I've written about LITERARY MEALS in the past, and a favorite topic of mine has always been breakfast in novels set outside of America, and here's a great article on a woman's childhood fantasy of running away from home and into the arms of great food:
But the type of book I liked best as a middle-grade, middle-class, middle-risk child always managed to combine the independence of running away with the conveniences of a secure household: Lucy Pevensie bolts out of England through the wardrobe and straight into afternoon tea; the Kincaid siblings tuck themselves into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and subsequently tuck into pie and coffee from the automat; Jesse’s terrifyingly extravagant three-dollar lunch in Bridge to Terabithia; even Ramona Quimby’s “tongue surprise” had an otherworldly appeal, as the only tongue I’d ever chewed had been my own, to say nothing of her basement feast of apples; the hoarded blueberries and river-cold bottles of milk available to the Boxcar Children, whose tenure in the boxcar was disappointingly brief; Heidi’s endless supply of toasted-cheese sandwiches; the dizzying array of savory pies available to Bilbo Baggins.
This paragraph struck me:
Unlike my own ziplocked lunches, the sandwiches in these stories always seemed to arrive wrapped carefully in either waxed or buttered paper, often with a single ingredient: cheese sandwich, egg sandwich, ham sandwich. Cakes wrapped in napkins, stored in pockets that by necessity must have been bigger and more capacious than any pocket I’d ever worn in my life.
Personally, I feel like every single book I read as a kid in which the main character went ANYWHERE overnight meant he or she would at some point be opening up a shoelace-tied shoebox that included fried chicken meticulously wrapped in waxed paper along with a slice of pie.
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