Pushkin, Lermontov, Dumas, Gogol, Krylov... Only Agatha Christie could figure out which of them ate 20 peaches at a time, who did not get enough of the royal dinner, who wrote a cookbook, who loved spaghetti, and who once ate pies with sawdust . By the way, Agatha Christie herself was a woman with a good appetite. Details are in this article.
Agatha Christie. Skinny glutton 
In her autobiography, the English writer recalls that since childhood she was prone to gluttony: “Taking into account the amount of food that I consumed in childhood and adolescence (because I was always hungry), I simply cannot understand how I managed to remain so skinny " As a 12-year-old girl, Agatha Christie even competed in “digestive prowess” with a 22-year-old young man: “He was ahead of me in terms of oyster soup, but otherwise we were “breathing down each other’s necks.” We both ate boiled turkey, then fried turkey, and four or five pieces of beef. Then we started on plum pudding, sweet pie and sponge cake. After this came biscuits, grapes, oranges, plums and candied fruit. And finally, for the rest of the day, handfuls of chocolate of different varieties were brought from the pantry, depending on who liked what.” The writer herself was not only surprised that after such dinners she did not have stomach problems, but also doubted that “people today are able to overcome such a meal.” And Agatha Christie considered cream to be her favorite dish, which she became addicted to as a child and continued to “stuff it all her life.”
Alexandre Dumas Sr. Between a book and a frying pan 
The famous French writer was known not only as the author of the legendary trilogy about the Three Musketeers, but also as a gourmet and glutton. Cooking and writing are two passions between which Dumas was torn all his life. Contemporaries recalled that he could part with a pen only “for the sake of a frying pan handle.” However, Dumas often combined two types of activities, which resulted in the “Great Culinary Dictionary”, which, however, the writer never had time to complete - Anatole France later did it instead. What’s nice: in the cookbook Dumas included five recipes for Russian jam (from roses, pumpkin, nuts, radishes and asparagus). However, in general, the writer did not really like Russian cuisine, and during two years of traveling around Russia he never managed to fall in love with it. The only dish that captivated the mind and belly of this gourmet was kurnik - a pie with eggs and chickens, prepared in the house of the Russian writer Avdotya Panayeva, with whom he was visiting. Later, she recalled the Frenchman’s incredible gluttony: “I think that Dumas’s stomach could digest fly agarics.” Dumas impressed her as a man with a great appetite and very brave, because he could eat “two plates of botvina, fried mushrooms, pies, pig with porridge - all at once!” This requires great courage, especially for a foreigner who has never tried such dishes in his life...”
Alexander Pushkin. Potatoes as bait 
“Don’t put off until dinner what you can eat at lunch” is one of the writer’s “Gastronomic maxims.” However, Pushkin was not a gourmet, he just loved to eat, and was unpretentious when it came to food. Pushkin’s friend, the poet Pyotr Vyazemsky, wrote: “Pushkin was not at all a gourmet... but he was a terrible glutton for other things. I remember how on the road he ate 20 peaches bought at Torzhok in one breath. The soaked apples also took a fair beating.” Pushkin was also familiar with French cuisine, which was popular in his time, but, nevertheless, he loved simple, one might even say, rustic Russian cuisine. “The genius of pure beauty” Anna Kern recalls that Pushkin’s mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, even lured her son to dinner with baked potatoes, “which Pushkin was a big fan of.” Pushkin was very fond of apple pie, which was prepared in the house of his neighbors Osipov-Wulf. Well, all the dishes of Pushkin’s nanny were appreciated not only by himself, but also by his friends. For sweets, Alexander Sergeevich was very fond of gooseberry jam.
Mikhail Lermontov. Lover of sawdust pies 
Unlike Pushkin, this poet had no reverence for food, moreover, he did not understand it at all. As his first lover, Ekaterina Sushkova, recalls in her Notes, Lermontov never knew what he ate: veal or pork, game or lamb. However, this did not stop the poet from arguing with his friends, convincing them of the sophistication of his gastronomic taste. They listened, listened, and then took and fed Mikhail Yuryevich buns filled with... sawdust. Young Lermontov (at that time he was only 16 years old), not suspecting anything, managed to eat a whole such bun and start on the second, but he was stopped, pointing to the “indigestible filling for the stomach.”
Ivan Krylov. 30 pancakes for a snack 
Ivan Andreevich not only loved to eat, he was a real glutton. There were legends about the fabulist's overeating - based on real facts. Krylov could eat up to 30 pancakes with caviar in one sitting. And these pancakes were “the size of a plate and the thickness of a finger.” He ate at least 80 oysters. He loved both “substantial” dishes - fish soup with pies, fried turkey, veal chops, pig with sour cream, and edible “little things” - cucumbers, lingonberries, plums. My preferred drink was kvass. It is interesting that Krylov did not eat at all at the royal dinners, after which he went to dine at a restaurant, and dinner was immediately waiting for him at home. Of course, how could he get enough of five spoons of soup, pies the size of a walnut, a turkey wing and a half-orange dessert with jelly and jam inside?!
Nikolai Gogol. Pasta soul 
The writer’s favorite dish was... Italian pasta. He enjoyed making them himself, adding salt, pepper, butter and Parmesan cheese. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, no one “could eat as much pasta as he ate sometimes.” Nikolai Vasilyevich also absolutely could not live without sweets: his trouser pockets were always full of sweets and gingerbread cookies, which he “chewed incessantly.” Gogol loved not only to eat himself, but also to treat others. The writer’s friend, critic Mikhail Pogodin recalls: “His supply of excellent tea was never exhausted, but the main thing for him was to collect various cookies for tea. And where he found all sorts of pretzels, buns, crackers, only he knew, and no one else. Every day something new appeared, which he first let everyone try, and he was very happy if someone found it to their taste and approved the choice with some special phrase. Nothing more could be done to please him.”
Agree, it would be interesting to know what the favorite dishes of great people were. It turns out that Tolstoy had a terrible sweet tooth, and Pushkin slept and saw baked potatoes. What Stalin treated his guests to and how to prepare chocolate jelly according to Sofia Andreevna Tolstoy’s recipe.
Oddly enough, despite European reference points, Peter the Great has always remained one of the adherents of Russian cuisine.
According to the memoirs of his contemporary, mechanic Andrei Nartov, the emperor’s usual “foods” were jelly, pickles, sauerkraut, sour cabbage soup, porridge and roast with cucumbers and pickled lemons. Before eating, Peter drank aniseed vodka, and during the meal - kvass. The emperor preferred to give public dinners with European dishes for foreign guests at Menshikov's.
Potatoes for Pushkin
Most of all, Alexander Sergeevich loved simple village dishes: cabbage soup and green soup with boiled eggs, porridge, chopped cutlets with sorrel and spinach, etc. But, according to the recollections of his contemporaries, the greatest pleasure was given to him by baked potatoes, which he could eat in huge quantities. They prepared it according to the traditional recipe: rolled it in a peel in coarse salt and baked it in the oven, burying it deeper in the ash. And for dessert, the poet loved to eat white gooseberry jam.
Sweet tooth Lev Nikolaevich
It is a well-known fact that Leo Tolstoy did not eat meat. All dishes prepared in his house were from plant products, milk and eggs. Every day for breakfast he ate oatmeal, sour milk and eggs. The writer did not think about the amount of food he ate and could easily drink up to three bottles of kefir, several cups of coffee, eat mashed rice, and pies in one day. The wife, Sofya Andreevna, was very worried about her husband’s stomach. “Today at lunch,” she wrote in her diaries, “I watched in horror as he ate: first salted milk mushrooms... then four large buckwheat croutons with soup, and sour kvass, and black bread. And all this in large quantities."
Lev Nikolaevich also loved sweets very much. There were always nuts, dates and dried fruits in the house, as well as jam, including Yasnopolyanskoye. Rather, it was even an assortment of fruits and berries, since it included melon, cherries, apples, peaches, plums, gooseberries and apricots.
Sofya Andreevna herself kept a “Cookbook”, in which she eventually collected over 160 recipes. One of them is chocolate... jelly. So, you should take one “plank” of chocolate (two standard bars), two cups of potato flour, a cup of sugar and two bottles of milk (one bottle in those years was about 0.75 liters). The chocolate was grated, mixed with starch and sugar and a small amount of milk. The rest of the milk is boiled and the resulting mixture is poured into it. The drink should be stirred until thick.
Luisa Contreras, 2013
Stalin's buffet
Stalin had a rather strange attitude towards feasts: they began late in the evening, lasted a long time, and the tables were literally bursting with dishes, while the leader himself ate little, preferring to treat the invitees to his fullest. Usually boiled pork, lamb or poultry rolls, sturgeon, pies, fish and, naturally, real Georgian dishes - shish kebab, lobio, pkhali, etc. were placed on the tables.
Anastas Mikoyan once recalled that Stalin’s favorite dishes included fish (frozen nelma, Danube herring, boiled). “I loved birds: guinea fowl, ducks, chickens. Loved the thin skewered lamb ribs. Very tasty thing. Thin ribs, little meat, dry roasted. Everyone always liked this dish. And boiled quail. These were the best dishes,” he said.
Photo from Instagram account shvepa, 2016
And General S. M. Shtemenko, the head of the operational department of the General Staff, who more than once dined with Stalin at the Near Dacha, in the book “The General Staff during the War” said that “dinner at Stalin’s place, even a very large one, always took place without the services of waiters. They only brought everything they needed to the dining room and silently left. Cutlery, bread, cognac, vodka, dry wines, spices, vegetables and mushrooms were placed on the table in advance. As a rule, there were no sausages, hams and other snacks. He didn’t tolerate canned food.”
Hitler's Night Snacks
An interesting fact about Adolf Hitler: it is known that he had problems with the spleen, so the Fuhrer followed a strict diet, which was personally monitored by his cook. But a couple of years ago, Hitler's former maid Elisabeth Kalhammer told reporters that at night, when the servants went to bed, the Fuhrer would sneak into the kitchen and secretly eat cookies and cream pies. According to Kalhammer, the cooks prepared a “Führer pie” with raisins, apples and nuts especially for him and left it in the kitchen before going to bed.
Lenin's hearty exile
In the family of the future leader, the daily routine was quite strict: breakfast at eight in the morning (on holidays at noon). Lunch on ordinary days is at two o'clock in the afternoon, and on holidays - at four. Dinner was served every day at eight or nine o'clock in the evening. Vegetable, cereal and milk soups regularly appeared on the table, and less often - cabbage soup and fish soup. Meat was usually eaten boiled, fish was also boiled or smoked. In addition, milk and chicken eggs were in use, which were eaten often and in any form (fried eggs, omelet, boiled, etc.). There was no cult of bread in the family: on weekdays they ate only black bread for lunch, and white bread was served for tea or dinner.
This diet generally had a beneficial effect on the children growing up in the family, but as soon as the future leader was deprived of his usual home-cooked food, having entered Kazan University, he almost instantly acquired gastritis, because of which he subsequently suffered throughout his life.
As the famous researcher of various types of cuisine, William Pokhlebkin, says, “at the end of 1895 the first arrest followed. In prison, Lenin's gastritis first worsens. But regular Russian prison food (cabbage soup, porridge) gradually stabilizes the situation. And even more favorable conditions are developing for Lenin in exile.
Having found myself in a private apartment in Krasnoyarsk with full board, that is, with abundant Russian food four to five times a day and a real Siberian menu (mushroom cabbage soup, veal, boiled fish, pies, dumplings, shanezhki, lamb with porridge, etc. ), Lenin enthusiastically writes to his family: “I live well, I’m quite happy with the table. I forgot to even think about mineral gastric water and, I hope, I will soon forget its name! “While in exile, I felt good.”
Laurel F, 2005
And among drinks, Lenin loved tea most of all, sometimes very strong. In exile, he sometimes drank beer, and upon returning to Russia, according to Vyacheslav Molotov, wine, but was not keen on it.
Let's talk about food, or rather the eating habits of famous people. For example, until the 17th century, at the royal court it was customary to serve fried swans or a pork or lamb head boiled with spices at festive receptions. An ordinary dinner could last until night, and for Ivan the Terrible - until dawn. Usually six to seven hundred guests were present at such feasts. At the wedding of the parents of Peter the Great (Alexey Mikhailovich and Natalya Naryshkina) they served roast goose, roast pig, chicken with lemon, chicken in noodles, chicken in rich cabbage soup, bread dishes: even sieve bread, kurnik sprinkled with eggs, lamb pie, a dish of pies sour with cheese, a dish of larks, a dish of thin pancakes, a dish of pies with eggs, a dish of cheesecakes, a dish of crucian carp with lamb, then another rosole pie, a dish of hearth pies, Easter cake and so on. But this was eaten on holidays, and on ordinary days the families of Russian autocrats ate rather modestly. Thus, Peter the Great’s favorite dish was celery soup with cream. Peter's traditional lunch consisted of thick hot sour cabbage soup, porridge, jelly, cold pig in sour cream or cold roast (usually duck) with pickled cucumbers or pickled lemons, ham and cheese. Catherine the Second preferred scrambled eggs with onions, garlic, and tomatoes. However, modesty in food did not apply to the nobles who served the kings. I remembered Pikul’s book “The Favorite,” where the author condemningly describes that Prince Potemkin eats pineapples and herring, seemingly incompatible products. But Potemkin was right, it’s really delicious! And now store shelves are full of herring with pineapples and mayonnaise.
Herring with pineapples.
Count Stroganov was also a notable glutton; we owe it to him for the dish of beef stroganoff (fried meat with onions in sour cream), although evil tongues said that the count was forced to come up with such food, since he had no teeth and could only cope with soft food.
At the court of Alexander the First, according to the famous fabulist and gourmet I. Krylov, they did not eat anything at all; here is an excerpt from a letter to A.M. Turgenev: “I never returned from these dinners full. And that’s what I thought before: they’ll feed you in the palace. I went for the first time and thought: what kind of dinner is there already - and I let the servant go. What happened? The decoration and serving are pure beauty. They sat down and they served soup: there was some kind of greenery on the bottom, the carrots were cut out in festoons, and everything just stood there, because there was only a puddle of soup itself. By God, there were five spoons in total. What about the pies? - no more than a walnut. I grabbed two, but the chamberlain is trying to run away. I held it by the button and took off a couple more. Then he broke out and surrounded the two people next to me. That’s right, lackeys are not allowed to lag behind.
The fish is good - trout; after all, the Gatchina ones are their own, and they serve such small fry - much less portioned! What’s so surprising when everything that’s larger is sold to traders? I bought it myself from the Stone Bridge.
French tricks went for the fish. It’s like an overturned pot, lined with jelly, and inside there are greens, pieces of game, truffle trimmings - all sorts of leftovers. It doesn't taste bad. I want to take the second pot, but the dish is already far away. What do you think this is?
They only let you try here?!
We got to the turkey. Don’t make a mistake, Ivan Andreevich, we’ll get even here. They bring it. Believe it or not, only the legs and wings, cut into small pieces, lie side by side, and the bird itself is hidden under them and remains uncut. Good fellows! I took the leg, gnawed it and put it on a plate. I look around. Everyone has a bone on their plate. The desert is a desert... And I felt sad and sad, I almost shed a tear. And then I see that the queen mother noticed my sadness and something he speaks to the chief footman and points at me... So what? The second time they brought me turkey. I made a low bow to the queen - after all, she was paid. I want to take it, but the bird lies there uncut. No, brother, if you’re being naughty, you won’t fool me: cut it like this and bring it here, I tell the chamberlain. So I got a pound of nutritious food. And everyone around is looking and envying. And the turkey was completely shabby, there was no noble stature, it was fried early in the morning and, monsters, it was heated up for lunch!
And the sweets! I'm ashamed to say... Half an orange! The natural innards are taken out, and instead, jelly and jam are filled. Out of spite for the skin, I ate it. Our kings are fed poorly, it’s a scam all around. And the wine flows endlessly. As soon as you drink, you look, the glass is full again. Why? Because the court servants then drink them.
I returned home hungry, very hungry... What should I do? I let the servants go, nothing was in store... I had to go to the restaurant. And now, when I have to dine there, dinner is always waiting for me at home." The famous fabulist poetically described his gluttony!
The favorite dish of Nicholas II's family was soup with pearl barley, and the tsar himself liked to eat buckwheat porridge at dinner. When sailors and soldiers captured the Winter Palace in 1917 (although the Provisional Government was already sitting in the palace, the Tsar’s cooks remained), they demanded that the cook prepare a dish that the Tsar ate. When they were brought soup with barley, they were outraged by the treat and began to reproach the cook for the fact that the king could not eat such simple food! To which the offended cook replied: "You also need to know how to eat!"
Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck loved it very much and at all receptions he ate only herring in a marinade of vinegar and bay leaf.
But the famous writer N.V. Gogol, while traveling in Italy, became addicted to pasta. He enjoyed making them himself, adding salt, pepper, butter and cheese. Nikolai Vasilyevich also absolutely could not live without sweets; he adored sweets and gingerbread.
But the wonderful writer A. Tolstoy loved pies.
I love this author madly, but recently I came across a reproduction with a portrait of Tolstoy at a table laden with food and drink. I had seen it before, but I did not pay attention to the date of the painting - 1943. The height of the war, people are starving, and the “red count” did not change his lordly habits of eating and drinking from the belly even in such difficult times. It would be possible to paint a portrait in a more modest setting. And what is his statement worth: “I’m a cynic, a mere mortal, and I don’t give a damn about anything!” A complete disappointment in a good writer! So, dear readers, as the royal cook said: “You have to know how to eat!” so that your health is normal and people are not disappointed in their favorite historical characters.
A.N. Tolstoy
It is no secret that readers are interested not only in the life and work of writers, but also in everything connected with their personality: hobbies, habits, attachments...
Would you like to know about the gastronomic preferences of your favorite authors?
Agatha Christie
In her autobiography, the writer recalls that since childhood she was prone to gluttony: “Considering the amount of food I consumed as a child and teenager (because I was always hungry), I just can’t understand how I managed to stay so skinny.” As a 12-year-old girl, Agatha Christie even competed in “digestive prowess” with a 22-year-old young man: “He was ahead of me in terms of oyster soup, but otherwise we were “breathing down each other’s necks.” We both ate boiled turkey, then fried turkey, and four or five pieces of beef. Then we started on plum pudding, sweet pie and sponge cake. After this came biscuits, grapes, oranges, plums and candied fruit. And finally, for the rest of the day, handfuls of chocolate of different varieties were brought from the pantry, depending on who liked what.” The writer herself was not only surprised that after such dinners she did not have stomach problems, but also doubted that “people today are able to overcome such a meal.” And Agatha Christie considered cream to be her favorite dish, which she became addicted to as a child and continued to “stuff it all her life.”
Alexandre Dumas
The famous French writer was known not only as the author of the legendary trilogy about the Three Musketeers, but also as a gourmet. Cooking and writing are two passions between which Dumas was torn all his life. Contemporaries recalled that he could part with a pen only “for the sake of a frying pan handle.” However, Dumas often combined two types of activities, which resulted in the “Great Culinary Dictionary”, which, however, the writer never had time to complete - Anatole France later did it instead.
By the way, the dish that captivated the mind and belly of this gourmet was kurnik - a pie with eggs and chickens, prepared in the house of the Russian writer Avdotya Panayeva, with whom he was visiting. Later she recalled the incredible gluttony of the Frenchman: “I think Dumas’s stomach could digest fly agarics.”. Dumas impressed her as a man with a great appetite and very brave, because he could eat “two plates of botvina, fried mushrooms, pies, suckling pig with porridge - all at once! This requires great courage, especially for a foreigner who has never tried such dishes in his life...”.
Dumas Sr. also had passionate feelings for chocolate. His favorite dessert was “erotic” chocolate, which the novelist prepared according to a special recipe using vanilla, cinnamon and liquid amber.
Guy de Maupassant
The whole flavor of French cuisine is reflected in two recipes for the famous writer Guy de Maupassant’s favorite delicacies - pureed soups “Dear Friend” and “Ma choushu” from veal.
Soup-puree “Dear Friend”
Guy de Maupassant's favorite soup, which was prepared almost daily by his chef during the writer's voyage on the yacht "Dear Friend". Interestingly, the writer himself called this soup “Dear Friend Royal,” which means “Royal.”
The cooking recipe, recorded by chef Henri Douet, has survived to this day. His style of presentation is preserved in the following recipe:
For the soup, you need to select small stalks of young and tender cauliflower, lightly simmer them, without letting them become soft, in water with a teaspoon of wine vinegar. Do not add salt, it roughens the taste. Finely chop two thirds of this cabbage after cooking, cut one third of the cabbage into halves.
After sautéing the sweet onions in cow's butter, add them to the chopped cabbage and pour in the cream until it completely covers the cabbage and onions. Simmer over low heat until the vegetables are completely softened, then rub the entire mass through a sieve. Add salt to taste. Add some white pepper. Stir well.
Heat slightly and add the yolks, beaten with a small amount of broth. They need to be poured in in a thin stream, and the soup should not be heated too much so that the yolks do not curdle. The husks, cut into halves, are introduced before serving, lightly fried in cow butter.
Serve cauliflower puree soup with tender Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, placed in rolls on a separate plate.
The great writer preferred Sauternes, a white French wine of exquisite taste, to accompany this light dish.
Another favorite Maupassant puree soup was called “Ma shushu”, which means “My charming one”. It was prepared from veal and served with boiled asparagus and cheese sticks.
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin
“Don’t put off until dinner what you can eat at lunch.” - one of the writer’s “Gastronomic maxims”. However, Pushkin was not a gourmet, he just loved to eat, and was unpretentious when it came to food. Pushkin's friend, poet Pyotr Vyazemsky, wrote : “Pushkin was not at all a gourmet... but he had a terrible glutton for other things. I remember how on the road he ate 20 peaches bought at Torzhok in one breath. The soaked apples also took a fair beating.” Pushkin was also familiar with French cuisine, which was popular in his time, but, nevertheless, he loved simple, one might even say, rustic Russian cuisine.
Anna Kern recalls that Pushkin’s mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, even lured her son to dinner with baked potatoes, “which Pushkin was a big fan of.” Pushkin was very fond of apple pie, which was prepared in the house of his neighbors Osipov-Wulf. Well, all the dishes of Pushkin’s nanny were appreciated not only by himself, but also by his friends. For sweets, Alexander Sergeevich was very fond of gooseberry jam.
Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov
Unlike Pushkin, this poet had no reverence for food, moreover, he did not understand it at all. As his first lover, Ekaterina Sushkova, recalls in her Notes, Lermontov never knew what he ate: veal or pork, game or lamb. However, this did not stop the poet from arguing with his friends, convincing them of the sophistication of his gastronomic taste. They listened, listened, and then took and fed Mikhail Yuryevich buns filled with... sawdust. Young Lermontov (at that time he was only 16 years old), not suspecting anything, managed to eat a whole such bun and start on the second, but he was stopped, pointing to the “indigestible filling for the stomach.” Bearing in mind that in the future Lermontov took revenge on Sushkova for numerous ridicule of himself, we can confidently say that the way to a man’s heart lies through his stomach.
Ivan Andreevich Krylov
There were legends about the fabulist's overeating - based on real facts. Krylov could eat up to 30 pancakes with caviar in one sitting. And these pancakes were “the size of a plate and the thickness of a finger.” He ate at least 80 oysters. He loved both “substantial” dishes - fish soup with pies, fried turkey, veal chops, pig with sour cream, and edible “little things” - cucumbers, lingonberries, plums. My preferred drink was kvass. It is interesting that Krylov did not eat at all at the royal dinners, after which he went to dine at a restaurant, and dinner was immediately waiting for him at home.
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
The writer’s favorite dish was... Italian pasta. He enjoyed making them himself, adding salt, pepper, butter and Parmesan cheese. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, no one “could eat as much pasta as he dipped in sometimes.” Nikolai Vasilyevich also absolutely could not live without sweets: his trouser pockets were always full of sweets and gingerbread cookies, which he “chewed incessantly.” Gogol loved not only to eat himself, but also to treat others. The writer’s friend, critic Mikhail Pogodin recalls: “His supply of excellent tea was never short, but his main job was to collect various cookies for tea. And where he found all sorts of pretzels, buns, crackers, only he knew, and no one else. Every day something new appeared, which he first let everyone try, and he was very happy if someone found it to their taste and approved the choice with some special phrase. Nothing more could be done to please him.”
Pushkin, Lermontov, Dumas, Gogol, Krylov. Only Agatha Christie could figure out which of them ate 20 peaches at a time, who couldn’t get enough of the royal dinner, who wrote a cookbook, who loved spaghetti, and who once ate pies with sawdust. By the way, Agatha Christie herself was an insatiable woman - in the gastronomic sense, of course.
In her autobiography, the English writer recalls that since childhood she was prone to gluttony: “Taking into account the amount of food that I consumed in childhood and adolescence (because I was always hungry), I simply cannot understand how I managed to remain so skinny " As a 12-year-old girl, Agatha Christie even competed in “digestive prowess” with a 22-year-old young man: “He was ahead of me in terms of oyster soup, but otherwise we were “breathing down each other’s necks.” We both ate boiled turkey, then fried turkey, and four or five pieces of beef. Then we started on plum pudding, sweet pie and sponge cake. After this came biscuits, grapes, oranges, plums and candied fruit. And finally, for the rest of the day, handfuls of chocolate of different varieties were brought from the pantry, depending on who liked what.” The writer herself was not only surprised that after such dinners she did not have stomach problems, but also doubted that “people today are able to overcome such a meal.” And Agatha Christie considered cream to be her favorite dish, which she became addicted to as a child and continued to “stuff it all her life.”
Alexandre Dumas Sr. Between a book and a frying pan
The famous French writer was known not only as the author of the legendary trilogy about the Three Musketeers, but also as a gourmet and glutton. Cooking and writing are two passions between which Dumas was torn all his life. Contemporaries recalled that he could part with a pen only “for the sake of a frying pan handle.” However, Dumas often combined two types of activities, which resulted in the “Great Culinary Dictionary”, which, however, the writer never had time to complete - Anatole France later did it instead.
What’s nice: in the cookbook Dumas included five recipes for Russian jam (from roses, pumpkin, nuts, radishes and asparagus). However, in general, the writer did not really like our cuisine, and during two years of traveling around Russia he was not able to fall in love with it. The only dish that captivated the mind and belly of this gourmet was kurnik - a pie with eggs and chickens, prepared in the house of the Russian writer Avdotya Panayeva, with whom he was visiting. Later, she recalled the Frenchman’s incredible gluttony: “I think that Dumas’s stomach could digest fly agarics.” Dumas impressed her as a man with a great appetite and very brave, because he could eat “two plates of botvina, fried mushrooms, pies, pig with porridge - all at once!” This requires great courage, especially for a foreigner who has never tried such dishes in his life...”
Alexander Pushkin. Potatoes as bait
“Don’t put off until dinner what you can eat at lunch” is one of the writer’s “Gastronomic maxims.” However, Pushkin was not a gourmet, he just loved to eat, and was unpretentious when it came to food. Pushkin’s friend, the poet Pyotr Vyazemsky, wrote: “Pushkin was not at all a gourmet... but he was a terrible glutton for other things. I remember how on the road he ate 20 peaches bought at Torzhok in one breath. The soaked apples also took a fair beating.” Pushkin was also familiar with French cuisine, which was popular in his time, but, nevertheless, he loved simple, one might even say, rustic Russian cuisine. “The genius of pure beauty” Anna Kern recalls that Pushkin’s mother, Nadezhda Osipovna, even lured her son to dinner with baked potatoes, “which Pushkin was a big fan of.” Pushkin was very fond of apple pie, which was prepared in the house of his neighbors Osipov-Wulf. Well, all the dishes of Pushkin’s nanny were appreciated not only by himself, but also by his friends. For sweets, Alexander Sergeevich was very fond of gooseberry jam.
Mikhail Lermontov. Lover of sawdust pies
Unlike Pushkin, this poet had no reverence for food, moreover, he did not understand it at all. As his first lover, Ekaterina Sushkova, recalls in her Notes, Lermontov never knew what he ate: veal or pork, game or lamb. However, this did not stop the poet from arguing with his friends, convincing them of the sophistication of his gastronomic taste. They listened, listened, and then took and fed Mikhail Yuryevich buns filled with... sawdust. Young Lermontov (at that time he was only 16 years old), not suspecting anything, managed to eat a whole such bun and start on the second, but he was stopped, pointing to the “indigestible filling for the stomach.” Bearing in mind that in the future Lermontov took revenge on Sushkova for numerous ridicule of himself, we can confidently say that the way to a man’s heart lies through his stomach.
Ivan Krylov. 30 pancakes for a snack
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