Favorite Foods of 5 Famous Authors

You are what you eat. Could it hold true for authors too?

Authors have flaunted weird habits throughout their lives. Turns out, their favorite foods are just as weird. Let’s dive right in!

1. Ernest Hemingway

If there was one word to describe Ernest Hemingway, it would be ‘adventurous.’ He sought adventure in every aspect of his life, including his diet. He obsessed over oysters from shore to shore and topped them off with iced cold wine.

In his memoir “A Moveable Feast,” he writes:

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

2. Agatha Christie

Christie loved munching apples in the bath. We think some of her most famous books including the Murder on the Orient Express and The Mysterious Affair at Styles were the result of many such apple-munching bathtub sessions.

She also had a weird devotion to creams. As her grandson once famously revealed, Christie preferred Devonshire clotted cream to coffee. And she drank it from a huge cup that read “Don’t be greedy” on the side.

3. Victor Hugo

Like most famed authors, Victor Hugo followed a strict writing ritual. He wrote from dawn till 11 a.m. every morning with a freshly brewed pot of coffee and spiced it up with two raw eggs!

In his youth, Hugo feasted on half an ox in one go and then fasted for three days in a row.

4. Stephen King

Stephen King’s writing ritual isn’t complete without cheesecakes. He calls them ‘brain food.’

But for all his brave writing, he hates oysters. In an interview with Bon Appetit, he said, “I don’t eat oysters. It’s horrible, the way they slither down your throat alive.”

5. Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps the strangest of all diets came from the Russian-American novelist of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov. He ate butterflies while spending time in Vermont. His passionate fascination with butterflies led him to discover two subspecies of his own, one of which is called Nabokov’s wood nymph.