From Roald Dahl to Anthony Bourdain, the author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest writes about the best descriptions of – and recipes for – food to switch on ‘the lamp in the spine’
• Read more authors’ top 10s
“A good dinner is of importance to good talk,” Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”
Written in 1928, the context of this statement was provocative – Woolf was distraught at the substandard fare at a women’s college and viewed it emblematic of the institutionalised sexism that seemed to desire women – the penultimate sentence in this quote has been an axiom of sorts in our comparatively less begrimed era. On its own, Woolf’s famous sentence seems like more than just a nod to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: “dined” as opposed to “eaten” connotes pleasure, intent, and discernment. While plenty of writers throughout history would have been extraordinarily happy with a meal of beef and prunes, the word “well” can certainly mean whatever the modern writer prefers. I’m sure there exist many great books that were fuelled by whisky and Pop-Tarts.
0 comments:
Post a Comment