James Bond was always fussy about his food – remember that breakfast in Casino Royale with "half a pint of iced orange juice, three scrambled eggs and bacon, and a double portion of coffee without sugar". Now William Boyd has taken 007's foodie fetishism to a new level with a footnoted recipe for salad dressing.
It opens up a whole new perspective on your bookshelves – what if you tried to live off the recipes buried between the covers of your favourite fiction? There's an old joke about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) – you might not enjoy the novel, but you can certainly learn how to make the French classic dish boeuf en daube. But this is completely untrue: the dish is made by Mildred (a cook who seems to spend most of her time looking after the children), and Woolf and Mrs Ramsay are both suspiciously vague about what is involved: both seem to think that the dish can burn, has knife-edge timings, and that the "bay leaf … must be done to a turn". This is complete rubbish, useless advice.
In Dorothy L Sayers' Strong Poison (1930), there is a full description of how to make a jam omelette, but this happens in court, during a murder trial, with the unusual purpose of explaining that the dish could not have been poisoned. The cook's technique is praised, and the appalling judge says "I advise you all to treat omelettes in the same way". You could certainly make one from the description, though it doesn't sound all that delicious.
Crime and spy novels and thrillers do seem to attract food writing. Contrary to popular belief, the unnamed hero of Len Deighton's 1962 The Ipcress File does not make himself anything more than sandwiches and coffee (in the film he becomes Harry Palmer and does cook), but he gives a couple of cocktail recipes, and you could certainly produce homard a la broche by following another character make it – spit-roast, and baste frequently with a mixture of champagne and butter. John Connolly's 1999 thriller Every Dead Thing is slowed down three-quarters of the way through by a detailed description of how to make chicken gumbo, a full-scale recipe. And in recent years there have been shedloads of American mystery stories featuring cooking sleuths who generously share their recipes with the reader – seriously, there are too many to mention.
Lobster again: in EF Benson's 1935 Mapp and Lucia, the two women almost die in a fight over the recipe for Lobster a la Riseholme – they are swept away by a flood while Mapp is trying to steal the vital piece of paper from Lucia's house. Fortunately they survive, though the only line of the recipe we see is "take two hen lobsters …"
One of the nicest quasi-recipes comes in Mary McCarthy's 1963 The Group, where there is a lovely description of Polly making paté from a family recipe while Libby, "having splurged on chicken livers at the market", stands watching and criticising. Polly sautés the livers ("Aren't you doing them too rare?" Libby asks) then laboriously pushes them through a sieve, which takes an hour. She then adds a huge amount of butter, plus brandy and sherry – "no wonder the Andrews family was insolvent". She should then make stock and boil it down to a glaze. It sounds deliciously tempting.
But it was during the foodie 80s that the "novel with recipes" really got going, adding a dash of real life some nuance and a pinch of backstory with the pretence that all fictional people need to eat too. In Nora Ephron's 1983 Heartburn – her roman a clef about affairs among the chattering classes in Washington DC – the heroine is a food writer, so before throwing it at her husband the narrator gives the recipe for key lime pie, not to mention a vinaigrette very different from James Bond's.
According to Kurt Vonnegut the recipes in Dead Eye Dick (1982) are "musical interludes for the salivary glands", though he does warn that "no one should use this novel as a cookbook". They don't really seem to add much, though one recipe for soup splendidly involves cooking large quantities of meat in liquid: you then remove the meat and what's left is the soup. Laura Esquivel's magic realist Like Water for Chocolate (1989) is structured around Mexican food: each section opens with a recipe, and centres on an incident involving the dish. And in Saturday (2005), Ian McEwan's annoying Henry Perowne makes bouillabaisse in such excruciating detail that we could surely follow his recipe.
James Hamilton Paterson's Cooking with Fernet Branca (which is a 2004 novel rather than the cookbook the name suggests) contains some of the most disgusting recipes you could ever wish to come across, and – going out on a limb here – are not intended to be made. But has anyone tried the (many) recipes from John Lanchester's 1996 The Debt to Pleasure? – the book is completely built around cooking, but there's something about it that might make you reluctant to try to replicate the dishes ...
Ephron's salad dressing seems much more appealing – I've just tested it against Boyd's. Both taste surprisingly good but are very strong (007's seems to have far too much vinegar in it, but it does work) and need to be used sparingly. But then maybe the same could be said of recipes in fiction.
