A Gothic Cookbook: Hauntingly Delicious Recipes Inspired by 13 Classic Tales

In their first cookbook, food journalist Buchan and food historian Pino have baked and butchered their way into gothic literature with recipes for traditional dishes ripped from the ghostliest, grimmest pages of novels such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Each chapter looks at a text and analyzes the role of food in it: how eating reflects on other appetites; when food invokes danger; how a rejection of food might reveal a deeper spiritual or sexual asceticism. Many of the literary analyses include quippy remarks (like “The devil’s in the domestic, and probably in the pudding too”), giving the book a smart, tongue-in-cheek literary knowingness. The authors also acknowledge when gothic texts require a more nuanced analysis—for instance, when they address systemic racism, rape, and other social issues—and their tone shifts in astute ways to recognize the real monstrosities in texts such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved.