Hannibal's Chef: How to Serve Your Friends
Somewhere in the course of history, the medieval practice of eating “soul cakes”—to represent the dead departing purgatory—morphed into the distribution to unsuspecting children little morsels of diabetes- and obesity-inducing packages of high fructose corn syrup. Either way, death and food have remained forever interlinked with Halloween.
It is in that morbid spirit of All Hallows’ Eve that I present to you an interview with Janice Poon—author, food stylist, and creator of the incredibly eye-catching dishes of ambiguous provenance that adorn NBC’s show Hannibal. Those who know the character of Hannibal Lecter from books and movies also know what he means when he “has friends for dinner.”
Poon’s book, Feeding Hannibal: A Connoisseur’s Cookbook (Titan Books), reveals the secrets to creating wonderfully questionable meals. In my interview below, I also ask whether she, too, enjoys serving her friends.
In the show Hannibal, there is sometimes an added tension in the meal scenes because the audience isn’t quite sure if … um … people are on the menu. Did this uncertainty have an impact on your presentation of food?
Janice Poon: 'In life, food we consume is always in question.'
This tension was the essence of everything I wanted to convey with Hannibal’s food. All the key characters were on a knife edge of uncertainty—teetering between sanity and madness; passion and patience; kindness and killing. In life, food we consume is always in question (Mad cows and best-before dates attest) so subconsciously we are always questioning: is it mother’s milk or polonium tea?
You are also a graphic novel author. Creating a book and creating a meal: any similarities?
Yes, very much so! You choose the most interesting ingredients/characters, chop them up a bit to expose their raw qualities, throw them together in a pot/place, turn up the heat and let them interact to take the dish/story to undiscovered places.
To put it delicately, food is sometimes the preamble to intimacy, as we see in some episodes of Hannibal, and in life. What are the ingredients to a sensual meal?
One of the most seductive dinners in history was made for Casanova by a nun. She made it luxurious—to draw out the sense of excess, and light—to lessen demands on blood flow. Everything was held on little warming plates so as not to press the timing of dinner against the timing of desire. However, Hannibal had no trouble seducing Bedelia simply by using my escargots recipe (secret ingredient: absinthe).
It’s Halloween, so here’s the scary question: Haven’t you ever wondered, you know, what it would be like to cook a little “long pork”?
Even after all these years of cooking for a fictional cannibal, I have to say the idea of doing that in real life makes me very queasy. Unless I was in a small group of perishing plane crash survivors … then maybe if I got the long straw … you never really know until you’re in the situation. Anyway, “long pig” couldn’t possibly be as delicious as lobster or buttery mashed potatoes. And potatoes are so much easier to catch!
Howard Lovy is executive editor at Foreword Reviews. You can follow him on Twitter @Howard_Lovy
Howard Lovy
