Good Enough to Eat

I'm swooning over this beautiful new book. Maybe because it's almost lunchtime and what I'm really feeling is faintness from hunger, but I doubt it.

Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature's Most Memorable Meals  by Dinah Fried

 Using meals from some of literature's biggest heavyweights, Dinah Fried has created a work of art.  She's cooked, arranged, and photographed each meal with unbelievable attention to detail.  Each photograph is accompanied with the text from the original novel, and interesting facts about the books and the food. 

In her introduction she says, "Many of my most vivid memories from books are of the meals the characters eat.  I read Heidi more than twenty years ago but I can still taste the golden, cheesy toast that her grandfather serve her..."

She's right, for some reason, when I think of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, what I remember most is the decadent meal that Tracy Bacon brings Sammy Clay at the top of the Empire State Building.  The cream of watercress soup, and steamed asparagus in holandaise sauce, the melted baked Alaska; I can see it and taste it all so clearly.

This book reminds me of an eighth grade project I once had.  My classmates and I had to prepare a meal based on Dickens' Great Expectations. We chose to make scones, and then blew out my mom's electric mixer.  She was not happy.  From the looks of this book, Fried had much better luck.