A collection of insightful essays on food accompanied by a host of recipes, "Literary Feasts" explores the significance of food in literature. Each featured meal--from Madame Bovary's wedding feast of chicken fricassee, to Doc's beer milkshake from "Cannery Row" --has been set down in recipe form as authentically as possible so readers may duplicate them at home.

Drawing on the culinary traditions of the times and cultures at the center of each novel, the author serves up an eggplant epiphany from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," jam tarts from D.H. Lawrence's "Sons...