Food in Fiction: Quirks and Customs

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. For most of us, that means celebrating with a big turkey dinner. However, in my Italian-immigrant family, every holiday calls for a multi-course dinner that typically consists of antipasto, soup, bread, pasta, meatballs, salad, cooked vegetables, roasted meat, potatoes, fresh fruit, and dessert. For Thanksgiving, we simply accommodate the turkey tradition by featuring the bird as our roasted meat.

I am so used to our family’s customs that I neglected to prepare my husband (then boyfriend) before he attended his first Thanksgiving dinner with my family. When my mother served homemade fettuccine and meatballs (following the requisite antipasto and soup), he assumed there would be no turkey. Being an easy-going guy, he didn’t say anything and simply ate his fill of pasta and meatballs.

(I couldn't find clip art of fettuccine with tomato sauce and meatballs, but you get the idea.)

Well, imagine his surprise when we whisked the pasta plates away and my mother brought out the bird, vegetables, and potatoes. Afterward, he told me he'd been too full to have more than a bite of turkey, and as a result, it hadn’t felt much like Thanksgiving to him. (Now he knows to pace himself, which I’m sure he’ll do tomorrow when we celebrate at my aunt’s.) Ironically, for me it wouldn’t have felt like Thanksgiving without pasta.

In this series of posts, we’ve been talking about the role of food in fiction. As JoAnn discussed, food can “ground fantasy in reality.” I agree. I also believe food plays an especially important role in historical and multicultural fiction. Everyone has to eat. Seeing what a character does and doesn’t eat can give readers insight into that character’s world, whether it’s a world of Scrapple and food rationing, as Mary Ann described in her post, or one where Christmas Eve dinner revolves around seafood, as in my novel Rosa, Sola. Because food-related customs and rituals can serve to bind people together or to set them apart, food can affect a character’s relationships, too. I still recall feeling like an outsider at lunch in elementary school. While other kids were eating peanut butter and jelly on squishy white bread, I had to deal with mortadella on crumbly, homemade Italian bread. No one ever swapped sandwiches with me!

Of course, food can be a characterization tool in all types of fiction. Like real people, characters may have quirky food preferences, preferences that can even affect a story’s plot. We see this in picture books like I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato by Lauren Child and I'd Really Like To Eat a Child by Sylviane Donnio, illustrated by Dorothee de Monfreid. But food preferences can also play a role in middle-grade and young-adult stories. After all, where would the plot of Twilight and other vampire books be if vampires craved macaroni and cheese instead of human blood?

For everyone celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, I wish you a happy and safe holiday. As you sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner, I encourage you to take note of any unique food customs and rituals. And even if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope the following Writing Workout will help you think about incorporating food quirks and customs into your fiction.

Writing Workout: Food Quirks and Customs 

Do you have any food quirks? Perhaps, like me, you only eat cold cereal without milk. (I just can't stomach soggy cereal!) Or maybe it's a friend or family member who has a food quirk. For example, one of my brothers-in-law will eat peanut butter on bread, or jelly on bread, but never peanut butter and jelly together on one sandwich. Try writing a scene where one of your fictional characters has a food-related quirk. How is that quirk a reflection of the character's overall personality?

Are there any food-related customs in your family, or special family recipes?
In the her last Writing Workout, Esther suggested you record a family recipe along with a memoir about the recipe's creator. Now write a scene where family members try to recreate a custom or recipe without the originator present. What happens? 

Happy writing!
Carmela

Multicultural Dialogue: Please Pass the Patate

Today, I'd like to follow-up on Mary Ann's response to an Ask the TeachingAuthors question submitted by Pam. Pam asked: "In MG and YA novels, do you ever use diction from other cultures or parts of the country in your characterizations? Or do you focus more on a character's actions, behavior and gestures to define them?"

When writing my middle-grade novel, Rosa, Sola, I had the challenge of trying to portray the speech of recent Italian immigrants. Members of my own immigrant family speak with heavy accents and often intersperse Italian words, or Anglicized Italian, with English. If I tried to reproduce such speech in my novel, readers would have a difficult time deciphering it. As Mary Ann pointed out in her post, such dialogue "can be murder to read."

Instead, I used several techniques to portray my immigrant characters' speech:

1. I occasionally interspersed relatively easy-to-pronounce Italian words with English, structuring the dialogue and conversation so that those words could be understood in context.
2. As much as possible, I used cognates of English words to make it easier for readers to guess a foreign word's meaning.
3. For the characters with the heaviest accents, I tried to keep their sentences short. I also structured their speech in nonstandard ways.
4. I included a glossary of the Italian words and phrases that appeared in the text.

For example, here's how I handled the first occurrence of the word sola:

Mrs. Morelli returned before AnnaMaria did. "I'm sorry, Rosa." She took the baby from Rosa. "AnnaMaria should not have left you sola."

"But I wasn't alone." Rosa smiled up at Mrs. Morelli. "Antonio was with me."

Because many readers are familiar with the word "solo," they might guess that sola means alone. But even if they didn't, they could surmise the meaning from Rosa's response. Similarly, for the title of this post, I'm hoping you guessed that patate means potatoes. Initially, I'd planned to say "Please pass the piselli," but I chose patate because the word looks more like "potatoes" than piselli does "peas."

Like Mary Ann, I also had to be careful regarding the historical accuracy of my dialogue because Rosa, Sola is set in the 1960s. The online etymology dictionary is a great resource to help insure historical accuracy. For example, if you look up the word "groovy," you'll learn:

As teen slang for "wonderful," it dates from 1944; popularized 1960s, out of currency by 1980.

My current work-in-progress, a young-adult novel set in 18th-century Milan, presents even greater challenges when it comes to dialogue. Unlike the characters in Rosa, Sola who speak a mixture of Italian and English, my Milanese characters speak only Italian. Therefore, it really isn't appropriate to intersperse Italian words in their dialogue. While I have read books that do, I try to avoid it. For example, to me, it doesn't make sense to write:

Luigi said, "Please pass the patate."

when, technically, it should be:

Luigi said, "Passami le patate per favore."

So in my novel set in Milan, the only time I have Italian dialogue is in complete (very short) sentences, such as:

When Maria passed him the potatoes, Luigi said, "Grazie."

I still use Italian words in the narrative at times, to help remind readers of the setting, but I avoid mixing them with English in the dialogue.

I hope this discussion has satisfactorily addressed Pam's questions. If we haven't answered your Ask the TeachingAuthors question yet, please be patient. We plan to tackle our backlog in September. Meanwhile, we hope you'll use the link in the sidebar to keep those questions coming!