Eating and Food

Does eating and food have a special place in Historicals?

The thread on the main novel board makes me wonder about this, partly because my characters spend some of their time starving, making food an important motivator in the plot. Also, what they eat, how they find or grow their food is equally important. The difference between the ready accessibilty of food in the present and the major problems with food sources in the past seems to me a major difference, as important as the slower and more erratic methods of communication, transportation, and technology in general. If a writer ignores food and eating, the story loses its authenticity.

The phrase "to put food on the table" has come to mean making money, but in the past it meant hunting and tilling the soil or bartering, time consuming and labor intensive activities, activities essential to sustaining life.

So I am wondering if others give rather more attention to food than writers of contemporary fiction, or do they consider too mundane?

Here is a bit from one of my scenes:


Og took the towel and spoke in a low voice. "I’m not to trumpet it about, but I’m worried about the stores. ‘Tis a nightmare. When I pried up the lids on several barrels, such a stench arose as you wouldn’t believe. The grain not eaten by rats is full of worms and rot. We can’t eat such stuff. Likely,’twould poison pigs."


How about the rest of you? How important is food to your plot or to your story?
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Willowmound said:

Oh definitely.

Historicals do something besides telling a great story. They teach a little, about other times and/or other places. It's what most readers of historicals look for, I think. I certainly do.

And you need those details anyway to bring these other places/times to life.

The reason food insn't interesting in a contemporary story, is because we all know what that food is like. How it's made. Where it came from.

Not so in historicals. Egypt 2000 BC? Scandinavia in the year 807? Shanghai in the middle of the nineteenth century? Or just what your grandparent's parents ate. It would have been different. And thus, interesting.

Click to expand...

Have we ever discussed the "interesting" to "dramatic" ratio in historicals?

Dorothy Hartley's books really interest me--they are written with considerable verve--but there is nothing dramatic about them. Perhaps that is part of why i brought up this subject, because I was wondering about the weight of scenes about food. I have a scene in another book where peaches are in season, a cause for celebration. I put it in for several reasons, but it has no conflict, is esssentially a period enhancer. is it interesting? No more than Proust's madelines, but it seems to me to be evocative and to anchor a rare and seasonal pleasure.

As Matt sanded a board the next morning, the tantalizing odor of cooking fruit wafted into the shop. When the men went to dinner at midday, the kitchen smelled of peaches. Matt breathed in the scent of the sweet fruit and said, "It smells like summer in Daventry, Mistress Ridley."

And in my WIP, a similar passage:

As the day grew hotter, the young men and boys roamed the beach and the settlement, gawking at the dark-skinned natives in their colorful garments. Matt bought fresh bananas, strange-looking, sweet-smelling fruit with a bright yellow skin that peeled off to expose a white fruit with such tiny black seeds they could eat the whole thing scarcely even chewing. He gorged himself on the treat before he tried the mangoes, which looked like a peach but smelled and tasted entirely different. Unlike the banana, the mango had a huge hard seed in the middle, but the sweet, pulpy flesh oozed juice so delicious he licked it from his lips and fingers when it spurted out. This was what he had hoped travel would be, new sights and tastes. He sighed with contentment.

Though such scenes lack drama, they seem essential to create the attitudes of the time.