Through the Wardrobe

by Herbie Brennan

  Lewis doesn’t exactly restrain himself about this, either. A very short time after Lucy is back in Narnia, this time with her brothers and sister in tow, they are all sitting down for a meal with Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, and it becomes plain that though it may have been winter for a hundred years in Narnia, rationing is no problem there. Fresh trout, and whole hams swinging from the rafters, and seemingly unlimited potatoes, and fresh milk, and “a great big lump of deep yellow butter in the middle of the table, from which everyone took as much as he wanted to go with his potatoes—”

  Lewis may sing the praises of the fish in the next paragraph, but during rationing one was allowed only two ounces of butter per week. Those who know how people kept even the paper that butter was wrapped in to get the last bit of flavor out of it will know where the real action in that dinner is. And then, as if unlimited butter isn’t enough, out comes “a great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll”—not just some kind of one-person pastry, but a rolled cake full of marmalade and drizzled with orange icing—and the teapot. After this final sensory onslaught-cum-sugar rush, no one is able to do much except push back from the table and sigh with contentment. And here Lewis and Rowling agree at heart: the cap of the feast for their characters, the thing that makes it all worthwhile, is having had enough to eat. The much-abused Harry, who’s lived under the stairs for years scraping by on scanty meals of beans-on-toast while his nasty cousin pigs out (literally) on anything he wants, is unquestionably brother under the skin to these four children from an earlier England who each were allowed only a little more than a pound of meat apiece per week. Those of us who have never known servings much smaller than the Quarter Pounder may be excused if at first we have trouble understanding the real significance of what’s going on at the Beavers’.

  And the Narnian food message just keeps on being pressed home. Even while they’re about to flee for their lives from Maugrim and Queen Jadis’s Secret Police, Mrs. Beaver casually packs up what in ration-time England would have been a king’s ransom in sugar and other comestibles. Father Christmas comes up with not only magical gifts, but tea (the liberal supply of sugar and jug of cream yet again make it plain that We’re Not In England Anymore). The little party of animals that Jadis and Edmund come across shortly thereafter are eating plum pudding (and here we see an extra layer of nostalgia added: the then-unimaginable luxury of a proper Christmas plum pudding, full of impossible-to-get suet and dried fruit, and afire with unobtainable brandy . . . completely unlike the valiant but sad fake puddings that people cobbled together during the wartime holidays). A restorative feast is prepared for the children after they meet Aslan for the first time, but little is said about this, as other matters quickly move to the fore. It doesn’t matter: we now know, as the children do, that we’ve come to a Good Place. But it was the concreteness of the food (and the company in which it’s been eaten) that left them, and us, ready to deal with the abstracts.

  As the Narnian series progressed, back in Lewis’s world rationing lessened but did not go away entirely. In Prince Caspian , Edmund’s remark that he wouldn’t mind “a good thick slice of bread and margarine this minute” suggests that butter is still a long way from being taken off the ration lists. (And the margarine of Edmund’s time was nothing like the I-can’t-believe-it’snot-butter spreads we’re used to now: it was a hard, white, nasty, greasy business into which you had to mix the coloring yourself.) Due to the fact that the Narnian culture has been driven underground at this point, the normal nature of the Narnian food takes a while to assert itself: it’s eaten in haste or under trying circumstances—a few roasted apples here, a snack of cold chicken and wine there. But once again, the unique personalities associated with the food make the difference: gifts of honey from the Bulgy Bears, nuts from Pattertwig the Squirrel, oaten cakes and apples and herbs and wine and cheese with the Centaurs. The shared nature of the food, the hospitality, is what makes it special here. And for Caspian, “to live chiefly on nuts and wild fruit was a strange experience . . . after . . . meals laid out on gold and silver dishes,” but the narrative tells us he had never enjoyed himself more. Then, at last, after the battles that lead to the restoration of Caspian as King of Narnia, come the grapes and magically restoring wines of Bacchus, and the dance of plenty that results in “roasted meat that filled the grove with delicious smell, and wheaten cakes and oaten cakes, honey and many-colored sugars and cream as thick as porridge and smooth as still water” and “pyramids and cataracts of fruit.” Narnia is finally coming back into its own, and the food is back with it.

  The antique quality of much high-end Narnian food is worth noticing, and this seems to suggest a different kind of nostalgia on Lewis’s part. But then so well-read a Medievalist could hardly be expected to avoid borrowing for his world the magnificent excesses of the great feasts of the Middle Ages. One such feast—the one set out daily for travelers who make their way to the Island of the Star near the edge of the world—reflects the best Medieval traditions of food for show as well as for eating, and is said to be “such a banquet as had never been seen, not even when Peter the High King kept court at Cair Paravel.” It featured “turkeys and geese and peacocks, there were boars’ heads and sides of venison, there were pies shaped like ships under full sail or like dragons and elephants, there were ice puddings and bright lobsters and gleaming salmon. . . .”

  This particular preference of Lewis’s for older styles of food sometimes expresses itself in negative form as a prejudice against more modern types—though there’s no question that in some cases the prejudice is warranted. The sandwiches that the ravenous King Tirian devours in The Last Battle are described pretty coolly, especially the ones with “some kind of paste” in them, probably one of the pestilent proto-sandwich spreads of Lewis’s youth, “for that is a sort of food that nobody eats in Narnia.” With good reason. These cheap attempted patés still exist in the British and Irish market and still taste terrible.

  Only once does a Narnian consciously make an effort to cater to the specifically British tastes of his guest (for elsewhere, the Narnian and British palates seem to mesh fairly well). Coriakin, the “fallen” star and magician of the Dufflepuds’ island, says to Lucy, “I have tried to give you food more like the food of your own land than perhaps you have had lately.” Not that Lucy has been particularly suffering on the shipboard fare available on the Dawn Treader. But this lunch of “an omelette, piping hot, cold lamb and green peas, a strawberry ice, lemon-squash to drink with the meal and a cup of chocolate after” was probably a pleasant restorative for a young girl who had just finished unsettling encounters with such items as the Bearded Glass and the magician’s scarily effective grimoire.

  “Foreign” food also seems to be something of a minor issue in the books, at least as compared to Narnian fare. We get several good looks at Calormene food both in the casual and formal modes in The Horse and His Boy, but they’re not all that positive, and the formal food, while opulent enough, isn’t described with Lewis’s usual care. Shasta, the putative fisherman’s son who escapes being sold as a slave by running away with the Talking Horse Bree, finds in his saddlebags “a meat pasty, only slightly stale, a lump of dried figs and another lump of green cheese”—uncured, this means, not moldy—“and a little flask of wine.” Except for the wine, this doesn’t sound particularly appetizing, and the later remark that Shasta finds this “by far the nicest [breakfast] he had ever eaten” seems to reflect the concept that most of his other breakfasts involved fish, stale bread, and water. Also, his later meals, independently obtained on the road, once again seem to mostly involve bread “and some onions and radishes.” Even his companion-to-be Aravis’s provisions, acquired under less duress, are simply vaguely described as “rather nice things to eat,” and her later meal with the dingbat Tarkheena Lasaraleen is passed over as “chiefly of the whipped cream and jelly and fruit and ice sort.” (One could make a case that, if Las seems a little ADD, the Tarkheena’s sugar-loaded diet might have a lot to do w
ith it.) And their last meal together is merely described as “supper.” It’s pretty rare for Lewis to be so terse in a food description.

  Then somewhat later, while Shasta’s being held by the royal Narnians who think he’s Prince Corin, he is given a meal “after the Calormene fashion. I don’t know whether you would have liked it or not,” Lewis says, going on to describe a very acceptable hot-weather lunch of whole lobster and chicken-liver pilaf (though admittedly the snipe stuffed with almonds and truffles might give some people pause) with any number of ices and some cold white wine. But the writer’s enthusiasm seems a little muted. One also has to consider in this context the less-than-positive references to the garlic-and-onion smells of the marketplace in Tashbaan, contaminated by their nearness to “unwashed people, unwashed dogs . . . and the piles of refuse.” The “no-garlic-please-we’re-British” phenomenon was a very late Victorian development that took a good while to be shaken off, and there was also a general lack of experience with the more Mediterranean cuisines. Lewis didn’t get down that way himself until rather late in life, and the at-home-British take on such food was pretty desperate until the great English food writer Elizabeth David came along and started showing people how to get it right. Either way, the “foreign” Calormene food never really compares positively to the Narnian, which is largely based on historical (or recent-memory) British cooking. You have to wonder what Lewis would have made of the modern Britain, where the number one favorite dish is chicken tikka masala.

  There is also, as a side issue, the moment that tells you that whatever a Narnian might think of Calormene food, the Calormenes take it seriously: the Tisroc—having previously pardoned one of his chefs—rather callously recalls the pardon as he feels indigestion coming on after his ultra-secret tête-à-tête with his Vizier and the inflammable Prince Rabadash. Anyone reading the chapter would be inclined to think that the indigestion was more situational than dietary . . . but then we’re told straight out that the Calormenes are a cruel people, so maybe nothing better should be expected.

  Whatever the case, when Shasta and Aravis and the Horses finally make it into Archenland, the change in tone of the language about food makes it plain where Lewis’s preferences lay. The goat’s milk (even though it comes as something of a shock to Aravis) and the porridge and cream for breakfast are a hint, and the later meal the Dwarfs give Shasta—the toast and butter (there it is again, with the additional note that Shasta has no idea what it is because “in Calormen you nearly always get oil instead of butter”), the bacon and eggs and mushrooms and coffee—all tell us that we are back in Normal Food Country, and the author is glad to be there.

  But the Calormene food is more slighted than actively scorned. What Lewis does not bother concealing his scorn for is the kind of “crank” vegetarianism that was beginning to be practiced in Britain postwar. One hopes he was actually reacting to the somewhat insufferable attitude that seems to have gone with the practice at that time, and which he caricatures when describing Eustace Scrubb’s “very up-to-date and advanced” mother and father. The “Plumptree’s Vitaminized Nerve Food” that Eustace demands after being dropped in the ocean next to the Dawn Treader—and that he demands be made with distilled water—gets short shrift.

  And there’s no arguing with Lewis’s condemnation of ersatz foods, the less-than-desirable substitutes that were frequently forced on unhappy consumers during the rationing years. The simple sausage would be one example of a food that repeatedly turns up transfigured in the Narnia books. Though sausages weren’t rationed during or after wartime, the meat that went into them was, so their desperately padded-out contents would have become a cruel mockery for a man raised in a part of the world whose great culinary claim to fame was the Ulster Fry, a dish incomplete without good sausages. The “hissing . . . and delicious” sausages that Jill and Eustace are given by their Narnian rescuers after their return from inner-earth are a straightforward antidote to the ones Lewis would have had to put up with for at least the previous decade: “not wretched sausages half full of bread and soya bean, either, but real meaty, spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt.”

  The annoyed descriptions of food gone wrong, however, are in the minority. Lewis’s fondness for a good meal and his willingness to describe it until the reader can practically taste it show up again and again. So does his playfulness about Narnian food. Another writer might sometimes be tempted to think that Lewis is inserting food “business” in one spot or another as a comfort measure, to break the tension of a scene just past. But sometimes these foodie episodes look more like something that Lewis allowed to happen primarily to amuse himself. And occasionally, during one of these, it’s possible to spot the symptoms of an author suddenly thinking through some aspect of his own creation that he hadn’t considered until just then. One of these moments is the rather harried description in The Silver Chair of the logistics of having a centaur for an overnight visit at your place—A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omelette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he attends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats and a bag of sugar. That’s why it’s such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weekend. A very serious thing indeed.

  —especially in a country where one comfort for the serious cook is definitely missing: the dishwasher. It’s a pity that Narnia is, by and large, so resolutely anti-machine. But even the Dwarfs who feed Shasta after his long run to warn the Archenlanders of the impending Calormene invasion describe the one of them who gets picked to do the dishes afterward as “the loser.”

  Something else amusing turns up in that passage about the Centaur: one of the very few foods that Lewis “invented” for Narnia. This is the pavender, which may be a Narnian-ized version of that uniquely Northern Irish fish, the pollan—a herring-like fresh-water fish related to the Arctic cisco, which like its cousin can only be found in formerly glaciated lakes like Loch Neagh. Interestingly, Lewis may be punning here, since the word “pavender” isn’t unique to him. It appears in exactly one other piece of literature—St. Leger’s quirky little poem “The Chavender.” The poem is itself an extended wordplay:There is a fine stuffed chavender

  A chavender or chub,

  That decks the rural pavender,

  The pavender or pub,

  Wherein I eat my gravender,

  My gravender, or grub.

  Lewis almost certainly knew this poem: and he might even have known that the “chavender or chub” was a relative of the pollan—or just looked a whole lot like it—and thought it would be funny to use “pavender” as the Narnian fish’s name.

  But the fun-and-games approach to Narnian food is not universal in the books, or unmixed with other influences or motivations. There is one notable spot where the humor about food abruptly becomes edgy. Again, this occurs in The Silver Chair when Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle are staying with the (so-called) Gentle Giants at Harfang. They’re in the kitchen waiting for the cook-giantess who’s guarding them to fall asleep, and Jill, though not particularly interested in the gigantic open cookbook on the counter, has a look at it. Under the entry for MALLARD, she goes into shock on seeing—MAN. This elegant little biped has long been valued as a delicacy. It forms a traditional part of the Autumn Feast, and is served between the fish and the joint. Each Man—

  We know from Lewis’s letters that he read and often enjoyed the “pulp” science fiction magazines of the period. The Silver Chair was published in 1953, and it’s difficult to believe that Lewis had not seen Damon Knight’s instant-classic SF story, “To Serve Man,” when it first appeared in Galaxy magazine in 1950. In this story, seemingly friendly aliens turn up to help humanity with its problems, and are almost universally trusted until someone succeeds in translating their “great book,” which share
s the story’s name. This book turns out to be a cookbook, and the aliens not nearly so altruistic as they’d seemed. The trope has since turned up in many other places, especially in film and TV, the story itself most famously appearing as an episode of the original Twilight Zone—and it looks as if Lewis was here one of the very first to invoke it for the joke’s sake, though the humor is fairly dark.

  Much more unsettlingly, though, this is also one of the places where food briefly—and unusually for Lewis—becomes a horror, an occasion of sin, or both. Earlier, just briefly, Edmund’s disastrous encounter with Jadis’s magical Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe leaves him much more likely to betray his sisters and brother than he would have been had he never eaten any: “Anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.” That was bad enough—though Edmund’s addiction and treachery did eventually lead to the end of Winter and the death of the Witch. And for his part in this, Edmund is eventually forgiven. But in The Silver Chair, when Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum discover that the venison they’ve been eating is from a Talking Stag, the horror is inescapable; the sense of helpless anguish among the three of them is crushing. Even at the end of the book, when all seems to be forgiven, there is a lingering sense that forgiveness may still not be enough.