What Writers Ate

Have you seen the Awl's Writer Food from A to Z describing some of the well-loved snacks, meals, and dietary habits of authors?

B is for booze, of course (Frost, Keats, everyone in the world), but Fritos also make their way on the list (Neil Simon). I thought M might be for madeleines a la Proust, but it's for milk (Molière and Balzac tried milk-only diets). Proust gets J for Java (he is rumored to have drank 16 cups of espresso a day!).

L is for loaves (Woolf and Dickinson baked, while Percy Shelley stashed bread in his pockets). P is, delightfully, for Jane Austen's morning spread of plum cake, coffee, chocolate, and other pastries. N, surprisingly, is for Nothing (the ascetics include the Brontës: Emily favored a simple diet while Charlotte had an aversion to dining in public). And, hauntingly, Q is for appetite-quelling in reference to Hemingway's time in Europe, staring at pictures of food in museums while "belly-empty, hollow hungry." But let's end on a happy note: C for, what else, champagne (Oscar Wilde)!


Check out the rest at The Awl. 

Sources:
Hu, Jane. "Writer Food From A-Z." The Awl. August 28, 2012. <http://www.theawl.com/2012/08/writer-food-from-a-to-z>

photo source: Man holding too many ice cream cones via Flickr