Theresa Carle-Sanders’ Castle Rock Kitchen takes a fascinating approach at adapting recipes from King’s novella The Body. At first glance, The Body doesn’t seem to lend itself particularly well to a food-focused consideration, with the food descriptions ranging from the boys cooking over a campfire to Gordie’s memorable tale of “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan.” 

As the boys reach the limit of Castle Rock, setting out to find the body of Ray Brower, they realize that none of them has thought to bring along any food. Gordie runs to the Florida Market to get some provisions, picking up some raw hamburger, hamburger rolls, and sodas. His interaction with George Dusset, who runs the market, typifies the contentious interactions that the boys have with most of the adults in their lives: Dusset attempts to cheat Gordie and when Gordie points out to him that “Your thumb is on that scales” (339), Dusset shrugs him off, then turns around and tries to cheat Gordie again, this time by overcharging him on his bill. Gordie runs out of patience, telling Dusset, “First you put your thumb on the scales and then you overcharged on the groceries, Mr. Dusset. I was gonna throw some Hostess Twinkies on top of that order but now I guess I won’t” (340). Gordie stands up for himself and holds Dusset accountable, but in the end he remains relatively powerless, as Dusset yells at Gordie and kicks him out of the store. This interaction with Dusset further underscores the need for the boys to be able to protect and care for themselves as well as they can, because the adults in their lives certainly aren’t going to do it for them. 

The boys reclaim this food as part of their independence and adventure in the woods, making what Gordie’s brother Dennis called “Pioneer Drumsticks”: “lumps of hamburger pushed onto the ends of green branches … charred outside, raw inside, and totally delicious” (381-2). They make the food themselves, even debating strategies and rationales of the best way to do so as they cook the Pioneer Drumsticks over the fire, and while objectively the food itself might not be great, to the boys, it tastes like freedom and there’s no better flavor in the world. 

One of the stories Gordie tells his friends in the woods is “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan,” which similarly employs food as a way for kids to gain power over the adults who keep them down. Hogan is one of the contestants in The Great Gretna Pie-Eat of 1960, pitted against older and more seasoned competitors. Davie Hogan is fed up with the adults and his fellow kids alike, because “he’s always gettin beat up and ranked out” (363). He enters the pie eating contest, though “Lard Ass had no hope or intention of winning … revenge was the only blue ribbon he sought” (371). He gorges himself on blueberry pies, having prepared for his big moment by downing a bunch of castor oil and forcing himself to imagine disgusting, groan-inducing images until he vomits all over the stage and one of his competitors, which starts a chain reaction of vomiting that ripples out through the crowd in a nearly two-page description of people throwing up all over the place. It’s definitely a memorable story, but not necessarily one to entice the appetite or give the reader a hankering for a big slice of blueberry pie. And much like Gordie’s combative interaction with Dusset at the Florida Market, beyond Hogan’s revenge it doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. Gordie wants to conclude the story with the pie-eating contest, but when he is badgered for closure by Teddy and Vern, Gordie reluctantly says that “I think his dad was at the Pie-Eat and when he came home, he beat the living crap out of Lard Ass … [And] the kids went right on calling him Lard Ass. Except that maybe some of them started calling him Puke-Yer-Guts too” (374). Like Gordie at the market, Hogan resisted, but both are put back in their place, at the mercy of ineffectual adults and cruel peers. While Chris, Vern, and Teddy aren’t satisfied with the ending of Hogan’s story, it’s one they can relate to all too well. 

In addition to taking a starring role in the pies, blueberries occupy an ominous position in The Body  more generally, as the missing Ray Brower “had gone out with one of his mother’s pots to pick blueberries” (296) when he met his tragic fate. This blueberry bucket sticks in Gordie’s mind, both as a boy and later as a man telling his story. The bucket isn’t with Brower’s body and Gordie’s imagination snags on this, as he thinks “He perhaps clutched it even tighter at first, as though it linked him to home and safety. But as his fear grew, and with it that sense of being utterly alone, with no chance of rescue except for whatever he could do by himself, as the real cold terror set in, he maybe threw it away into the woods on one side of the tracks of the other, hardly even noticing it was gone” (418). As an adult, Gordie still entertains the notion of going back to the tracks and walking alongside them, looking for Brower’s lost bucket, a way of reconnecting with the dead boy, of honoring his humanity and his struggle, though he knows the bucket is likely long gone. 

Of the two representations of blueberries in The Body, then, one is disgusting and the other is heartbreaking. 

In Castle Rock Kitchen, Carle-Sanders includes recipes for both “Pioneer Drumsticks” and “Blueberry Cheesecake Pie,” inspired by these two significant food moments. This is certainly a departure from the traditional cookbook approach, as these scenes in the novella explore body horror, abjection, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s dichotomy of raw versus cooked (which mirrors discourses of nature versus culture). The third Body-inspired recipe Carle-Sanders includes is for “Interstellar Escargot,” drawn from the moment the boys finally find Ray Brower’s body, when Gordie describes Vern “licking his lips in a compulsive sort of way, as if he had tasted some obscure new delicacy, a Howard Johnson’s 29th flavor, Tibetan Sausage Rolls, Interstellar Escargot, something so weird that it excited and revolted him at the same time” (403). As with the scene at the market and Gordie’s story of the pie-eating contest, this is a moment of trauma, not very likely to inspire the appetite. 

Carle-Sanders’ recipes for these three dishes are (like all of her others), inventive and thoughtfully designed, with her blueberry pie built on a foundation of homemade short-crust pastry and her take on the escargot a “spiced up” rumination on “this manifestation of a boy’s imagination” (97). I haven’t had the best luck with my own attempts at these dishes, though that’s trouble on my end rather than any fault of Carle-Sanders’ recipes. My cheesecake filling didn’t quite turn out and I haven’t yet been able to find the Chinese 5-Spice Powder required by the Interstellar Escargot (thought I’m still looking—we may be circling back to this one later). 

While there are several dishes in Castle Rock Kitchen, like “Matt Burke’s Bolognese,” that invite active reflection on the fiction and the food as pleasurable part of the cooking and dining experience, these Body-inspired recipes seem to work at a cross-purpose, departing from King’s horror and reclaiming the abject by transforming it into something delicious. 

You can check out Castle Rock Kitchen here.

[Page numbers for The Body are from the Signet paperback edition of Different Seasons. For more on Lévi-Strauss, see his 1964 book The Raw and the Cooked.]