For February’s project, I’m working on a second draft of the
cozy mystery I wrote in November for NaNoWriMo, currently titled Warnings at
the Waterfront. In this story, I describe an award-winning lemon éclair as
being
“a pastry oblong about five inches long, glazed with a streak of chocolate and dotted with yellow icing flowers… She took a bite and gooey lemony custard squeezed out the sides. It was sharp, sweet, and creamy all at once…”
Yum!
But could a lemon
éclair be that good? It’s one thing to describe an item so that it sounds
appealing to our sense of taste, smell, or sight. It’s quite another for such
an item to exist, or even be possible. Lemon and chocolate is a tricky
combination, and I’ve been experimenting with combinations of lemon curd and
vanilla custard in an attempt to come up with an actual lemon éclair. So far,
it falls significantly short of its fictional version.
An attempt at a lemon eclair |
There are plenty of wonderful things in books; things that I
would like to exist, but which don’t.
When I first read The Lord of the Rings,
I was much impressed with athelas,
aka kingsfoil, and its fragrance when crushed in the king’s hands and cast into
water. Its fragrance is described as follows:
“and then he crushed them, and straightaway a living freshness filled the room, as if the air itself awoke and tingled, sparkling with joy. And then he cast the leaves into the bowls of steaming water that were brought to him, and at once all hearts were lightened. For the fragrance that came to each was like a memory of dewy mornings of unshadowed sun in some land of which the fair world in Spring is itself but a fleeting memory.” (The Return of the King, p.173)
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an herb so deliciously
fragrant that it could banish the Black Breath? Or, in our world, depression?
What would such an herb smell like? In my mind, athelas was a sort of combination of
parsley (crisp and fresh) and peppermint (cool and sharp), without being
either. I guess peppermint comes closest, at least for me, but I’d still like
an athelas plant of my own.
There were plenty of other non-existent entities to long for
in The Lord of the Rings. Lembas, the
elves’ waybread, are described as “very
thin cakes, made of a meal that was baked a light brown on the outside, and
inside was the colour of cream.” Not only do lembas taste better than the best
of honeycakes, but
“the cakes will keep sweet for many, many days, if they are unbroken and left in their leaf-wrappings, as we have brought them. One will keep a traveller on his feet for a day of long labour, even if he be one of the tall Men of Minas Tirith.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, pp. 478-479)
Maybe someone could
come up with something that resembles lembas in flavor and texture, but they are
unlikely to duplicate its nourishing qualities and long shelf-life.
A more modern example of a fictional delight is butterbeer.
A mug of hot butterbeer on a cold day sounds like a great treat, but how would
it actually taste? The name itself calls up the taste of butterscotch and root
beer. I haven’t had the butterbeer that was created for Harry Potter fans, but
I gather that butterscotch is one of the flavors involved. I suspect that if
their version had turned out to be as good as the fictional version, it would
be more widely available by now. And while I like butterscotch, it seems like a
very strong, very sweet flavor for something you’re going to drink an entire
mugful of. (Then again, perhaps I would have said the same of root beer, if I’d
only ever had it in the form of candy.)
But back to my fictional lemon éclair. It just may not be a
genuine possibility. One solution is to change the pastry in the book to
something that could be genuinely wonderful (and so be able to include a recipe
for it, should the book ever get that far.) That’s probably the best solution.
But that isn’t always
the solution. Some books, especially fantasy, are better with a few impossibly
wonderful things in them. We just have to accept that description outpaces
possibility. Not every longing we have can be satisfied.
At least I’ve got peppermint.
Till next post.
P.S. Page numbers are from the 1965 paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings.
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