Fictitious Dishes

Some of my favorite book scenes involve characters sitting down to a meal.  Remember Leopold Bloom’s kidney breakfast in James Joyce’s Ulysses?  Or how about Esther Greenwood’s famous crab stuffed avocado lunch in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar?  Don’t get me started on all of the apple pie, ice cream, and coffee in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, or the decadent party bites featured in F. Scott Fitzgerals’s The Great Gatsby. 

Dinah Fried put together a spectacular book, Fictitious Dishes:  An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals (HarperCollins), showcasing her own photos based on said famous meals.  Fried, a designer, art director, and graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, has done a glorious job of visually representing these fictitious meals.  Check out the book’s website and pick your favorite among the sample photos displayed on her page.  Better yet, order the book as part of your coffee table collection.

My favorite?  At least today, I’m salivating over Holden Caulfield’s (The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger) grilled cheese and malted milk lunch – well, mostly the malted milk.  What about you?

Click here to check out photos of some fictitious dishes!