The Pennsylvania Gazette: Profile: Feasts Fit for a Writer

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Feasts Fit for a Writer

ERNEST Hemingway's fictional characters typically met unhappy endings, but like their creator, they at least ate and drank well along the way -- dining on woodcock flambé in Armagnac in a Milan hotel room in A Farewell to Arms, sipping manzanilla and snacking on garlic olives in a Madrid tapas bar in The Garden of Eden and warming up the Spanish Pyrenees with hot rum punch in The Sun Also Rises. Paying tribute to the well-traveled writer's adventurous appetite for life -- and food and drink -- Craig Boreth C'91 has created The Hemingway Cookbook (Chicago Review Press).
   A Web-site editor and producer in Somerville, Mass., Boreth got the idea for a cookbook while visiting Hemingway's famous haunts during his own travels to Paris, Madrid and Pamplona. "It's hard to get away from the fact that food is a profound theme there," he explains. "As I began looking at more [of Hemingway's writing], I found more and more food. It began to come together as a nice, unified theme that really ties his whole experience together in a way that I don't think has been explored thoroughly very often."
   The cookbook parallels Hemingway's personal journeys, novels and news accounts with recipes ranging in sophistication from his favorite peanut butter and onion sandwiches to instructions on the preparation of fillet of lion -- the subject of a tongue-in-cheek article Hemingway wrote for Sports Illustrated based on an African hunting safari. Hemingway likely did try lion meat, says Boreth. "From a very young age," he says, "Hemingway's father taught him and his siblings to try all kinds of different things, and never to be afraid to be very adventurous in their eating."
   Many of the recipes have been adapted from period cookbooks. Some come straight from establishments frequented by Hemingway that remain in business today, such as Harry's Bar in Venice and Casa Botín in Madrid. Others are original creations, inspired by the authentically detailed food descriptions in Hemingway's short stories and novels, as well as biographies about him.
   Boreth, whose culinary training mainly consists of watching PBS cooking shows, tested his recipes by gathering friends together for a Hemingway- inspired tasting party during last year's Super Bowl. "My favorite dish is probably paella de langosta, or lobster paella, which I adapted from a restaurant in Valencia called La Pepica, where I met some remarkable people and was made to feel at home," he says. (It was one of Hemingway's favorite dishes while living in Spain, covering the bullfights for Life magazine and writing what would eventually become The Dangerous Summer.) "They taught me how to prepare it [using] lobster broth (made out of lobster bodies and tails.) It really makes a difference to make it with lobster broth as opposed to anything else."
   Of course, Hemingway himself probably would have had little use for a cookbook. "He did not cook much himself, if at all," Boreth says, "but he certainly knew what to order, and he certainly knew what he should provide for his characters to make them genuine, and to make them as happy as they could be, given most of their circumstances."

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