For her photo series Fictitious Dishes, graphic designer Dinah Fried cooked, assembled, and photographed five meals from her favorite novels.
Some of the dishes are instantly recognizable--it's hard to picture gruel without thinking of Oliver--but Fried told us that she began with Holden Caulfield's meal of a cheese sandwich and a malted. "This is probably the least iconic meal of the bunch," Fried said, "but it always stuck in my head."
Fried said that cooking all of the meals herself was fun, as was "searching in thrift stores and my friends' kitchens in search of the perfect fork, water glass, doily, pepper grinder, or what have you."
Sometimes, though, like for this meal from Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Fried had to improvise a bit: "It seems the main characters are constantly consuming open-faced sandwiches and coffee. The sandwich toppings--cheese, sliced hard-boiled egg, and scallions--are inspired by the book, but I don't think that exact sandwich was ever described."
The Moby-Dick meal is based on Chapter 15 ("Chowder") of Melville's epic, in which Ishmael and Queequeg stop by Nantucket's Try Pots Inn to try a pot of Hosea Hussey's famous chowder (that comes in "cod" or "clam"). "The crusty bread and ale are details I imagined," Fried said, "not ones reported by Melville," but that chunky bowl o' chowder does seem deserving of this Melvillean praise:
Fried has more Fictitious Dishes in the works, and is happy to take suggestions from fans of novelistic noshing. Find her at her website or hit her up on Twitter, where she goes by @dinahfried.
[Dinah Fried via Laughing Squid]