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Each month, I offer edible clues from a delectable dish that appears in a novel, memoir or biography. Did you figure out last month’s Foodie Fiction? It was a delicious seed cake that Jane Eyre and her school friend are treated to by a teacher. This month, I’ve got a midsummer recipe that is perfect for a freshwater terrain like ours. Your ingredients are delightfully straightforward: You’ll need a fish known for its slender body, pink and silver skin and delicate taste. These fish often put up a bit of a fight when you try to catch them. To prepare them as the characters did in the novel, you’ll need butter, wild greens, salt and pepper and – if you’re doing it right – an open fire that you can smoke the fish over. Be sure to spoon some of the broth over the fish when you’re ready to serve. The novel that this simple yet mouthwatering dish comes from is set in Europe in the 1920s and follows the characters as they travel through postwar Paris, rural France and Spain. This novelist, someone who loved nothing more than to stand in a cold rushing river in the mountain west and pull in fish, wrote an elegant scene in which the character catches his midday meal. Here’s part of that scene: “I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored, firm and hard from the cold water. I took the fish ashore, washed them in the cold, smooth heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and then packed them all in the bag. I walked up the road and got out two bottles of wine. They were cold. Moisture beaded on the bottles as I walked back to the trees. I spread the lunch on a newspaper and uncorked one of the bottles and leaned the other against a tree. The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty." So, that’s my Foodie Fiction Challenge for July. Can you guess the fish dish this character will eat and the novel? When you know, tweet me @KerriMPR.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 