What's on the menu?

The best books are the ones that put some thought into food

The books that got me hooked on reading were the ones by Enid Blyton, more 

specifically the Mallory Towers series, set in an idyllic boarding house where 

Darrell Rivers and her band of intrepid friends had the most marvellous 

adventures. But what I loved most about these books were the scenes that

 described food: the midnight feasts that the girls sneaked off to, the ginger 

beer (ginger beer? What was that about?) they guzzled on days out with their 

parents. Some of the food items they consumed were little more than words to 

me — but they were words that transported me to a world far away from mine, 

introducing me to tastes that I could only conjure up in my imagination. 

Ever since those halcyon days of early childhood I have been captivated by 

books that took food seriously (and by that I don’t mean food books — those

 are a different species entirely). As a teenager, even as I was enraptured by 

the love stories at the heart of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, my taste 

buds would come alive when she began describing what was served at the 

endless balls, routs and masquerades that the heroines attended. I still have 

no idea what ratafia tastes like but the name itself conjures up a different, 

more chivalrous age. 

It’s the same story when I plunge into Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet 

Chronicles, as I do ever so often. Set after the First World War, it describes a 

milieu that is defined by meal times: the nursery teas served to the children; 

the elaborate three or even four course meals the adults settle down to, the 

ritual consumption of sherry and port. All of this with the aid of a devoted staff 

that cuts and chops, boils and roasts, bakes and grills so that those above 

stairs can feed and flourish. 

The most evocative food writing, though, comes from one of my favorite 

writers: Donna Leon. The hero of her detective series set in Venice, 

Commissario Guido Brunetti, takes his food very seriously indeed. He stops by

 for a brioche and a coffee at one of his favoured shops on his way to work. 

He takes a little break for some tramezzini and a small glass of wine (this is 

Italy after all!) half way through the day if he is not traipsing back home for a 

nice hot lunch. And dinner is the highlight of the day, featuring antipasto, 

pasta, a meat course and dessert followed by a glass of Calvados, sipped 

meditatively while sitting on his terrace with his wife Paola and looking 

on to the splendid views of Venice laid out before him. 

At the moment I am reading the new Jilly Cooper novel, Tackle. And even

 though the angelic Taggie, wife of reformed cad Rupert Campbell Black, is 

now a shadow of her former self, being treated for cancer, I find myself 

thinking back fondly to the many meals this gifted cook used to conjure up 

for her oblivious and ungrateful family. 

I know they say that the best books provide food for thought. But I find that

 books that put some thought into food are the best of them all. 

The book's the thing

Good books transport us to another world; great ones make us want to live there forever

A few weeks ago, suddenly overtaken by a wave of nostalgia, I pulled out an old, battered copy of Jilly Cooper’s Riders from my bookshelves to relive the memories of my misspent youth. And before you could say ‘bonkbuster’ I was back in the universe of Rutshire, a rural enclave enlivened by the heart-stoppingly good looking (and heartbreakingly caddish) Rupert Campbell Black, the show jumper who rarely met a woman he didn’t want to jump. And even though I knew the story and even remembered some of the more memorable lines I was still sucked into the world that Cooper had created so evocatively. 

So much so that I felt a sense of acute bereavement when the book ended and it was time to say goodbye to the characters. Except, of course, that I did not need to do any such thing. All I had to do to remain in that idyllic universe was to download the next seven books in the series. And that’s exactly what I did, racing through Rivals, Polo, The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous. And as of this writing I am immersed in the world of classical music with Appassionata — but still within the confines of the mythical Rutshire.  

Cooper may make it look effortless but it takes an amazing amount of skill, imagination and dexterity to create a world in which the reader immerses herself so that she never wants to ever leave it. Few writers, no matter how good they are, manage to do that. And those who succeed are the ones to whom I go back again and again to live in the environs which they have conjured up with the magic of their pen. 

The first writer I encountered who managed to do that was Georgette Heyer. I discovered her Regency Romances when I was a teenager and I was immediately transported into another era in which women were squeezed into corsets before being poured into gowns and presented for the delectation of the ‘ton’. But these women were not just beautiful playthings; they were brave, feisty, fiery, even fierce. And in a world that offered them no path of advancement other than marriage, they still managed to leave their imprint on the world. 

And what a world it was! There were balls held on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo; there were masquerades in which the identities of villains were unmasked; there were strong women who held their own in a world ruled by men; and there were love stories that lost none of their passion for being conducted in such a chaste universe. 

Since then I have discovered a few other writers who have inveigled me into their fictional worlds. There was the late, great John le Carre, whose ‘Circus’, populated by such legendary characters as George Smiley, kept me entertained for decades. There is Donna Leon, who brings Venice alive in her series of detective novels. And of course there is my old favourite, Daniel Silva, whose spy novels starring the Israeli spymaster, Gabriel Allon, are in a class of their own. 

They say that the power of a good book is that it can take us out of our world and into a parallel universe. But it’s only the truly great ones that make you want to live there forever. And I count myself lucky to have found several such worlds nestled among my bookshelves. 

Comfort reading

Trust me, it’s the best way of keeping calm and carrying on in the midst of a lockdown

Whenever I am going through a period of stress – and it will surprise precisely no one that this lockdown period has been a unique stressor – I always seek succor in my comfort reads. 

You know what I mean, right? Comfort reads are those books that transport me to better worlds, minutely imagined parallel universes, where all problems have resolutions, and every loose end can be niftily tied at the end of the narrative. These are books I have re-read so often that I know some of the dialogue by heart and yet the punchlines leave me chuckling each time. And these are the books that I have been turning to, to keep my spirits up, during this enforced stay-at-home period.

I am happy to report that they have done the trick quite nicely. I usually spend about an hour or so with them in the late afternoon after I have done my writing for the day and need to decompress. And I turn to them last thing at night, when I read myself to sleep. And they soothe and calm me much more than actual meditation ever does.

So, on the off chance that you may benefit from this remedy too, here’s my list of go-to books and authors. I hope they bring you the same comfort they do to me.

• I have always been a fan of Margaret Atwood, but it had been a long time since I read her seminal work, The Handmaid’s Tale. But after bingeing on the three seasons of the TV show on Amazon Prime, I had this irresistible urge to go back and re-read the book the series was based on. And I am ever so glad that I did. The sparse prose, the easy cadences, and the effortless grace of Atwood’s writing left me in awe yet again. To read this book is to see the author at the height of her powers. And marvel once more at the imagination from which the dystopian world of Gilead sprung, fully-formed and full of horror.

• The other TV series that sent me scurrying back to the book it was based on was Little Fires Everywhere on Hotstar. I had read Celeste Ng’s bestseller when it was first published but given that my memory is like a sieve these days, going back to it was like reading a new book. So, I could appreciate afresh the universe that Ng had created, with two intertwined families at the centre of the narrative, which spooled in a direction that was entirely unexpected. The show has deviated at many seminal points from the book, so even if you have seen the series, the book will still provide you with many surprises.

• I had mentioned in my last column that I intended to explore the entire oeuvre of Elizabeth George, to chart the progress of Inspector Lynley and Barbara Havers’ careers as they went about solving murders across the decades. I have since begun reading A Great Deliverance, the very first Inspector Lynley mystery, which came out way back in 1988, and I am astonished to see just how much the characters have evolved since then. In this book, for instance, Lynley is portrayed as a dashing ladies man, who has slept with most of the women in his department, and Lady Helen Clyde is described as his ‘longest-running mistress’. As someone who rejoiced at their wedding and (spoiler alert coming up!) and cried tears at Helen’s passing, this throwback was startling to say the least.

• As regular readers will know, whenever I need cheering up, my go-to author is Georgette Heyer. Her Regency romances have been a staple of my comfort reading list ever since my teenage years – and that hasn’t changed even though I am now well into my middle age. This time round, I first sought refuge in Venetia, in which the heroine of the title falls prey to the charms of a well-practiced rake, only to win his heart – and his hand – in the end. And then, I dived right into The Grand Sophy, in which the redoubtable heroine re-arranges the lives of all those around her, much to their consternation and my delight. 

• Now that I am cooking more than ever, given that there is no other way to put food on the table, I keep dipping into food books to find inspiration (not recipe books, I am afraid, because I like to make things up as I go along, rather than follow in well-trodden paths). Some of the books that have provided food for thought in this period are Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat (she has a show by the same name on Netflix, which you could check out), Pasta Pane Vino by Matt Goulding, and closer home, The Flavour of Spice by my old friend Marryam H. Reshii. I like to think that the information I have gleaned from these worthy tomes has made me a better cook – the botched experiments, needless to say, are entirely of my own making.

If you too want to read yourself out of a lockdown-induced depression, then I can’t recommend comfort reading enough. Start with some of the books I have recommended, or find your own. But do read for a couple of hours every day – and no peeking at your phone while you do it. Believe me, it will make a world of difference to your day.

Screen time

There’s nothing quite as fun as seeing a beloved book series make the transition to television

For the longest time ever, I have wondered why Daniel Silva’s creation, the Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon, does not get the James Bond (or even the Jason Bourne) treatment. For those who have not read Silva’s series of spy novels, Allon is a marvelous creation, art restorer by day and assassin by night (and sometimes the other way around), with a personal tragedy in his past life that haunts him to this day, even though a second marriage to a gorgeous Italian woman and a new family has eased his pain somewhat.

Allon always seemed like a character made for the movies to me. But, it turns out that he is destined to make his mark on the small screen, with MGM Television having acquired the rights to the collection of Silva’s Allon novels. So, Gabriel Allon will be arriving on a TV screen somewhere near you nearly 18 years after he first came to life in The Kill Artist (published in 2000) and I, for one, can’t wait.

As if this news wasn’t enough to send me into ecstasies, it turns out that another of my favourite novelists is having her works turned into a television show as well. Production on Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend – the first book of her Neapolitan quarter – is underway in Caserta, Italy. The book will be turned into an eight-episode TV series set in Naples, telling the story of Lenu (Elena Greco) and Lila (Raffaella Cerullo), the two girls who find each other in childhood and go on to have a life-long friendship with its share of ups and downs. (And the best part is that the series – produced by HBO in collaboration with Rai Fiction – will have the characters speaking Italian, which will give it a certain verisimilitude that wouldn’t have been possible with an Italian cast spewing heavily-accented English.)

But no sooner had I finished celebrating all this good news than my inner Greedy Gretel got going. And now, I can’t stop fantasizing about some of my other much-loved book series being adapted for television, allowing me a glimpse of my favourite characters on the small screen.

Here’s just a small sampling of some of my fantasy TV series.

Donna Leon’s murder mysteries

Set in Venice, this series revolves around the career and life of one of the most engaging private detectives of modern fiction. Commissario Guido Brunetti is not your average tortured detective, smoking and drinking too much as he tries to cope with challenging cases and a dysfunctional family. No, that kind of clichéd writing is not for Leon. Her detective is a family man who walks home to lunch everyday to feast on the three-course meals served up by his intelligent and feisty wife, Paola, so that he can enjoy the company of his two children, Raffi and Chiara.

The crimes themselves are interesting enough but the real star of the series is the city of the Venice itself. You can almost smell the dank scents rising from the canali and calli of the city, see the winding streets that lead to the waters of the Grand Canal and the laguna, and marvel at the architecture of the beautiful buildings that keep Brunetti company as he walks to and back from work.

Strangely enough, only a German production house had filmed some of the stories though the series hasn’t been distributed widely. It’s time someone in the English-speaking world stepped up and gave us Venice and Brunetti in all their glory.

Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances

Regular readers of this column will know what a dedicated fan of Heyer’s romances I am. So, it would be no exaggeration to say that I have spent the last two decades of my life waiting for someone to make a TV series based on her Regency novels. But much to my disappointment, while every ‘period’ work from Poldark to Howard’s End is regaling TV audiences across the world, nobody seems willing to give Heyer a shot.

It’s a baffling state of affairs. These are ready-made storylines, incredibly well-plotted, laced with humour and wit, and almost cinematic is their treatment. The characters are very well-drawn as well, both the dashing heroes and the sparkling, willful heroines who are no shrinking violets. And yet, nobody seems to have thought of bringing the lovely Arabella, the masterful Frederica or the amazing Grand Sophy to life.

Well, the first one who does will have a bonafide hit on his or her hands. Meanwhile, I live in hope.

Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers series

These were my absolute favourite books growing up. I would devour them late into the night, reading by the light of a torch that I had smuggled into my bed. And then, when I finally fell asleep I would dream of midnight feasts, night-time swims, classroom pranks, and so much more, waking up even more determined than ever to go to boarding school.

Well, that never happened. So, I guess the next-best thing – now that I am all grown up – would be to be transported to the world of Mallory Towers via my TV screen. Strangely enough, while the Famous Five and Noddy have had their stints on television, Darrell Rivers and her friends at boarding school have never managed to make that transition.

And that’s a pity, if you ask me. It’s time a new generation of children was introduced to the antics of this group of girls: the sensible but hot-tempered Darrell, her best friend Sally Hope, the spoilt little brat Gwendoline Lacey and the resident joker Alicia Johns. And what better way to do that for this non-reading generation than through the medium of television?

The book's the thing...

And sometimes it’s even better when it is adapted for TV or a movie

If you are a fan of Elena Ferrante, and (like me) are suffering withdrawal pangs after having devoured every word she has ever written, then I have some good news for you. The Italian film and television production company, Wildside, has announced that it is working on adapting Ferrante’s Neopolitan quartert into a TV series, along with producer Fandango. The series will be shot in Italy, and in Italian.

The four novels, which trace the friendship of Lenu and Lina over half a century, will be adapted into a four-season TV series, which each novel taking in eight episodes, making it a 32-episode blockbuster. Ferrante is believed to be involved in the production, though nobody quite knows in what capacity or how closely. But then, given that nobody even knows who Ferrante is – she is still jealously clinging tight to her anonymity – that can’t be very surprising.

No release date has been announced but I am already salivating with anticipation. The story of Lenu and Lina consumed me entirely as I raced to the final book in the quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, and I can’t wait to see this tale of female friendship retold in a visual medium.

Of course, this anticipation is tinged with a dash of fear. It is the same fear that every book-lover experiences when a well-loved book is turned into a movie or a TV series. I felt that fear when the first series of Game of Thrones was released, not sure how that tale of kings and knights, love and lust, pride and passion, would work on the TV screen.

Would it all look a bit ridiculous, like some costume dramas tend to do? Would the story have the same power on TV as it did in the book? Would the characters be reduced to caricatures because of the demands of the visual medium? Would it just become yet another bodice-ripper of the kind that litter the television universe?

You can imagine my relief when the TV series proved to be as much of a triumph as the books. Of course, I felt a little miffed that I already knew what was going to happen, thus losing out on the thrill of anticipation that other viewers, who hadn’t read the book, were feeling. But then, George R.R. Martin, rather obligingly, went off script in the later seasons, and I could watch with the same edge-of-the-seat excitement that non-readers were privileged to experience.

So, yes, I am a tad nervous about how the Ferrante will survive the transition to our TV screens. Just as I am both nervous and excited about the movie adapation of Longbourn that is in the works. Random House Studios and Focus Features have acquired the film rights to Jo Baker’s novel about life below stairs in the Bennet household made famous by Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), and the release date is tentatively set for 2017. I just hope and pray that this adaptation remains true to the original and doesn’t go down the Downton Abbey route.

But the one author whose works I long to see on television is Georgette Heyer (just one of her books, The Reluctant Widow, has been made into a film – and a pretty bad one at that!). The prolific author of Regency Romances has given us such amazing characters as The Grand Sophy, Arabella, Frederica, Venetia, and it would be an absolute treat to see them come alive on the TV screen. But for some reason, British TV companies are too busy filming Pride and Prejudice again and again and again to pay any attention to the possibilities inherent in these Heyer heroines.

And that is an absolute pity, if you ask me. Heyer tells absolutely cracking stories, intricately-plotted and leavened with wit and humour. And her heroines are the absolute best; plucky little creatures who do their best in a society that hems them around with strict rules of etiquette.

Who else but Heyer could come up with a heroine like Sophia Stanton-Lacy who comes visiting her aunt with a little monkey to gift her young cousins, and thinks nothing of confronting an evil moneylender with an elegant but effective pistol? Or the impish Leonie de Saint-Vire, who masquerades as a young page in Parisian society, before being unveiled as an aristocratic beauty? Or even the stunningly beautiful Deborah Grantham, relegated to the fringes of polite society as Faro’s Daughter, who makes the greatest conquest of them all?

I could go on listing the marvelous, resourceful, witty, intelligent, beautiful women who people Heyer’s stories (the headstrong Lady Serena Carlow, Judith Taverner, Mary Challoner are just some names that come to mind) but then we’d be here forever. Instead you could go over to petitionbuzz.com and sign a petition asking that Heyer’s novels be made into a movie.

Though, if you ask me, television is better suited to telling Heyer’s stories (in my view, movies are like short stories, only TV series can do justice to the sweep of a novel). Surely the BBC or ITV, which spends millions on period dramas of dubious quality, could pick up one Heyer Regency Romance – my personal favourite would be The Grand Sophy – and adapt it into a six-part series. I would bet my entire collection of tattered copies of Heyer’s novels that it would do so well that production companies would be scrambling for the rights to the books yet to be filmed.

So, come on guys, look sharp. This is a world of fiction beyond Jane Austen and Julian Fellowes that beckons.