Reviewer COLIN STEELE brings together three very different books with a theme around eating – the history, the famous and the necessary. 

Food writer Jenny Linford’s beautifully illustrated, informative new book chronologically covers the history of eating, cooking and drinking, through 300 selected objects from the British Museum.

Since the earliest days of human history, to eat and drink has been an essential constant. In Repast. The Story of Food (Thames and Hudson, $59.99) Linford comments: “Food is universal, yet particular. The need to eat is a biological imperative, one that omnivorous humans have responded to with much ingenuity over many millennia. 

“While the requirement to eat is common to all of us, what we eat and how we eat it varies according to geography, climate, history and societal norms.”

Working with BM curators, Linford has chosen objects that range widely both culturally and geographically. Here the reader will find a spear thrower in the shape of a mammoth made from reindeer antler dating from the last Ice Age; ancient clay cooking vessels; a long, slender drinking straw made in Ur around 2600 BCE; gold drinking cups; a Roman shopping list; an Arabic Mamluk dynasty lunchbox; Chinese ritual water sprinklers; a 19th-century Japanese netsuke carved in the form of a tea bowl and whisk; a Tiepolo drawing of a Venetian cafe scene; a Malaysian bamboo quiver and Australian rock art revealing a kangaroo hunt.

All beautifully complement the text, which is arranged in 13 thematic chapters, such as Hunting, Gathering, Religion, Alcohol, Preserving and Processing, Travel and Trade Fasting, and Eating Out.

Within the chapters, Linford has subsections so that in Preserving and Processing, there are entries for example, on olive oil, salt and dairy. Before refrigeration drying and smoking meat was essential with salt being for centuries a luxury rather than a cheap source of flavouring and preservation.

Linford tells us: “The historic importance of meat to humanity is a strand throughout the book”, with pork the world’s most eaten meat. Tea is the world’s most consumed drink after water and wheat is the source of 20 per cent of the world’s human calorie consumption.

Linford reflects: “The sheer relatability of cooking and eating – activities we can all know and understand – makes the past seem closer.” 

She also notes today we have a world in which parts face malnutrition and famine while elsewhere obesity is a major health problem. Repast provides much food for thought as well as enjoyment.

BEE Wilson brings together a  collection of the most-loved recipes from famous authors in Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake. A Compendium of Classic Authors’ Favourite Recipes (Faber. $26.99). 

Plath turned to cooking in an effort to stave off her depression and her failing marriage with Ted Hughes. Tomato Soup Cake was apparently her signature dish.

Wilson notes, in her introduction. that some of the authors, such as Beryl Bainbridge and Dodie Smith, freely admit to being “bad cookers”. Others provide recipes, such as Jack Kerouac’s Green Pea Soup, that are “so widely off as to sow seeds of doubt”.

Readers will find here Robert Graves’s mock anchovy pate, Norman Mailer’s stuffed mushrooms, Rebecca West’s Dutch onion crisps, Rosamond Lehmann’s shepherd’s pie, Agatha Christie’s hot bean salad, Christopher Isherwood’s brownies and Joan Didion’s Mexican chicken. One of the longest sections is Angela Carter’s four-page analysis of the ingredients for her potato soup recipe.

Eggs get a good run alongside soups. Ian Fleming’s scrambled eggs preparation echoes that of James Bond but with the addition of Taittinger pink champagne. Kingsley Amis offers “fromage à la crème”, a combination of egg whites, cream cheese, cream and sugar, although given the nature of Amis’ misogynistic marriages, he probably never actually made it for himself.

Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake is a fun authorial food compilation that Wilson believes is “full of atmosphere you can sniff”.

THE Hill Topp House retirement home occupants in Alan Bennett’s dark comic novella Killing Time (Faber $22.99) do enjoy a Norwegian culinary evening, although they reflect “smoked fish only takes you so far”.

Bennett’s novella length only allows sketches of the characters, which range from the snobbish manager Mrs McBryde; Mr Woodruff, with a tendency to regularly expose himself; Gus the staff handyman who satisfies the resident’s  sexual needs for a small fee in the lawnmower shed (Mrs Porteous reflects “it is such a nice change from humbugs”) and Mr Jimson, the ex-chiropodist, who clips the resident’s toenails, which he later sells on.

Now 90, Bennett certainly delivers his own reflections on ageing in the bittersweet fictional clippings in Killing Time.