When the taste of a trend was sour

Discover the joy of researching dishes that were mentioned in your favourite novels and poems

You always remember your first. There would be others: once you acquire a taste for cooking dishes mentioned in your favourite novels and poems, you are lost. You will try to recreate the picnic in The Wind in the Willows — “Cold chicken, cold tongue, cold ham, cold beef, pickled gherkin, salad, French rolls, cress sandwiches, potted meat, ginger beer, lemonade – soda water.”

Harder than it sounds: the potted meat, the chicken and the beef will need a day’s planning. You are squeamish about tongue, so, guiltily aware that Rat and Mole would not have approved; you substitute a mushroom pate and add in fat, smoky, rounds of Bandel cheese.

Other experiments are more successful. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s

Pather Panchali , with its many passages about hunger in the city and village, still makes me rummage through old cookery books for khichuri recipes; a scaled-down version of the macaroni pie in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s

The Leopard (“chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles” in a “spice-laden haze”) is a good lazy winter Sunday lunch staple. Sometimes, it’s simple things, like rice with pine-nuts sautéed in butter, from Elif Shafak’s

The Bastard of Istanbul , or a recipe from Bulbul Sharma’s

The Anger of Aubergines . The rule of gastrobiblionomy: stick to authors who look like they know how to enjoy themselves, abjure realism and misery-lit.

But one of my first encounters with food in fiction was confounding, and yet the item that inspired this confusion was so modest: pickled limes. These are the ones that Amy March in

Little Women brings to school, at the height of a craze for these sour delicacies.

“It’s nothing but limes now, for everyone is sucking them in their desks in school time, and trading them off for pencils, bead rings, paper dolls, at recess. If one girl likes another, she gives her a lime. If she’s mad with her, she eats one before her face, and doesn’t offer even a suck.”

Meg generously funds Amy, and she comes to school triumphant, with 24 limes in a “moist, brown-paper parcel”. Doubly delicious, this concealment of a delicacy, this promise of gratification, delayed.

But the fate of Amy’s limes is why I began to distrust Little Women , and indeed all those novels that police women’s appetites. Disaster strikes; the limes are confiscated by a cross schoolteacher, Amy has her palm smacked, and she has to throw the “plump and juicy” fashionable pickle. Even Alcott couldn’t give in entirely to punitive discipline, though — I rejoiced that Amy ate one of the pickled limes before they were confiscated.

For some years, I imagined that the limes were pickled Indian-style — with fenugreek, asafoetida, sesame oil? Or with green chillies, garlic and turmeric? Amy scattering achar (in a moist, brown-paper parcel, not in a glass jar) to the Irish urchins below — such a strange, incongruous image.

Then I read further, and assumed that Amy’s limes were pickled Moroccan-style — layered in salt and fermented — though the book seemed to suggest the limes were whole.

A 2011 column by Bee Wilson finally provided illumination: Amy’s limes were left whole, pickled in a sea-salt brine for three weeks in the fridge.

This seemed barbaric to me, but it finally cleared up that old puzzle.

In revenge against Alcott’s generation and their terror of women who love the salt, the spicy sourness, the illicit side of life with a passion, I rewrote that chapter of Little Women in my mind. In my version, it ends with Amy licking the salt off her fingers as she walks home, slowly, delicately, tasting pleasure after all.

The writer is a literary critic and author. Her latest book, The Hundred Names of Darkness , released last year.