Viennetta, Croquembouche and Selfish Feeding
Lottie Hazell on the food in her debut novel Piglet
Lecker Book Club is a monthly (ish!) feature spotlighting a recently released book within the genre of food writing. As well as a podcast interview with the author, you can find additional content here. As the name suggests, I’d love this to be a conversation. Have you read the book? What did you think? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
This month the book is Piglet by Lottie Hazell.
Photo credit: Siobhan Calder
I first came across Lottie's writing when she contributed to the first Lecker zine that I curated and published in 2019. Plum Jam was a piece of short fiction about a funeral, an underset blancmange, and a broken tooth. I still remember how the piece unsettled me, placing complicated family relationships alongside difficult or reluctant pleasure derived from feeding others. Or being fed by them.
Lottie's debut novel Piglet came out earlier this year and its writing is deeply rooted in what food can mean to us physically, emotionally, and socially.
Lottie: I didn't want food to be, like, a benign good. Sometimes cooking can be a relief and a meditation, but that is a percentage of the time, and I just wanted it to be pervasive throughout the entire text.
Reading Piglet, I found it such an interesting experience to encounter such luscious, detailed writing about food in a fictional setting, particularly set alongside scenes of abject discomfort. You'll know what I mean if you've read it. The book really made me squirm in an intriguing way, and I loved how the dishes and tablescapes that Piglet makes and consumes dress the set of her home and work lives.
Heads up that the book does touch somewhat implicitly on themes of body image, weight and some implied references to disordered eating. So if those topics are in any way sensitive to you just please take care with listening.
Lottie: I describe Piglet as a story of appetite and aspiration and it follows a woman who is nicknamed Piglet in the couple of weeks before her wedding and in the days before she's due to be married her fiancé confesses this terrible truth to her that threatens to unravel the life that she has really carefully curated for them both and we follow her in the countdown to the day they're to be married and we follow her unraveling and her trying to digest this truth, food pun, not intended but inevitable when I'm talking about this book, and we see lots of her kind of grappling happen through the lens of food, which is really important to how she perceives herself as a person and how she perceives others.”
Lucy: And so how does she perceive herself as a person?
Lottie: I think their class comes into this in a big way in terms of…Piglet comes from kind of like a working class, I suppose, family from Derby and she is doing her best, I think, to distance herself from those people. Not for…the book doesn't really present us with any information why she would be doing that besides the fact that her family have nicknamed her Piglet and we assume that has a level of complication and pain attached to it.
But it's more a case of: we get a sense…we meet her when she's in a very aspirational part of her life, like Kit and his family are kind of like middle upper class and she's trying to assimilate. And lots of her food behaviours are, you know, lavish spreads, expensive pieces of meat and wine and alcohol.
So I think that's all part of her perception is that she is kind of affluent and worthy in the context of her mind. compared to her family, I suppose.
The writing of Piglet began during a creative writing PhD, in which Lottie sought to “explore the question of the satisfaction cycle”, and where food fits into this. This is particularly interesting in the novel as the reader is denied the satisfaction of ever finding out a particular piece of information that feels central to the narrative.
Lottie: I was trying to work out how disclosure could integrate with a novel that used food to offer kind of levels of satisfaction or release or kind of unclenching for the reader.
And so in Piglet, I'm really trying to run Kit's confession and how much we know about that as a reader alongside Piglet's appetite as it grows and kind of ask the question of what's satisfying.
Lucy: How have readers responded to the fact that we never learn what Kit has actually done?
Lottie: Mostly really well. I think my publishers have done a really good job of positioning the book because I think that if it was packaged differently you might think it's a kind of like a ‘will they won't they’ romp about whether they get married and or maybe it's kind of more of a crime thriller.
So I think they've done a really good job in setting up the expectation that I'm not going to necessarily follow the contract that is set up between the writer and the reader at all times and that's kind of by design. But I have also had – I had another one yesterday – quite a few irate Instagram DMs being like, I've read the whole book and it's never said anywhere what he does so can you please…like chop chop what's, what's going on here?
Lucy: Do you know what he does?!
Lottie: Yeah, I feel like one of the guests at the wedding in a way, and looking around at everyone on my table, like in a gossipy sense, being like, do you know what it was? Oh, it could have been this. And speculating.
And food isn’t only used in this way, it’s entirely central to the novel’s world-building. I asked Lottie if she would be able to talk us through some of the ways in which food is carefully centred throughout the novel.
Lottie: Yeah, I find that very hard to answer because I feel it is the book itself. I feel like there's not a element that it hasn't touched. I suppose the main things that I was trying to explore, where I feel food is wonderful at illustrating that, are things like the gender expectations that surround women, but specifically at the wedding, which I think is the body plays into that as well and the physical self and I think food does so much in that space both in the kind of like the woman eating but also the woman being perceived to be eating. So that was a big one. I think also kind of social frictions…like the things that different people find acceptable or worthwhile to eat.
So I've spoken a lot about Vienetta when I've spoken about Piglet and the kind of importance of that as a, I think, social and cultural touchpoint and how people, different people react to that.
I, funnily enough, I found out that Vienetta in Canada is apparently a really like high-end. Like very posh thing. And I was like, this is, we didn't do the sensitivity read for Canada. Missed a trick.
Lucy: Vienetta is such an interesting, like British class symbol. And I think when you – I did write this down – that there's a line about “they only serve Viennetta ironically”, which I think, I just think like encompasses so much about British food culture and like class and like the kind of obsession with wealthier middle class people often having this kind of like obsession with working class culture and almost like a cosplay, weird cosplay thing.
So yeah, I do think that, that I can see why you've talked a lot about it because I think it says so much to us.
Lottie: Yeah, but I also think it underlines the kind of cruelty. For Piglet I think there's a cruelty that she thinks so freely in that sense that she serves a Vienetta ironically because it's so much of a…not only is she rejecting those familial customs, she's also refashioning them into something to kind of like step on them and to lift herself up and I think it's kind of like, I think it's kind of in conversation with what you're saying about the cosplaying, but there's a kind of sinister element.
The croquembouche that Piglet decides to make for her own wedding - an unhinged thing to do at the best of times, which this certainly is - is a pillar of the novel. I asked Lottie why it had to be a croquembouche:
Lottie: There was a kind of irresistible pull to French cuisine for the wedding. I think it says lots about, you know, Piglet as a kind of aspirational person. In the book we discover that Kit's parents import foie gras from France because it's obviously illegal in the UK. I think it's just a commitment to assimilation and to showing off.
It's a look at me opportunity and irresistibly – because it's a dessert you traditionally smash – I was like, when we get to the end of the book, like, I need someone to take a baseball bat to this, and I thought, I just like the inverting of the, let's smash it together and push one in each other's face to destroy it.
Lucy: Yeah, yeah, I think for me, it was kind of, obviously, like it's, like you say, it's a construction that is very durable in a sense, because it does need to be smashed in, but there's also this, like, innate sense of fragility. Because it's such a complicated, delicate thing to make. And. It doesn't go to plan, like her making of it, it ends up being this sort of like, ersatz croquembouche, , and one of the bits I really liked about this kind of, you know, this thread was her family getting involved in the making of it, which felt actually really sweet in kind of a horrible situation.
Lottie: Yes, I think the croquembouche is really, it's kind of a metaphor for Piglet herself: it's an overreaching, for no reason, like there's no reason to do this. And when Franny comes in to try and help her with the glue gun at the end, and is like, no one cares. And, yeah, I find that really tender as well, just to be like this, let's get ready, you crazy, crazy lady.
Lucy: I have not made a croquembouche, but I definitely related to that idea of when you actually break it down and you think about something, you're like, I'm entirely doing this for myself, this is only for me. And this is only because I want people to say to me, aren't you so clever and brilliant, look what you've made.
Something I noted about Piglet is that food is threaded throughout the text, as Lottie has mentioned, but sometimes in a way that feels repulsive, and disgusting. The imagery of a clogged artery on a cigarette packet is described as “like a skirt steak, oozing yoghurty plaque.”
Lottie: I think I didn't want food to be, like, a benign good. I never wanted it to be like, when she interacts with food, the weight lifts and she's good and her mind can float because I just don't perceive that to be truthful.
Sometimes, cooking can be a relief and a meditation. But, that is a percentage of the time, and I just wanted it to be pervasive throughout the entire text to kind of manifest all the emotions because that to me felt more honest.
Lucy: Yeah, your use of the phrase benign good there is, that is so accurate I think because I do think that is how food is portrayed in so much writing about it. And I think it's kind of seen as this very like cozy…but we can't ignore the fact that there are so many internal and external factors that bring discomfort to our thinking and eating.
Lottie: Exactly. But even when it's cosy, like, why is it cosy? Are we thinking about a childhood and, you know, a dead parent or an absent, you know, absent parental figure?
Like, why? I don't think it's ever…it can feel good. But I don't think that good feeling is ever without depth and something to explore. And I think that was really important for me for writing a female character as well with a food interest, that she isn't a benign good, like her feeding of people isn't selfless, it's very selfish.
She's getting so much from it and it's not the nurturing and kind of feeding of others that is her primary goal.
When I was writing and generally when I'm writing, I just want to try and put words on the page that feel like they're truthful. And that feels like a truthful thing to me. Like I relate to that. Like when I make, you know, a big lunch with friends or family, like I enjoy doing, I enjoy eating the food, but also I enjoy being like, look at this, look at it.
I was curious whether Lottie had ever done any non-fiction writing, mostly because I felt like the food in Piglet took up such an unusual space for fiction writing: being so luscious, and so rich in its descriptions it felt familiar to me as someone who reads a lot of narrative non-fiction writing, and yet totally unfamiliar in its context in an uncomfortable, tense fictional setting. She said that she hadn’t, really, aside from some food blogging years ago.
Lottie: In the novel, for the most part, I was attempting to put as few words on the page as possible and be really sparse with my descriptions. But when we got to the, when it's in the food sections, that's where I try to let the writing bloom and kind of exhale and take up space and so maybe that is, I don't know, maybe it's the relief, that's the sense of relief in that, in those passages that allows a sense of goodness, whereas in the rest of it I'm being very, or trying to be, kind of fraught and tight and withholding.
Lucy: Withheld. Yeah, that's really interesting. Maybe that is what's coming across to me. I don't know what the best way to put it is, but I don't read that many books where food is talked about with such, like, passion, but also nuance.
Piglet by Lottie Hazell is out now, published by Doubleday
You can find all the Lecker Book Club picks on my Bookshop.org list.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity. If you would like to hear a longer, more in depth version of my conversation with Lottie, including some of her favourite picks of novels that deal with food in an intriguing way, click here to listen to the podcast.
You can follow Lottie Hazell on Instagram and you can follow Lecker there too.