Food in fiction, from fantasy stew to johnny cakes, by Gillian Polack

This last fortnight I’ve been indulging in comfort reading and comfort cooking. I need a couple of hours safety in my day in order to cope with our current interesting times. My reading time has been spent about equally in fantasy worlds and in the world of Georgette Heyer. All of this convinces me that it’s time to talk about food again.

Medlars, picture by Gillian Polack

One of the ways in which I judge the success of the invention in a novel (any novel) is how well the writer handles food. Georgette Heyer is comfort reading partly because she understands that food and the social habits that surround food are essential to her stories. She skips over many things, but seldom food. 

She doesn’t describe it rapturously or gluttonously: she uses it as an essential part of the lives of the characters. Her female characters can go whole days without ever needing to use a toilet, but when Elinor Rochdale rocks up to a strange house in The Reluctant Widow and no-one is prepared for her coming, there are only cold meats and maybe bread and butter on offer. In a well-run household there would be more choices, but the house Elinor discovers is not well run in any way. People must eat, even in poorly-run households, but people may not eat safely or may not have much in the way of choices but starvation is just that and only applies to those living in appalling circumstances. Heyer’s Regency is imaginary and so a lot of the ugly side of society is missing: no-one starves, although people may skip meals or have sadly restricted choices. Food is at the service of story.

Food in a good novel is always at the service of the novel. Even if the author doesn’t mean it to say something, it is part of the story. When an author doesn’t consider food properly and just shoves it in willy-nilly, it’s the reader who pays.

Dried barberries, picture by Trudi Canavan

Until Diana Wynne Jones mocked the ever-present stew in adventure fantasy travel in her The Tough Guide to Fantasyland travellers eating stew appeared far too often in a certain kind of fantasy novel. It was important to feed people felling tyrants or achieving noble quests, and ‘stew’ was a simple concept that worked for those who had never made a decent stew from scratch. By ‘from scratch’ I mean ‘first trap your hare and wild-harvest your carrots’. Decent stew is not a recipe suitable for exhausted people who need nourishment instantly and who are on the run or on a quest.

The writers who used stew in this way had a particular need in their writing. It wasn’t just to feed travellers. Others have used random nuts discovered (in or out of season) or stale bread to serve the same function in the story. They might be depicting a sense of camaraderie around a campfire, a feeling of solidarity or a moment of hope. A hot meal in the midst of panic gives that moment of comfort and equates in reading terms to my choice of novels right now.

Food isn’t just for keeping people alive. Not in fiction and not anywhere. It tells us what level of luxury we live in, what friends we have, how far we’re social beings and far solitary, how much we as individuals luxuriate in or ignore our senses. So if stew can’t be used in quite the way it has been in fantasy novels, what can?

Dried white mulberries, picture by Trudi Canavan

There are many choices, and they all relate to the function the food serves at that precise moment and also to the culture drawn on for the novel. When I was a child, damper was our stew-equivalent for a moment of camaraderie around a fire. Or, if we had a pan, johnny cakes. Johnny cakes are ‘journey cakes’, I suspect (though have never actually demonstrated). 

I and my friends took our sense of mood form the folklore and folksongs we were taught. This is how that bonding can be developed, even if there’s no time or capacity to cook a stew. The song that pushed me to think about journey food was called “Four little Johnny cakes” and a version of it can be found here. http://folkstream.com/042.html It’s all about comfort. All about a pause in travel for refreshment, physical and emotional. The food can be cooked quite quickly, on a single pan, or has been pre-cooked. It has associations with wandering the roads and carrying a swag: the food of swaggies or stockmen.

I’m using Australian terms quite intentionally here, for another thing that writers do when they haven’t thought through things properly is to use the language of their youth or of the fiction they write. How many US readers however, know what a squatter is or care about swaggies? The rules were different. The history is different. The words we write with are not culturally neutral. 

Picture by Gillian Polack

It’s easier to remember that these terms are not culturally neutral if I use less-familiar ones. Saying “johnny cake” in my fiction would have to be backed by some suggestion as to what a johnny cake is, for my readers might not have grown up with (probably didn’t grow up with) that song. I could use the song, or I could joke about the griddle cake Alfred burned (if it was historical fiction) or I could describe the delectable aroma, or... there are many techniques open to writers. The trick is to remember to use them. A good historical fiction novel will use a dozen in a chapter, for they are what bring the detail to life for the reader when one is talking about a distant time.

Flour and water and a bit of salt and a bit of raising agent and maybe a few currants and you have a johnny cake. It takes a very few minutes over a hot pan. If you don’t have a hot pan then you find a stick and make damper. A somewhat wetter dough, wound around the stick and then cooked over a hot fire. These are the travel foods of my childhood. We drizzled honey over our lightly burned damper and made a wonderfully sticky mess. Damper can be savoury and it can be cooked in a dying fire or a dutch oven. 

Flour and water are the traditional cooking ingredients of many travellers, because flour could be carried in a small flour bag and water is a survival necessity. Much more real than stew, in that way.

Alas, for flour and water, the writer has to work that much harder to get the sense of camaraderie around a campfire, or eating a hot meal together I a time of difficulty. Not all foodstuffs serve the same narrative goals with the same ease.

Stew is not impossible while travelling. Soup is even more possible. But they need planning, time and cooking equipment. This is where it’s really handy to look at what travellers actually ate at various times in various places in history. How far from village to village, farm to farm was it? Was it customary for stray travellers to be fed if they arrived when a meal was being served or (for whatever reason) were travellers left unwelcomed? Did voyagers steal chickens from farmers or buy them or forgo fresh meat? Did they walk into a shop and buy equipment and did that equipment include special bags to carry flour and salt and ground coffee and travel soup? Did they travel with a cart, a mule, a horse, a boat? The reader doesn’t have to know all this – if a writer develops the right model for their tale, it will make the story a lot more evocative and mean that food can be used in all the various ways: it’s not just a matter of making sure that characters don’t starve.

Research doesn’t have to be theoretical. Right now, I know a bit more about portable soup than I ought. This is because I’ve been making it. A lot. I know that chicken doesn’t work so well (the bones are too brittle) but that duck is splendid and beef bones with a little meat on are best of all. Of all the beef I tried, Belted Galloway farmed in an old-fashioned way made the best portable soup. I know the exact mount to cook it down to in order to make ‘soup glue’ which has so little moisture that it can be packed in paper and taken on board ship. One smallish cube of my portable soup makes 2-3 mugs of real soup. And I can make quite tasty soup this way. In fact, I have duck soup in my freezer right now and am using it instead of stock cubes in my stews. It makes the best stews ever. My version, however, takes three to five days to make, over low heat. There’s no way of speeding it up and still having a safe and tasty end-product. I’ve tried. It’s wonderful travel food, but it takes planning or resources.

I cook things like this on writing days. This is the wonder of the modern kitchen. I have to keep an eye on my big saucepan, but I don’t have to tend a fire. Before iron stoves were invented quite recently, it wasn’t so easy to make.

 

This explains the bread and the mutton and the johnny cakes and the fish. It also makes a kind of travel stew possible if you have a pan and a fire and some meat and some vegies. If travellers carry enough baggage and have a good cook in the company, it’s possible to have the comfort food.

It takes a lot of set-up, however. A slice off a piece of mutton bought from a farmer and a piece of bread or damper to eat it with, or a johnny cake (or four) – these are more likely for that Western European based fantasy world than a travel stew. Georgette Heyer, of course, simply finds an inn for her travellers and, if they arrive at an odd hour, someone has to argue with the innkeeper until food is produced. Food is at the service of story in a good novel, always.

History in Fantasy by Juliet McKenna

Today we have a guest post from a successfully published writer of Fantasy. History was one of her favourite subjects at school and she read Classics at St. Hilda's, Oxford. It was there that she joined the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group, which led for her as for so many others into writing her own fiction. While working as a Bookseller at the now defunct Ottakar's Juliet found recognition, through their rep, with the publisher Orbit and they offered her a two-book deal, bringing out her début, The Thief's Gamble in 1999.

“But don’t you just make it all up?” That’s a frequent comment when I mention my research for the book I’m working on. I’m an epic fantasy novelist, writing swords’n’sorcery and wizards’n’dragons. It’s not as if I’m writing a historical novel.

Let me explain. First, there’s the world building. If a fantasy writer just sketches the background, drawing on Tolkien and other genre writers, all they’ll have is a flat backdrop, as convincing as painted scenery in a school play. Do some research and the fantasy writer can create a fully realised world for the reader, a far more immersive experience than anything offered by film, TV or even the best live theatre.

These days, there’s a wealth of social and thematic history published exploring the everyday lives of real people; what they ate, what they wore, what they did for fun and entertainment.
The reader can experience the true discomforts and delays of travel by horse or carriage. They will realise how different life was when privacy was the exception and shared living, even shared beds were the norm. They see the practical implications, when the fastest means of communication is a man on a horse. Well, apart from a carrier pigeon, but don’t forget, those only go one way. And horses or pigeons, they need feeding and care, not just plugging in to recharge.

This research isn’t solitary toiling in a library. Visit galleries and stately homes to look at paintings and furniture and the fantasy writer can decorate their imagined world. Clothes and jewellery will be far more than some generic ‘gown’. Living history displays and battle re-enactors prompt vivid and realistic descriptions of sword fights. TV series like “Tales from the Green Valley” and “The Victorian Farm” give still more breadth and depth to the writer’s imagined world.

As long as the writer remembers that fantasy fans with an interest in history will most likely have watched the same programmes. Lifting material wholesale is a bad idea. Such an informed reader will also spot vague hand-waving to cover up a lack of knowledge. All the more reason to do the research.

If a fantasy world rests on shaky foundations, the reader soon realises they can’t really trust the writer. Then why should they keep on reading? Whereas, when an imagined world is fully detailed and fully convincing, that bond of trust is strong enough for the reader to follow the writer into the truly fantastic; to believe in the magic and dragons.

As long as their place in this world is thought through with the same care and attention.  Which is why I’ve read countless books on medieval universities, on the history of science when alchemy and astrology ruled, to create the city of Hadrumal where my wizards live and study. Which is why I’ve read medieval bestiaries and myths from around the world, to find out what people really believed about dragons, in those past centuries when they really believed in monsters. Don’t worry though. You won’t see more than a tenth of this in my books and you won’t notice it when you do. The most important thing about using history in fantasy is to use it with a light touch.

Historical research gives writers far more than a convincing world. Any story is about people as much as it’s about place. They influence each other. We’re all products of our time and upbringing, our paths through life influenced by our social status and the opportunities that result or which are closed to us. In turn our individual temperaments and our actions influence the world around us. This has been true for as long as mankind has existed.

Once again, we have superb resources these days. History is no longer about extolling the great deeds of great men. The lives and livelihoods of ordinary folk, the middle classes, even the criminal classes have been uncovered. In particular, the history of women has been brought into the light.

This is important for an epic fantasy writer moving on from the Tolkien template, where the affairs of kings and wizards dominate and the few visible women are defined by their relationships with the men who drive the plot. Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t think Tolkien was a woman hater. But he was a writer of the Great War generation and of his social class and we live in very different times. These days a modern reader is really going to struggle to empathise or engage with any character whose attitudes to gender, race and religion are historically authentic.

Thankfully these days a fantasy writer can read about astonishing women who defied the pressures and expectations of their times. Like Lady Jane Digby who left her husband for an Austrian prince in the 1820s and after two more husbands and numerous lovers, married an Arab sheik twenty years her junior. Once we understand what sort of woman would be so daring, and yes, the price which she would pay, then we can create convincing women to play an equal part in our epics alongside the men.

Crucially we can do that without jarring the reader out of our imagined world, without threatening that bond of trust, with implausible attitudes and reactions. Because it would be the most idiotic fantasy to write about a feisty servant girl who wakes up one morning and discards a lifetime’s upbringing to decide she really must invent feminism.

Speaking of servant girls, we now see that remarkable women don’t have to be noble. Indeed, lower class women often had far more freedom than privileged daughters whose marriages transferred their father’s wealth to some husband. These days we know that women sailed with Nelson’s navy and worked in the dockyards building his ships. We know how women contributed to the rise of science in the Enlightenment, even if their brothers and husbands got all the credit. True, these were exceptional women but stories are generally about exceptional people. Now there’s no excuse to only to write about exceptional men.

Not that everyone has to be exceptional. There will be the ordinary people, the ‘extras’. These people still need to be convincing, however limited their lives and opportunities. Hopefully those characters will also give readers pause for thought, if they think that the freedoms which men and women alike have won in the last century or so no longer need defending.

So historical research gives us convincing worlds and believable people. It also gives us ideas for plots. Not in the obvious way. Readers will soon spot someone rewriting the American Revolution and hoping that no one will notice if they change the hats and the hemlines.

It can happen with little things. When I realised the implications of carrier pigeons only going one way, I couldn’t use magic to solve that problem in that particular book. Then I saw this was an opportunity to invent people who carried pigeons from place to place. Those bird-brokers added a whole new dimension to the unfolding plot of The Aldabreshin Compass.

It can happen on a much bigger scale. In “The Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution”, I wanted to write a story about a divided society, where hatred and grudges persist through generation. About the people involved making their own situation worse without even realising. About the people looking on from outside with no good reason to intervene or even be benefitting from those quarrels.

So I read up on the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, a thousand years of Irish history, a century of division over Israel and Palestine and these past few decades of upheaval in the Balkans. I would never have dared write a novel about any of those times or places though. Just getting the detail right would be nigh on impossible. Inconvenient facts would wreck the drama I was trying to shape. Whatever side I was on, or if I refused to take a side, people would read whatever I said in the light of their own pre-conceptions.

But writing about the Lescari Civil Wars meant I could tell exactly the story I wanted to, with men and women from different classes and rival dukedoms coming together to fight against the intractable suffering their families endured. All that research made the story, the people, the places, the twists and surprises, all the more convincing. Here the use of history in writing fantasy goes beyond offering mere entertainment. The more convincing such a story is, the greater the chances that the readers will think a little more deeply about the next news report on some real-world strife. 

Now I’m writing a new trilogy. Those wizards in their scholarly city are facing the greatest challenge of their generation. It’s always been agreed that magic has no place in warfare. How long can that principle hold when corsairs are raiding the Caladhrian coast, stealing and burning? If the Archmage’s Edict is defied, what then?

Here I’m drawing on the decade and more of research which I’ve done since writing my first book. Because history is full of tipping points prompted by the use or abuse of power, whether that’s political or technological or both. Whether it’s wielded by those in authority or by some uprising to challenge the establishment. So that’s why this new series really had to be called ‘The Hadrumal Crisis’.

                                                                www.julietmckenna.com