Stories of cooking humans have been around pretty much forever. In most cultures it symbolizes a horrific and transgressive act, and we can’t seem to leave it alone. We scratch at the theme like a scab: from witches popping children in their cauldrons, to Hannibal Lecter dining on liver with fava beans, to lurid re-tellings of real life cannibalism.
I picked the titles below for a range of cooking methods, reasons for cooking, and the ways in which the author deals with the subject. Bon appétit.
Stew in “The Juniper Tree” by the Brothers Grimm
A woman is “prompted by the Devil” to behead her stepson when he sticks his head inside her apple chest. She manages to fool her own daughter into thinking she killed him, then forces her to help get rid of the body by putting him into a stew. The boy’s father, happily ignorant of the situation, comes home to a lavish feast and can’t stop eating:
‘Give me some more,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to share this with you. Somehow I feel as if it were all mine.’
If that wasn’t enough for you, look up “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” in The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, edited by Jack Zipes.
Pie in The String of Pearls: a Romance by Thomas Preskett Prest
What would this list be without a mention of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett? The String of Pearls is the first penny dreadful that features the murder-and-pie duo. Sweeney Todd constructs an ingenious chair that tips his customers headfirst into an underground passage; Mrs. Lovett picks the corpses up to feed her booming pie business. No further introductions needed, but interesting reading for those only familiar with the musical or film.
Sandwich in Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z Brite
Serial killer Andrew meets decadent playboy Jay. They click. They go off on a cannibalistic serial killer spree that is both beautifully written and at times extremely difficult reading: Brite goes into poetic, graphic and minute detail. Contains a packed lunch in the form of a sandwich with a piece of flank lightly fried in butter.
Barbecue ribs in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café by Fannie Flagg
Abusive husband Frank Bennett returns to his estranged wife to steal their child, but is stopped by café employee Sipsey who kills him with a frying pan. To hide the body, Big George does the logical thing and puts Frank on the barbecue. The detectives who show up to investigate Frank’s disappearance are delighted by the best barbecue they’ve ever had in their lives. Satisfaction and disgust in one neat package.
Cake in “The Language of Knives” by Haralambi Markov
I mentioned that cooking people is a horrific act in most cultures. Not all. Markov’s story is different in that it describes a consensual act, and that the cooking is used to tell a story about the life of the deceased. A warrior has died, and his loved ones carefully and lovingly bake his body into a cake, which will then be offered to the gods. For every part of the process, new details of the family’s life are unraveled. Uncomfortable and beautiful, it’s one of the best stories on this theme I’ve ever read.
Honorary mention: Chicken Little in The Green Butchers (film)
I put this here for all the fans of Hannibal and Mads Mikkelsen, as Hannibal wasn’t Mikkelsen’s first go at cooking humans. In the Danish film The Green Butchers, Mads plays a butcher, Svend, who commits accidental murder and hides the evidence by selling the flesh as “chickie-wickies.” When they turn out to be a massive success, Svend expands his business, with among other things “a little Swede I found in the park.”
Originally published in March 2015.
Karin Tidbeck is a resident of Malmö, Sweden. She is the author of the award-winning short story collection Jagannath and her short story “Sing” can be found on Tor.com. She has also written three pieces of fiction that involve cooking people.
Cannibalism is an accepted cultural institution in Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite – the human beings marooned on Geta brought no meat animals with them, the native biochemistry is incompatible with that of humans, and the environment is so hostile that famine is never far away. Suicide, allowing your friends and family to eat your corpse, is a highly-regarded sacrifice, and funerary cannibalism is de rigeur.
Cannibalism is a core cultural problem to be overcome in the last part of The Galactic Gourmet by James White (part of the Sector General series).
Heinlein still too squicky in “Stranger in a Strange Land”.
Forgot to include this link that indicates that cannibalism isn’t really worth the trouble, nutrition-wise, if there’s any other sort of meat animal around.
Sweeney Todd, everyone’s favorite barber on Fleet Street, worked with Mrs Lovett, who used the corpses supplied by Mr Todd in her meat pies, two for thruppence
@1: If we broaden the definition of “human” to mean “sapient species,” there’s the dragons of Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw, who also practice funerary cannibalism. Indeed, who gets to eat how much of whom is a matter of considerable legal and social maneuvering.
Diane Duane’s Book of Night With Moon features a “saurian” species– descendants of dinosaurs living hidden in caverns under Manhattan– who sadly and revoltingly have nothing to eat but each other.
Returning to H. sapiens, there’s a throwaway moment in Patrick O’Brian’s The Truelove; at a victory feast
However, W. S. Gilbert reminds us that taboos can be broken in cases of emergency, and that you are what you eat.
“Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo’sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain’s gig.”
I’m reminded of the 1991 French film Delicatessen: a postapocalyptic nightmare of a movie where human beings are just about the last remaining source of protein; the protagonist, a circus clown played by the rubber-faced Dominique Pinon, is lured by a want ad to be the next item on the menu. Very dark, very twisted, very absurd, very over the top, surprisingly kind.
Delicatessen(1991)
@6 Amaryllis
Yes, once you widen the field to “Cannibalistic sapient species” there are more examples in SF. Haven’t read your two examples, but there’s another sapient saurian in McLoughlin’s Toolmaker Koan that practiced funerary cannibalism and expected humanity to make the corpses of its dead available for this purpose if we were ever to get along.
Gilbert and Sullivan is always appropriate. Didn’t realize that that bit of verse was theirs, though. But thanks.
This list omits the most horrific cannibalism story I’ve ever read, and the only one that I know of on the theme of auto-cannibalism: “Survivor Type,” by Stephen King.
Watching Fried Green Tomatoes can put me off eating BBQ for months. The rest I will happily ignore because Cannibalism grosses me out.
Willie Shakepeare should be on this list with Titus Andronicus. Not only is there cannibalism but rape, dismemberment, and perverted behavior, enough to satisfy the hardest of torture porn lovers….
I recall a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, “The Food of the Gods”
The short story I thought of was “The Sharing of Flesh”, by Poul Anderson.
Donald Kingsbury’s ‘Geta’ (aka Courtship rite) is a fascinating portrayal of a planet where the human population has only 6 ‘sacred’ foods and themselves as a food source (there are no diseases)
There’s ritual cannibalism in Gene Wolfe’s ‘Book of the New Sun’, in which corpses are eaten after the use of a drug which allows the consumer to take on the memories of the dead.
Not exactly a rec, but surely one of the most notorious cannibalism novels in SF: Farnham’s Freehold, Robert Heinlein.
Also, a short story by John Wyndham, “Survival”, in which the only woman aboard a marooned spacecraft (I think there are half a dozen or so men, including her husband) proves the most ruthless and the most determined to survive.
And, guiltfree cannibalism, in the south of Velm, the planet depicted in Samuel Delany’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains Of Sand, both the sentient species who live there, evelmi and humans, dine off meat grown in vats but cloned from evelmi and humans – “longpig” and “shortpig”. The genetic samples used for cloning are voluntarily donated (and without harm to the donor) though there are indications that “voluntarily” may mean “Well, she didn’t actually say No fast enough to stop me when I stuck a sampling needle in her arm”.
In Warren Ellis’ “Transmetropolitan,” there is a restaurant called “Long Pig” that serves you-know-what.
In Neil Gaiman’s “World’s End” Sandman graphic novel, there is a story (“Cerements”) about Litharge, or the city of the dead. The teller, Petrefax, recounts his experience with a sky burial (which is actually practiced by some cultures). After he and the other morticians have disembowled and taken apart the body of the dead person, which will be eaten by birds, they eat their lunch without washing their hands. One characters says that is the custom of the culture from which the dead person comes and Petrefax says the bits of human flesh make the food taste better.
While I am NOT a cannibal, I can see how eating someone’s flesh after they die could be a sign of respect and a way to “take them into” yourself. From a certain perspective (and very much in keeping with Brite’s/Martin’s* novel “Exquisite Corpse,” it can even be an act of love.
*The author Poppy Z. Brite is Trans*gender and now goes by Billy Martin. I know him a little bit and always buy him and his partner dinner when I am in New Orleans. He is now working on a critical book about Stephen King’s work
Let’s not forget the New Brotherhood Army in Niven & Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer.
What about transubstantiation and The Last Supper?
Also, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), in which the lover is roasted and served on a platter. Not sure it’s still worth watching, unless you want to see Helen Mirren nude.
In the backstory of the original vampires in Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned, ritual cannibalism was more or less behind the events that led to the creation of vampires, and helps resolve the plot.
Then there’s the heavily-implied Frey pie scene in A Dance With Dragons .
There’s a particularly gross cannibalism scene in CONSIDER PHLEBAS by Iain M. Banks.
Your description of The Green Butchers puts me in mind of the Hong Kong film Untold Story, in which Anthony Wong plays a restauranteur who simultaneously solves the problems of corpse disposal and the creation of tasty meat bun filling.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103743/
both the sentient species who live there, evelmi and humans, dine off meat grown in vats but cloned from evelmi and humans
As do the crew of the GCU Arbitrary in Iain M. Banks’ “The State of the Art” – specifically, they eat meat cloned from some of the more unpleasant members of Earth’s population. “Ian Smith Burgers, Kim Il Sung in Black Bean Sauce…”
The Last Supper by Russell FitzGerald, a short story from Quark/2 (1971) edited by Samuel R Delany. Exquisitely detailed, thoroughly disgusting. It has stayed with me for decades.
@6: The Young Wizards short story (novella?) On Ordeal: Mamvish fsh Wimsih features a planet of saurians with almost nothing to eat except each other. It presents as an epic Hero’s Journey the protagonist’s quest to become the strongest, fastest, wisest etc. of her kind by finding and eating all of those other heroes, most but not all of whom willingly let her “make them young again,” acquiring their abilities as their souls live on in her mind. Sweet Sarlacc, it’s glorious.
@12: I’ve described Titus Andronicus as “a very messy play in which approximately 13 people kill each other with extreme prejudice, amid elaborate speeches and lots of screaming and weeping”
@22: In addition to probably-human pie, A Song of Ice and Fire features human stew, roast human, extra-fresh human sashimi (someone eating people alive), and many other joking or serious references to cannibalism.
(I don’t know why the text in the top paragraph is enlarged)
@18 so good to hear that PZB is writing again! I haven’t gotten to Exquisite Corpse yet, but I find it hard to believe that it could possibly be more f***ed up than his short story “Toxic Wastrels”. Knowing him, though, I suppose it’s always possible…
I suppose The Silence of the Lambs is too obvious to mention here, but I’ll put a word in for its prequel, Hannibal Rising (which I don’t believe has been made into a movie yet), which gives us a pretty damn disturbing explanation of why Hannibal, as a kid growing up in WWII-era Eastern Europe, turned out the way he did.
@28. holt: Hannibal Rising was filmed in 2007. Not a good movie.
All that and you missed Time Enough For Love? Seriously?
Titus Andronicus (which has a really brilliant/bizarre movie adaptation with Anthony Hopkins…apparently he likes playing cannibals…) is one of my favorite weird plays, and in fact, was my first thought after reading about the Frey pie.