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Guest Post: Rachel Fellman Chews on Bad Food in Fiction

Look, I love to write about terrible food. Life contains so much more of it than good food, or at least my life does. (I have limited funds and poor judgement for risk.) But more than the realism, I’m drawn to bad food because it infuses a scene with context, with a messy pathos. Someone failed before this dish was even served.

I think about the scene in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in which the spymaster George Smiley tells the story of his one meeting with his Soviet opposite number, Karla. Sitting in a greasy restaurant with his confidant, he takes a few bites of his chicken, murmuring, “There, that shouldn’t offend the cook.” By the end of the scene, he’s given up on the dish, “over which white flakes of fat had formed like seasonable frost.” I mean, the frost isn’t even unseasonable. It is correct that this is happening; it is meet. That chicken died for nothing and everyone knows it.

The cook may have made an unpalatable dish for a sad, unhungry man, but Le Carré prepares a nose-to-tail butcher’s feast of pathos and waste. One of the points of the scene is that Smiley tried and failed to pull a Not So Different Speech on Karla; he ruined it because he’s honest, and honestly lonely. The chicken fulfills its destiny in a way that’s perfect for the mood. It doesn’t symbolize Smiley’s feelings ““ nothing so cheap. Le Carré is a subtler chef than that. Each grim bite of Smiley’s chicken evokes a universe where no spymaster, no heroic fieldman, no great analyst, no chicken farmer or chicken or roadhouse chef, can catch a single break.

I come from a Patrick O’Brian family, and when I mentioned this post to my brother Aaron, he ran to find the bit in The Far Side of the World where Captain Jack Aubrey serves up a lobscouse on which “the liquid fat [stands] half an inch deep over the whole surface.” Later, a pie leaks “thin blood [thin blood!].” As Aaron points out, the pie is rich with social worldbuilding: “Jack has no cook and he’s had to rely on various sailors who don’t actually know how to provide dishes. He’s high class enough that he can’t cook, but he exists in a social setting where he can make one set of people cook for him and another pretend to enjoy the terrible results. […] I feel like a lot of bad meals in literature say stuff about power. One thinks also of the meals Charles’ dad attacks him with in Brideshead Revisited. First red dishes, then white dishes!”

I am myself, as I have said, a gleeful writer of tragic food. It’s true that my debut, The Breath of the Sun, doesn’t have the worst food I’ve ever written. This is because I cut a scene in which a character orders something called “chicken cogulare,” which beats out a scene from a previous manuscript in which a Potemkin village of breakfast pastries is served by an evil prince.

It’s also because The Breath of the Sun is a mountaineering novel, and the literature of survival has a very specific relationship with bad food: since these stories are about scarcity, they’re also about the miracle of having food at all. I remember a meal of spaghetti and fried garlic bread in Kim Stanley Robinson’s underrated Antarctica, which prompts a character to contemplate that Antarctic food, eaten in “extreme states of hunger,” “often tasted wildly delicious even if it was very plain fare.” By the same token, who could forget the “feast of hot water” with which Genly and Estraven celebrate their ice trek in The Left Hand of Darkness (or the hot beer, oddly pleasant in an ice age, over which they make the first moves of their complicated friendship)? Some of the food on Gethen is very fine, and some of it is bad, but it is always transmuted by the sharing at the hearth.

In The Breath of the Sun, when my characters eat dried chicken and biscuit (singular, because in Arctic narratives “biscuit” is a monolithic item), and when my narrator Lamat observes that this biscuit needs to be heavily hydrated with saliva before it can be swallowed, I want to evoke a purely practical un-food. Dehydrated and preserved, it doesn’t feel prepared by human hands. For my two cranky and embittered heroines, the solitude of climbing is both terrible and delicious, and so is the dried pap you eat from a tube. To climb is to leave the context of the earth, and I use food to stretch out that feeling as far as it will go.

Even a breakfast the characters eat when not on the mountain, served by Lamat’s velvety and brutal ex-husband, has this feeling of detachment. Served on “a dirty white table” in an empty courtyard, it is “an untidy heap of miscellaneous food “” rolls and dates and apples with an unpleasant touch of lemon-juice to them, boiled eggs.” The same preservation, the same detachment, but this time there’s nothing delicious or terrible about it, only a mess of context on a plate.

Lamat’s a bartender and innkeeper when not climbing, and I think the only food she really trusts anymore is what she makes herself. When she imagines the mountain from the city, she can only conjure “a morning like a clear glass cup of tea and an egg.” And when she comes home to her lover, she describes her as “a burning breath of coffee, a sense of solidity and strength […] a steady fierce look like some tame animals have.” Home is the right drink on the right breath, and privacy.

Good food is a joy of literature, of course, just as in life. But for subtle worldbuilding, for comedy, for the interplay of hospitality and power — give me the bad stuff. It is a dish of vertiginous depth. Plus, I don’t have to taste it.


Bio: Rachel Fellman is an archivist in Northern California. She writes sharp, painterly science fiction and fantasy about her various preoccupations: art history, extreme survival, toxic love, queer identity, and terrible moral choices. Most of her protagonists are great at exactly one thing and are continually prevented from doing it. Publishers Weekly called her debut novel, The Breath of the Sun, “an atmospheric, poetic, and occasionally wry and brutal story that moves with the gentle but unstoppable momentum of an iceberg.” She does not climb mountains.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me?

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Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.

Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.

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  • Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
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  • Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
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2 Responses

  1. I loved the bad food in Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka, a visceral dystopia. Our protagonist gnaws on raw cubes of rutabaga and starts her day with mushroom porridge “” in a world of cold scarcity.

  2. I really enjoyed the descriptions of food in “Antarctica” too, to the point that I’ve always pictured those meals as being really tasty, regardless of the monotony of the food. But it’s one of my favourite books. I’m currently on my fourth copy as people keep “forgetting” to give it back to me. That scene in the pool under the ice makes me so jealous that I can’t be there!

    Now I’m going to go and explore The Breath of the Sun, because I love mountaineering stories (even though I don’t climb either!)

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Guest Post: Kathy L. Brown on Miss Lutra's Squirrel Stew from "Water of Life"

Cabin photo by Kathy L Brown.In my prohibition-era, urban fantasy novelette, Water of Life, investigator Sean Joye searches the Southern Illinois hill country for Caleb, a missing moonshiner. His trek, beyond a flooded river and through a forest bristling with ice and fae ill intent, leads him to a strange old mountain woman. Miss Lutra would just as soon shoot him as feed him squirrel stew; but feed him she does, and the meal is delicious.

Dinner with Miss Lutra

Letting old ladies feed me hasn’t failed me yet. The stew and bread smelled great. My stomach growled as I sat down at the oak-plank dining table, and I realized I hadn’t eaten all day.

Miss Lutra invited me to say grace over our meal, but apparently found my “For these thy gifts make us truly thankful” a poor effort and jazzed up the prayer with a blessing on the squirrel, the forest, the other animals of the forest, the creek, the farmland, Caleb”””who is lost from us but will be delivered whole and sound, if not now, at the final trumpet,” me, my people, her people, and herself. Although mostly focused on my rumbling stomach, at the final “amen” I remembered not to cross myself, the Church of Rome not so very popular in these parts.

Miss Lutra had filled out the scant meat from a single squirrel with potatoes and turnips, and the meal was quite tasty. Between mouthfuls of hot stew, only marred by the occasional buckshot pellet, I said, “I don’t mean to be abrupt, ma’am, but was Caleb here today or not?”

The old lady cut off a hunk of hot bread with her enormous knife and wiped her bowl with it, sopping up the peppery gravy. “You ain’t from around here, are you, Mr. Sean Joye? Sound like you could even be from over the waters.”

“Do I now? Does that make a matter where Caleb went?” Through the tiny window, I could see dark clouds full of snow gathering low over the woods. “Or does it make a matter of what you’ll tell me?”

Squirrel Stew For Two

While Miss Lutra has a long lifetime of putting together a bit of this and a pinch of that to keep her household fed, I need recipes. She’s not one to share her secrets, of course, but hinted at the following squirrel stew instructions:

  • A squirrel or two, cleaned and cut into pieces (or, 1 pound of chicken thighs with skins and bones)
  • 1 teaspoon salt, divided
  • ¼ teaspoon black pepper, divided
  • ¼ teaspoon red pepper, divided
  • 1-3 Tablespoon bacon fat, as needed
  • A handful of mushrooms (if you got “˜em)
  • 2-3 Tablespoons flour (Depends on how much fat the meat renders. You need equal portions fat and flour.)
  • ¼ cup moonshine (Irish whiskey works OK.)
  • 2-3 Cups chicken broth (divided)
  • 2-3 cloves garlic, chopped well
  • Several sprigs of rosemary
  • Several leaves of sage
  • An onion, chopped well
  • 2-3 potatoes, peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces
  • 2-3 turnips, peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces
  • A carrot, peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces
Squirrel photo by Yinan Chen from Pixabay.
Squirrel photo by Yinan Chen from Pixabay.

Melt two tablespoons of the bacon fat in a cast-iron stew pot or Dutch oven. Salt and pepper the squirrel (or chicken thighs, if you can’t get one) with about half the seasonings and then brown for five to ten minutes in the bacon fat.

Remove the meat and brown the mushrooms, if you’re using them.

Next, brown the chopped onion.

Now use the bacon fat and rendered grease to make a gravy. (You need equal amounts of fat and flour for the roux””the gravy base. Add more bacon fat, if needed””depends on how much fat was soaked up by the mushrooms. Dissolve the flour in the fat and brown it””about as dark as a pecan or an acorn””over low heat. Keep stirring the roux, scraping up any bits of meat stuck to the pan. This might take a while, depending on how dark you like the roux. Don’t rush it. Then stir in the moonshine and two cups of the broth. It’s gravy!)

Warm the herbs and garlic in the gravy until they smell good, then add the vegetables, half a teaspoon or so of salt and red and black pepper if you like it, and more broth to cover. Stir it a bit. Nestle the browned meat among the vegetables.

Bring the stew to a boil, then lower heat to simmer, covered, for an hour or so.

After about an hour, uncover and fish out the meat to cool a bit (ten minutes or so) on a cutting board.

Add the cooked mushrooms to the stew and continue to simmer, uncovered if it seems a bit too thin.

After the meat cools, cut it away from the bones, chop, and put back in the stew. Adjust the seasonings as needed.

Serve with hot, crusty bread and apple pie for dessert.


Author Photo of Kathy L Brown by Daniel Brown.BIO: Kathy L. Brown lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Her hometown and its history inspire her fiction. When she’s not thinking about how haunted everything is, she enjoys hiking, crafts, and cooking for her family. Her novella The Resurrectionist and novelette Water of Life are available as paperback and e-books from Amazon.com. The Resurrectionist is also available from Ingram. Kathy’s short fiction has appeared in the Bards and Sages Anthology Great Tome of Forgotten Relics and Artifacts (The Great Tomes Series, Volume One), with earlier works in Bards and Sages Quarterly, Golden Visions Magazine, and Mused Literary Journal. Hippocrene has published several poems. Follow her on Instagram at kathylbrownwrites, Facebook at kbKathylbrown, and Twitter at KL_Brown. Kathy’s blog, Kathy L. Brown Writes The Storytelling Blog, lives at kathylbrown.com.


If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

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Guest Post: Kyle Winter on The Power of Passive Representation

Treading the waters of diversity is tricky because we never want to disrespect the struggles that women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, or others have had to endure. As writers, we often want to include people like this in our stories because their stories are powerful and can make a difference. This sometimes manifests itself as ‘the gay friend’ or ‘the black friend’ or if you’re really batting for a home run ‘the gay black friend’. This character is great for diversity. He shows that those people exist and that we shouldn’t be afraid of them. But over time, if we see the gay black friend over and over it creates a subliminal message that all gay black men behave a certain way, and that can damage the community. I think we should allow those characters to break the mold and keep it to themselves.

Gender identity, skin color, and sexual orientation don’t affect your ability to do things. Period. There’s no reason a gay man can’t be a hardened combat veteran and there’s no reason a straight man can’t enjoy ballet. The fact that we use these stereotypes reflects our perceptions of society. It acts as a shorthand for the reader / viewer to go “Oh, he’s the gay guy, I get it!” and we can immediately paint a picture of who that person is without digging any deeper. While it’s great to include someone like this in your story, you may actually do more harm than good by treating them this way. Why? Because you’re adding to society’s confirmation bias. If every time someone sees a gay man on TV or reads about them in a book and they behave like a giddy teenage girl, then we will continue to think that’s how all gay men behave. Not that there’s anything wrong with a flamboyant personality, but it can be an oversimplification of the gay community.

What if, instead, we put a gay man in a position of power? The NBC show Brooklyn 99 does this with the character Captain Raymond Holt. He’s a stoic, calculating man that comes off cold but everyone loves him anyway. Just because he lacks flamboyance doesn’t make him any less gay. He still has a pride flag on his desk and there are many episodes with his husband, but he’s not treated any different because of his sexual preference. Yes, there are some episodes about his struggles as a gay black man in the NYPD because that is a story worth telling, but his skin color and sexual orientation never interfere with his ability to perform his duties. That’s because they literally have no bearing on his performance, and his entire team treats him the same as they treat everyone else. Imagine the impact that has for people who have never met a gay man like him. For some people, it never occurs to them a gay man could behave that way. For some people, that character is eye-opening and possibly life-changing.

Wizards of the Coast, a gaming company that owns Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering (among others), often portrays people of color as their flagship heroes. They even have several prominent non-binary characters, which they’ve supported despite friction from some members of the community. Imagine the impact when someone who’s never played one of these games, in an industry that has traditionally been dominated by white dudes, thumbs through one of the rule books and sees a heroic character that looks like them. The imagination stirs as we consider the possibilities of being that character. It makes us feel like we could be part of that adventuring group, part of the epic story that will be written as a legend in years to come. All because of some simple artwork!

Placing these characters front and center, without necessarily making their differences the focus of the narrative, can have a profound effect on society. By having these characters represented in our stories we are saying, “This is how life is, these people exist and they don’t need to be treated any different than you or I.” This silent diversity becomes powerful representation for these communities. It reinforces the idea that we are all equal. If a child sees a hero that looks like them on the cover of a book, or on a movie poster, it tells them they could be that hero. It tells them there are other people with their unique traits in the world and that those people can accomplish great things. It tells them they aren’t alone.

Does this mean you can’t tell a story about a person of color’s struggles? Of course not. Am I suggesting that a woman’s climb to the top of her field isn’t worth hearing about? No. I’m saying that if we fast-forward through the struggles these people face every day and portray them as successful heroes then maybe society will treat them like heroes. In the end, we all want equality. We want a world where our gender identity, skin color, sexual preference or any other part of our being is accepted without a second thought.

Why not nudge society in that direction by telling stories where that is already true?


Headshot of Kyle WinterBIO: Kyle Winter is an author who is terrible at writing about himself, especially in the third person. He considers himself a genre-fluid author, dabbling in science-fiction, fantasy, pulp and others. He is an avid gamer, whether it be video games, tabletop RPGs, miniatures, board games or card games nothing is safe. For the past nine years he has routinely gotten beat up at his Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes and enjoys every second. You can visit his website www.TheKyleWinter.com or connect with him on Twitter @TheKyleWinter.

If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

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