When Shelley asked me to write about the food in my Screwing Up Time series, I was excited.
Probably
because I’m a foodie and so food plays an integral role in my time travel
novels. Henry, the main character in my time travel novels, is always dealing
with food. If it’s not because of his mom, a dyed-in-the-wool, organic health
food nut, who serves tofu-turkey for Thanksgiving or his sister Kate and her
midnight trips for fries and Whoppers, it’s the food he encounters while he travels
in other times and places.
After all, how can you visit the Middle Ages and not
experience eel pie or a cockentrice (a combination of a pig and a chicken sewn
together and cooked)? Because let’s face it, cockentrice is cool. And eel pie
is just weird.
But food is more than setting and characterization. It’s
also part of what drives the story. Even in our real lives, food is part of the
plot. At holiday times, we come together to share a meal. Engagements happen
over candle-lit dinners. Even many religious ceremonies like Communion and
Passover involve food. So too, food helps drive the plots of in the Screwing Up Time series. In Screwing Up Babylon, a monkey with the
aim of a Yankees’ pitcher in a pendant-winning year nails people with limes in
Babylon. And when the beast is tamed with candied orange peel, Henry discovers
the key to rescuing a woman from the harem. Or in one of my favorite scenes
from Screwing Up Alexandria, Henry steals
a mug of Sumerian beer so he can mix up a time travel elixir and save the woman
he loves from being sacrificed.
Oddly enough, the food in my novels often drives the plot of
my own life. Because if I’m going to write about ancient beers, candied orange
peel, and eel pies, I have to know how they taste. The beer was great. Candied
orange peel is delicious. And eel pie…okay, I didn’t really make eel pie. But I
ate smoked eel, which is probably close enough, and it was surprisingly good.
Thanks for stopping by to share your food for thought, Connie!
You can find Connie here:
