The little tramp eats his boot
Snowbound in a prospector’s cabin one Thanksgiving, and with nothing left to eat, Charlie Chaplin’s sad little tramp decides to cook one of his own boots. The brilliance lies in the attention to detail: the ladling of extra liquor over the footwear once it’s plated, the careful filleting of the uppers and the discarding of the nail-bound skeleton, the twirling of the laces on the tines of his fork, as if they were spaghetti. When, at the end, he thumps his chest to deal with the heartburn, you can’t help but believe he’s finally eaten his fill Photograph: Corbis
Two dogs, one strand of spaghetti
... and immediately you are a child again, listening to that accordion music swell for the first time, watching two dogs stare into each other’s eyes, over a plate of spaghetti with meatballs. You could analyse the scene for what it says about attitudes to Italian-Americans and question the peculiar relationship between a comedy chef and a hound, but that’s missing the point. What matters is that the dogs are so absorbed they do not notice they are on the end of the same strand of spaghetti until they have drawn themselves to the inevitable kiss. Slushy, overblown. And perfect Photograph: Rex Features
Tom and Mrs Waters get stuck in
The food-sex relationship has been worked to death over the years – there could have been entries in this list for Eat Drink Man Woman, La grande bouffe and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, among others — but perhaps this one blunt scene in which Tom Jones (Albert Finney) and Mrs Waters (Joyce Redman) eat lustfully at each other, as a kind of gastronomic foreplay, can stand for the rest: first a chicken leg, then an oyster, finally a pear, the juice dribbling down their chins. It’s curiously unsexy but at least they seem to be having a good time Photograph: Rex Features
A whole lot of baked beans
It’s not clever and it’s not pretty, but it is very, very funny. Especially if you are, say, a nine-year-old boy with a highly developed taste for the scatological. Which is exactly what I was the first time I saw Mel Brooks’s brilliant parody of cowboy movies. A dozen cowboys sit around a campfire eating baked beans and farting. And really, that’s all there is to it. Except that each one rises delicately from their seat to let one go, as if they are musicians in a finely conducted orchestra. Which, in a way, they are. Genius Photograph: Public Domain
Hecky Brown toasts his own suicide
OK, not exactly a meal, but it does require hotel room service. Plus it’s a masterclass in what can be done in cinema, shot by shot. Zero Mostel plays Hecky Brown, an actor who has been driven to despair by the anti-communist McCarthyite witch-hunts. He orders a bottle of champagne. He observes all the formalities of its delivery, opening and pouring and, when the waiter has gone, toasts himself by an open window. For a moment, the camera looks away and when it returns to the open window Hecky has gone. We immediately know he has taken the quickest way out Photograph: Public Domain
A boy gives in to a cream cake
This one scene could stand as a metaphor for the glorious indulgence of Sergio Leone’s epic portrait of the birth of organised crime in America. A kid takes a cream cake to the apartment of a girl he has been told will offer sex in return for patisserie. She’s busy, so the boy sits on the stairs with the cake by his side. He stares at it. He runs one finger round the edge to get at a little cream. He takes a more lavish sweep. Then suddenly he’s eating the whole damn thing, all thought of more carnal pleasures gone. Like the film itself, it’s long and satisfying Photograph: Public Domain
Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm
Shot in Katz’s deli in New York, old friends Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal discuss the importance of ordering parts of dishes on the side – “On the side is a big thing with you” — before turning to the matter of girls who fake orgasm. Crystal declares that it has never happened to him. So Ryan gives her best performance in the middle of the deli. Cut to woman at next table (the director Rob Reiner’s mother): “I’ll have what she’s having.” A sign now hangs at the deli, from the ceiling over the spot where the scene was shot, asking: “Did you have what she had?” Photograph: Rex Features
Hoods cook up dinner in prison
Food plays a major part in Scorsese’s mafia masterpiece – many of their hits are talked about over food; at one point, the doomed Joe Pesci even goes into the restaurant business, opening a joint called the Leaning Tower – but the key moment is in prison. “In prison,” Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill intones, “dinner was always a big thing.” These guys get their hands on endless supplies of lobster and prime rib. Cue a detailed food prep scene with, at the heart of it, Paulie, played by Paul Sorvino, slicing garlic with a razor blade so that when it hits the oil “it melts” Photograph: Public Domain
Ray Liotta is served his own brain
Writer Thomas Harris is a renowned gourmand, which lent his creation, the psychopathic cannibal Hannibal Lecter, an extra delicious dimension. In both the book and the Ridley Scott film, the crowning glory, so to speak, is the moment during which Lecter sedates FBI agent Paul Krendler (Liotta), saws off the top of his cranium, takes two scoops of his brain while keeping him alive and serves them up to his victim in a beurre noisette. As in the book, the brilliance lies in the absolutely correct gastronomic detail. Lecter knows how to prepare fresh brain, human or otherwise Photograph: Allstar
A restaurant critic is transported back to childhood
Of all the movies about chefs and restaurants, it is, curiously, this animated feature about a gastronomically gifted rat which many cooks regard as the only one to have captured the true essence of the business. There are countless scenes to choose from, but the one in which restaurant critic Anton Ego, gloriously voiced by Peter O’Toole, tastes our hero’s ratatouille and is immediately transported back to being a little boy who has grazed his knee and needs his mother’s cooking to make him feel better is pitch perfect. As is the preparation of the dish itself Photograph: Rex Feature
