How fictional foods inspire real-life culinary adventures
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), wizard Howl cooks a breakfast of fried eggs and fatty bacon and serves it with a sourdough slice to Sophie and Markl. The meal was simple but hearty and had an instant visual connection with the audience. To bring this connection to life, Bento Bento will be serving Studio Ghibli classics such as Satsuki’s Bento Box from My Neighbor Totoro (1988), ramen from Ponyo (2008), onigiri from Spirited Away (2001) and of course, Howl’s breakfast.
Food plays a similar role in British author Roald Dahl’s bibliography. He was renowned for his passion for the culinary arts and food became central to many of his plot lines, most famously, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Matilda (1988). In the latter, it was a decadent chocolate cake slice that got Matilda’s classmate Bruce Bogtrotter into trouble with the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, leading to the young pupil having to eat the whole chocolate cake in front of the school assembly.
Whether you’ve read the book, seen the films or sung along with Matilda the Musical, that chocolate cake has built a snug home in your mind and all chocolate cakes have the task of living up to that. So, when the Royal Shakespeare Co.’s Matilda the Musical came to India in May, the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre’s Theatre Café served three-layered, chocolate ganache-frosted slices of chocolate cake, which they called Matilda Cake. An Indian film that used food as a key character was The Lunchbox (2013), starring the late Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur.
The relationship between the protagonists develops over the food in the four-tiered lunch box. A polished-off bowl of malai kofta is the turning point in the film. To pay homage to this contemporary film that does
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