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[novelsforhungrypeople]

My last night on Capri, I found myself sitting at the end of a long dinner table with three older Italian women, all wearing bright silk blouses--scarlet, coral, indigo--that rustled against their sweeping, gesticulating arms. All of them were smoking. All of them were divorced. It was nearly midnight, and the table was covered with the remains of our feast: vermicelli tossed with sea urchin, ravioli stuffed with zucchini flowers, sea bream with stewed cherry tomatoes.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison

[novelsforhungrypeople]

She could not help it but she loved when her children got out of hand. In her secret heart, she was on their side and she longed for Henry Demarest's business trips so that she and the children could eat nursery food around the wooden kitchen table. Polly liked to make shepherd's pie, lamb stew, mashed potatoes, junket, stewed figs with cream, hush puppies, hermits, and rice pudding. For Henry she served a more elaborate cuisine. He liked complicated food: stuffed breast of veal, carpetbagger steak, fresh ham with pistachio, all of which Polly was happy to provide, but her favorite time of the year was late February, with lots of sleety, messy weather, Henry in Boston or Dallas or San Francisco, and she and the children being silly and having dinner.

"Family Happiness," Laurie Colwin, The Lone Pilgrim

[novelsforhungrypeople]

The food I lived on was eccentric. I strained yogurt through cheesecloth to concentrate it, and I ate it with pickled cabbage and salted Japanese plums. I cooked carrots with honey and garlic and ate them cold--the odd tastes of a solitary person. When I had people in to dinner, I spent days wondering what ordinary people ate. I gave my husband what I ate: a cup of thick yogurt; a plate of pickled cabbage, salted plums, and cold carrots; and some chicken cooked the way I liked it--with soy sauce, paprika, and clove. He ate what was set before him and never said he found the meal strange, which warmed me to him.

"Travel," Laurie Colwin, The Lone Pilgrim

[novelsforhungrypeople]

Jane sat Cordy down to the first of their many home-cooked meals. She made an omelet, a simple one, with cheese and chives. Cordy appeared to be transported. He had never had such an omelet--not even in France, he said.

"The Boyish Pilgrim," Laurie Colwin, The Lone Pilgrim

[novelsforhungrypeople]

The waiter came by, reeking of weed and burnt bacon. Jenny handed him her menu and ordered a patty melt, fries, and a big side of ranch. 'Big, China-big.' I was in a breakfast mood, but not a meat mood, asked for eggs over easy and hash browns to soak up the yolk with.

Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier

[novelsforhungrypeople]

For dinner, he made a kind of rutabga soup, with dill and celery seed. It was his mother's recipe. She would make it one of two ways, a 'weekday' or a 'weekend' version. 'For you, we will make it weekend-style,' he said, adding a scoop of sheep's yogurt for a richer broth. I toasted big slabs of black bread and made a seltzer drink with the sour cherry juice.

"Returning," Bliss Montage, Ling Ma

[novelsforhungrypeople]

The Husband orders a red wine and I order a Diet Coke. Plates are laid out: tuna carpaccio with toasted sesame seeds, pea shoot tendrils tenderly clasping veal medallions in abstracted herb sauce, zucchini slivers dressed in mint-dill reduction. The Husband sips his wine, eats his veal while I tell him about the things my ex-boyfriends and I did all day, the art we saw, the items we bought. Dessert arrives, a vanilla torte with raspberry coulis and mascarpone cream.

"Los Angeles," Bliss Montage, Ling Ma

[novelsforhungrypeople]

He took her to an all-night conbini that was a short walk from their hotel. He bought egg salad, chicken croquette, and strawberry-and-cream sandwiches; inari; two liters of Royal Milk Tea. 'These are my favorites,' he said. They took the sandwiches up to Marx's hotel room and they spread their convenience-store feast on a towel on the bed.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin

[novelsforhungrypeople]

I closed for the day, too, and drove over to La Cienega to Rudy's Bar-B-Q, gave my name to the master of ceremonies, and waited for the big moment on a bar stool with a whiskey sour in front of me and Marek Weber's waltz music in my ears. After a while I got in past the velvet rope and ate one of Rudy's 'world-famous' Salisbury steaks, which is hamburger on a slab of burnt wood, ringed with browned-over mashed potato, supported by fried onion rings and one of those mixed up salads which men will eat with complete docility in restaurants, although they would probably start yelling if their wives tried to feed them one at home.

The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler

[novelsforhungrypeople]

Vivian picked up three raspberries from the plastic punnet, chewed them, and wiped the juice from her mouth. She'd told Luke she expected to be fed, and that she hated hotel food; accordingly, he'd stepped out to Sainsbury's Local. The bed served as their table. Cocktail sausages, vegetable samosas, sushi, fruit, a one-liter green smoothie carton, all laid out on a towel--a funny sort of breakfast, but those were the best.

The Happy Couple, Naoise Dolan

[novelsforhungrypeople]

I came out of our bedroom and kissed my husband on the cheek. He was making a grand meal. The salad had goat cheese and candied pecans and cranberries in it. The pork chops were seared and dressed in gravy. Mashed potatoes with scallions were on the side. I sat down and looked at my husband. I said, 'This meal looks divine.'

Belly Up, Rita Bullwinkel ("Harp")

[novelsforhungrypeople]

A long line from the kitchen moves the food out to the fold-out tables. There is lemonade for the kidlets. There is a great barrel of popcorn with nutritional yeast topping, mangled lettuce salad, tomato salad, tempeh salad. Bulgur wheat and bean salad. Spicy tofu salad. Yegg salad. Pasta salad. There are heaps of bread rapidly depleting. Rice and beans. Salsa. A vat of yam stew. So many pies that they will have no more preserves until harvest. Soy cream in pistachio, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry. Some of the day visitors are not so bad: some have come back from various towns laden with grapes and bananas, crates of oranges, celery sticks, great cans of peanut butter, industrial bread, which tastes like paper to Bit. Huge bags of crinkled things someone calls chips that are so salty they make him gasp. Cookies from huge boxes that taste the way batteries do when licked.

Arcadia, Lauren Groff

[novelsforhungrypeople]

A single glass of white could recall oysters and brine and lovers' spit and citrus fruits and sunburn, a glass of red grass and dirt and blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. Like the line from the poem Jude read aloud to me that afternoon in my concrete backyard, the pavement cracked with weeds, while we sat on the chipped garden furniture eating prosciutto with pearls of melon, smoked salmon with crème fraiche, cheese layered on thick crusts of bread, truffle honey, strong black coffee.

Thirst for Salt, Madelaine Lucas

[novelsforhungrypeople]

My mother had made Chinese ribs with ketchup and they had a glandular sheen, like a lacquer. Olives from a can, buttered nuts, cheese straws. Some sludgy dessert made from mandarin oranges, a recipe she'd seen in McCall's.

The Girls, Emma Cline

[novelsforhungrypeople]

Franny made fish tacos at the Crittenden family's Swiss-style château. They were the first fish tacos the others had ever eaten; Franny and Brian had had them in Baja, and Franny had watched how they were made: chunks of red snapper floured and fried, onions chopped with cilantro, fresh limes squeezed over all. She'd bought salsa at Younts: 'I hung around the Mexican food aisle to see what Mexicans liked---Herdez, mostly.

Off Course, Michelle Huneven

[novelsforhungrypeople]

Linus and I stare at the laminated menus even though we already know what we're going to order. I want a Reuben with everything and the bread buttered on both sides. I want coleslaw. First we want to share a dish of pickled herring. Our order is so obvious to us, we almost forget to tell our waitress.

Goodbye, Vitamin, Rachel Khong

[novelsforhungrypeople]

Dinner at Nortons, warm, glowing aqua candles, bright sudden pink-petaled yellow-centered asters. Swordfish and sour cream broiled (with Perry pink-faced bending over testing the taste.) Hollandaise and broccoli. Grape pie and ice cream, rich, warm. And port, sharp, sweet, startling gulped with a sudden good sting behind the eyes and a relaxing into easy laughter. Good scalding black coffee. And Dick and I at home an evening, mutually warm, rich, seething with peace.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath