Books and The Power of Suggestion

In the movie"City of Angels" starring Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage, Nicolas Cage plays an angel on earth that falls in love with Meg Ryan and becomes human. (It would've been a great movie had it not been for the ending....but I digress!) She first notices him in a library, and when he sees her he's reading a book about food. Being an angel, he has no need for food, or sleep or anything else. But he reads a paragraph alound, and with a pleased look upon his face, he closes the book and estatically says, "I love it when they write how things taste!"

That hit a chord with me, because I'm always getting romanticized by a description about a food item! In "Where the Heart Is," by Billie Letts, I totally got sucked in by the description of the birthday dinner that Forney prepared for a pregnant, Walmart-dwelling Novalee. I craved beef, gravy and puffy pastry like mad! In Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder (My favorite childhood author) I got hooked on the idea of frying apples and onions together, and making ice cream! Also by L.I.W......in The Long Winter.....the feast that the Ingalls Family had after the impossible blizzard-filled winter when trains couldn't come through with supplies: After reading that I always have a hankering for a Thanksgiving feast!

My latest is one I don't think I'd ever would have considered on my own. But in "I Feel Bad about my Neck" by Nora Ephron, she writes an essay about vanishing food. You know, things that you love to go out and eat, and then one day you go and they're not there anymore. (like the Banana Rumba dessert at Chili's...forever a memory!) Well, in this particular case, Ms. Ephron laments the loss of.....cabbage strudel. Yes, you read that correctly. In this particular case, it's not the cabbage strudel that disappears, but the Hungarian bakery that made the coveted treat. She searched high and low, collected recipes....all to no avail. Then one day, a friend calls her to tell her that there's a place nearby that serves it and it's culinary bliss. Strudel to me should be a sweet breakfast treat, like cherry or apple, sugary and served with coffee. Not with a vegetable! But by the time I finished reading her awesome description of the buttery, flaky savoriness of it, I found myself wondering if the city nearby has a Hungarian bakery!! :)