Best fiction and food combinations

Tunku Varadarajan, an assistant managing editor at the Wall Street Journal, selected a short list of the "most delectable combinations of fiction and food" for Opinion Journal.

A taste from his list:

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Deliverance from starvation: Inman, the Confederate soldier who deserts at Petersburg, Va., late in the Civil War, has lost all acquaintance with food on his hellish trudge back home to the Blue Ridge Mountains when he chances upon a homestead. There, "a young woman, a girl really," feeds him back to life: "The woman served him up a plate heaped high with beans and bread and a big peeled onion. . . . Inman took the plate and a knife and spoon into his lap and fell to eating. A part of him wished to be polite, but it was overcome by some dog organ deep in his brain, and so he ate loudly and in gulps, pausing to chew only when absolutely necessary. He forewent slicing the onion and ate on it like an apple." Unfeeling must be the reader who will not taste that onion on his own palate.

Check out Number One on Varadarajan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue