Most Ludicrous Food in Fiction?
Here’s my nominee for the Most Ludicrous Food in Fiction stakes:
It comes from a novel called The Zenda Vendetta by Simon Hawke, one of a series in which a bunch of “Time Commandos” go on missions to different times and places in history to stop bad guys messing up the time-space continuum. In this one, they are - you guessed it - in Ruritania; the bad guys have infiltrated the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda, and the commandos have to infiltrate it too in order to combat them. One of the boys is impersonating Rudolf Rassendyll; he meets King Rudolf of Ruritania, is invited to dine with him in his quaint Central European hunting lodge, where:
"They sat down to a sumptuous feast of venison steak which had been smoked, potatoes roasted in an open fire, fresh baked bread and blackberry jam, baked beans, and Yorkshire pudding."
Now, WTF is going on there? What could the author possibly have been thinking of?
- For a start, some of it is literally impossible. You can’t roast potatoes in an open fire. And although you can smoke any cut of venison you like, you can’t cook smoked venison in any way that you would then describe as “steak” - e.g. you wouldn’t grill or fry it.
- Baked beans? Yorkshire pudding? Whether you take Ruritania to be ethnically German, Slav, or even Hungarian, those quintessentially Anglo-Saxon dishes could have no possible business there.
- Can anyone imagine “feasting sumptuously” on such a weird jumble of foods anyway? You certainly wouldn’t eat them together, and I can’t imagine a logical sequence for them (anyway, nobody serves Yorkshire pudding without some gravy for it to soak up). If anybody here can see any logic to this meal, do tell!
After that it’s something of an anticlimax to find that when the character who is pretending to be the King of Ruritania goes to the Ruritanian capital by railway to be crowned, he insists on having breakfast at the station restaurant and is served a "breakfast of shirred eggs with biscuits and gravy"! It’s my understanding that these are both traditional breakfast dishes in the southern USA (confirmation please?); but nothing like either of them forms any part of a Central or Eastern European breakfast.
It comes from a novel called The Zenda Vendetta by Simon Hawke, one of a series in which a bunch of “Time Commandos” go on missions to different times and places in history to stop bad guys messing up the time-space continuum. In this one, they are - you guessed it - in Ruritania; the bad guys have infiltrated the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda, and the commandos have to infiltrate it too in order to combat them. One of the boys is impersonating Rudolf Rassendyll; he meets King Rudolf of Ruritania, is invited to dine with him in his quaint Central European hunting lodge, where:
"They sat down to a sumptuous feast of venison steak which had been smoked, potatoes roasted in an open fire, fresh baked bread and blackberry jam, baked beans, and Yorkshire pudding."
Now, WTF is going on there? What could the author possibly have been thinking of?
- For a start, some of it is literally impossible. You can’t roast potatoes in an open fire. And although you can smoke any cut of venison you like, you can’t cook smoked venison in any way that you would then describe as “steak” - e.g. you wouldn’t grill or fry it.
- Baked beans? Yorkshire pudding? Whether you take Ruritania to be ethnically German, Slav, or even Hungarian, those quintessentially Anglo-Saxon dishes could have no possible business there.
- Can anyone imagine “feasting sumptuously” on such a weird jumble of foods anyway? You certainly wouldn’t eat them together, and I can’t imagine a logical sequence for them (anyway, nobody serves Yorkshire pudding without some gravy for it to soak up). If anybody here can see any logic to this meal, do tell!
After that it’s something of an anticlimax to find that when the character who is pretending to be the King of Ruritania goes to the Ruritanian capital by railway to be crowned, he insists on having breakfast at the station restaurant and is served a "breakfast of shirred eggs with biscuits and gravy"! It’s my understanding that these are both traditional breakfast dishes in the southern USA (confirmation please?); but nothing like either of them forms any part of a Central or Eastern European breakfast.