Food - Bee Wilson experiments with some old favourites
All good cooks are plagiarists. They steal a few ideas from here, a few from there, and make them into something better. This is just as it should be. On being presented with the most perfect sauce hollandaise, fabricated with the butter of centuries, seasoned with the salt of Romans, spritzed with the same lemon used in the earliest Parisian restaurants, no sensible person complains that it isn't completely original; one simply enjoys it. It is the same with children's fiction. Familiarity is no obstacle to excitement; indeed, it is from the comfort of the familiar that true creativity emerges.
I knew I was going to love Harry Potter when I got to the start-of-term feast in the first book. It is like every midnight feast you've ever read or dreamed about - utterly unsurprising but quite thrilling. The orphaned Harry, who has recently found out that he is a wizard, is sitting in the hall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. After a decade of near-starvation at the hands of his brutal uncle and aunt (Vernon and Petunia Dursley), he looks down at his empty golden plate and realises how hungry he is. "Harry's mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs."
Those mint humbugs are a nice touch. Like Enid Blyton (another unoriginal genius), J K Rowling understands that the most mouthwatering descriptions of food need a few incongruous elements. Blyton conjures picnics of sardines and pineapple chunks in her Mallory Towers books. Harry, meanwhile, eats odd-sounding strawberry and peanut- butter ice-cream cones, and drinks peculiar pumpkin juice.
When it comes to confectionery, however, Rowling is less like Blyton than she is like Roald Dahl, who combined the sweet with the grotesque. At Honeyduke's sweetshop, Harry sees "shelves upon shelves of the most succulent-looking sweets imaginable. Creamy chunks of nougat, shimmering pink squares of coconut ice . . ." Then there's the weird stuff: Black Pepper Imps, Cockroach Cluster, Fizzing Whizzbees, Toothflossing Stringmints and Droobles Best Blowing Gum, "which filled a room with bluebell-coloured bubbles that refused to pop for days". Rowling also imagines joke sweets, such as the Ton Tongue Toffee that makes the horrible Dudley Dursley's tongue swell up until it is 4ft long.
A running gag is provided by Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. These are a child's fantasy: jelly beans with a difference, as Harry's best friend Ron explains. "'When they say every flavour, they mean every flavour - you know, you get all the ordinary ones like chocolate and peppermint and marmalade, but then you get spinach and liver and tripe.'" Even the venerable Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, can be fooled. He selects a golden-brown toffee bean, only to choke on the disgusting taste of earwax.
Rowling is not afraid of establishing obvious links between food and character. The mean and pretentious Aunt Petunia is mean and pretentious when it comes to food. She is mean with Harry, providing two slices of bread and a lump of cheese for his birthday supper; but she is pretentious with posh guests, for whom she fashions "a huge mound of whipped cream and sugared violets". By contrast, the down-to-earth Mrs Weasley cooks vast, comforting breakfasts - eight or nine sausages and three fried eggs a head - and sends Harry home-made cakes. At Hogwarts, Hagrid, the amiable half-giant and connoisseur of monsters, serves beef casserole in which huge talons lurk.
In the latest book, The Goblet of Fire, there are new signs of culinary sophistication. The swotty Hermione Granger boycotts school dinners in protest at the labour conditions of house-elves in the kitchen. Harry tastes "foreign" food for the first time: bouillabaisse - "a sort of shellfish stew", for those readers who don't know - cooked in honour of visiting French witches from Beauxbatons school. Harry Potter is growing up. But something tells me that he will never grow out of his unoriginal but bewitching love of fantastic food.
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