The Take-Away in Literature

It was a nice little dinner ...being entirely furnished forth from the coffee-house 

(Great Expectations, Charles Dickens)

Until I visited Pompeii - during a holiday on the Amalfi coast a few years ago - I had always assumed take-aways were a recent invention.  But in the ancient Italian city devastated by the  volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD the streets were lined with thermopolia, service counters opening onto the street where people could buy food to take away.  There were more than 200 of these in Pompeii, and the remains of houses show few traces of kitchen and dining areas, suggesting that cooking at home was unusual.

Eating Out

I love eating out almost as much as I love cooking.  And living in London as I do, I'm lucky enough to have an amazing array of restaurants within easy reach offering me all types of food.  
And it's not just dining in fine establishments - which to be honest I hardly ever do - which I enjoy.  I love cafes, pub food, pizza chains and so on.  It's partly the social element - since my eating out in London is always with friends or family - but also the enjoyment of having someone cook (and perhaps more importantly wash up and tidy away!) for me.

Thinking back over the posts I have written I realise there have been very references to eating out.  Shakespeare's comic creation Falstaff, whom I wrote about here, eats and drinks regularly at the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap and, although I did not blog about it, in Pride and Prejudice Jane and Elizabeth Bennet break a journey from London to Hertfordshire at an inn and dine at 'a table set out with such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords'.

Midnight Feasts

When we went upstairs to bed, [Steerforth] produced the whole seven shillings' worth, and laid it out on my bed in the moonlight, saying: 
'There you are, young Copperfield, and a royal spread you've got.'

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

As a child I longed to go to boarding school.  Not because I hated my family, but because of the books I read about boarding school life.

The ones that stand out in my memory are the Malory Towers and St Clare's series by Enid Blyton. The varied personalities of the schoolgirls - who always included at least one 'foreigner' for added glamour - coupled with the eccentric teachers, created a tantalising world that was  so far removed from my Devon schooldays.  And the 'fun and mischief' they got up to - as it says on the blurb of my ancient copy of Third Year at Malory Towers - was equally appealing to my diligent and well-behaved nine year-old self;  I would never dare to be naughty, but I could live vicariously through Blyton's creations.

Eating someone else's food

When we had done, [the waiter] brought me a pudding, and having set it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become absent in his mind for some moments.
'How's the pie?' he said, rousing himself.
'It's a pudding', I made answer. 
'Pudding!' he exclaimed.  'Why, bless me, so it is!  What!' looking at it nearer.  'You don't mean to say it's a batter-pudding!'
'Yes, it is indeed.'
'Why, a batter-pudding,' he said, taking up a table-spoon, 'is my favourite pudding!  Ain't that lucky?  Come on, little 'un, and let's see who'll get most.'
The waiter certainly got most.   David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Why is it so often the case that what someone else is eating is so much more enticing than what is on our own plate?   I have vivid memories of primary school lunches when I would have done just about anything to eat my friend's white sliced bread sandwiches and chocolate bar rather than my Mum's home-made soup, though nowadays I think I got the better deal.

And how much more difficult it must be if you have nothing to eat, but all around you is food, as is the case with the waiter in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1849-50).

Christmas Cake

Christmas is a favourite time of year in literature, with its appearance serving many different narrative functions.  It provides an occasion for characters to be reunited - as in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) where Tom Tulliver returns from school to his family.  Christmas can also provide drama, such as the Christmas meal in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861), during which the soldiers hunting the escaped prisoners - including Magwitch, whom the protagonist Pip has supplied with his sister's Christmas pork pie - arrive and disrupt proceedings.  In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published 18 years earlier in 1843 Christmas provides the motivation and opportunity for personal change, with the miserly Scrooge learning to love and give after he is visited by an array of ghosts.