A quiz on food and feasts in literature
As we head into high food season, which only just begins at Thanksgiving and stretches (along with our waistlines) for six weeks, test your knowledge of some key moments in literature where a dish, a meal, or an experience at the table left a lasting impression.
1. In “A Gentleman in Moscow,” Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, under house arrest for life in the Hotel Metropol, meets young Nina at the Piazza, a glamorous restaurant in the hotel. When he is seated, she explains she is meeting her father later for dinner and has already ordered an appetizer. “‘Quite sensible,’ said the Count.” What did Nina order?
a. Caviar and blini
b. A small tower of ice cream
c. Salat Olivier
d. Borscht
2. In “Crying in H Mart,” Michelle Zauner recounts the story of caring for her sick mother but not knowing how to cook the Korean dishes her mother craved during chemotherapy. Zauner did eventually learn some of those specialties. Who taught her to cook?
a. A local Korean chef
b. Her mom’s favorite cookbook
c. YouTube instructional videos
d. Her grandmother
3. “The Norman countryside struck me as quintessentially French, in an indefinable way,” writes Julia Child in “My Life in France” about her first visit. It was more striking than anything she’d seen in a film or magazine, with few cars, hundreds of bicycles, cultivated fields. She and husband Paul had lunch in Rouen at Restaurant La Couronne, which they found in the Guide Michelin. After, she writes, “It was the most exciting meal of my life.” What did Julia dine on?
a. Canard à la Rouennaise
b. Escalope à la Normande
c. Sole meunière
d. Tripes à la mode de Caen
4. In Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” the protagonist makes a once-in-a-lifetime meal for the communicants of a strict Lutheran sect in rural Denmark among whom she has found a home as a refugee from the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. Its centerpiece, her signature dish, was which of the following?
a. Quiche Lorraine
b. Ile Flottante
c. Bouillabaisse
d. Cailles en Sarcophage
5. What Dickens character, confronted by an apparition, says: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”?
a. Ebenezer Scrooge
b. Mr. Micawber
c. Alexandre Manette
d. Inspector Bucket
6. In “Heartburn,” Nora Ephron’s revenge novel about her ex, journalist Carl Bernstein, the heroine is a food columnist named Rachel Samstat, married to journalist Mark Feldman. Seven-months pregnant, Rachel finds out Mark is having an affair. She leaves, then returns, finds out he’s still cheating, and throws something at him. What is it?
a. Key lime pie
b. Bowl of pasta
c. Tossed salad
d. Glass of wine
7. In 1940, when Nazis march into Paris in “All the Light We Cannot See,” Marie-Laure, a blind girl, and her father, Daniel, join thousands of others in an epic exodus from the city. The two are en route to family in Brittany and stop in a hay field west of Versailles to sleep. Daniel opens his rucksack to pull out food. What does he feed Marie-Laure?
a. A wedge of cheese
b. An apple
c. A cookie
d. Bread and sausage
8. On Christmas in “Little Women,” Marmee tells her daughters about the Hummel family nearby, where “six children are huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There is nothing to eat over there.” Marmee wants the girls to give their breakfast to the family as a Christmas gift. The March sisters, who have very little, agree. Later that day, what do they have for Christmas supper?
a. Nothing
b. A surprise feast
c. A small pudding
d. Toast and marmalade
ANSWERS
1. b. It’s the Christmas season when Nina and the Count meet in Amor Towles’s bestseller. The restaurant, usually lit with strings of lights, has no decorations, and feels empty. When the waiter arrives, he is carrying Nina’s ice cream tower, and asks the Count if he wants a menu. “No thank you, my good man,” replies the Count. “Just a glass of Champagne and a spoon.” Nina eats the ice cream a flavor at a time.
2. c. Zauner, a musician in the band Japanese Breakfast, was raised by a Korean mother and a white father. She never learned to make a lot of the food of her mother’s native country. Grieving after her mother’s death, Zauner wanted to connect with her and her culture because, as the memoir title suggests, every visit to H Mart made Zauner cry. She found Maangchi, a lively Korean YouTube cook. When they finally met in person, Zauner told an Eater interviewer, she thought Maangchi was “one of the most effervescent people I’ve ever met.”
3. c. Julia Child, who did not speak French at that point, had to rely on Paul to tell her what everyone was saying. He heard the waiter discuss the wine list with a neighboring table. “I had never drunk much wine other than some $1.19 California Burgundy, and certainly not in the middle of the day,” writes Julia. The two split a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé from the Loire Valley. The main course was a whole Dover sole “in a sputtering butter sauce.” She describes it as “perfection.”
4. d. Cailles en Sarcophage (“quails in a coffin”), Babette’s signature dish, is made with stuffed quails in flaky puff pastry with foie gras and truffles. The dinner was to celebrate the 100th birthday of the sect’s late founder, in whose absence members were bickering. Babette pays for her meal with all the money she won in the French lottery. The guests, who are also served fine wines, are friends again at the end.
5. a. In proposing that the apparition is a construct of his imagination, Dickens is following some early-19th-century medical/philosophical theory that argued that ideas and mental images derived from sense impressions could arise from outside or inside the body, including those from the process of digestion. In this case, his late business partner Jacob Marley isn’t a real visitor from the afterlife, but a result, Scrooge thinks, of what he had for supper that evening. The grave/gravy wordplay is Dickens’s way of making the connection explicit.
6. a. In this thinly veiled autobiographical novel, Ephron, as Rachel Samstat, has a few thoughts before she flings a key lime pie. If she throws it, she thinks, Mark will stop loving her. On the other hand, he already doesn’t love her, so why not put a pie in his face?
7. d. Daniel and Marie-Laure are exhausted by the very long walk out of Paris. They sit in the field and eat bread and white sausage quietly. Afterward, she asks him: Where will they sleep? Are there beds? She is catching on to their plight. When he asks her if she wants more bread and sausage, she tells him to save it.
8. b. After a milk-and-bread breakfast, the sisters in “Little Women” put on a play. While they were busy, Old Mr. Laurence, a wealthy neighbor, sent over a surprise feast: two dishes of ice cream, one pink and one white, cake, fruit, French bonbons, and bouquets of flowers.