Darling Shelley invited me to guest
post on her blog about food. Food my characters eat. Curiously, in my first
trilogy, SIREN SUICIDES, there is
hardly any talk of food except human souls, which is what sirens sing out of
people, for, well, nourishment. But in my second novel ROSEHEAD a 12 year old American girl, Lilith
Bloom, and her talking whippet Panther, travel from Boston to Berlin for a
family reunion, and there they pig out on hearty German food, which is
partially inspired by my own memories of traveling from Moscow to Berlin (I was
11) and marveling at the abundance of food unlike what I have ever seen in my
life, considering the fact that while I devoured fat German sausages, most
Russians had to get food by coupons.
Upon arriving for the first time for breakfast, Lilith approached it uncertainly:
Upon arriving for the first time for breakfast, Lilith approached it uncertainly:
She expected breakfast to be the usual American fare,
but what she saw made her gasp with glee. The table offered all kinds of
jam, marmalade, syrup, and nugat-crème; plates of rolls, bowls of yoghurt,
and trays of freshly made waffles that issued a delicious smell.
In
contrast to this, Panther tells Lilith that he eats mastiffs for breakfast, as
a joke. You see, there is a vicious mastiff in the mansion, and, of course,
there is an immediate rivalry between the two, although later Panther primarily
eats raw steak, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, because both Lilith
and Panther very much like Holmes and Watson, investigate the cause for the
rose garden surrounding the mansion to behave strangely, and suspect it to be
carnivorous, there are also many instances when Lilith is close to losing her
breakfast, although she never does. She often skips lunch, her and her dog,
traversing in the midst of foul smelling greenery, hoping to find the cause for
both the stink and the noises the flowers produce. If it were me, I certainly
would prefer to do said activity on an empty stomach.
There remains the case of dinners.
On most days, exhausted and scratched all over (remember, this is a rose garden
we're talking about), Lilith and Panther usually came back to the mansion to
eat dinner, and, funny enough, Lilith requested breakfast for dinner, nostalgic
of American food:
“Can
I please have breakfast for dinner?” She said to the housekeeper. “I’d like an omelet with cheese, American style, with bacon, sausage and
blueberry pancakes on the side. Oh, and a bowl of steak for Panther.”
They
do, however, eat the typical German sausage, the bratwursts, and
rostbratwursts, blutwursts, bockwursts, knckwursts, leberwursts, and, of
course, potatoes, fried potatoes, potato salad, potato pancakes and the
like, with mustard. Well, now my mouth is watering from just writing this.
Panther manages to steal the sausage right off Lilith's fork, all the while
telling her (he is a talking dog, after all) that he would prefer squirrels,
that he even dreams of squirrels:
“It was the most beautiful dream I’ve
ever seen! I was chasing
squirrels, a dozen fat juicy squirrels.” He rolled up his eyes. “Then I
caught them, they tasted like—” (He gets interrupted and sadly we never
find out what exactly they tasted like.)
There
are also macabre and grotesque references to unusual food images, like this
one:
“Whatever happened to your beret?” Gabby asked suddenly. “I thought
I saw you put it on this morning."
Lilith
inhaled, exhaled, and resorted to the only defense she had against her
mother’s wrath. “Wild elephants ate it, mother. They thought it was a
gigantic strawberry from Mars. In fact, the garden was full of them.
Elephants, not strawberries. I’m dreadfully sorry we missed dinner.
We watched them do a private ballet performance for us.
In tutus. Right, Panther?” Panther raised his ears and flashed her a look
that could only mean, Did you really say, elephants in tutus?”
I think in all, I had fun writing in food
choices into ROSEHEAD and playing with them. And now I will go make myself some
German sausage, because all this writing about German food made me hungry. So
thanks for reading, and bye. *opens the fridge*
Thanks for stopping by to share your food for thought, Ksenia!
You can find Ksenia and her books here:
I had to much fun writing this, thanks for interviewing me!
ReplyDeleteThis looks like a fun escape read. Thanks for posting.
ReplyDelete