And speaking of food… there is nothing quite like a description of magical victuals, is there? This scene comes from a Feast (which always precedes a Revel) on page 120 in The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There.
“The central boulevard of Tain, which A-Through-L could have told them was called Fool’s Silver, erupted with long tables full of the delights of a dozen cuisines. Goblin tarts and Nuno honey in rock-crystal jars, steaming Spriggan pies of heartberry and blisspeach and pumpkin and moonkin that got bigger and smaller as you grasped for them, green and healthful Gnome soups overflowing with hexweed, passionpoppy leaves, thrallbulbs, memory-mums, and ropes of good, sweet basil and sage. Glashtyn oatcakes and hay-muffins with golden crusts, Dryad rain-stews and sunnydaise sauces, braided flame-bread for Ifrits and seastone pastries for Marids, genuine cloud-roasts and piles of grilled dunkel-fish and the Jarlhoppes’ special feverblossom coffee. The Scotch-wights had been saving their best Pining Peat for the occasion—and of course the Wyverns’ beloved radishes scattered here and there on the tables like drops of blood, among charm-tortes shaped just exactly like old books, brown and buttered and crackling.”
Oh, that passage makes me hungry! Hungry for the food of never, of dreaming and seeming. I might try a little baking magic of my own one of these days and come up with a recipe for Spriggan pies or Gnome soups (I’m sure it would involve wishing).
Tell me, have you ever been tempted by otherworldly dishes as described in a book?
Interested in other food-related posts? Check out Beth Fish Reads’ Weekend Cooking!
