This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player, Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts. (And please subscribe!)
Food is a huge part of Roald Dahl’s children's stories, not only in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but also in Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and more.
But Dahl's creative (and sometimes twisted) approach to food wasn’t limited to his books -- as his family will tell you.
“Food was a big part of our upbringing,” says Dahl's youngest daughter, Lucy Dahl (above as a child with her father and below, left, with her father and baby daughter, Chloe). “Everything about our childhood was eccentric, although we didn’t realize it at the time.”
This week on The Sporkful, Lucy recalls the witch’s potions at bedtime, being woken up in the middle of the night to eat chocolate, and the cabbage her father said came straight from the Queen's garden.
“Anything that was potentially something that a child might reject, my father put a story behind it and made it extra super special so that we did eat it,” Lucy says.
Lucy's daughter, Chloe Dahl, says when she was growing up, her mother carried on her grandfather's fantastical food traditions -- from those bedtime potions to recipes taken right from a cookbook based on the foods in her grandfather's books, Revolting Recipes.
Did Roald Dahl model Willy Wonka after himself? Listen in to the full episode to hear Lucy's take on that -- and to learn about the very particular way Dahl ate his chocolates.
Plus, later in the episode, Andrew Rea from Binging with Babish joins Dan to recreate the giant chocolate cake from Matilda (shown above) -- and things get a little weird:
"We’re going to add our own blood and sweat to [this cake]," Andrew tells Dan. "I went jogging this morning and harvested as much sweat as I could."
Check out Andrew's video for more on that culinary adventure!
This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player, Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts. (And please subscribe!)
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Interstitial music in this episode from Black Label Music:
- "Birthday Party" by Kenneth J. Brahmstedt
- "Hot Night" by Calvin Dashielle
- "Incidentally" by Kennth J. Brahmstedt
- "Pumpkin Face" by Jack Ventimiglia
- "New Old" by JT Bates
Photos: Michael Faircloth and Dan Pashman
