A great literary banquet or how to sit at the table with Hemingway, Irène Némirovsky and 50 other authors

The smell of borscht from the courtyard of the Pustaválov house, which Chekhov refers to in his story Dear; the plate of chops, roast potatoes and sliced ​​tomato that Sam Spade, the detective protagonist of The maltese falcon, eats at John's Grill in San Francisco, the same one frequented by author Dashiell Hammett; or the laborious stew boeuf en daube with which in to the lighthouse Mrs Ramsay entertains her guests and is worried because they arrive late and this threatens to spoil the evening, according to Virginia Woolf, they are recreated in all their literary and gastronomic splendor in Author's cuisine, recipes for reading lovers (North Slope). “We think of this book as a game for people who love to read. The books weighed more than the food, but we also sought a balance between fish, meat and vegetarian dishes,” explains the writer Berta Vias Mahou on the phone, co-author with her husband Antón Casariego, of this peculiar cookbook-literary anthology. It is one of the first titles of Ladera Norte publishing housewhich Casariego has launched with his sister Sira and editor Ricardo Cayuela.

From García Márquez's Colonel Buendía's stewed meat to Harper Lee's fried chicken, to sea bass in sauce from Catopard of Lampedusa, the stuffed cabbage leaves of James Joyce, the herring in a fur coat by Gogol or the Tafelspitz of the von Trottas in The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, this review of great classics of world literature, with a tablecloth in between, mainly covers the 19th and 20th centuries, with the notable exceptions of Cervantes and Diderot. There are European and American authors (the trout that Hemingway's characters eat in Spain, the lemon chicken by Silvina Ocampo or the shrimp chupe by Conversation in the Cathedral by Vargas Llosa). And the genres are varied: detective novel (Georges Simenon and his quiche Lorraine, Agatha Christie and Dab Veronique), Love (Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen, Anna Karenina of Tolstoy), there are diaries (Marisa Madieri), poetry (Pablo Neruda and his Ode to conger caldillo and even philosophical dialogues (Diderot with Jacques the fatalist and his master).

In his literary-gastronomic canon, Vias says that they have sought equality — “there are an equal number of men and women” — although he recognizes that in many cases he detects in female writers that they give less importance to food, perhaps because they have had “ “a certain aversion to being called housewives.” She is particularly proud of having included hake in muslin sauce in the book. The fires of autumn, by Irène Némirovsky, already the first writer to receive the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Selma Lagerlöf, with her roasted salmon with volovanes.

“We started with a few dishes that we knew should be there, like the quail in a sarcophagus of Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen, Proust's jellied beef or Fannie Flagg's fried green tomatoes,” explains Vias Mahou, translator from French and German, something that, she acknowledges, has weighed on the selection of works. This is a personal menu of literary and gastronomic tastes in which Vias and Casariego expand as hosts. Therein lies the originality of this work, which brings together books and authors whose fame can be intimidating, as well as recipes—all for main courses—that are quite elaborate. And if on the literary level they offer, without stuffiness or pedantry, the necessary information to explain who the author is, what his novel is about and how that food appears, on the gastronomic level they propose accompaniments, give advice to make the recipe more economical and show the same enlightened casualness.

Vias explains that there have been some authors who are among his favorites from whom he has not been able to get a plate for this book. Take Kafka as an example — “he's a hunger artist, so he makes sense” — and Conrad — “only disgusting soups appear in his books” —. More than in her work as a translator, it was in her work as a writer that the broth for this volume arose. “While she was working on They came to look for him (Cliff), a book in which I reconstruct the last days of Albert Camus, whom I call Jacques after the character of The first manI discovered that the day he died in the car accident he had eaten black pudding empanada with apple compote at the Hôtel de Paris et de la Poste in Sens. It was a dish that my mother prepared and I put it in my book, with a recipe included , making my mother the owner of the restaurant,” he explains.

That recipe is not in Signature cuisine, nor any other by Camus, but it was the French intellectual who gave them the thread that they pulled for years: “Antón was rescuing dishes that we found in novels. He shared a love of cooking with my mother.” Maysa Mahou, a reader of black and pink novels, got married without knowing how to cook and her husband was no gourmet, but he developed a crazy passion for the kitchen and for the art of setting the table, with menus on any given day of 10 courses. All of this is reflected in this book, for which Vias and Casariego not only gathered the information, bought the ingredients and prepared the recipes, but also set up the tables with details that refer to the author and the book in question, and took them the photographs themselves. “It has been a year against the clock with shopping, cooking a
nd props. A marathon to get the recipes, finish the selection and translate the texts where those foods appear,” he says. There was some mishap, some plate that didn't turn out round, but they managed to save it for the photo, she remembers with amusement. The stoves are mostly Casariego's work, perhaps because the expertise of her mother—who sent her to school with a carrot, a pickled pickle, and a boiled potato as a snack, which made her a celebrity in the playground—was an element deterrent for Berta.

His proposal of 52 recipes is an invitation to make one per week for a year — “and for everyone to change or improvise whatever they want” —. With this intention, they include a space for notes at the end of the book for the reader, so that they can write down “when, with whom, how” on the blank index cards they have left for each author. “We like that game and the idea is to invite friends, enjoy without worries,” concludes Vias. Who knows if there is the beginning of new novels.

_