Imagine sitting down to a lavish meal with a vow “to be silent upon all matters of food and drink”. This is the resolve of Martina and her sister Philippa when their housekeeper decides to cook a “real French dinner” in Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen. As Babette brings in blinis Demidoff, turtle soup, cailles en sarcophage, as she refills glasses with Veuve Clicquot 1860, the guests remain silent. But then, something happens: “Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity.” Lifelong feuds are forgotten, old resentments laid to rest in this quintessential tale about the power of food, where the dinner table becomes the scene of a love affair “in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety!”
Reading Rawi Hage is like going to a wild party. Beirut Hellfire Society is a celebration of irreverence: people disdain religion, push through funeral processions, chuckle at burials, dance around coffins, have sex in cemeteries. War rages and destroys, but humour and desire remain irrepressible. “Laughter should be permissible under all circumstances,” reflects the main character, Pavlov. Hage tests this notion, drawing the reader into scenes of revenge, gluttony, loneliness, carnal excess – showing how even in extremis one is never far from a joke. All the while, his language explodes like the bombs falling on Beirut.
“Telling a recipe takes greater art than telling a joke,” observes Leo Auberg in Herta Müller’s novel The Hunger Angel. When he is deported from his home in Romania to a Soviet labour camp, privation defines Leo’s life, and profligacy rules his imagination. Fantasies of food haunt this story. Inmates talk most about eating when hunger is at its peak. The recipes they exchange each take “three acts, like a play”. These are more than a roll call of ingredients: they contain histories, lost loves and lives, endless longing. They taunt the body but nourish the deep human need to be heard and understood, to share and to survive. It is a story whose richness resides in its stark, spare telling.
“If translation is like a table,” as Kate Briggs writes, then with This Little Art she has set it with the most glorious spread. She shares morsels that show the delicious connections between languages, and invites us to join her in chewing over the complexities of translation – no little art at all, but a vast enterprise held up by countless visible and invisible supports. The translator, she says, is a “producer of relations”, as she views writers, philosophers, translators, lovers and ideas through the prism of her own experiences. “The English-speaking world is not the world,” Briggs reminds us – there is so much more to feast on!
Scrambled tofu akuri; cauliflower, pomegranate and pistachio salad; chocolate damson cake: I’ve made these three dishes often this year – both for friends and when eating alone. The fabulous cookbooks in which I found my hero trio of recipes – Meera Sodha’s East, Yotam Ottolenghi’s Simple and Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries II – are a little dented at the edges, their ribbon markers are frayed, their pages marked with stains. They are my trusted co-conspirators, irresistible companions offering endless inspiration to feast.
• Priya Basil’s Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity is published by Canongate (RRP £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
