Better on a Stick #LitHappens #FoodieReads

Culinary Cam
Sep 17
2 min read

I am posting this after reading the September #LitHappens selection: The Names by Florence Knapp.

On the Page

This was an interesting novel whose central question is: Whats in a name? Well, sort of. Knapp has create three different stories based on what Cora names her baby.

At the beginning of the book, we meet Cora who has just given birth to her second baby with her abusive husband, Gordon. She is supposed to go to the registrar and officially log the birth of her baby. Gordon expects - and insists - that the baby be named Gordon, Jr.

Each of storylines follows the baby over the next three and a half decades as Gordon, the name his father wanted; as Julian, the name Cora wanted; and as Bear, the name his nine-year-old sister, Maia, chose. In addition to the affect of what name a baby is given. This novel explores the question of nature versus nurture.

The domestic abuse was hard to read and Gordon, Sr. was a disturbingly one-note character, a monster with no redeeming qualities. But the premise of the novel and its execution were well done. I will definitely pick up another book by the author when she releases one.

There wasn't a lot of food on the pages. But there was some.

I almost made some scones.

"Someone has ordered afternoon tea, and as Cora bites into a scone layered with thick clotted cream and strawberry jam, its sweetness causes her to close her eyes for just a second."

Edamame is always a favorite though I do not think that I have ever roasted them.

"'Will there be snacks?' Maia asks. 'Yes,' Maia says. 'I’m imagining how good roasted edamame would be. All those little grains of salt getting stuck in the folds of leather around the gearstick'."

On the Plate

But the passage that I really liked for food inspiration was this one...

"Bear can’t recall who bought the pack of bamboo skewers, but he already knows that when he looks back on this time, it will partly be defined by the foods they threaded onto them above the low coffee table. Small squares of takeaway pizza cut with blunt scissors, pressed alternately against pickled onions; the salt-on-salt of folded salami slices interspersed with olives; a boiled egg sandwiched between spinach leaves."