Ilovemyshed drool reflex....,I never knew that.
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands was one of my favourite books (Brazilian, Jorge Amado) I read and re-read it. Every chapter has a recipe but traditional Bahian cuisine which I never attempted to replicate. "The ineffability of taste, and scent". And I am also here for the white bread teeny tiny sandwiches with egg and cress...

YES to the Redwall books! That’s what immediately came to mind when I read the thread title.

Some of the descriptions of the feasts in Harry Potter also sounded amazing, even though, not having grown up in the UK, I didn’t know what some of the dishes were!

came here to say Swallows and Amazons: when they make scrambled egg and eat it from the common dish, and susan tells them to "start scraping like mad"

Oh god all of these plus the chocolate cake for breakfast in The Outsiders.

In The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton there was a sweet that grew larger and larger as you sucked it until it dissolved into a fizzy mass - or something like that -it was 60 years ago I read it…

Michael Bond (he of Paddington fame) wrote a series of books about a French food inspector for something similar to the Michelin Guide. He was an ex policeman (from the Parisian Surité) and travelled around with his ex police dog (bloodhound) Pommes Frites. The series is called Monsieur Pamplemousse and the... and all the food descriptions are exquisite.

I’ve been reading The Outsiders to DS, who wrinkled his nose and said he wouldn’t eat chocolate cake directly from the fridge.😀

I was imagining Soda and Ponyboy telling one another to let it get to room temperature.

Reading it in adulthood, though, does pose all kinds of questions about which of Sodapop, Ponyboy and Darry bakes vast amounts of chocolate cake in between their jobs and rumbles.

Fantastic Mr Fox. I used to drool at the feast they had.

The Magic Porridge Pot. All the streets filled with porridge and the pictures of the mice holding out bowls as the porridge drips off buildings.

I have to go and make porridge immediately!

I too came on to say Farmer Boy. Fried apples'n'onions sounded lovely, as did birds nest pie covered in cream. Eggnog on a hot day when you are haymaking. Fried salt pork and rye bread.

Toasted cheese in Heidi always made my mouth water.

The Famous Fives delicious picnics and the "lashings of ginger beer"

The roast chicken birthday dinner Marianne couldn’t eat in Marianne Dreams.

Edmund’s special drink in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Sausages and chips and ice cream in The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

Roald Dahl’s fresh fish and homemade kranaken ice cream in Boy.

There’s a part in one of the Narnia books where they cook freshly caught fish over a fire. I didn’t even like fish as a child, but I wanted to eat that.