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With this book the reader can cook and eat in the company of literary giants and find out what Nora Joyce cooked for Samuel Beckett.
Take twelve Irish literary masters, among them James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Sean O'Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, and Mary Lavin, and note from pastiches of their works how food, all aspects of it, appears in their pages. With insight, humor, and more than a little ingenuity then create recipes for the dishes, situating them as Veronica Jane O'Mara and Fionnuala O'Reilly have - with tasty allusions to the works - and you partake of a feast.
From a sampling of Finnegan's Wake, we learn of "careful teacakes," the recipe for yeasty rounds further instructing us not to drop butter on our shirts and not to eat too many! We make white scones and brown scones as well, as Sean O'Casey would have liked them, and from Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September comes the inspiration and recipe for Sink-the-Bismarck Chocolate Cake, a black-out combination to end all chocolate cakes.
There are recipes for porridge and tarts and kedgeree and a fool, and so much more.
