Jumbly Junkery

My friend Tejal writes for the Atlantic food channel online, so every now and then I do an illustration for one of her articles. Since Valentine’s Day is coming up, she did an article about this cookbook written by this romance novelist, Barbara Cartland. Barbara Cartland was pretty amazing, come to find out. She wrote nearly 20 books a year, dictating them from her sofa to her secretary. She wore all pink all the time and had these Pekingese dogs. Here is a photo proof that she is probably even more eccentric than you are imagining right now:

Her cookbook is full of her talking about how all these different foods are good for romance as well as your overall health… duck, salmon, beef kidneys, oysters, mushrooms, asparagus, etc. etc. Pretty much everything except for white bread and white sugar (she was a big proponent of honey as a health food). Every food photo is surrounded by porcelain figurines and flowers (all from her house) and is arranged in some sort of ridiculous method, usually involving the color pink and the shape of a heart. Unless it’s the orange chicken, in which case it has a line of old, dried wishbones running a diagonal across the dish. I am totally not making this up.

ANYWAY. Here is the illustration I did for that, inspired by this amazing woman and her questionable taste in decorating food (you can click it to view larger):