Vinnie Hansen's Blog - Posts Tagged "smollett"
Smollett & the Modern Gustatory Mystery
When Steve, an eccentric local publisher, invited me to join his spring literary soiree, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse. The group would discuss Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett. I’d never heard of the book, and had never read Smollett. That alone was enough to entice me. But Steve had also helped me enormously over the years with the publication of my mysteries.
Because my mysteries have food words in the titles, Steve assigned me the topic “Smollett & the Modern Gustatory Mystery.”
Gulp.
Yet, food is elemental in writing, appealing to our sense of taste, and characterizing with each mouthful. Does the protagonist eat rare steak or tofu? Sue Grafton’s heroine, private investigator Kinsey Milhone, eats peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. What does that tell us about her? She’s accustomed to dining alone, has little food in the ‘frig, and is not afraid to experiment. Martha Grime’s Aunt Agatha gobbles up all the petit fours and fairy cakes on the tea tray. Her picky freeloading consumption captures most of what we need to know about her character, and tea, of course, persuades us the book is British (although Martha Grimes is American). S.J. Rozen’s private detective Lydia Chin lives dutifully at home with her mom who communicates her feelings by what she prepares for dinner. Dim Sum and all is good. Food is so predominate in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Series that spinoffs include cookbooks, so we can all prepare the pumpkin stew apparently popular in Botswana. Even one’s taste in mystery is subdivided gastronomically into hard-boiled or soft-boiled.
Humphrey Clinker is not a mystery. The story relates a road trip through England and Scotland in the 1700’s. The epistolary style offers five fictional characters composing the letters, giving various perspectives on the stops along the way. The main character Matthew Bramble is piercingly sarcastic, but I often only half understood his political and cultural barbs because the time is so foreign to me. However, when Matthew Bramble turns his attention to food and drink, as he often does, he is hilarious. Here he is on the subject of the waters at Bath: “But I am now as much afraid of drinking, as of bathing; for, after a long conversation with the Doctor, about the construction of the pump and the cistern, it is very far from being clear with me, that the patients in the Pumproom don’t swallow the scouring of the bathers. I can’t help suspecting, that there is, or may be, some regurgitation from the bath into the cistern of the pump. In that case, what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat, and dirt, and dandruff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below.”
Food and drink have the omniscient power to cross cultural barriers and to span the chasm of time. Breaking bread or sharing a toast offer powerful connections in our lives, and to the worlds we encounter when we open a book.
Because my mysteries have food words in the titles, Steve assigned me the topic “Smollett & the Modern Gustatory Mystery.”
Gulp.
Yet, food is elemental in writing, appealing to our sense of taste, and characterizing with each mouthful. Does the protagonist eat rare steak or tofu? Sue Grafton’s heroine, private investigator Kinsey Milhone, eats peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. What does that tell us about her? She’s accustomed to dining alone, has little food in the ‘frig, and is not afraid to experiment. Martha Grime’s Aunt Agatha gobbles up all the petit fours and fairy cakes on the tea tray. Her picky freeloading consumption captures most of what we need to know about her character, and tea, of course, persuades us the book is British (although Martha Grimes is American). S.J. Rozen’s private detective Lydia Chin lives dutifully at home with her mom who communicates her feelings by what she prepares for dinner. Dim Sum and all is good. Food is so predominate in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Series that spinoffs include cookbooks, so we can all prepare the pumpkin stew apparently popular in Botswana. Even one’s taste in mystery is subdivided gastronomically into hard-boiled or soft-boiled.
Humphrey Clinker is not a mystery. The story relates a road trip through England and Scotland in the 1700’s. The epistolary style offers five fictional characters composing the letters, giving various perspectives on the stops along the way. The main character Matthew Bramble is piercingly sarcastic, but I often only half understood his political and cultural barbs because the time is so foreign to me. However, when Matthew Bramble turns his attention to food and drink, as he often does, he is hilarious. Here he is on the subject of the waters at Bath: “But I am now as much afraid of drinking, as of bathing; for, after a long conversation with the Doctor, about the construction of the pump and the cistern, it is very far from being clear with me, that the patients in the Pumproom don’t swallow the scouring of the bathers. I can’t help suspecting, that there is, or may be, some regurgitation from the bath into the cistern of the pump. In that case, what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat, and dirt, and dandruff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below.”
Food and drink have the omniscient power to cross cultural barriers and to span the chasm of time. Breaking bread or sharing a toast offer powerful connections in our lives, and to the worlds we encounter when we open a book.
