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Old 11-21-2008, 03:49 AM   #19
Man In Room 5
 
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: IL, USA
Posts: 754
If you're looking for black colored food or melancholy themed meals there is always this classic passage from Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours (Against The Grain). In this scene the protagonist is throwing a mourning party to sarcastically "celebrate" his sexual impotence. The black food, black settings and perverse humor of mixing sex and death strikes me as gothic.

In the dining room, hung in black and opening on the transformed
garden with its ash-powdered walks, its little pool now bordered with
basalt and filled with ink, its clumps of cypresses and pines, the
dinner had been served on a table draped in black, adorned with
baskets of violets and scabiouses, lit by candelabra from which green
flames blazed, and by chandeliers from which wax tapers flared.

To the sound of funeral marches played by a concealed orchestra, nude
negresses, wearing slippers and stockings of silver cloth with
patterns of tears, served the guests.

Out of black-edged plates they had drunk turtle soup and eaten Russian
rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, smoked Frankfort black
pudding, game with sauces that were the color of licorice and
blacking, truffle gravy, chocolate cream, puddings, nectarines, grape
preserves, mulberries and black-heart cherries; they had sipped, out
of dark glasses, wines from Limagne, Roussillon, Tenedos, Val de Penas
and Porto, and after the coffee and walnut brandy had partaken of kvas
and porter and stout.

The farewell dinner to a temporarily dead virility--this was what he
had written on invitation cards designed like bereavement notices.
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