Inspired by fiction to cook
Have you ever been watching a movie or reading a book, and been so smitten by a dish that you had to cook it yourself? Slate contributor J. Bryan Lowdor had that experience while watching a movie called Babette. It moved him to cook a ridiculously complicated and fancy French meal for his friends, which turned out quite well. More power to him, really! My own experiences in this regard have been… mixed.
When I was a teenager I was completely insane for the Dragonlance books. At one point, a book with official recipes was published, and I snatched it right up. The cookbook not only included recipes for foods that were mentioned in the books, it also had recipes that were inspired by the books.
I remember one in particular: it was a flatbread that the characters ate while on their journeys. I don't know what I expected, but what I got was something like a non-pocketed round of pita bread. Except that, being fourteen years old and completely inexperienced in the kitchen, I botched it so that it was lumpy and burnt on one side.
Many years later as I was reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club I was moved to try my hand at Chinese dumplings. I bought basic filling ingredients and a package of dumpling wrappers and got to work.
Lacking either a food processor, mandoline, or patience, I did a terrible job at mincing the ingredients. Then I had to stuff these big wads of vegetable into the dumpling wrappers, which I couldn't get to stick together. And finally, I boiled them with the water too hot, so that all the dumplings fell apart in the pot and basically I ended up with soup. It was a pitiful and frustrating experience, and even though it was about 20 years ago, I still think about it whenever I'm tempted to try and recreate something I've seen in fiction.
Image of dumplings that mine looked nothing like, courtesy Flickr/avlxyz