Cara Nicoletti is a Brooklyn butcher whose love of great books and great food inspired her popular blog Yummybooks. Her new cookbook Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way Through Great Books (Little, Brown; Aug.) celebrates this relationship in stories and recipes from classic to contemporary works and just might change the way readers eat and eaters read. Nicoletti spoke with PW about how the “hungry reader” inside her found a voice.
How did you come to write a book about food and literature?
I believe there’s a natural connection between food and literature, and it has always interested me. You can tell a lot about characters by what they eat and who gathers around their table. Food grounds a book in a physical reality that you can smell and taste, or it can further a magical setting. They are both things that brought me out of my shell and helped me connect with other people. Both are my biggest personal comforts.
How do you define a “hungry reader?”
For me there is a similar hunger and craving for a good book and good food, so it’s someone who is always searching for both. A hungry reader understands that food helps you connect more deeply to the story.
What was your criteria for including a particular book or a particular dish? Did you select the book or the dish first?
My publisher was good about letting me try anything. My food preferences as a butcher are reflected in several dishes such as Porchetta di Testa (Lord of the Flies) and in Chicken Liver Mousses (Silence of the Lambs.) I was obsessed with creating a white soup for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and I tried one recipe from an old English cookbook of the period, but it was a gelatinous disaster, so I opted for a delicious white garlic soup. For The Bell Jar I planned to do Sylvia Plath’s favorite lemon meringue pie, but I didn’t want to do anything that involved an oven, so I chose an avocado crab salad instead.
With Voracious, have you created the template for a new sort of book club?
That would be amazing if it inspired choices for book clubs. I get many inquiries from my blog audience about recipes for books they are reading in their clubs. I think it’s a natural progression to want to cook something from a book you’re reading. I’m curious if Voracious might inspire people to re-read these books, or to read books they hadn’t read before.
I revisited all the books in Voracious. It was fun yet time-consuming, but I wanted to capture that feeling of when I first read them. I found that some books don’t hold up anymore. Nancy Drew books seemed dated, but other books like If You Give a Mouse A Cookie held new meaning for me as an adult. There are great recipes in stories, but there are also great stories in recipes.
