descriptions of food from literature: lashings and lashings of ginger beer

A Note

2010-05-16T12:31:00.001-07:00

Dear Readers,

This blog has been quiet recently due to real life deadlines, work pressures, etc. As such we won't be able to update it much for the next month, but in that time, we would love suggestions on any books or excerpts that you think should be here. So far, we've had quite a few emails suggesting Redwall, so that will definitely be here, as well as On The Road.

What else do you want to see here? Feel free to comment, and check back next month.

Until then!

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

2010-03-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

Here's something to keep our one or two faithful readers interested; Fatima and I are both on tough deadlines but hope to be back soon.

It is somewhat de rigueur to be contemptuous about The Secret History, the story of a small set of students of ancient Greek who find it necessary to murder one of their classmates, but I am quite fond of it--it has its faults but attention to detail is not one of them. Food does not figure very prominently; the main characters eat (as Laurie Colwin said about someone else) like dyspeptic middle-aged Brits and are rather more prone to drink. But there is one plot point that revolves very pointedly around something that might be eaten.

Julian, of course, had made the lunch himself, and we ate at the big round table in his office. After weeks of bad nerves, bad conversation, and bad food in the dining hall, the prospect of a meal with him was immensely cheering; he was a charming companion and his dinners, though deceptively simple, had a sort of Augustan wholesomeness and luxuriance which never failed to soothe.

There was roasted lamb, new potatoes, peas with leeks and fennel; a rich and almost maddeningly delicious Château Latour. I was eating with better appetite than I had in ages when I noticed that a fourth course had appeared, with unobtrusive magic, at my elbow: mushrooms. They were pale and slender-stemmed, of a type I had seen before, steaming in a red wine sauce that smelled of coriander and rue.

"Where did you get these?" I said.

"Ah. You're quite observant," he said, pleased. "Aren't they marvelous? Quite rare. Henry brought them to me."

I took a quick swallow of my wine to hide my consternation.

"He tells me--may I?" he said nodding at the bowl.

I passed it to him, and he spooned some of them onto his plate. "Thank you," he said. "What was I saying? Oh, yes. Henry tells me that this particular sort of mushroom was a great favorite of the emperor Claudius. Interesting, because you remember how Claudius died."

I did remember. Agrippina had slipped a poisoned one into his dish one night.

"They're quite good," said Julian, taking a bite. "Have you gone with Henry on any of his collecting expeditions?"

"Not yet. He hasn't asked me to."

"I must say, I never thought I cared very much for mushrooms, but everything he's brought me has been heavenly."

Suddenly I understood. This was a clever piece of groundwork on Henry's part. "He's brought them to you before?" I said.

"Yes. Of course I wouldn't trust just anyone with this sort of thing, but Henry seems to know an amazing lot about it."

"I believe he probably does," I said, thinking of the boxer dogs.

"It's remarkable how good he is at anything he tries. He can grow flowers, repair clocks like a jeweler, add tremendous sums in his head. Even if it's something as simple as bandaging a cut finger he manages to do a better job of it." He poured himself another glass of wine. "I gather that his parents are disappointed that he's decided to concentrate so exclusively on the classics. I disagree, of course, but in a certain sense it is rather a pity. He would have made a great doctor, or soldier, or scientist."

I laughed. "Or a great spy," I said.

Julian laughed too. "All you boys would be excellent spies," he said. "Slipping about in casinos, eavesdropping on heads of state. Really, won't you try some of these mushrooms? They're glorious."

I drank the rest of my wine. "Why not," I said, and reached for the bowl.

The Song of Solomon

2010-02-03T10:32:00.001-08:00

I just read this again, and though it's not really 'about' food, it's so lovely.

... Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.
How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!
Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.
A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,
Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:
A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.
Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

Complete text here.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

2010-01-09T17:51:00.000-08:00

Below, a long excerpt from The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath's clean, measured, precise prose takes its time unfolding, and holds a great deal more than what's on the surface. Here, under cover of reminiscing about food, Esther Greenwood travels across social anxiety, greed, the fear of never being sated, the fear of never getting what's hers and whether she deserves it anyway--all part of the march toward her famous crackup.

This scene has always made me hungry, even though I know they all get terrifically sick afterward, from ptomaine poisoning in the crabmeat.

Arrayed on the Ladies' Day banquet table were yellow-green avocado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise, and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a cut-glass bowl heaped with black caviar. I hadn't had time to eat any breakfast at the hotel cafeteria that morning, except for a cup of over-stewed coffee so bitter it made my nose curl, and I was starving.

Before I came to New York I'd never eaten out in a proper restaurant. I don't count Howard Johnson's, where I only had french fries and cheeseburgers and vanilla frappes with people like Buddy Willard. I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else. No matter how much I eat, I never put on weight. With one exception I've been the same weight for ten years.

My favorite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream. In New York we had so many free luncheons with people on the magazine and various visiting celebrities I developed the habit of running my eye down those huge handwritten menus, where a tiny side dish of peas cost fifty or sixty cents, until I'd picked the richest, most expensive dishes and ordered a string of them.

We were always taken out on expense accounts, so I never felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.

"I want to welcome the prettiest, smartest bunch of young ladies our staff has yet had the good luck to meet," the plump, bald master-of-ceremonies wheezed into his lapel microphone. "This banquet is just a small sample of the hospitality our Food Testing Kitchens here on Ladies' Day would like to offer in appreciation for your visit."

A delicate, ladylike spatter of applause, and we all sat down at the enormous linen-draped table.

There were eleven of us girls from the magazine, together with most of our supervising editors, and the whole staff of the Ladies' Day Food Testing Kitchens in hygienic white smocks, neat hairnets and flawless makeup of a uniform peach-pie color.

There were only eleven of us, because Doreen was missing. They had set her place next to mine for some reason, and the chairs stayed empty. I saved her placecard for her--a pocket mirror with "Doreen" painted along the top of it in lacy script and a wreath of frosted daisies around the edge, framing the silver hole where her face would show.

Doreen was spending the day with Lenny Shepherd. She spent most of her free time with Lenny Shepherd now.

In the hour before our luncheon at Ladies' Day--the big women's magazine that features lush double-page spreads of Technicolor meals, with a different theme and locale each month--we had been shown around the endless glossy kitchens and seen how difficult it is to photograph apple pie a la mode under bright lights because the ice cream keeps melting and has to be propped up from behind with toothpicks and changed every time it starts looking too soppy.

The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It's not that we hadn't enough to eat at home, it's just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, "I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound," which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.

While we were standing up behind our chairs listening to the welcome speech, I had bowed my head and secretly eyed the position of the bowls of caviar. One bowl was set strategically between me and Doreen's empty chair.

I figured the girl across from e couldn't reach it because of the mountainous centerpiece of marzipan fruit, and Betsy, on my right, would be too nice to ask me to share it with her if I just kept it out of the way at my elbow by my bread-and-butter plate. Besides, another bowl of caviar sat a little way to the right of the girl next to Betsy, and she could eat that.

My grandfather and I had a standing joke. He was the head waiter at a country club near my home town, and every Sunday my grandmother drove in to bring him home for his Monday off. My brother and I alternated going with her, and my grandfather always served Sunday supper to my grandmother and whichever of us was along as if we were regular club guests. He loved introducing me to special tidbits, and by the age of nine I had developed a passionate taste for cold vichyssoise and caviar and anchovy paste.

The joke was that at my wedding my grandfather would see I had all the caviar I could eat. It was a joke because I never intended to get married, and even if I did, my grandfather couldn't have afforded enough caviar unless he robbed the country club kitchen and carried it off in a suitcase.

Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn't ooze off and ate them.

I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

I learned this trick the day Jay Cee took me to lunch with a famous poet. He wore a horrible, lumpy, speckled brown tweed jacket and gray pants and a red-and-blow checked open-throated jersey in a very formal restaurant full of fountains and chandeliers, where all the other men were dressed in dark suits and immaculate white shirts.

This poet ate his salad with his fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and art. I couldn't take my eyes off the pale, stubby white fingers traveling back and forth from the poet's salad bowl to the poet's mouth with one dripping lettuce leaf after another. Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.

None of our magazine editors or the Ladies' Day staff members sat anywhere near me, and Betsy seemed sweet and friendly, she didn't even seem to like caviar, so I grew more and more confident. When I finished my first plate of cold chicken and caviar, I laid out another. Then I tackled the avocado and crabmeat salad.

Avocados are my favorite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison.

"How was the fur show?" I asked Betsy, when I was no longer worried about competition over my caviar. I scraped the last few salty black eggs from the dish with my soup spoon and licked it clean.

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

2009-12-27T12:08:00.000-08:00

This is a little bit of a cheat--or a great deal of a cheat, depending on how you feel about such things--because this excerpt is from a book I haven't finished. I made it a good way through, and then something intervened (I can't remember what) and I never picked it up again. And where discussing a passage from a book you don't know at all offers an obvious challenge, I've been surprised by how hard it is to narrow down my thoughts about books I know--it seems--too well.

Here is breakfast at the Sanatorium Berghof. It is observed with the same care and formality with which the Sanatorium's inhabitants note their every symptom. This takes place very early in the book, as Hans Castorp--for now just a visitor at the Sanatorium, not a patient--gathers impressions and begins to reckon with the shadow that falls over even the nicest things or (to move the metaphor from outward to in) the ever-present rotting core.

The translation is by John E. Woods:

There were plates of marmalade and honey, bowls of oatmeal and creamed rice, plates of scrambled eggs and cold meats; they had been generous with the butter. Someone lifted the glass bell from a soft Swiss cheese and cut off a piece; what was more, a bowl of fruit, both fresh and dried, stood in the middle of the table. A dining attendant in black and white asked Hans Castorp what he wanted to drink--cocoa, coffee, or tea? She was as small as a child, with an old, long face--a dwarf, he realized with a shock. He looked at his cousin, who merely shrugged and lifted an eyebrow as if to say, "Right, what else is new?" and so Hans Castorp simply accepted the fact and, since it was a dwarf, asked for his tea with special courtesy. He began with some creamed rice topped with sugar and cinnamon, meanwhile letting his eyes wander over the other items he intended to sample and across the seven tables of assembled guests--Joachim's colleagues, his companions in misfortune, all with the same illness deep inside, all chatting and breakfasting.

Little House On The Prairie (2), Laura Ingalls Wilder

2009-12-24T17:07:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays, everyone!

When he saw the creek rising, Mr. Edwards said, he had known that Santa Claus could not get across it. (“But you crossed it,” Laura said. “Yes,” Mr. Edwards replied, “but Santa Claus is too old and fat. He couldn’t make it, where a long, lean razor-back like me could do so.”) And Mr. Edwards reasoned that if Santa Claus couldn’t cross the creek, likely he would come no farther south than Independence. Why should he come forty miles across the prairie, only to be turned back? Of course he wouldn’t do that!

So, Mr. Edwards had walked to Independence. (“In the rain?” Mary asked. Mr. Edwards said he wore his rubber coat.) And there, coming down the street in Independence, he had met Santa Claus. (“In the daytime?” Laura asked. She hadn’t thought that anyone could see Santa Claus in the daytime. No, Mr. Edwards said; it was night, but light shone out across the street from the saloons.)

Well, the first thing Santa Claus said was, “Hello, Edwards!” (“Did he know you?” Mary asked, and Laura asked, “How did you know he was really Santa Claus?” Mr. Edwards said that Santa Claus knew everybody. And he had recognized Santa at once by his whiskers. Santa had the longest, thickest, whitest set of whiskers west of the Mississippi.)

So Santa Claus said, “Hello, Edwards! Last time I saw you you were sleeping on a cornshuck bed in Tennessee.” And Mr. Edwards well remembered the little pair of red-yarn mittens that Santa Claus had left for him that time.

Then Santa Claus said: “I understand you’re living now down along the Verdigris River. Have you ever met up, down yonder, with two little young girls named Mary and Laura?”

“I surely am acquainted with them,” Mr. Edwards replied.

“It rests heavy on my mind,” said Santa Claus. “They are both of them sweet, pretty, good little young things, and I know they are expecting me. I surely do hate to disappoint two good little girls like them. Yet with the water up the way it is, I can’t ever make it across that creek. I can figure no way whatsoever to get to their cabin this year. Edwards,” Santa Claus said, “Would you do me the favor to fetch them their gifts this one time?”

“I’ll do that, and with pleasure,” Mr. Edwards told him.

Then Santa Claus and Mr. Edwards stepped across the street to the hitching-posts where the pack mule was tied. (“Didn’t he have his reindeer?” Laura asked. “You know he couldn’t,” Mary said. “There isn’t any snow.” Exactly, said Mr. Edwards. Santa Claus traveled with a pack mule in the southwest.”)

And Santa Claus uncinched the pack and looked through it, and he took out the presents for Mary and Laura.

“Oh, what are they?” Laura cried; but Mary asked, “Then what did he do?”

Then he shook hands with Mr. Edwards, and he swung up on his fine bay horse. Santa Claus rode well for a man of his weight and build. And he tucked his long, white whiskers under his bandana. “So long, Edwards,” he said, and he rode away on the Fort Dodge trail, leading his pack-mule and whistling.

Laura and Mary were silent an instant, thinking of that.

Then Ma said, “You may look now, girls.”

Something was shining bright in the top of Laura’s stocking. She squealed and jumped out of bed. So did Mary, but Laura beat her to the fireplace. And the shining thing was a glittering new tin cup.

Mary had one exactly like it.

These new tin cups were their very own. Now they each had a cup to drink out of. Laura jumped up and down and shouted and laughed, but Mary stood still and looked with shining eyes at her own tin cup.

Then they plunged their hands into the stockings again. And they pulled out two long sticks of candy. It was peppermint candy, striped red and white. They looked and looked at the beautiful candy, and Laura licked her stick, just one lick. But Mary was not so greedy. She didn’t even take one lick of her stick.

Those stockings weren’t empty yet. Mary and Laura pulled out two small packages. They unwrapped them, and each found a little heart-shaped cake. Over their delicate brown tops was sprinkled white sugar. The sparkling grains lay like tiny drifts of snow.

The cakes were too pretty to eat. Mary and Laura just looked at them. But at last Laura turned hers over, and she nibbled a tiny nibble from underneath, where it wouldn’t show. And the inside of the cake was white!

It had been made of pure white flour, and sweetened with white sugar.

Laura and Mary never would have looked in their stockings again. The cups and the cakes and the candy were almost too much. They were too happy to speak. But Ma asked if they were sure their stockings were empty.

Then they put their hands down inside them, to make sure.

And in the very toe of each stocking was a shining bright, new penny!

They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny. Think of having a whole penny for your very own. Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny.

There never had been such a Christmas.

...She looked up again when Ma gasped. And Mr. Edwards was taking sweet potatoes out of his pockets. He said they had helped to balance the package on his head when he swam across the creek. He thought Pa and Ma might like them, with the Christmas turkey.

There were nine sweet potatoes. Mr. Edwards had brought them all the way from town, too. It was just too much. Pa said so. “It’s too much, Edwards,” he said. They never could thank him enough.

Mary and Laura were too excited to eat breakfast. They drank the milk from their shining new cups, but they could not swallow the rabbit stew and the cornmeal mush.

“Don’t make them, Charles,” Ma said. “It will soon be dinner-time.”

For Christmas dinner there was tender, juicy, roasted turkey. There were the sweet potatoes, baked in the ashes and carefully wiped to that you could eat the good skins, too. There was a loaf of salt-rising bread made from the last of the white flour.

And after all that there were stewed dried blackberries and little cakes. But these little cakes were made with brown sugar and they did not have white sugar sprinkled over their tops.

Then Pa and Ma and Mr. Edwards sat by the fire and talked about Christmas times back in Tennessee and up north in the Big Woods. But Mary and Laura looked at their beautiful cakes and played with their pennies and drank their water out of their new cups. And little by little they licked and sucked their sticks of candy, till each stick was sharp-pointed on one end.

That was a happy Christmas.

George Orwell's Christmas Pudding and Plum Cake Recipes

2009-12-11T04:43:00.001-08:00

Thanks to the Guardian, here is George Orwell's Christmas pudding and plum cake recipes, typed in his own fair hand:

I wonder if that stain is indeed a pudding stain.

Study of Two Pears, Wallace Stevens

2009-12-09T12:43:00.000-08:00

This is perhaps somewhat different than most of our posts: there's no meal involved, just a couple of pears observed with ambiguous precision. Even if the pears can't be seen as the observer wills, perhaps they can be eaten as the reader wishes.

Opusculum paedagogum.

The pears are not viols,

Nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Bulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

Tapering toward the top.

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

The shadows of the pears

Are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell

2009-12-06T18:28:00.000-08:00

I didn't know which excerpt to post from this book - the sickening account of the filthiness of the expensive Parisian hotel kitchen (cockroaches in the bread bin, 'the waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy - the nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair, the toast retrieved from the dirty floor); the wolfing down of two loaves of bread and a bottle of wine after starving for three days; the lament of the kitchen dishwasher who bobs helplessly on waves of the cook's 'ceaseless, nagging... orders'; or the religious workers who tempt the homeless with fruit buns? But perhaps including any of these excerpts from a book which is all about not having food (or very much else) is not telling enough - the passages that struck me most were those where food and hunger are obsessions, when the narrator finds himself in a world in which food, the one thing that can revive him or inspire any motivation in him, is obscenely abundant, and yet horribly out of reach. Personally, it also disturbs me whenever I read it because, while aware, intellectually, that there are billions of people for whom constantly battling hunger is a reality, it is so easy to be totally oblivious on a daily basis of that fact, and to have not even a chance of understanding what it must be like when you live in a world where your most difficult choices about food are whether to have dessert or not or whether to go to a Japanese restaurant or eat an organic, grass-fed burger instead - so Orwell provides a good jolt in that respect. It is, at least, an interesting counterpart to the many excerpts we have here which are all about feasting - in these, the feast is nothing more than an impossible, painful fantasy.

And then there are your meals - meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. [...]
You go to the baker's to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. 'Pardon, monsieur,' she says, 'I don't suppose you mind paying two sous extra?' Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think you might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is hours before you dare venture into a baker's shop again. [...]
You discover what it is to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you, and you refrain, from pure funk.
You discover the boredom which is inescapable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do, and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

*****

Two bad days followed. We had only sixty centimes left, and we spent it on half a pound of bread, with a piece of garlic to rub it with. The point of rubbing garlic on bread is that the taste lingers and gives one the illusion of having fed recently... We were too hungry to think of anything but food. I remember the dinner Boris finally selected for himself. It was: a dozen oysters, borscht soup (the red, sweet, beetroot soup with cream on top), crayfishes, a young chicken en casserole, beef with stewed plums, new potatoes, a salad, suet pudding and Roquefort cheese, with a litre of Burgundy and some old brandy. Boris had international tastes in food. Later on, when we were prosperous, I occasionally saw him eat meals almost as large without difficulty.

Eggs à la Nabocoque, Vladimir Nabokov

2009-12-03T08:29:00.000-08:00

Maxime de la Falaise had a varied career as a fashion model, cookbook author, and Andy Warhol collaborator (she was featured in Blood for Dracula, and designed a menu for Warhol's version of the automat--the Andymat). She wrote a food column for Vogue, and in 1973 published Seven Centuries on English Cooking.

Found among Vladimir Nabokov's archives is the following recipe, dated November 18, 1972, and addressed to Maxime, who presumably requested it for inclusion in her cookbook. Nabokov noted on the top of the page "Maxime de la Falaise McKendry for a cooking book"; a later note reads, "Never acknowledge by Maxime." Perhaps it wasn't quite what she was looking for.

At any rate, here's the recipe that Nabokov sent Maxime:

Eggs à la Nabocoque

Boil water in a saucepan (bubbles mean it is boiling!). Take two eggs (for one person) out of the refrigerator. Hold them under the hot tap water to make them ready for what awaits them.

"Place each in a pan, one after the other, and let them slip soundlessly into the (boiling) water. Consult your wristwatch. Stand over them with a spoon preventing them (they are apt to roll) from knocking against the damned side of the pan.

If, however, an egg cracks in the water (now bubbling like mad) and starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an oldfashioned seance, fish it out and throw it away. Take another and be more careful.

After 200 seconds have passed, or, say, 240 (taking interruptions into account), start scooping the eggs out. Place them, round end up, in two egg cups. With a small spoon tap-tap in a circle and hen pry open the lid of the shell. Have some salt and buttered bread (white) ready. Eat.

This Is Just To Say, William Carlos Williams

2009-12-01T12:37:00.000-08:00

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

The Erl King, Angela Carter

2009-11-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

I love Angela Carter. I've posted an excerpt from The Magic Toyshop before, but I really love her stories based on traditional folk/fairy tales and myths (fairy tales themselves fascinate me). She is one of the best female writers I've ever read, because to me her writing is so deeply feminine, and she's so good at capturing the tension and beauty of being an adolescent girl especially. This story is about the Erl King, a sinister creature of the forest, rapacious, deathly and beautiful. In the story, a young girl wanders into the forest where she is surprised by and seduced by the Erl King (she first is aware of his presence in one of my favorite lines from the story 'the two notes of the song of a bird rose on the still air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound'), with his room filled with aromatic herbs and, most tellingly, cages and cages of trapped songbirds carelessly piled upon each other. Although she knows the mysterious Erl King 'will do you grievous harm', the girl allows herself to be seduced by him, with a surprising twist - but you'll have to read the entire story to find out. This is also one of the few stories where the food mentioned is somewhat fantastical (perhaps with the exception of chanterelles and oatcakes), but you can somehow imagine the taste, smell and appearance of the dishes mentioned perfectly.

The Erl-King lives by himself all alone in the heart of the wood in a house which has only one room. His house is made of sticks and stones and has grown a pelt of yellow lichen. Grass and weeds grow in the messy roof. He chops fallen branches for his fire and draws his water from the stream in a tin pail.
What does he eat? Why, the bounty of the woodland! Stewed nettles; savoury messes of chickweed sprinkled with nutmeg; he cooks the foliage of shepherd's purse as if it were cabbage. He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotting fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things. Even the homely wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow chanterelle with its fan-vaulting and faint scent of apricots; all spring up overnight like bubbles of earth, sustained by nature, existing in a void. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he came alive from the desire of the woods.
He goes out in the morning to gather his unnatural treasures, he handles them delicately as he does pigeon's eggs, he lays them in one of the baskets he weaves from osiers. He makes salads of dandelions that he calls rude names, 'bum-pipes' or 'piss-the-beds', and flavours them with a few leaves of wild strawberry but he will not touch the brambles, he says the Devil spits on them at Michaelmas.
His nanny goat, the colour of whey, gives him her abundant milk and he can make soft cheese that has a unique, rank, amniotic taste. Sometimes he traps a rabbit in the snare of string and makes a soup or stew, seasoned with wild garlic. He knows all about the wood and the creatures in it.
... He is an excellent housewife. His rustic home is spick and span. He puts his well-scoured saucepan and skillet neatly on the hearth side by side, like a pair of polished shoes. Over the hearth hang bunches of drying mushrooms, the thin, curling kind they call jew's-ears, which have grown on elder trees since Judas hanged himself on one; this is the kind of lore he tells me, tempting my half-belief. He hangs up herbs in bunches to dry, too - thyme, marjoram, sage, vervain, southern wood, yarrow. The room is musical and aromatic and there is always a wood-fire crackling in the gate, a sweet, acrid smoke, a bright, glancing flame. But you cannot get a tune out of the old fiddle hanging on the wall beside the birds because all its strings are broken.
... Goat's milk to drink, from a chipped tin mug; we shall eat the oatcakes he has baked on the hearthstone. Rattle of the rain on the roof. The latch clanks on the door; we are shut up inside with one another, in the brown room crisp with the scent of burning logs that shiver with tiny flame, and I lie down on the Erl-King's creaking palliasse of straw. His skin is the tint and texture of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples, ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears blossom and fruit on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely.

The Eve of St Agnes, John Keats

2009-11-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

(This is just an excerpt.)

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, 
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd, 
While he forth from the closet brought a heap 
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; 
With jellies soother than the creamy curd, 
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; 
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd 
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
 From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.  

These delicates he heap'd with glowing hand 
On golden dishes and in baskets bright 
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand 
In the retired quiet of the night, 
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.
 "And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake! 
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
 Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes' sake, 
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache."

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

2009-11-25T10:36:00.000-08:00

In light of the recent rather unseemly revelations about what ground beef may or may not contain, I bought a meat-grinding attachment for my big stand-mixer--something I'd been meaning to do for a while. It feels primal, somehow, grinding meat, obviously not in the same camp as my super-hardcore friend Novella Carpenter, who raises and butchers her own chickens, rabbits, and pigs (and wrote a splendid book about it), but still very satisfying.

One reason I'd had this on my mind for a while was that the following passage from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was imprinted on me at a very young age. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Neeley came home and he and Francie were sent out for the weekend meat. This was an important ritual and called for detailed instructions by Mama.

“Get a five-cent soup bone off of Hassler’s. But don’t get the chopped meat there. Go to Werner’s for that. Get round steak chopped, ten cents’ worth, and don’t let him give it to you off the plate. Take an onion with you, too.”

Francie and her brother stood at the counter a long time before the butcher noticed them.

“What’s yours?” he asked finally.

Francie started the negotiations. “Ten cents’ worth of round steak.”

“Ground?”

“No.”

“Lady was just in. Bought a quarter’s worth of round steak ground. Only I ground too much and here’s the rest on the plate. Just ten cents’ worth. Honestly, I only just ground it.”

This was the pitfall Francie had been told to watch against. Don’t buy it off the plate no matter what the butcher says.

“No. My mother said ten cents’ worth of round steak.”

Furiously the butcher hacked off a bit of meat and slammed it down on the paper after weighing it. He was just about to wrap it up when Francie said in a trembling voice,

“Oh, I forgot. My mother wants it ground.”

“God-damn it to hell!” He hacked up the meat and shoved it into the chopper. Tricked again, he thought bitterly. The meat came out in fresh red spirals. He gathered it up in his hand and was just about to slam it down on the paper when . . .

“And mama said to chop up this onion in it.” Timidly, she pushed the peeled onion that she had brought from home across the counter. Neeley stood by and said nothing. His function was to come along for moral support.

“Jesus!” The butcher said explosively. But he want to work with two cleavers chopping the onion up into the meat. Francie watched, loving the drumbeat rhythm of the cleavers. Again the butcher gathered up the meat, slammed it down on the paper and glared at Francie. She gulped. The last order would be hardest of all. The butcher had an idea of what was coming. He stood there trembling inwardly. Francie said all in one breath,

“And-a-piece-of-suet-to-fry-it-with.”

“Son-of-a-bitchin’ bastard,” whispered the butcher bitterly. He slashed off a piece of white fat, let if fall to the floor in revenge, picked it up and slammed in on the mound of meat. He wrapped it furiously, snatched the dime, and as he turned it over to the boss for ringing up, he cursed the destiny that had made him a butcher.

After the chopped meat they went to Hassler’s for the soup bone. Hassler was a fine butcher for bones but a bad butcher for chopped meat because he ground it behind closed doors and God knows what you got. Neeley waited outside with the package because if Hassler noticed you had bought meat elsewhere, he’d proudly tell you to go get your bone where you got your other meat.

Francie ordered a nice bone with some meat on it for Sunday soup for five cents. Hassler made her wait while he told the stale joke: how a man had bought two cents’ wroth of dog meat and how Hassler had asked, should he wrap it up or do you want to eat it here? Francie smiled shyly. The pleased butcher went into the icebox and returned holding up a gleaming white bone with creamy marrow in it and shreds of red meat clinging to the ends. He made Francie admire it.

“After your mama cooks this,” he said, “tell her to take the marrow out, spread it on a piece of bread with pepper, salt, and make a nice samwish for you.”

“I’ll tell Mama.”

“You eat it and get some meat on your bones, ha ha.”

After the bone was wrapped and paid for, he sliced off a thick piece of liverwurst and gave it to her. Francie was sorry that she deceived that kind man by buying the other meat elsewhere. Too bad Mama didn’t trust him about chopped meat.

It was still early in the evening and the street lights had not yet come on. But already, the horseradish lady was sitting in front of Hassler’s grinding away at her pungent roots. Francie held out the cup that she had brought from home. The old mother filled it halfway up for two cents. Happy that the meat business was over, Francie bought two cents’ worth of soup greens from the green grocer’s. She got an emasculated carrot, a droopy leaf of celery, a soft tomato and a fresh sprig of parsley. These would be boiled with the bone to make a rich soup with shreds of meat floating in it. Fat, homemade noodles would be added. This, with the seasoned marrow spread on bread, would make a good Sunday dinner.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving

2009-11-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

I vaguely remember my father reading bits of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. to me when I was a kid, but my earliest recollection of this story comes from the Bing Crosby-narrated Disney version. As such, I can only picture that Ichabod, with his giant, bobbing Adam's Apple and huge, twitching ears dribbling over a tottering stack of cartoonishly delicious pancakes slathered with shiny syrup. Mmmm... Oh, and there's also that timeless piece of advice from one of the several musical interludes: "With a hip-hip, and a clippety-clop/He's out looking for a head to chop/So don't stop to figure out a plan/You can't reason with a headless man."

Despite looking like "Famine descending upon the earth or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield," Ichabod has a monstrous appetite, and a tendency to read his surroundings in culinary terms.

As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly Autumn. On all sides he beheld vast store of apples--some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees, some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market, others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press. Farther on he beheld great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts and holding out the promise of cakes and hasty pudding; and the yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun, and giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies; and anon he passed the fragrant buckwheat-fields, breathing the odor of the beehive, and as he beheld them soft anticipations stole over his mind of dainty slapjacks, well buttered and garnished with honey or treacle by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel.

*********************************************************************************

The pedagogue's mouth watered as he looked upon this sumptuous promise of luxurious winter fare. In his devouring mind's eye he pictured to himself every roasting-pig running about with a pudding in his belly and an apple in his mouth; the pigeons were snugly put to bed in a comfortable pie and tucked in with a coverlet of crust; the geese were swimming in their own gravy; and the ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples, with a decent competency of onion sauce. In the porkers he saw carved out the future sleek side of bacon and juicy relishing ham; not a turkey but he beheld daintily trussed up, with its gizzard under its wing, and, peradventure, a necklace of savory sausages; and even bright Chanticleer himself lay sprawling on his back in a side-dish, with uplifted claws, as if craving that quarter which his chivalrous spirit disdained to ask while living.

Door In Your Eye, from 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,' Wells Tower

2009-11-24T09:30:00.000-08:00

I have a crush on Wells Tower. What is written on the internet is written forever, I know, so I do not want to write any more on this topic lest I embarrass myself beyond belief - but there you have it, I have a raging crush on Wells Tower, insofar as you can have a crush on someone who you've only read one book and a handful of articles by (though as a child I had a crush on Astroboy, so perhaps you don't even need to be real or have human legs to impress me). Part of me simply appreciates the fact that someone is named Wells Tower, let's be honest, but his collection of stories, 'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned', is also one of the best things I've read recently. I noted with pleasure when reading it that there was a good amount of food, particularly in the story 'Retreat', which has an especially disconcerting, slightly stomach-churning passage. I wanted to post that one, but since it's quite long and integral to the story, I thought I'd post an excerpt from 'Door In Your Eye' and suggest you buy the book to read the other story instead. Here, eighty-three year old Albert, recently moved in with his adult daughter, visits the prostitute across the street who he has been observing for some time...

'You were right about this dope,' I said after a while. 'It does make you crave something to eat.'
'You hungry?'
'Oh, yes,' I said.
'Well, don't look at me,' she said, 'I can't be cooking now. This is one of my busy days.'
'What about that?'
'What?'
'That tomato. We could eat that,' I said, 'It looks ripe.'
'You want to eat my tomato?'
'Sure,' I said.
She reached out and snapped the tomato off its vine and handed it to me.
'You don't want some?'
'Nah,' she said, 'Go to town.'
I took a bite. It was delicious, full of the strong, green flavor of the vine. So much juice ran out that Carol stopped me and went to get a towel. The juice ran down my chin. I could feel my beard getting heavy with it, but I didn't care.
I was nearly finished when Carol motioned me over to the open window. Charlotte had gotten home. She was out on the porch next to my empty chair, holding the crabs in a white paper package, turning her head up and down the street.
'Is that your daughter?'
'That's her,' I said.
Charlotte shouted out for me, a yell as loud as a bullhorn.
Carol seemed not to hear. She held up the little remnant of our cigarette. 'You want any more of this?' she asked.
'No, thank you,' I said.
She licked her fingers and pinched it out, and then she popped it in her mouth and swallowed it.
Down below, Charlotte yelled for me again. 'You're not going to see about her?' Carol asked.
'I put my hands on the windowsill and stuck my entire head out into the afternoon. The wind chilled the wetness on my lips and my chin. 'Hey,' I called out to my daughter, 'Hey, Charlotte, look up here.'

Follow Us on Twitter!

2009-11-24T06:16:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we're now on Twitter! Follow us at the link below, where we'll be posting site updates and whatever related 140-character ideas might pop into our heads:

http://twitter.com/LitFoodPorn

Là-Bas, Joris-Karl Huysmans

2009-11-23T14:25:00.000-08:00

Although not quite as well known as À rebours, Là-Bas is nearly as entertaining. In it, we are introduced to Durtal, a thinly veiled stand-in for the author, who would later become a recurring character in a series of novels chronicling Huysmans' conversion to Catholicism. At this point, however, Durtal is a paradigm of fin de siècle world-weariness and boredom; and in an effort to escape the hollow banality of the modern world, he does what anyone else would do: he embarks upon a study of medieval occultism and researches the life of famed 15th century child-murderer Gilles de Rais. Needless to say, his investigations come to reveal that Satanism is alive and well in 19th century Paris.

In this scene, over a cozy pot-au-feu at the bell-ringer's house, Durtal and des Hermies, his friend and chief verbal sparring partner, debate the relative merits of restaurant dining. Ever the provocatuer, des Hermies provides a decidedly unappetizing account of a restaurant that he nonetheless frequents "once a month or so," all in the interest of observing how rapidly its patrons are deteriorating from the sub-par cuisine.

“Can we help you finish laying the table?” suggested des Jermies.

But Carhaix’s wife refused.

“No, no, sit down. Dinner is nearly ready.”

“That smells good,” said Durtal, inhaling the odour of a bubbling pot-au-feu, in which the odour of celery added piquance to the smell of the other vegetables.

“Dinner is served,” boomed Carhaix, reappearing in a clean blouse, his face gleaming from a good scrubbing.

They sat down. The glowing stove roared. Durtal, almost fainting, felt the sudden sense of nervous relaxation which a frozen soul experiences when immersed in a warm bath; one was so far away from Paris here at the Carhaix’s, so far out of this century!

The lodge was extremely poor, but so welcoming and comfortable! Even the table was laid country-style, the polished glasses, the covered dish of semi-salted butter, the cider pitcher, the old-fashioned lamp, which had seen better days, and which emphasized the homely atmosphere by casting reflections of tarnished silver over the white expanse of the table-cloth.

“The next time I come, I must remember to stop at that English delicatessen and buy a jar of that deliciously dependable orange marmalade,” said Durtal to himself, who, by mutual agreement with des Hermies, never dined with the bell-ringer without furnishing a share of the provisions.

Carhaix prepared the pot-au-feu and a simple salad and provided some of his own cider. So as not to be a burden, des Hermies and Durtal brought the wine, coffee, liqueurs, desserts and arranged matters such that their contributions compensated their hosts for the soup and the beef, which would otherwise have lasted them for several days, that were consumed.

“Just right!” noted Mme Carhaix triumphantly, serving to each in turn a bouillon the colour of mahogany whose iridescent surface was looped with rings of topaz.

It was succulent and unctuous, robust and yet delicate, flavoured as it was with a broth made from chicken liver.

Everyone was silent now, their heads lowered over their plates, their faces shining from the steam of the savory soup.

“Now is the moment to repeat one of Flaubert’s favorite commonplaces: ‘You never eat like this in a restaurant,’” remarked Durtal.

“No maligning of restaurants,” said des Hermies. “They afford a very special delight to those who know the right way to inspect them. Only the other night, coming back from a house call, I dropped in on one of those establishments which do a set menu for three francs: soup, a choice of one or the other of the day’s specials, side salad and pudding.

“Now I eat at this restaurant once a month or so. It has an unvarying clientele: irritable stuffed-shirts, officers in mufti, Members of Parliament, civil servants.

“While fiddle-faddling about with the sauce au gratin which accompanied a redoubtable sole, I examined the habitués seated around me. They had singularly changed since my last visit. They had become either bloated or emaciated; their eyes were either hollow, with violet rings around them, or puffy, with crimson pouches under them; the fat ones had turned yellow and the thin ones were becoming green.

“It was obvious that the terrible concoctions served in this place, far deadlier than any of the lethal potions employed by the popes of Avignon, were slowly poisoning the customers.

“You can imagine how interested I became. I immediately carried out a toxicological investigation on my own person, paying careful attention to what I was eating. The ingredients were frightful: a mixture of tannin and coal dust, used to mask the smell of fish which is no longer quite fresh, not dissimilar to the stench of decomposing human tissue; marinated meats, painted with sauces the colour of sewage; wines adulterated with fuscin, perfumed with furfurol, provided with artificial body by the addition of molasses and plaster!

“I have promised myself to return every month in order to chart the customers’ decline…”

“How dreadful!” cried Mme Carhaix.

“Good God!” exclaimed Durtal. “What a black sense of humour you have!”

Recipe For A Salad, Sydney Smith

2009-11-23T04:30:00.000-08:00

I think I may actually try to make this one for the next time I post... stay tuned.

"In a letter to Lady Holland in 1839, Smith gives the recipe for this salad. It follows the poem except that at the close Smith instructs her, "Mix the Salad thoroughly just before it is used" (The Letters of Sydney Smith, Vol. II, ed. Nowell C. Smith [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953]: 684)."*

To make this condiment, your poet begs 
The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs;
 Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve, 
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,  
And, half suspected, animate the whole.
 Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
 Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;  
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,  
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca brown,
 And twice with vinegar procured from town;
 And, lastly, o'er the flavored compound toss
 A magic soupcion of anchovy sauce.
O, green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!  
'T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat:
 Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,  
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl!
 Serenely full, the epicure would say, 
"Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day."

(*Poem and note courtesy of Ian Lancashire at the University of Toronto)

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

2009-11-20T22:04:00.000-08:00

Pirate Prentice has the ability to get into and "manage" the dreams and fantasies of others; he also has a bananery, from which he culls the ingredients for the following dishes. The first is something of an appetizer, and the second, which features some potentially delicious banana French toast, is a proper banana breakfast feast.

"Across a blue tile patio, in through a door to the kitchen. Routine: plug in American blending machine won from some Yank last summer, some poker game, table stakes, B.O.Q. somewhere in the north, never remember now....Chop several bananas into pieces. Make coffee in urn. Get can of milk from cooler. Puree 'nanas in milk. Lovely. I would coat all the booze-corroded stomachs of England....Bit of marge, still smells all right, melt in the skillet. Peel more bananas, slice lengthwise. Marge sizzling, in go long slices. Light oven whoomp blow us all up someday oh, ha, ha, yes. Peeled whole bananas to go on broiler grill soon as it heats. Find marshmallows...."

******************************************************************************************

"With a clattering of chairs, upended shell cases, benches, and ottomans, Pirate's mob gather at the shores of the great refectory table, a southern island well across a tropic or two from chill Corydon Throsp's mediaeval fantasies, crowded now over the swirling dark grain of its walnut uplands with banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded into the shape of a British lion rampant, blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade) which Pirate has appropriated as his motto ... tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead ... banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing a clandestine radio transmitter ..."

We won something!!

2009-11-20T12:02:00.000-08:00

As you may have noticed thanks to Emily's recent posts, Lashings & Lashings of Ginger Beer is back. From now on, we are going to update the blog a lot more frequently.

But first, I want to thank Kitty at Fahrenheit 350 for giving us a wonderful Lemonade Stand Award. I'm not so sure we really deserve this award, as we've been terrible about updating, but I think we will take it as a gentle encouragement to keep this blog going and to show gratitude to all the people who comment and read us. Thank you!

It's also a great opportunity to make a note of some blogs that we love, since the rules of accepting and sharing this award are:

1. Put the logo on your blog or post

2. Nominate at least 10 blogs that show an attitude of gratitude

3. Link to your nominees within your post

4. Comment on their blog to let them know they've received this award

5. Share the love and link to the person who nominated you

6. Tell us how you've come to have an attitude of gratitude

Well, though I don't think we can bestow the award back, let's focus on Fahrenheit 350 first. I would not at all recommend going to this blog if you are hungry or attempting to lose weight. It's the visual equivalent of walking past a bakery at 6am in the morning, or someone shoving a freshly baked cinnamon bun under your nose, or envisioning a world where everything is made out of chocolate. If you don't believe me, look at these moon pies. I could die.

The 10 blogs who get the award from us are (in no particular order):

1. Amy at Blue Lotus - this beautiful blog details the meals that the author makes and eats in her adopted home of Japan. Unlike many other blogs, the food is presented simply, without pretension, and in the midst of her normal family life. It's a great glimpse into all aspects of another culture, and I've learned so much about Japanese food from it.

2. Elly, Sarah & Alix at Vintage Cookbook Trials - we've been planning to do a collaboration with them, but due to my laziness and general chaotic-ness, haven't gotten around to it yet. Anyway, I think this is one of the best ideas for a food blog, and their efforts to create some alarming sounding recipes from old cookbooks are both respectful of the food they're dealing with and quite humourous. My favourite has to be the ill-fated Party Pyramids, from the drunken cook to the way that the recipe, which must have been so sophisticated in its time, now appears as exceedingly bizarre.

3. Mr. Dave at The Ridiculous Food Society of Upstate New York - this blog is just immensely enjoyable to read. His willingness to try the most horribly packaged of foods alongside his obvious enjoyment of carefully creating dishes out of scratch is great. I wish Mr Dave was my next door neighbour and I could poke my head out of my window and ask him how the primitive beer he is brewing is coming along, or to eat some bacon-wrapped fudge. He also has an enviably adorable child.

4. Meg from Queenie Takes Manhattan - one of the first blogs to be nice to us. A lady (as in, one really classy lady) with perfect taste in everything, from food to interior decorating. She also has great advice on where to eat when in Paris or New York.

5. Maud Newton - needs no introduction, and isn't technically a food blogger, but it's fine because she's fantastic.

6. Eric Hanson - Eric is an illustrator whose work has appeared in a range of illustrious publications and who has written 'A Book of Ages', described as: ""An Eccentric Miscellany of Achievements, Misdeeds, Crossed Paths, Bypaths, Inventions, Scandals, Child Prodigies, Late Masterpieces, Marriages and Breakups, Fueds, Dead Ends, Second Chances, Adventures and Misadventures, Novels Written and Battles Won and Lost, All Organized by Year of Age." He also has made a picture of a crocodile riding a bicycle.

7. Sonya at EpiCute - cute, cute, darling, adorable, lovely, sweet, pretty, gorgeous food. Look at this! WTF how cute is that?!

8. Michael at Forgotten Bookmarks - this too is not a food blog, but Michael is considering branching out into a blog that makes recipes found in books, so this award is our encouragement to do that (perhaps an entrepreneurial food blogger can approach him?). It is also my favourite blog of all blogs ever, I think.

9. Food Snob - Food Snob is so famous that people are impressed that I am his Facebook friend. That's real fame.

10. Amuse Biatch - they haven't updated in a million years which is an absolute travesty when you consider a) how unbelievably good this season of Top Chef is, and b) how funny their blog is. This 'award', is, when applied to them, more of a warning to update immediately or I will punish them.

11. Laura Schaefer at The Teashop Girl's Blog - the author of a book that is going to be featured on this blog very soon, I hope.

12. Readable Watchable Edible Potable - our sister blog in a way, who is far better at updating than we are, and includes film, too.

And there you have it! Back to your (now) regularly scheduled programming soon, with more Proust, Wells Tower and Ancient Romans coming up in the next few days, I promise.

Bad News, Edward St. Aubyn

2009-11-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

I just love Edward St. Aubyn's trilogy of novellas, Some Hope, of which Bad News forms the middle installment. St. Aubyn is a fine writer: his prose crackles with tart humor, real insight, and a kind of brutal honesty that you suspect has cost the author something. So much so that I'm almost surprised to have to admit that it's a novel about recovery--from abuse, from drug addiction, toward hard-won self-knowledge--not the kind of book I usually find myself reading, much less enjoying.

It is the story of Patrick Melrose, son of a tyrannical, talented father and a vacant, wealthy mother. In Bad News, he travels from London to New York to collect his father's ashes and try to come to grips with his drug problem, and which of these is the more difficult task is hard to reckon. His most potent weapons are his ferocious intelligence and brittle wit--no match for the sirens he'll encounter along the way.

Food in literature is not always about being happily transported--it is, as we've seen, also about longing, about what's missing in a relationship, about poverty of spirit, about snobbery. The passage that follows takes us into somewhat unhappy new territory, elevating a meal into a vehicle for contempt, and in the end for utter self-loathing. I was talking to a friend today about this book, and about how it's possible that despite all the pompousness, all the scorn and derision, all the nastiness--despite all of these terrible qualities, we still like Patrick, and we still root for him. We couldn't come to any conclusion; I offer up this scene as proof.

Trying to outrun his desire for heroin, he picks up a girl at the Mudd Club (it's the 1980s). The diner they go to together reminded me of a place down in TriBeCa I used to frequent in those days, Terminator Chili--they had something called a "garbage plate," which I loved. Poor old Rachel.

"I'm feeling kinda hungry," said Rachel uneasily.

"Hungry?"

"Yeah, I got this craving for chili."

"Well, I'm sure we can get you some on room service," said Patrick, who knew perfectly well there was no chili on the Pierre's all-night menu and would have disapproved if there had been.

"But there's this diner where they make like the greatest chili in the entire world," said Rachel, sitting up eagerly. "I really wanna go there."

"Right," said Patrick patiently. "What's the address?"

"Eleventh Avenue and Thirty-eighth."

"I'm sorry about this," said Patrick to the driver, "we've changed our minds. Could we go to Eleventh Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street instead?"

"Eleventh and Thirty-eighth?" repeated the driver.

"Yup."

The diner was a ribbed silver caravan with TRY OUR FAMOUS CHILI AND TACOS in red neon outside. It was an offer that Rachel could not resist. A green neon chili flashed cutely next to a yellow sombrero.

When the giant oval plate arrived loaded with chili-flavored minced meat, refried beans, guacamole, and sour cream, topped with bright orange cheddar and accompanied by speckled ochre tortilla shells, Patrick lit a cigarette in the hope of drawing a veil of thin blue smoke over the pungent heap of spicy food. He took another sip of insipid coffee and sat back as far as possible in the corner of the red plastic bench. Rachel was clearly a nervous overeater, stuffing herself before he stuffed her, or perhaps, very persuasively, trying to put him off sex altogether by wreaking havoc on her digestive system, and saturating her breath with the torrid stench of cheese and chili.

"Uh-hum," said Rachel appreciatively, "I love this food."

Patrick raised an eyebrow slightly but made no comment.

She piled the chili into the tortilla, smeared some guacamole on top, and patted down the sour cream with the back of her fork. Finally, she took a pinch of cheddar between her fingers and sprinkled it on top.

The tortilla flipped open and chili flooded onto her chin. Giggling, she lifted it with her index finger and forced it back into her mouth.

"Delicioso," she commented.

"It looks disgusting," said Patrick sullenly.

"You should try some."

She stooped over the plate and found ingenious angles from which to snap at the collapsing tortilla. Patrick rubbed his eye. It was itching wildly again. He stared out of the window but was drawn back into the arena of its reflections. The tulip-red bar stools on their chrome stems, the hatch into the kitchen, the old man hunched over a cup of coffee and, of course, Rachel like a pig in a trough. It reminded him of the famous painting by whathisname. Memory getting burned out. The terror of forgetting everything. Hooper . . . Hopper. Got it. Life in the old dog.

"Finished?" asked Patrick.

"They make a great banana split here," said Rachel saucily, still chomping her last mouthful of chili.

"Well, don't restrain yourself," said Patrick. "Will one be enough?"

"Don't you want one too?"

"No, I do not," said Patrick pompously.

Soon a long glass dish arrived on which scoops of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream were bracketed by the two halves of a banana, buried under rippling waves of whipped cream and decorated with beads of pink and green candy. Red maraschino cherries ran down the center like a row of clown's buttons.

Patrick's leg twitched up and down involuntarily as he watched Rachel exhume bit of banana from the mound of brightly colored creams.

"I've given up dairy products," she said, "but I allow myself these binges sometimes."

"So it seems," said Patrick stiffly.

He was overcome with loathing and contempt. The girl was completely out of control. Whereas drugs were at least amenable to advertising: life on the edge, exploring the inner Congo, the heart of darkness, outstaring death, returning with the scars and medals of a haunting knowledge, Coleridge, Baudelaire, Leary . . . ; and even if this advertising seemed horribly false to anyone who had taken drugs at all seriously, it wasn't possible even to pretend that there was anything heroic about an eating problem. And yet there was something unsettlingly familiar about Rachel's obsessive greed and ridiculous dishonesty.

"Can we go now?" snapped Patrick. "Yeah, okay," said Rachel timidly.

He ordered the check, threw down a twenty-dollar bill before it arrived, and wriggled out of the booth. Another fucking taxi drive, he thought.

* * *

"I feel kinda nau-tious," complained Rachel, as they went up in the hotel elevator.

Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

2009-11-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

Goodness, I've been away so long I've forgotten how to use Blogger.

What have I been doing? Among about a million other things I've undertaken, with the help of an excellent on-line reading group called The Cork-Lined Room, to read Proust, something I've always meant to do but been consistently thrown back by the first few pages. It turns out that those first few pages are like the breakers; you have to crash past them in order to swim comfortably. And now the pages fly by.

So we all know the famous madeleine passage from this novel--in fact I believe Fatima used it way, way back as the very first post in this blog. Food, of course, is a frequent vehicle for the reminiscences of Marcel, Proust's narrator; as I recently learned, at the time Proust was writing, it was still not understood scientifically how efficiently taste and smell can be attached to memory (if you are interested you can read more about it here), but Proust understood it quite clearly.

Food is also used to quite humorous effect as it is in this brief passage. I'm still working out why it's funny--at the moment I only know that it is. Here Marcel recalls the rigid structures of his Aunt Léonie's days, and the exceptions, which are also rigid. It feels like there are memories folded into these foods in a manner oddly reticent for Proust, who will willingly describe pretty much anything.

The translation is by Lydia Davis.

And so, for instance, every Saturday, because Françoise went to the Roussainville-le-Pin market in the afternoon, lunch was, for everyone, an hour earlier. And my aunt had so thoroughly acquired the habit of this weekly violation of her habits that she clung to it as much as to the others. She was so well "routined" to it, as Françoise said, that if she had to wait, some Saturday, to have lunch at the regular hour, this would have "disturbed" her as much as if on another day she had had to move her lunch forward to the Saturday hour. What was more, this early lunch gave Saturday, for all of us, a special face, indulgent and almost kindly. At the time of day when one usually has another hour to live through before the relaxation of the meal, we knew that in a few seconds we would see the arrival of some precocious endives, a gratuitous omelette, an undeserved beefsteak.

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

2009-08-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

Brideshead Revisited is one of those books that changes with one’s years: when I read it as a teenager I (like many teenage girls, missing the point entirely) pretty much lost interest once Sebastian Flyte disappears into northern Africa; later I decided that it was immature and shallow to love the novel’s idyllic university section, that the point of the book was not the BBC-ready Oxford scenes but the inexorable pull of the Catholic church on the family, the “twitch upon the thread,” which acts so differently upon each of them (including Charles Ryder, whose own conversion is so delicately offered at the end). I take a more tempered view now—clearly Waugh enjoyed that first lush, sentimental section, and it would be silly for his readers not to enjoy it as well.

The following scene comes from just after it, about halfway through the book, after Charles has left Oxford to study art in Paris. It recounts a meal with Rex Mottram, who is engaged to Julia Flyte. Rex is suspect in a number of ways—he is Canadian, ambitious, a self-made man—but he and Charles want the same thing, to be accepted into the family circle at Brideshead, and their status as outsiders is cunningly portrayed in this meal.

I started this as an excuse to type out some of Waugh’s sentences and get to the bottom of their magic. As you can see, I found it hard to stop. I could have taken you all the way through the meal, to the amusing and telling disagreement about cognac—snobbish on the one hand, overconfident and misinformed on the other—but I managed to stop after the wonderful description of the preparation of the pressed duck. So bloody, so violent, such civilized language.

Has anyone ever seen a duck press in person? I've seen only pictures.

I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way. I remember the dinner well—soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé. At the last minute, fearing the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bère of 1904.

Living was easy in France then; with the exchange as it was, my allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally. It was very seldom, however, that I had a dinner like this, and I felt well disposed to Rex, when at last he arrived and gave up his hat and coat with the air of not expecting to see them again. He looked round the somber little place with suspicion, as though hoping to see apaches or a drinking party of students. All he saw was four senators with napkins tucked under their beards eating in absolute silence. I could imagine him telling his commercial friends later: “ . . . interesting fellow I know; an art student living in Paris. Took me to a funny little restaurant—sort of place you’d pass without looking at—where there was some of the best food I ever ate. There were half a dozen senators there, too, which show you it was the right place. Wasn’t at all cheap either.”

“Any sign of Sebastian?” he asked.

“There won’t be,” I said, “until he needs money.”

“It’s a bit thick, going off like that. I was rather hoping that if I made a good job of him, it might do me a bit of good in another direction.”

He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I thought, for the hour of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could wait until the attention was blunted and one could listen with half the mind only; now in the keen moment when the maître d’hôtel was turning the blinis over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the press, we would talk of myself.

“Did you stay long at Brideshead? Was my name mentioned after I left?”

“Was it mentioned? I got sick of the sound of it, old boy. They Marchioness got what she called a ‘bad conscience’ about you. She piled it only pretty thick, I gather, at your last meeting.”

“‘Callously wicked,’ ‘wantonly cruel.’”

“Hard words.”

“It doesn’t matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up."

“Eh?”

“A saying.”

“Ah.” The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed, separating each glaucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.

“I like a bit of chopped onion with mine,” said Rex. “Chap-who-knew told me it brought out the flavour.”

“Try it without first,” I said. “And tell me more news of myself.”

“Well, of course, Greenacre, or whatever he was called—the snooty don—he came a cropper. That was well received by all. He was the blue-eyed boy for a day or two after you left. Shouldn’t wonder if he hadn’t put the old girl up to pitching you out. He was always being pushed down our throats, so in the end Julia couldn’t bear it any more and gave him away.”

“Julia did?”

“Well, he’d begun to stick his nose into our affairs you see. Julia spotted he was a fake, and one afternoon when Sebastian was tight—he was tight most of the time—she got the whole story of the Grand Tour out of him. And that was the end of Mr. Samgrass. After that the Marchioness began to think she might have been a bit rough with you."

“And what about the row with Cordelia?”

“That eclipsed everything. That kid’s a walking marvel—she’d been feeding Sebastian whiskey right under our noses for a week. We couldn’t think where he was getting it. That’s when the Marchioness finally crumbled.”

The soup was delicious after the rich blinis—hot, thin, bitter, frothy.

“I’ll tell you a thing, Charles, that Ma Marchmain hasn’t let on to anyone. She’s a very sick woman. Might peg out any minute. George Anstruther saw her in the autumn and put it at two years.”
“How on earth do you know?”

“It’s the kind of thing I hear. With the way her family are going on at the moment, I wouldn’t give her a year. I know just the man for her in Vienna. He put Sonia Bamfshire on her feet when everyone including Anstruther had despaired of her. But Ma Marchmain won’t do anything about it. I suppose it’s something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to take care of the body.”

The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We ate to the music of the press—the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast. There was a pause here of a quarter of an hour, while I drank the first glass of the Clos de Bère and Rex smoked his first cigarette. He leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke across the table and remarked, “You know, the food here isn’t half bad; someone ought to take this place up and make something of it.”

The Little White Horse (2), Elizabeth Goudge

2009-08-14T08:20:00.000-07:00

I owe everyone a huge apology. I have not updated this blog for months and months, though Emily has been maintaining it in my absence (injury and all) - thank you. My only excuse is an unholy combination of masses of dissertation work and other academic/work concerns that more or less crushed my life temporarily. I promise, however, to start posting again here regularly, and hopefully we should have some interesting surprises for readers soon.

Here is a little excerpt to start things up again on my part, from a book that has been posted before. Enjoy, and please do let us know if you have any suggestions!

The supper was delicious. There was home-made crusty bread, hot onion soup, delicious rabbit stew, baked apples in a silver dish, honey, butter the colour of marigolds, a big blue jug of warm mulled claret, and hot roasted chestnuts folded in a napkin.
Miss Heliotrope confined herself to eating bread and butter and sipping a little claret, but she did it with an appetite that surprised her. Maria ate everything there was to eat, very daintily, as was her habit, but with an enjoyment surprising in one so ethereal looking. Her cousin greeted her good appetite with a chuckle of appreciation, 'A digestion of cast iron, like all Merryweathers,' he noted with approval.

Mapp and Lucia, E. F. Benson

2009-07-29T11:28:00.000-07:00

Hello, hello. My cast has come off, and I can finally type with two hands. To celebrate this event, I give you another bit from E. F. Benson's immortal Mapp and Lucia series, and fans of those books (and remarkably good television adaptations, and even the two also remarkably good "in the style of" sequels written by Tom Holt) will remember lobster à la Riseholme, one of the engines that propel forward the plot of Mapp and Lucia, the fourth book in the series. If you are such a fan, you probably already know some of the devoted Web sites compiled by other such fans, and that a few people have constructed possible recipes for lobster à la Riseholme, including Nigella Lawson, here.

Somehow Benson makes pettiness, revenge, and talking out of both sides of one's mouth so much fun. Note in the following paragraphs how every adjective can be read two ways, sincerely (as by Lucia, who expects that every word is true), and ironically (as by Elizabeth Mapp, who would put a snarl on words like "privilege" and "joyful"). I am going to cheat, as I did before with Benson, and give you two short excerpts. Just because I can.

Lucia's luncheon party the next day was to be of the nature of a banquet to celebrate the double event of her recovery and the fact that Tilling, instead of mourning her approaching departure, was privileged to retain her, as Elizabeth had said, forever and ever. The whole circle of her joyful friends would be there, and she meant to give them to eat of the famous dish of lobster à la Riseholme, which she had provided for Georgie, a few weeks ago, to act as a buffer to break the shock of Foljambe's engagement. It had already produced a great deal of wild surmise in the minds of the housewives at Tilling, for no one could conjecture how it was made, and Lucia had been deaf to all requests for the recipe: Elizabeth had asked her twice to give it her, but Lucia had merely changed the subject without attempt at transition; she had merely talked about something quite different. This secretiveness was considered unamiable, for the use of Tilling was to impart its culinary mysteries to friends, so that they might enjoy their favorite dishes at each other's houses, and lobster à la Riseholme had long been an agonizing problem to Elizabeth. She had made an attempt at it herself, but the result was not encouraging. She had told Diva and the Padre that she felt sure she had "guessed it," and when bidden to come to lunch and partake of it, they had both anticipated a great treat. But Elizabeth had clearly guessed wrong, for lobster à la Riseholme à la Mapp had been found to consist of something resembling lumps of India rubber (so tough that the teeth positively bounced away from them on contact) swimming in a dubious pink gruel, and both of them left a great deal on their plates, concealed as far as possible under their knives and forks, though their hostess continued manfully to chew, till her jaw muscles gave out.

[ . . . ]

Though Tilling regarded the joyful prospect of Lucia's never going away again with certain reservations, and in the case of Elizabeth, with nothing but reservations, her guests vied with each other in the fervency of their self-congratulations, and Elizabeth outdid them all, as she took into her mouth small fragments of lobster, in the manner of a wine taster, appraising subtle flavors. There was cheese; there were shrimps, there was cream; there were so many things that she felt like Adam giving names to the innumerable procession of different animals. She had helped herself so largely that when the dish came to Georgie, there was nothing left but a little pink juice, but he hardly minded at all, so happy had the events of the morning made him. Then, when Elizabeth felt that she would choke if she said anything more in praise of Lucia, Mr. Wyse took it up, and Georgie broke in and said it was cruel of them all to talk about the delicious busy winter they would have, when they all knew that he would not be here any longer but back at Riseholme. In fact, he rather overdid his lamentations, and Lucia, whose acute mind detected the grossest insincerity in Elizabeth's raptures, began to wonder whether Georgie, for some unknown reason, was quite as woeful as he professed to be. Never had he looked more radiant; not a shadow of disappointment had come over his face when he inspected the casserole that had once contained his favorite dish and found nothing left for him. There was something up--What on earth could it be? Had Foljambe jilted Cadman?--and just as Elizabeth was detecting flavors in the mysterious dish, so Lucia was trying to arrive at an analysis of the gay, glad tones in which Georgie expressed his misery.

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, Iris Murdoch

2009-07-19T16:56:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, and it may be a little while longer. I'm drowning in work. In the mean time, stand up to your grief with a drink, courtesy of Iris Murdoch:

Edgar in tweeds (it had not occurred to him to remove his jacket) was sweating freely. Monty was in white shirt and black trousers with the narrowest conceivable leather belt. The room was cool, as he had remembered to keep the shutters closed earlier in the day. He poured out drinks into tall glasses. Gin and freshly pressed lemon, and slice of lime which Harriet had given him, and soda water and a little parsley floating about, like his mother used to make in the old days. Sophie never drank long drinks, even in summer.

Less Than Angels, Barbara Pym

2009-07-02T18:45:00.000-07:00

I have been avoiding Barbara Pym because I don't know that I can do her justice. Laurie Colwin says of Pym, in More Home Cooking, "Everybody thinks she is just darling, but she is not just darling, she's really tough. One of the great things about Barbara Pym is that the food in Barbara Pym is just wonderful."

Pym is tough: and sly, dry, and so very observant. Many of her characters are middle-aged or nearly so, what we no longer call "spinsters," but who don't hesitate to use the term themselves. There are also a lot of anthropologists, appropriately enough: Pym herself was a knockout observer of culture and habit. Here is a young woman who feels her narrow life chafing, and how can we tell? Read on.

"Is that you, dear?" Her mother's voice greeted her as she opened the front door.

"Yes. I hope you haven't waited supper?"

"No, we were just going to start."

In the dining-room Rhoda and Malcolm were already sitting at the table contemplating their salads.

"I had salad for lunch," said Deirdre.

"Oh, did you, dear? I hope you don't mind having it again."

"Well, it's not madly exciting, is it."

"You could have an egg," her aunt suggested.

"I don't feel like an egg," said Deirdre unhelpfully. "I'd like something different."

There was an expectant silence round the table.

"Some rice, all oily and saffron yellow, with aubergines and red peppers and lots of garlic," went on Deirdre extravagantly.

"Oh, well, dear, it's no good wishing for that sort of thing here," said her mother with an air of relief.

"You look rather pink in the face, dear sister," said Malcolm in a jocular tone. "Almost as if you'd been drinking."

"I've had three glasses of sherry," said Deirdre rather defiantly. "I was at the new Library place--Felix's Folly we call it--and there was a sort of party there."

"I suppose it was for anthropologists," said Rhoda, bringing out the word with difficulty.

"Yes, there were quite a lot there."

"What about the one you rather like--was he there?" Mabel asked.

"The one I like?" said Deirdre coldly. "I can't think who you can mean. I don't like any of them particularly."

"I thought there was one who lent you some notes or something," floundered Mrs. Swan. "I'm sure you said something about it."

"One of them may once have been more polite than the others," said Deirdre, "but I don't think I particularly liked him for it."

"I expect the right one will come along one of these days," said Rhoda with an aunt's confidence. She liked to think of her niece as being courted by suitable young men, though, from what she had heard of them, she rather doubted whether anthropologists could be so regarded. There was something disquieting about all this going out to Africa to study the natives, she felt. She would have preferred to see Deirdre married to one of Malcolm's friends and comfortably settled in a nice little house nearby.

"You must make us some of this rice you were talking about," said Mabel quickly. "I dare say it's delicious and if we weren't going out to bridge or seeing Father Tulliver about anything it wouldn't really matter about the garlic, would it, Rhoda?" she turned to her sister, anxious to prevent her from making any more remarks about the right young man coming along. Spinsters didn't really know how to deal with young people, and even mothers said the wrong thing often enough.

"All right, I'll get the things in Soho one day," said Deirdre quite graciously.

Another Marvelous Thing, Laurie Colwin

2009-06-24T00:00:00.000-07:00

Laurie Colwin wrote two wonderful books about food—Home Cooking and More Home Cooking—and her obvious delight in it is one of the elements that unifies her fiction. Colwin died rather young, in 1992, of something heart-related; whenever I come across, in one of her (not particularly reliable) casually narrated recipes, an instruction like “you then put a lump of butter into the top of a double boiler and when it melts, add the eggs. Stir constantly, remembering to have your blood cholesterol checked at the earliest possible moment,” I feel an unhappy little frisson of real-life dramatic irony.

Colwin is an odd writer—on bad days, she rubs me the wrong way; other times I want to take the phone off the hook and read through her entire oeuvre without stopping. Her characters are affluent, good looking, with flaws that are meant to be charming rather than irritating. Their problems seem trivial. But there is a complicated undercurrent here, one that Iris Murdoch would have understood: they are trying to figure out what is a good, moral, meaningful life, no matter how unexpected the shape it may take.

Two of her books are about the place of adultery in a happy marriage; in at least one other it functions as a kind of minor chord. The excerpt that follows comes from one of the former. Francis, an aesthetic, cosmopolitan type, the sort that Colwin called, in another book, a “domestic sensualist”—keenly appreciative of the comforts of home—is having an affair with Billy, a woman who seems indifferent to comfort of any sort, physical or otherwise. Both are married, Francis to Vera, and Billy to Grey. Food is just one of the currencies of their relationship, one of the ways that manifests how they do and don’t fit together. In a neat reversal of the usual trope, here the appreciation of fine food feels more like an evasion of desire than an embodiment of it.

She was wearing his sweater which made Francis’s heart flutter. He could never quite get over her, even if he had just seen her three seconds before. He peered to see if she was going to finish her soup. He was starving and he knew he had eaten the last of the bread. He reflected that he never got enough to eat at Billy’s and that, no matter how much he got of her, his hunger for her never quite abated. He looked out the window to see that it was sleeting. The idea of going into the cold to get a decent lunch held little charm. Under the table he nudged her with his foot.

“Hey,” he said.

Billy looked up. She was half asleep. “Hey what?” she said.

“I’m starving.”

“Hmm,” said Billy.

“I require an egg,” said Francis. “More soup. Anything.”

“There aren’t any eggs,” Billy said. “I ate the last one.”

“Soup,” said Francis.

“There isn’t any more,” said Billy. “This is the last can.”

“A saltine.”

“This is the last saltine,” said Billy. “Do you want half of it?”

Francis regarded the saltine half. It looked wet and it was not, in fact, half. It was more a scant third.

“There’s some wheat germ,” said Billy. “On second thought, there’s not. Gee, I’m not good for much, am I?”

“Not for food,” said Francis. “But you have compensating charms.”

“Hey,” said Billy. “I know what. You stay here.”

She went into the kitchen and returned carrying a pottery terrine in the shape of a goose. Francis knew at once that it was full of pâté de foie gras.

“I forgot about this,” Billy said. “Grey’s uncle sent it to us ages ago. And look! Water biscuits.”

Francis adored foie gras. He thought, lovingly, of brown bread with Normandy butter, endive salad, chilled white wine, and spicy little cornichons to go with it, but here at Billy’s table, they ate their slices on stale water biscuits. He thought of other meals he would like to have with it: double consommé with tiny meat dumplings, Bibb lettuce with mustard dressing, toast points. On white plates with big linen napkins. This was his way of making mental reference to Vera, who knew how to serve foie gras, without thinking about her.

The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh

2009-06-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

If you don't immediately recognize the title of the book, or the author--that's all right: it's the utterly less-discussed sequel to Harriet the Spy.

Now I know that many of you will immediately think, "Why on earth is she ignoring the most important food element of this character?"--that is to say, Harriet's immortal tomato sandwich--and you would be right, I am. For me, although the tomato sandwich itself is immortal, but there isn't a description of it that I've carried around with me all these years. Except maybe the scene in which Harriet's mother is futilely suggesting other potential sandwiches ("Pastrami? Roast beef? Cucumber?"). And then one in which, in response to a note revealing that a classmate is sickened by her tomato sandwiches, Harriet, uncomprehending, thinks, "It was the best taste in the world. Her mouth watered at the memory of the mayonnaise." I can't tell you how often that happens to me; mayonnaise and I have a complicated relationship.

Oh, look. You got the tomato sandwich out of me after all.

The Long Secret is also a wonderful book, as sensitive as the original to the ordinary meanness and sadness of adolescence, and to the complicated fit of friendship. I've been thinking over this book for a couple of weeks, trying to pinpoint its appeal, which has something to do with the wholeness of the characters--even, or perhaps especially those who start out as caricatures--and the dignity the author affords to the questions and thoughts of children.

In the following scene, a lovely clambake is the prelude to one such serious discussion.

Over near the end of the spit which curved into Mecox Bay they could see Mrs. Welsch waving at them as Mr. Welsch leaned over the pit.

"Let's go," said Harriet, and they all ran across the sand.

Mr. Welsch had taken the tarpaulin off, and with the aid of tongs, was heaping things into baskets as he got down through each layer. First there was corn, steamed in the husks. Harriet grabbed an ear, burned her fingers, and dropped it, screaming.

"Wait," said Mrs. Welsch, "just wait."

Then came a layer of steamed clams, then a layer of mussels, more corn, then the lobsters. They could hardly wait until it was all piled high on their plates. There was a big pot of melted butter, which Mrs. Welsch divided into cups for each of them.

They all sat around on logs and rocks, dipping the lobster meat , the clams, the mussels, and covering their faces with butter and grins. Everything had a marvelous smooth, smokey taste.

"This is great!" said Janie, gnawing on her fourth ear of corn.

"Yeah!" said Harriet.

Even Beth Ellen ate a lot. They all stuffed themselves. Harriet lay back on the sand and pretended she was dead from overeating.

"That's the beauty of this kind of dinner," said Mrs. Welsch, "no dishes to wash." She threw her paper plate in the fire with abandon and watched it burn. They all threw their plates in and the fire reared up. It was getting darker and darker. They lay back, watching the fire glow and the dark come, all thinking their own thoughts.

After a while Mrs. Welsch stretched a little and said, "I think I'd like to walk out to the end of the spit. Anybody want to come?"

"I do," said Janie and jumped up. "Harriet says there's a swan skeleton out there!"

"There is," said Mrs. Welsch. "Here, I'll take the flashlight and show it to you."

"I'll go too," said Beth Ellen quietly and got up.

"Not me," said Harriet. "I ate too much."

"You shall be made fat," said Janie and got a sneaker thrown at her for her trouble. She jumped away and laughed.

"I'll watch the fire," said Mr. Welsch.

They left and Harriet and her father watched the stars begin to come out one by one.

"Daddy?" Harriet said after a while.

"Yes?" said Mr. Welsch.

"Are you religious?"

The Iliad, Homer

2009-06-18T18:45:00.000-07:00

I am so sorry about my absence. My one typing hand is very tired indeed.

Lately I have been listening to The Iliad on audiobook on the way to work (easier than trying to hold on to the subway pole and a book with the same hand). I've never been much of an audiobook fan--we all best receive information in different ways, I think, and I don't retain things I've heard as well as those I've read--but I thought it might be interesting to listen to something that began as an oral tradition.

There isn't much to say about this excerpt; certainly throughout The Iliad there are plenty of descriptions of sacrifice and feast, some less appetizing than others (such as one evidently involving wine mulled with goat cheese). But I was hungry on my way home yesterday, and this sounded good.

The Greeks are being trounced by the Trojans, partly because Achilles is sulking in his tent, refusing to fight. An envoy, led by Odysseus, arrives at Achilles's camp to beg him to rejoin the battle.

A "chine" is a cut of meat. The translation is Robert Fagles's.

So Prince Achilles hailed and led them in,
sat them down on settles with purple carpets
and quickly told Patroclus standing by, "Come,
a bigger winebowl, son of Menoetius, set it here.
Mix stronger wine. A cup for the hands of each guest--
here beneath my roof are the men I love most."

He paused. Patroclus obeyed his great friend,
who put down a heavy chopping block in the firelight
and across it laid a sheep's chine, a fat goat's
and the long back cut of a full-grown pig,
marbled with lard. Automedon held the meats
while lordly Achilles carved them into quarters,
cut them well into pieces, pierced them with spits
and Patroclus raked the hearth, a man like a god
making the fire blaze. Once it had burned down
and the flames died away, he scattered the coals
and stretching the spitted meats across the embers,
raised them onto supports and sprinkled clean pure salt.
As soon as the roasts were done and spread on platters,
Patroclus brought the bread, set it out on the board
in ample wicker baskets. Achilles served the meat.

The Little White Horse, Elizabeth Goudge

2009-06-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

It was a delight to watch Marmaduke Scarlet making pastry, for if ever a man was a master-craftsman at his work that man was Marmaduke. His wielded his rolling-pin like a king's sceptre, and so light was his pastry that it looked more like sea foam than dough as he flicked it over on his board. Beside him stood a great dish of succulent chunks of veal and ham, hard-boiled eggs, parsley and chopped onion. Maria's mouth watered as she looked at it, and when he swung the great oval of white pastry over it she had to swallow hard. Then he started to make the decorations for the top of it, his skillful fingers pinching out flowers and leaves from the dough with an artistry that any sculptor might have envied.
... Then he went through one of the doors in the wall, through which Maria could see a cool stone-vaulted larder, and came back with a big blue bowl full of eggs and a blue jug of cream; and, mounting once more upon his stool, he proceeded to make a syllabub. Twelve eggs went into the making of the syllabub, a pint of cream, and cinnamon for flavouring.

Hazel Green, Odo Hirsch

2009-06-03T01:06:00.001-07:00

Another Australian children's writer today - Odo Hirsch, who by night writes about strawberry tarts and ginger fingers, but by day is/was a doctor who treats torture victims and a management consultant (or so the internet claims)... anyway, onto the pastries.

Old Mrs Volio, the baker's mother, gave Hazel a cup of cocoa.
'Now, what would you like?' she asked.
Hazel looked around the bakery. The pastries were laid out on trays stacked high in steel frames. Vanilla slices, chocolate eclairs, almond croissants, strawberry tarts, custard doughnuts, raspberry crunches, ginger fingers... Hazel's belly began to rumble.
'What about a lovely chocolate rollo?' said young Mrs Volio, although she didn't look particularly young to Hazel. But she was certainly younger than old Mrs Volio, who was definitely old. Old Mrs Volio must have been almost a hundred!
Young Mrs Volio picked up a rich brown pastry with a delicious nubbin of chocolate showing through the end.
Yes, thought Hazel, a lovely chocolate rollo, fresh from the oven, with warm runny chocolate that would flood into your mouth and roll, roll, rollo down your tongue as soon as you took a bite...
'No, Teresa,' said Mr. Volio.
'No?'
Mr. Volio shook his head. He was grinning mischievously. Then he winked.
'Eh, Teresa?'
Mrs Volio grinned as well. Hazel didn't know what they were talking about. The baker went over to a tray in the corner. Unlike the other trays, it was covered with a cloth. He reached under the cloth and took a pastry out. He handled it as carefully as if it were made of glass. Everyone in the bakery had turned to watch, the two Mrs Volios, and Andrew McAndrew, and the four apprentices, who were all sitting in a row on the other side of the table - everyone except Martin, the pastry chef, who was working with the last heat of the ovens, lost in concentration.
Mr Volio put the pastry in Hazel's hand. 'Now you tell me, Hazel, whether Mr Murray has ever made something like this!'
Hazel was holding a round pastry with a shortbread crust. The top was made out of toffee, and a glazed strawberry sat in the middle. She examined it carefully. She had never seen anything like it before. It must have been Mr Volio's latest invention.
Hazel took a bite. First the sweet toffee fractured between her teeth. Then she tasted the wonderful smooth caramel custard. Then there were swirls of strawberry. Then there was a delicious surge of almond and cinnamon. And just when she thought she had discovered all the flavours in the pastry, her tongue dipped into a layer of chocolate covering the base. And all in one bite!

A Certain Age, Tama Janowitz

2009-05-31T17:36:00.000-07:00

I was planning to wait a bit longer before returning to Tama J., but as it happens I am recuperating from hand surgery, and this book was . . . within arm's reach of where I am stationed on the couch.

Florence Collins, a modern-day Lily Bart, is by most measures a beautiful and desirable woman, but this is late-twentieth-century New York, and there are millions of women more beautiful, more connected, richer, younger. She's unmarried and running out of options, and the prizes don't seem quite as nice as they used to.

In this scene she juggles two potential suitors over a sumptuously disgusting dinner. Janowitz is, as usual, microscopically accurate in her attention to social detail.

"Here's a plate, Florence." Charlie reached around and handed her a plate from the top of the stack as they got to the head of the line.

"I helped make some of the food, last night!" Florence said. A waiter stood behind the table, carving a flank of tuna steak, dried and charred on the outside, bright pink and raw inside. After carving, he plonked each slice on top of a dollop of mashed potatoes and then drizzled some kind of pink sauce over it. For a moment Florence was mesmerized—the whole thing was so hideous.

"May I help you to some of this pasta?" said Raffaello. The pasta was a huge bowl of mushy-looking curly noodles embedded with chunks of tomatoes and congealed lumps of spinach glistening with oil. He spooned some onto her plate, and as he did so he leaned into her, pressing against her from behind. Through his thin trousers she could feel his erection.

She stepped away and gave him a flattered look of disbelief. "You—you're outrageous!"

"And you are just my type. Except for your provincialism—it is so American to pretend to be shocked. Tell me, which is the food you have prepared? I will take that, specially." He certainly had some kind of S and M routine worked out—it was like getting petted and slapped almost at the same time. "Some kind of Brazilian dish," she said. "I was chopping the onions."

"You must be very good at chopping onions."

She felt witless in the presence of such cynical smirkiness, "I think there's tripe in it."

"Not a popular dish, here in America!" he said. "However, for myself, I love what you call organ meat. I a very English, in that respect. You like tripe? Or kidneys? And the sweetbreads—that is my favorite."

"Are you friends of Natalie's? Or John?"

"Oh, of both," he said, helping himself to some dry slabs of turkey meat. "And you?" He made it clear that her question was banal. Next to the turkey was the dish that she had participated in preparing—a heaving mountain of black beans, from which gray things resembling human digits protruded at various angles.

There were a few other dishes on the table: some bright green peapods, all positioned in exactly the same direction; a salad of orange segments, onion slice and lettuce leaves; and something that might have been a rice pilaf—she was uncertain. There was something that might have been beef or lamb stew, and a platter of chicken legs in a yellow-and-cream-colored sauce. As usual with these buffet dinners, nothing seemed to go with anything else; it was almost as if you had to create food in stranger and more peculiar concoctions than had previously been thought of, so that a meal had become the food equivalent of "The Emperor's New Clothes," with people smacking their lips and commenting "How delicious!" over a plate full of garbage.

Farmer Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder

2009-05-27T04:34:00.001-07:00

We have had many, many requests for this book. I'm starting off with an early excerpt, but do not fear, there will be more Farmer Boy.

The kitchen was full of hoopskirts, balancing and swirling. Eliza Jane and Alice were hurrying to dish up supper. The salty brown smell of frying ham made Almanzo's stomach gnaw inside him.

He stopped just a minute in the pantry door. Mother was straining the milk, at the far end of the long pantry; her back was toward him. The shelves on both sides were loaded with good things to eat. Big yellow cheeses were stacked there, and large brown cakes of maple sugar, and there were crusty loaves of fresh-baked bread, and four large cakes, and one whole shelf full of pies. One of the pies was cut, and a little piece of crust was temptingly broken off; it would never be missed.

Almanzo hadn't even moved yet. But Eliza Jane cried out: 'Almanzo, you stop that! Mother!'

Mother didn't turn around. She said: 'Leave that be, Almanzo. You'll spoil your supper.'

That was so senseless that it made Almanzo mad. One little bite couldn't spoil a supper. He was starving, and they wouldn't let him eat anything until they had put it on the table. There wasn't any sense in it. But of course he could not say this to mother, he had to obey her without a word.

He stuck out his tongue at Eliza Jane. She couldn't do anything, her hands were full. Then he went quickly into the dining-room.

The lamplight was dazzling. By the square heating stove set into the wall, Father was talking politics to Mr. Corse. Father's face was toward the supper table, and Almanzo dares not touch anything on it.

There were slabs of tempting cheese, there was a plate of quivering headcheese; there were glass dishes of jams and jellies and preserves, and a tall pitcher of milk, and a steaming pan of baked beans with a crisp bit of fat pork in the crumbling brown crust.

Almanzo looked at them all, and something twisted in his middle. He swallowed, and went away slowly. The dining room was pretty.

[...] But to Almanzo the most beautiful sight was his mother, bringing in the big willow-ware platter full of sizzling ham[... ]The smell of the ham was almost more than Almanzo could bear.

Mother set the platter on the table.[...] It seemed a long time before they were all in their places. Father sat at the head of the table, Mother at the foot. Then they must all bow their heads while Father asked God to bless the food. After that, there was a little pause before Father unfolded his napkin and tucked it in the neckband of his frock.

He began to fill the plates. First he filled Mr. Corse's plate. Then Mother's. Then Royal's and Eliza Jane's and Alice's. Then, at last, he filled Almanzo's plate.

[...] Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate the mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie.

All In The Blue Unclouded Weather, Robin Klein

2009-05-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things I wanted to do in this blog was to share excerpts from the great wealth of Australian children's literature. I grew up in Australia, and one of the really lucky things about that country is how imaginative, varied and rich its writing for children is. Much of it is also uniquely Australian, inspired by the terribly beautiful landscape and wildlife, and the youthful and lively culture that is so different from anywhere else. Australian books always resonated with me especially - while I loved reading about Ramona Quimby and Charlie Bucket, for example, in the works of Robin Klein, Maureen McCarthy, John Marsden, Gillian Rubinstein and Isobel Carmody, amongst many others, I truly recognised the people and the world around me in all its intimate details, and that meant a lot.

Robin Klein is probably one of the most beloved - and prolific - Australian children's and young adult writer. No matter what grade I was in, there was always a Robin Klein book with characters who were at the same stage as me, growing up alongside of me. Her books about the Melling girls, however, were a little different, because unusually for her, they were historical fiction. A very conscious Australian nod to the March sisters, there are four Mellings - Grace (sophisticated, urbane); Heather (adolescent and unsure); Cathy (reckless and brave) and Vivienne (sweet and thoughtful). They live in a small Australian country town, are working class and just scraping by, and suffer/delight under their scatterbrained mother, war-traumatised father and quite awful cousin Isobel, who longs to be a movie star. Even the sweetest Melling makes the most rebellious March look tame in comparison: like the country they live in, the girls are brash, fierce, vibrant and wild, tearing through life in a series of very funny but quite ordinary adventures.

This was one of my favourite scenes, probably because it features staples of the Australian child's diet - jam, hundreds and thousands (sprinkles), jelly (no doubt Aeroplane brand), Milo and chips. And 'gutsy', of course, is one of those mythical Australian qualities, one that at least the characters in this book embody quite well.

'My mum writes newspaper poems for when people die,' Vivienne explained, going into the kitchen. 'She's working on one for Mr Humphreys; he got squashed to death under a big frozen carcass at the Meat Works. Cathy says they should carve "He Bravely Went To Meat Death" on his tombstone. Sit down and I'll make us some afternoon tea.' She levered a scrounging cat from a chair and put down a piece of newspaper 'To keep your dress clean,' she said politely and Nancy Tuckett sat down, hoping for nice little biscuits and perhaps a glass of raspberry cordial. But Vivienne poked up the fire, slung a pat of dripping into a big iron pan and began to slice some potatoes.

'I can make the best chips at our house,' she said, 'Sometimes if I can't drop off to sleep I get up in the middle of the night and fry up some chips. Mum doesn't mind. I can make Gutsy Drinks, too. Oh, you probably won't know that they are, Isobel invented them. I'll make you a Gutsy Drink while the chips are cooking.'

She wiped a glass casually on her skirt. Then she put in a lavish shake of malt powder, a tablespoon each of red jelly crystals, plum jam, hundreds and thousands, Milo and icing sugar, then she added milk from a jug in the ice-chest and stirred it vigorously with a screwdriver because she couldn't find a spoon. She tipped the chips into enamel bowls and gave one to Nancy Tuckett. Over her own serving she poured a lake of Worcestershire sauce. Nancy Tuckett picked up a chip and nibbled it. It was very black on one side and raw in the middle, but the other side was delicious. So was the Gutsy Drink, and she burped genteely behind her Snow White hanky.

The Phantom Tollbooth, Norman Juster

2009-05-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

Any other fans out there of The Phantom Tollbooth? I can't count how many expressions and puns I learned from this book, which both revels in and cautions against the absurdity of literal-mindedness. I reread this book recently and was surprised by how conceptual it is: the author seems to know that children understand more than they are generally given credit for.

The following scene takes place in Dictionopolis, a kingdom devoted to words, where our hero, Milo, along with his traveling companions, the Humbug and Tock, have paused in their quest: to return the princesses Rhyme and Reason to the land. Enjoy!

"Are you ready with the menu?" reminded the Humbug.

"Well," said Milo, remembering that his mother had always told him to eat lightly when he was a guest, "why don't we have a light meal?"

"A light meal it shall be," roared the bug, waving his arms.

The waiters rushed in carrying large serving platters and set them on the table in front of the king. When he lifted the covers, shafts of brilliant-colored light leaped from the plates and bounced around the ceiling, the walls, across the floor, and out the windows.

"Not a very substantial meal," said the Humbug, rubbing his eyes, "but quite an attractive one. Perhaps you can suggest something a little more filling."

The king clapped his hands, the platters were removed, and, without thinking, Milo quickly suggested, "Well, in that case, I think we ought to have a square meal of--"

"A square meal it is," shouted the Humbug again. The king clapped his hands once more and the waiters reappeared carrying plates heaped high with steaming squares of all sizes and colors.

"Ugh," said the Spelling Bee, tasting one, "these are awful."

No one else seemed to like them very much either, and the Humbug got one caught in his throat and almost choked.

"Time for the speeches," announced the king as the plates were again removed and everyone looked glum. "You first," he commanded, pointing to Milo.

"Your Majesty, ladies and gentlemen," started Milo timidly. "I would like to take this opportunity to say that in all the--"

"That's quite enough," snapped the king. "Mustn't talk all day."

"But I'd just begun," objected Milo.

"NEXT!" bellowed the king.

"Roast turkey, mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream," recited the Humbug, bouncing up and down quickly.

"What a strange speech," thought Milo, for he'd heard many in the past and knew that they were supposed to be long and dull.

"Hamburgers, corn on the cob, chocolate pudding--p-u-d-d-i-n-g," said the Spelling Bee in his turn.

"Frankfurters, sour pickles, strawberry jam," shouted Officer Shrift from his chair. Since he was taller sitting than standing, he didn't bother to get up.

And so down the line it went, with each guest rising briefly, making a short speech, and then resuming his place. When everyone had finished, the king rose.

"Pâté de foie gras, soupe à l'oignon, faisan sous cloche, salade endive, fromages et fruits et demi-tasse," he said carefully and clapped his hands again.

The waiters reappeared immediately, carrying heavy, hot trays, which they set on the table. Each one contained the exact words spoken by the various guests, and they all began eating immediately with great gusto.

"Dig in," said the king, poking Milo with his elbow and looking disapprovingly at his plate. "I can't say that I think much of your choice."

"I didn't know that I was going to have to eat my words," objected Milo.

"Of course, of course, everyone here does," the king grunted. "You should have made a tastier speech."

The O'Sullivan Twins, Enid Blyton

2009-05-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

I hope you all enjoyed Melville Week! Unfortunately, like all good things, it must come to an end. We want to have more themed weeks, however, so if anyone has any suggestions please let me know. Today though I have an excerpt in honour of the name of this blog. It is far away from the world of breadfruit and whales and sailors, and I also expect that it will attract some disappointed foot fetishists.

The two girls were in a great state of excitement. Tessie had had two birthday cakes sent to her, which pleased her very much. She had been able to put the bigger one of the two on the tea-table for all her form to share - and had kept the other for the midnight party.
There were biscuits, sweets, chocolate, a big fruit cake, and four tins of peaches, with a tin of Nestle's milk for cream! There were also the strings of little sausages to fry. It was going to be great fun!
'We haven't anything to drink!' whispered Winnie to Tessie, in arithmetic at the end of that morning.
'Yes, we have. I've got some ginger-beer,' whispered back Tessie. Miss Jenks caught the word 'ginger-beer'.
'Tessie, how does ginger-beer come into our arithmetic lesson?' she enquired, coldly.
'Well - it doesn't,' say Tessie, at a loss what to say. 'Sorry, Miss Jenks'.
... Everything was hidden in the music-room, ready for that night. The eight girls were in a great state of excitement... Soon the three of them were creeping out of the room, down a few stairs, round a corner past the second-form dormitory, and into the music-room.
The door opened and shut quietly and the three girls blinked at the bright electric light. The blinds had been drawn and the oil-stove had made the little room warm as toast. The other five girls were busy opening tins and setting out cake and biscuits.
... The girls set to work to eat all the good things, giggling at nothing. It was so exciting to be cooped up in the little music-room, gobbling all sorts of goodies when everyone else was fast asleep.
'Oh, Susan - you've spilt peach juice all over my toes', giggled Janet.
'Lick it off then,' said Susan, 'I bet you can't.'
Janet was very supple. She at once tried to reach her foot up to her mouth to lick off the juice from her bare pink toes. She overbalanced and fell off her music-stool.
'Janet! You've sat on the sausages!' hissed Tessie in dismay, 'Get up, you idiot. Oh, the poor sausages - all squashed as flat as pan-cakes!'
The girls began to giggle helplessly. Tessie tried to press the little sausages back into their ordinary shape again.
'When are we going to fry them?' asked Isabel, who loved sausages.
'Last thing,' said Tessie,' That is, if there's anything left of them when Janet has finished with them!'
.. So the sausages were fried, and sizzled deliciously in the pan on the top of the oil-stove. Tessie turned them over and over with a fork, trying not to squeal when the hot fat jumped out and burned her.
... Mam'zelle slid back her chair and went to the door, puzzled. She threw it open, but there was no one there. She stood there for a moment, wondering if she could possibly be mistaken - and then she heard, from somewhere not very far off, a subdued giggle. And down the passage crept the unmistakable smell of - frying sausages!

Melville Week: Redburn

2009-05-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

Although a vegetarian, as Fatima noted earlier, I must admit that this meal sounds rather more appetizing than the dubious dunderfunk of yesterday's post. Redburn is a nautical bildungsroman, which recounts Wellingborough Redburn's often harrowing first voyage aboard a merchant ship bound from New York to Liverpool. Upon arriving at their destination, the crew head over to a boarding-house called the Baltimore Clipper, where they treat themselves to a comparatively sumptuous meal. It sounds better than salt beef, at any rate--though I'd pass on the "swipes."

From these reveries I was soon roused, by a servant girl hurrying from room to room, in shrill tones exclaiming, "Supper, supper ready."

Mounting a rickety staircase, we entered a room on the second floor. Three tall brass candlesticks shed a smoky light upon smoky walls, of what had once been sea-blue, covered with sailor-scrawls of foul anchors, lovers' sonnets, and ocean ditties. On one side, nailed against the wainscot in a row, were the four knaves of cards, each Jack putting his best foot foremost as usual. What these signified I never heard.

But such ample cheer! Such a groaning table! Such a superabundance of solids and substantial! Was it possible that sailors fared thus?--the sailors, who at sea live upon salt beef and biscuit?

First and foremost, was a mighty pewter dish, big as Achilles' shield, sustaining a pyramid of smoking sausages. This stood at one end; midway was a similar dish, heavily laden with farmers' slices of head-cheese; and at the opposite end, a congregation of beef-steaks, piled tier over tier. Scattered at intervals between, were side dishes of boiled potatoes, eggs by the score, bread, and pickles; and on a stand adjoining, was an ample reserve of every thing on the supper table.

We fell to with all our hearts; wrapt ourselves in hot jackets of beef-steaks; curtailed the sausages with great celerity; and sitting down before the head-cheese, soon razed it to its foundations.

Toward the close of the entertainment, I suggested to Peggy, one of the girls who had waited upon us, that a cup of tea would be a nice thing to take; and I would thank her for one. She replied that it was too late for tea; but she would get me a cup of "swipes" if I wanted it.

Not knowing what "swipes" might be, I thought I would run the risk and try it; but it proved a miserable beverage, with a musty, sour flavor, as if it had been a decoction of spoiled pickles. I never patronized swipes again; but gave it a wide berth; though, at dinner afterward, it was furnished to an unlimited extent, and drunk by most of my shipmates, who pronounced it good.

But Bob Still would not have pronounced it so; for this swipes, as I learned, was a sort of cheap substitute for beer; or a bastard kind of beer; or the washings and rinsings of old beer-barrels. But I do not remember now what they said it was, precisely. I only know, that swipes was my abomination. As for the taste of it, I can only describe it as answering to the name itself; which is certainly significant of something vile. But it is drunk in large quantities by the poor people about Liverpool, which, perhaps, in some degree, accounts for their poverty.

Melville Week: White-Jacket

2009-05-15T19:22:00.000-07:00

Herman Meville's White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War offers an almost sociological account of life aboard a US naval frigate (Erving Goffman would later refer extensively to the novel in laying out his theory of the "total institution"). Any such account would of course be incomplete without a description of the ship's culinary culture. The following scene, in which some poor bastard has a rather obscure delicacy stolen from him, is among the highlights:

One clear, cold morning, while we were yet running away from the Cape, a raw boned, crack-pated Down Easter, belonging to the Waist, made his appearance at the mast, dolefully exhibiting a blackened tin pan, bearing a few crusty traces of some sort of a sea-pie, which had been cooked in it.

"Well, sir, what now?" said the Lieutenant of the Deck, advancing.

"They stole it, sir; all my nice dunderfunk, sir; they did, sir," whined the Down Easter, ruefully holding up his pan.

"Stole your dundlefunk! what's that?"

"Dunderfunk, sir, dunderfunk; a cruel nice dish as ever man put into him."

"Speak out, sir; what's the matter?"

"My dunderfunk, sir--as elegant a dish of dunderfunk as you ever see, sir--they stole it, sir!"

"Go forward, you rascal!" cried the Lieutenant, in a towering rage, "or else stop your whining. Tell me, what's the matter?"

"Why, sir, them 'ere two fellows, Dobs and Hodnose, stole my dunderfunk."

"Once more, sir, I ask what that dundledunk is? Speak!"

"As cruel a nice------"

"Be off, sir! sheer!" and muttering something about non compos mentis, the Lieutenant stalked away; while the Down Easter beat a melancholy retreat, holding up his pan like a tambourine, and making dolorous music on it as he went.

"Where are you going with that tear in your eye, like a traveling rat?" cried a top-man.

"Oh! he's going home to Down East," said another; "so far eastward, you know, shippy, that they have to pry up the sun with a handspike."

To make this anecdote plainer, be it said that, at sea, the monotonous round of salt beef and pork at the messes of the sailors--where but very few of the varieties of the season are to be found--induces them to adopt many contrivances in order to diversify their meals. Hence the various sea-rolls, made dishes, and Mediterranean pies, well known by men-of-war's men--Scouse, Lob-scouse, Soft-Tack, Soft-Tommy, Skillagalee, Burgoo, Dough-boys, Lob-Dominion, Dog's-Body, and lastly, and least known, Dunderfunk; all of which come under the general denomination of Manavalins.

Dunderfunk is made of hard biscuit, hashed and pounded, mixed with beef fat, molasses, and water, and baked brown in a pan. And to those who are beyond all reach of shore delicacies, this dunderfunk, in the feeling language of the Down Easter, is certainly "a cruel nice dish."

Now the only way that a sailor, after preparing his dunderfunk, could get it cooked on board the Neversink, was by slily going to Old Coffee, the ship's cook, and bribing him to put it into his oven. And as some such dishes or other are well known to be all the time in the oven, a set of unprincipled gourmands are constantly on the look-out for the chance of stealing them. Generally, two or three league together, and while one engages Old Coffee in some interesting conversation touching his wife and family at home, another snatches the first thing he can lay hands on in the oven, and rapidly passes it to the third man, who at his earliest leisure disappears with it.

In this manner had the Down Easter lost his precious pie, and afterward found the empty pan knocking about the forecastle.

Melville Week: Moby-Dick

2009-05-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

I couldn't pass this up, even though a nod to the great book has already been made.

Stubb, the second mate, has killed the journey's first whale and is fond of whale steak ("Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate"). He orders the harpooneer Daggoo to cut him a steak ("A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut me one from his small!") and the cook to cook it, and all the while sharks have gathered around the boat to feast on the dead whale's flesh, noisily tearing into it and slapping their tails against the hull. Stubb, finding his steak overcooked, roundly abuses the cook, and forces him to tell the sharks to behave themselves, and pipe down.

What is unfortunate here is that the speech of the cook, a black man, is rendered in terrible, Song-of-the-South style; moreover he is none too bright. I thought and thought of how much to include, or if it was dishonest just to leave it aside altogether. But in the end it had nothing to do with the bit of the chapter that is most to the point, as far as this blog is concerned: the food.

Stubb's advice to the cook echoes a recipe I once heard for the perfect amount of vermouth in the martini: you show the vermouth bottle to the glass, and that is all.

Well, then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don't you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go.

Melville Week: Omoo

2009-05-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

Moving along chronologically, Omoo, Melville’s second novel, stands as a loose sequel to Typee. Having been rescued by the Julia, another whaler, the narrator ends up cruising among the Society Islands.

The Julia, however, is a troubled ship: the provisions are poor, the Captain seemingly incompetent, and the First Mate an always drunk and frequently brutal tyrant who refuses to grant the men a shore leave. A mutiny breaks out, and much of the crew is condemned to a fairly cushy imprisonment on Tahiti while they await the judgment of a punctilious colonial administrator. The narrator and his traveling companion, Doctor Long Ghost, soon escape, and begin roving from island to island. The following scene described a dinner to which the wanderers are treated on Imeeo (better known as Moorea):

Upon the ferns before us were laid several layers of broad, thick "pooroo" leaves; lapping over, one upon the other. And upon these were placed, side by side, newly-plucked banana leaves, at least two yards in length, and very wide; the stalks were withdrawn so as to make them lie flat. This green cloth was set out and garnished in the manner following:--

First, a number of "pooroo" leaves, by way of plates, were ranged along on one side; and by each was a rustic nut-bowl, half-filled with sea-water, and a Tahitian roll, or small bread-fruit, roasted brown. An immense flat calabash, placed in the centre, was heaped up with numberless small packages of moist, steaming leaves: in each was a small fish, baked in the earth, and done to a turn. This pyramid of a dish was flanked on either side by an ornamental calabash. One was brimming with the golden-hued "poee," or pudding, made from the red plantain of the mountains: the other was stacked up with cakes of the Indian turnip, previously macerated in a mortar, kneaded with the milk of the cocoa-nut, and then baked. In the spaces between the three dishes were piled young cocoa-nuts, stripped of their husks. Their eyes had been opened and enlarged; so that each was a ready-charged goblet.

There was a sort of side-cloth in one corner, upon which, in bright, buff jackets, lay the fattest of bananas; "avees," red-ripe: guavas with the shadows of their crimson pulp flushing through a transparent skin, and almost coming and going there like blushes; oranges, tinged, here and there, berry-brown; and great, jolly melons, which rolled about in very portliness. Such a heap! All ruddy, ripe, and round--bursting with the good cheer of the tropical soil from which they sprang!

"A land of orchards!" cried the doctor, in a rapture; and he snatched a morsel from a sort of fruit of which gentlemen of the sanguine temperament are remarkably fond; namely, the ripe cherry lips of Misa Day-Born, who stood looking on.

Marharvai allotted seats to his guests; and the meal began. Thinking that his hospitality needed some acknowledgment, I rose, and pledged him in the vegetable wine of the cocoa-nut; merely repeating the ordinary salutation, "Yar onor boyoee." Sensible that some compliment, after the fashion of white men, was paid him, with a smile, and a courteous flourish of the hand, he bade me be seated. No people, however refined, are more easy and graceful in their manners than the Imeeose.

The doctor, sitting next our host, now came under his special protection. Laying before his guest one of the packages of fish, Marharvai opened it; and commended its contents to his particular regards. But my comrade was one of those who, on convivial occasions, can always take care of themselves. He ate an indefinite number of "Pee-hee Lee Lees" (small fish), his own and next neighbour's bread-fruit; and helped himself, to right and left, with all the ease of an accomplished diner-out.

"Paul," said he, at last, "you don't seem to be getting along; why don't you try the pepper sauce?" and, by way of example, he steeped a morsel of food into his nutful of sea-water. On following suit, I found it quite piquant, though rather bitter; but, on the whole, a capital substitute for salt. The Imeeose invariably use sea-water in this way, deeming it quite a treat; and considering that their country is surrounded by an ocean of catsup, the luxury cannot be deemed an expensive one.

The fish were delicious; the manner of cooking them in the ground preserving all the juices, and rendering them exceedingly sweet and tender. The plantain pudding was almost cloying; the cakes of Indian turnip, quite palatable; and the roasted bread-fruit, crisp as toast.

During the meal, a native lad walked round and round the party, carrying a long staff of bamboo. This he occasionally tapped upon the cloth, before each guest; when a white clotted substance dropped forth, with a savour not unlike that of a curd. This proved to be "Lownee," an excellent relish, prepared from the grated meat of ripe cocoa-nuts, moistened with cocoa-nut milk and salt water, and kept perfectly tight until a little past the saccharine stage of fermentation.

Melville Week: Typee II

2009-05-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

The second entry in Melville Week also comes from Typee.

In early 1841, Melville set sail aboard the whaler Acushnet, which he and a shipmate, Richard Tobias Greene, deserted in July 1842. Melville remained on Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas, for approximately three weeks, while Greene left at some time before him. Upon its initial publication, Typee was marketed as a straightforward travel narrative; and although it stretched the credulity of many readers, Greene later resurfaced and published his own account in the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser along with an open letter to Melville, both of which largely corroborated the events related in the book (at least those for which "Toby" was present). Despite this, Typee demonstrates a clear pattern of exaggeration (Melville's three weeks become the narrator's four months) and is generally considered a work of fiction.

Despite his periodic bouts of homesickness, the narrator regards Typee society as a sort of pre-capitalist idyll and laments the inevitably destructive impact of the impending French colonization. Some of the most lovingly described aspects of Typee life revolve around food, and the following describes what the narrator refers to as "The Feast of Calabashes":

So soon as I mounted to the pi-pi I saw at a glance that the revels were fairly under way.

What lavish plenty reigned around?—Warwick feasting his retainers with beef and ale, was a niggard to the noble Mehevi!—All along the piazza of the Ti were arranged elaborately carved canoe-shaped vessels, some twenty feet in length, tied with newly made poee-poee, and sheltered from the sun by the broad leaves of the banana. At intervals were heaps of green bread-fruit, raised in pyramidical stacks, resembling the regular piles of heavy shot to be seen in the yard of an arsenal. Inserted into the interstices of the huge stones which formed the pi-pi were large boughs of trees; hanging from the branches of which, and screened from the sun by their foliage, were innumerable little packages with leafy coverings, containing the meat of the numerous hogs which had been slain, done up in this manner to make it more accessible to the crowd. Leaning against the railing on the piazza were an immense number of long, heavy bamboos, plugged at the lower end, and with their projecting muzzles stuffed with a wad of leaves. These were filled with water from the stream, and each of them might hold from four to five gallons.

The banquet being thus spread, naught remained but for everyone to help himself at his pleasure. Accordingly not a moment passed but the transplanted boughs I have mentioned were rifled by the throng of the fruit they certainly had never borne before. Calabashes of poee-poee were continually being replenished from the extensive receptacle in which that article was stored, and multitudes of little fires were kindled about the Ti for the purpose of roasting the bread-fruit.

Within the building itself was presented a most extraordinary scene. The immense lounge of mats lying between the parallel rows of the trunks of cocoanut trees, and extending the entire length of the house, at least two hundred feet, was covered by the reclining forms of a host of chiefs and warriors who were eating at a great rate, or soothing the cares of Polynesian life in the sedative fumes of tobacco. The smoke was inhaled from large pipes, the bowls of which, made out of small cocoanut shells, were curiously carved in strange heathenish devices. These were passed from mouth to mouth by the recumbent smokers, each of whom, taking two or three prodigious whiffs, handed the pipe to his neighbour; sometimes for that purpose stretching indolently across the body of some dozing individual whose exertions at the dinner-table had already induced sleep. ...

There were many in the Ti for whom the tobacco did not furnish a sufficient stimulus, and who accordingly had recourse to 'arva', as a more powerful agent in producing the desired effect.

'Arva' is a root very generally dispersed over the South Seas, and from it is extracted a juice, the effects of which upon the system are at first stimulating in a moderate degree; but it soon relaxes the muscles, and exerting a narcotic influence produces a luxurious sleep. In the valley this beverage was universally prepared in the following way:—Some half-dozen young boys seated themselves in a circle around an empty wooden vessel, each one of them being supplied with a certain quantity of the roots of the 'arva', broken into small bits and laid by his side. A cocoanut goblet of water was passed around the juvenile company, who rinsing their mouths with its contents, proceeded to the business before them. This merely consisted in thoroughly masticating the 'arva', and throwing it mouthful after mouthful into the receptacle provided. When a sufficient quantity had been thus obtained water was poured upon the mass, and being stirred about with the forefinger of the right hand, the preparation was soon in readiness for use. The 'arva' has medicinal qualities.

Upon the Sandwich Islands it has been employed with no small success in the treatment of scrofulous affections, and in combating the ravages of a disease for whose frightful inroads the ill-starred inhabitants of that group are indebted to their foreign benefactors. But the tenants of the Typee valley, as yet exempt from these inflictions, generally employ the 'arva' as a minister to social enjoyment, and a calabash of the liquid circulates among them as the bottle with us.

Mehevi, who was greatly delighted with the change in my costume, gave me a cordial welcome. He had reserved for me a most delectable mess of 'cokoo', well knowing my partiality for that dish; and had likewise selected three or four young cocoanuts, several roasted bread-fruit, and a magnificent bunch of bananas, for my especial comfort and gratification. These various matters were at once placed before me; but Kory-Kory deemed the banquet entirely insufficient for my wants until he had supplied me with one of the leafy packages of pork, which, notwithstanding the somewhat hasty manner in which it had been prepared, possessed a most excellent flavour, and was surprisingly sweet and tender.

Pork is not a staple article of food among the people of the Marquesas; consequently they pay little attention to the BREEDING of the swine. The hogs are permitted to roam at large on the groves, where they obtain no small part of their nourishment from the cocoanuts which continually fall from the trees. But it is only after infinite labour and difficulty, that the hungry animal can pierce the husk and shell so as to get at the meat. I have frequently been amused at seeing one of them, after crunching the obstinate nut with his teeth for a long time unsuccessfully, get into a violent passion with it. He would then root furiously under the cocoanut, and, with a fling of his snout, toss it before him on the ground. Following it up, he would crunch at it again savagely for a moment, and then next knock it on one side, pausing immediately after, as if wondering how it could so suddenly have disappeared. In this way the persecuted cocoanuts were often chased half across the valley.

Melville Week: Typee

2009-05-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

[Welcome to Melville Week, our first ever themed set of excerpts here on Lashings & Lashings of Ginger Beer. This week we're (obviously) posting excerpts from Herman Melville's work. We've done so before with the well-known 'Clam or Cod?' passage from Moby Dick, but hopefully we'll be able to post some of Melville's lesser-known (though their deliciousness varies) descriptions of food. Below is the first, from James. - Fatima]

While Herman Melville is now widely renowned as the author of Moby-Dick, the fearsome White Whale didn't just sink the Pequod, it struck a blow to Melville's career from which he never recovered. Following that novel's almost complete critical and commercial failure, Melville published a further three novels, which were largely ignored, before giving up on fiction at the tender age of 38. Although he wrote Billy Budd sometime towards the end of his life, it was not found until 1924, and he instead devoted his creative energies to writing poetry, nearly all of which was either reviled or ignored. By the time he died in 1891, he was a recently retired City of New York customs inspector, none of whose forgotten novels had been in print for over 15 years.

Before this, however, Melville wrote a series of acclaimed and widely popular novels that were loosely based on the maritime adventures of his early twenties. His first novel, Typee, from which today's entry is drawn, is a curiously hybrid novel, blending as it does conventional travel and adventure narrative, detailed anthropological and ethnographic observations, natural history, vigorous anti-colonial polemics, and many long descriptions of the preparation and consumption of various South Seas cuisines.

The bread-fruit, however, is never used, and is indeed altogether unfit to be eaten, until submitted in one form or other to the action of fire.

The most simple manner in which this operation is performed, and I think, the best, consists in placing any number of the freshly plucked fruit, when in a particular state of greenness, among the embers of a fire, in the same way that you would roast a potato. After the lapse of ten or fifteen minutes, the green rind embrowns and cracks, showing through the fissures in its sides the milk-white interior. As soon as it cools the rind drops off, and you then have the soft round pulp in its purest and most delicious state. Thus eaten, it has a mild and pleasing flavour.

Sometimes after having been roasted in the fire, the natives snatch it briskly from the embers, and permitting it to slip out of the yielding rind into a vessel of cold water, stir up the mixture, which they call 'bo-a-sho'. I never could endure this compound, and indeed the preparation is not greatly in vogue among the more polite Typees.

There is one form, however, in which the fruit is occasionally served, that renders it a dish fit for a king. As soon as it is taken from the fire the exterior is removed, the core extracted, and the remaining part is placed in a sort of shallow stone mortar, and briskly worked with a pestle of the same substance. While one person is performing this operation, another takes a ripe cocoanut, and breaking it in halves, which they also do very cleverly, proceeds to grate the juicy meat into fine particles. This is done by means of a piece of mother-of-pearl shell, lashed firmly to the extreme end of a heavy stick, with its straight side accurately notched like a saw. The stick is sometimes a grotesquely-formed limb of a tree, with three or four branches twisting from its body like so many shapeless legs, and sustaining it two or three feet from the ground.

The native, first placing a calabash beneath the nose, as it were, of his curious-looking log-steed, for the purpose of receiving the grated fragments as they fall, mounts astride of it as if it were a hobby-horse, and twirling the inside of his hemispheres of cocoanut around the sharp teeth of the mother-of-pearl shell, the pure white meat falls in snowy showers into the receptacle provided. Having obtained a quantity sufficient for his purpose, he places it in a bag made of the net-like fibrous substance attached to all cocoanut trees, and compressing it over the bread-fruit, which being now sufficiently pounded, is put into a wooden bowl—extracts a thick creamy milk. The delicious liquid soon bubbles round the fruit, and leaves it at last just peeping above its surface.

This preparation is called 'kokoo', and a most luscious preparation it is. The hobby-horse and the pestle and mortar were in great requisition during the time I remained in the house of Marheyo, and Kory-Kory had frequent occasion to show his skill in their use.

But the great staple articles of food into which the bread-fruit is converted by these natives are known respectively by the names of Amar and Poee-Poee.

At a certain season of the year, when the fruit of the hundred groves of the valley has reached its maturity, and hangs in golden spheres from every branch, the islanders assemble in harvest groups, and garner in the abundance which surrounds them.

The trees are stripped of their nodding burdens, which, easily freed from the rind and core, are gathered together in capacious wooden vessels, where the pulpy fruit is soon worked by a stone pestle, vigorously applied, into a blended mass of a doughy consistency, called by the natives 'Tutao'. This is then divided into separate parcels, which, after being made up into stout packages, enveloped in successive folds of leaves, and bound round with thongs of bark, are stored away in large receptacles hollowed in the earth, from whence they are drawn as occasion may require. In this condition the Tutao sometimes remains for years, and even is thought to improve by age. Before it is fit to be eaten, however, it has to undergo an additional process. A primitive oven is scooped in the ground, and its bottom being loosely covered with stones, a large fire is kindled within it. As soon as the requisite degree of heat is attained, the embers are removed, and the surface of the stones being covered with thick layers of leaves, one of the large packages of Tutao is deposited upon them and overspread with another layer of leaves. The whole is then quickly heaped up with earth, and forms a sloping mound.

The Tutao thus baked is called 'Amar'; the action of the oven having converted it into an amber-coloured caky substance, a little tart, but not at all disagreeable to the taste.

By another and final process the 'Amar' is changed into 'Poee-Poee'. This transition is rapidly effected. The Amar is placed in a vessel, and mixed with water until it gains a proper pudding-like consistency, when, without further preparation, it is in readiness for use. This is the form in which the 'Tutao' is generally consumed. The singular mode of eating it I have already described.

Birds Without Wings, Louis de Bernieres

2009-05-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

Today's excerpt was sent in by Megan, who says that: "Here is the food passage that has struck me most strongly in recent reading. The rest of the book is amazing as well, though filled with violence and sadness." Having actually had a Circassian chicken dish recently at the home of a friend, this description is special in that it really evokes the taste and warmth of the food, and makes me long to eat it again.

It was to be an orgy of garlic. Leyla took two aubergines and charred them over the brazier, leaving them until they became soft enough to mash up with lemon juice, garlic and olive oil.
She boiled potatoes until they were utterly soft, and mashed them up with the same ingredients, adding the olive oil drip by drip. She made cacik with mint and yogurt, garlic and cucumber. She prepared humus so that the chickpeas would provide an aphrodisiac, and she mixed a marvellous and exotic drink of camel's milk with honey, cinnamon, nutmeg and cardomom, with the same aim in mind. She made a paste of yellow lentils, in order that happiness and laughter should come into the house. The cook took cubes of lamb, made a small slot in each, and hid a small clove of garlic in every one. He browned them over a quick flame and then simmered them at almost indiscernible heat for the whole day, in a ratatouille of parsley, tomatoes, onions and pepper. He would add the remaining flavours at the last minute so that they would be full in the mouth. He made Smyna meatballs and Adana kebabs. In honour of Leyla he created Circassian chicken, rich with tarragon, cloves, paprika, walnuts, garlic and walnut oil. He laid it out on a great flat dish so that it would be as white and round and lovely as the face of the Circassian maid that she purported to be.

The Mistress of Spices, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

2009-05-08T16:33:00.001-07:00

First things first: we are blog of the week over at Readerville, how lovely! Thank you, dear friends.

And now, kheer.

But here is another image. A woman in a kitchen, cooking my rice. She is fragrant as the grains she rolls between her fingers to see if they are done. Rice steam has softened her skin, has loosened hair tied back taut all day. Has gentled the smudges under her eyes. Payday today, so she can begin the frying, mustard seeds sputtering in the pain, brinjal and bitter gourd turning yellow-red. Into a curry of cauliflowers like white fists, she mixes garam masala to bring patience and hope. Is she one, is she many, is she not the woman in a hundred Indian homes who is sprinkling, over sweet kheer that has simmered all afternoon, cardomom seeds from my shop for the dreams that keep us from going mad? Inside my head her thoughts knock against one another, falling.
... But it is dinnertime now. The mothers call out and the children come running from homework, chairs are pulled up, the steaming dishes brought in. Rice. Rajma. Karela sabji. Kheer.
Kheer today after so long, and there's enough after Father and Elder Brother have been served, enough even for Mother who eats always last for all. Kheer with almonds and raisins and crunchy pods of elaichi because the old woman at the store said they were on sale when she saw us looking. I dip my mouth into its sweetness, milkwhite lines on my lips, and it's like New Year, and like New Year I can wish for anything.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

2009-05-08T16:01:00.000-07:00

The cooking in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not luxe or even particularly delicious-seeming, but it conveys other qualities that I have always found compelling.

Katie Nolan is a tough woman, not particularly loving, but she is protective, determined, and fierce. This list of the staples she provides for her family, poor children-of-children of immigrants in nineteenth-century Brooklyn, is a catalogue of effort, ingenuity, and an attentiveness informed by scarcity. There is an odd feeling of abundance, although not the sort we usually associate with food.

I've been learning some interesting things by typing out passages word for word from well-loved books. There is insight into syntax, cadence, the way a scene is built. Betty Smith's writing is not as precise, not as metered as I thought it would be--but that doesn't dim its effectiveness one bit.

The Nolans practically lived on that stale bread and what amazing things Katie could make from it! She'd take a loaf of stale bread, pour boiling water over it, work it up into a paste, flavor it with salt, pepper, thyme, minced onion and an egg (if eggs were cheap), and bake it in the oven. When it was good and brown, she made a sauce from half a cup of ketchup, two cups of boiling water, seasoning, a dash of strong coffee, thickened it with flour and poured it over the baked stuff. It was good, hot, tasty and staying. What was left over was sliced thin the next day and fried in hot bacon fat.

Mama made a very fine bread pudding from slices of stale bread, sugar, cinnamon and a penny apple sliced thin. When this was baked brown, sugar was melted and poured over the top. Sometimes she made what she had named Weg Geschnissen, which laboriously translated meant something made with bread bits that usually would be thrown away. Bits of bread were dipped into a batter made from flour, water, salt and an egg and then fried in deep hot fat. While they were frying, Francie ran down to the candy store and bought a penny's worth of brown rock candy. This was crushed with a rolling pin and sprinkled on top of the fried bits just before eating. The crystals didn't quite melt and that made it wonderful.

Saturday supper was a red letter meal. The Nolans had fried meat! A loaf of stale bread was made into pulp with hot water and mixed with a dime's worth of chopped meat into which an onion had been cleavered. Salt and a penny's worth of minced parsley were added for flavor. This was made up into little balls, fried and served with hot ketchup. These meat balls had a name, fricadellen, which was a great joke with Francie and Neeley.

They lived mostly on these things made from stale bread, and condensed milk and coffee, onions, potatoes, and always the penny's worth of something bought at the last minute, added for fillip.

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

2009-05-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

Midori's cooking was far better than I had expected: an amazing assortment of fried, pickled, boiled and roasted dishes using eggs, mackerel, fresh greens, aubergine, mushroom, radishes, and sesame seeds, all cooked in the delicate Kyoto style.

'This is great,' I said with my mouth full.

'OK, tell me the truth now,' Midori said, 'You weren't expecting my cooking to be very good, were you - judging by the way I look?'

'Not really,' I said honestly.

'You're from the Kansai region, so you like this kind of delicate flavouring, right?'

'Don't tell me you changed the style especially for me?'

'Don't be ridiculous! I wouldn't go to that much trouble. No, we always eat like this.'

'So your mother - or your father - is from Kansai?'

'Nope. My father was born in Tokyo and my mother's from Fukushima. There's not a single Kansai person among my relatives. We're all from Tokyo or northern Kanto.'

'I don't get it,' I said, 'How can you make this 100 per cent authentic Kansai-style food? Did somebody teach you?'

'Well, it's kind of a long story,' she said, eating a slice of fried egg. 'My mother hated housework of any kind, and she almost never cooked anything. And we had the business to think about, so it was always 'Today we're so busy, let's get a take-away,' or 'Let's just buy some croquettes at the butcher's,' and so on. I hated that when I was little, I mean I like cooking a big pot of curry and eating the same thing three days in a row. So then one day - I was in the fifth year of school - I decided I was going to cook for the family and do it right. I went to the big Kinokuniya in Shinjuku and bought the biggest, handsomest cookbook I could find, and I mastered it from cover to cover; how to choose a cutting board, how to sharpen knives, how to shave fresh bonito flakes, everything. It turned out the author of the book was from the Kansai, so all my cooking is Kansai style.'

'You mean you learned how to make all this stuff from a book!?'

'I saved my money and went to eat the real thing. That's how I learned flavourings. I've got pretty good intuition. I'm hopeless as a logical thinker, though.'

'It's amazing that you could teach yourself to cook so well without having anyone to show you.'

'It wasn't easy,' said Midori with a sigh, 'growing up in a house where nobody gave a damn about food. I'd tell them I wanted to buy decent knives and pots and they wouldn't give me the money, 'What we have now is good enough,' they'd say, but I'd tell them that was crazy, you couldn't bone a fish with the flimsy knives we had at home, so they'd say, 'What the hell do you want to bone a fish for?' It was hopeless trying to communicate with them. I saved up my allowances and bought real professional knives and pots and strainers and stuff. Can you believe it? Here's a 15-year-old girl pinching pennies to buy strainers and whetstones and tempura pots when all the other girls at school are getting huge allowances and buying beautiful dresses and shoes. Don't you feel sorry for me?'

Blog recommendation

2009-05-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

Another food in fiction (and movies) blog - Readable Edible Watchable Potable - which seems to have far less tea, toast and crumpets present than this one.

Comrade Bingo, P. G. Wodehouse

2009-05-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

[Edit: James is a new contributor to this blog - by way of introduction, he was responsible for the Gogol post yesterday, and has read far more books than anyone I've ever come across in my life. However, he is a vegetarian.]

Bingo Little's tendency to fall in love with every girl he happens to meet has involved his friend Bertie Wooster in more than one awkward culinary encounter. Bingo here attempts to court Charlotte Corday Rowbotham, the daughter of a political radical, and compels Wooster to host a tea for his new comrades. Although Bertie is reluctant to commit himself to revolution (pointing out that the "whole hub of the scheme seems to be to massacre coves like me"), he does his best to play the gracious host:

Funny how one changes as the years roll on. At school, I remember, I would cheerfully have sold my soul for scrambled eggs and sardines at five in the afternoon; but somehow, since reaching man’s estate, I had rather dropped out of the habit; and I’m bound to admit I was appalled to a goodish extent at the way the sons and daughter of the Revolution shoved their heads down and went for the foodstuffs. Even Comrade Butt cast off his gloom for a space and immersed his whole being in scrambled eggs, only coming to the surface at intervals to grab another cup of tea. Presently the hot water gave out, and I turned to Jeeves.

“More hot water.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Hey! what’s this? What’s this?” Old Rowbotham had lowered his cup and was eyeing us sternly. He tapped Jeeves on the shoulder. “No servility, my lad; no servility!”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ Call me Comrade. Do you know what you are, my lad? You’re an obsolete relic of an exploded feudal system.”

“Very good, sir.”

“If there’s one thing that makes my blood boil in my veins—“

“Have another sardine,” chipped in young Bingo—the first sensible thing he’d done since I had known him. Old Rowbotham took three and dropped the subject, and Jeeves drifted away. I could see by the look of his back what he felt.

At last, as I was just beginning to feel that it was going on for ever, the thing finished. I woke up to find the party getting ready to leave.

Sardines and about three quarts of tea had mellowed old Rowbotham. There was quite a genial look in his eye as he shook my hand.

“I must thank you for your hospitality, Comrade Wooster,” he said.

“Oh, not at all! Only too glad—“

“Hospitality?” snorted the man Butt, going off in my ear like a depth-charge. He was scowling in a morose sort of manner at young Bingo and the girl, who were giggling together by the window. “I wonder the food didn’t turn to ashes in our mouths! Eggs! Muffins! Sardines! All wrung from the bleeding lips of the starving poor!”

“Oh, I say! What a beastly idea!”

“I will send you some literature on the subject of the Cause,” said old Rowbotham. “And soon, I hope, we shall see you at one of our little meetings.”

Jeeves came in to clear away, and found me sitting among the ruins. It was all very well for Comrade Butt to knock the food, but he had pretty well finished the ham; and if you had shoved the remainder of the jam into the bleeding lips of the starving poor it would hardly have made them sticky.

“Well, Jeeves,” I said, “how about it?”

“I would prefer to express no opinion, sir.”

Christmas Eve, Nikolai Gogol

2009-05-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

We've had lots of new readers recently, particularly from Maud Newton, Moonrat and Gayle Brandeis. Welcome, everyone! We hope this blog makes you as hungry as it makes us. Also, for those who haven't seen it yet, Geoff Nicholson's recent essay on awful food in books was very interesting. It reminded me that descriptions of disgusting food can often be just as (if not more) memorable than delicious ones, and we'll definitely be putting more of those here.

Today's excerpt comes courtesy of James B, who introduces it by saying:
"Gogol's work is surfeited with elaborate gastronomic set-pieces. The bulk of his narratives feature long, lingering and often comical descriptions of food and feasting. There's a sad irony in this: although Gogol was himself prone to overeating, he incessantly complained of severe and chronic gastric pain (he was convinced that his stomach was upside down). Towards the end of his life, Gogol suffered from religious mania; and in pursuing a regimen of obsessive asceticism, he starved himself to death.

"Christmas Eve" is drawn from the second volume of Gogol's Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, a cycle of stories that feature a frame narrator spinning tales derived from the Ukranian folk tradition.

It's Christmas Eve, and the Devil is free to wreak whatever havoc he pleases for a night. He descends upon Dikanka to torment Vakula, the local blacksmith, in retaliation for the unflattering portraits Vakula paints of the Devil in Dikanka's church. Vakula is meanwhile trying to win the favor of Oksana, the village beauty, who tells him that she will only marry him if he can obtain for her the Tsarita's slippers. Suspecting that his task can only be achieved through magic, Vakula decides to visit Patsyuk, a Cossack who is widely alleged to have friendly relations with the devil.

Patsyuk is at first too busy devouring magical dumplings and turnovers --which leap from their bowl into cream and then directly into his mouth--but eventually reveals to Vakula that the devil is in fact hiding in the sack that he's carrying over his shoulder."

Not without some timidity, the blacksmith opened the door and saw Patsyuk sitting Turkish-fashion on the floor before a little tub on which stood a bowl of dumplings. This bowl stood as though purposely planned on a level with his mouth. Without moving a single finger, he bent his head a little toward the bowl and sipped the soup, from time to time catching the dumplings with his teeth.
"Well,' thought Vakula to himself, 'this fellow's even lazier than Chub: he does eat with a spoon, at least, while this fellow won't even lift his hand!"
Patsyuk must have been entirely engrossed in the dumplings, for he seemed to be quite unaware of the entrance of the blacksmith, who offered him a very low bow as soon as he stepped on the threshold.
'I have come to ask you for a favor, Patsyuk!' said Vakula, bowing again.
Puzaty Patsyuk lifted his head and again began swallowing the dumplings.
'They say that you - no offense meant...' the blacksmith said, taking heart, 'I speak of this not by way of any insult to you - that you are a little akin to the devil.'
When he had uttered these words, Vakula was alarmed, thinking that he had expressed himself too bluntly and had not sufficiently softened his language; and, expecting that Patsyuk would pick up the tub together with the bowl and fling them straight at his head, he turned aside and covered his face with his sleeve so that the hot dumpling soup might not spatter it. But Patsyuk looked up and again began swallowing the dumplings.
... 'If you need the devil, then go to the devil,' answered Patsyuk, not lifting his eyes to him, but still chewing away at the dumplings.
'It is for that that I have come to you,' answered the blacksmith, offering him another bow. 'I suppose that nobody in the world but you knows the way to him!'
Patsyuk answered not a word, but ate up the remaining dumplings. 'Do me a kindness, good man, do not refuse me!' persisted the blacksmith, 'Whether it is pork or sausage or buckwheat flour or linen, say - millet or anything else in case of need... as is usual between good people... we will not grudge it. Tell me at least how, for instance, to get on the road to him.'
... Then Vakula noticed that there were neither dumplings nor a tub before him; but two wooden bowls were standing on the floor instead - one was filled with turnovers, the other with some cream. His thoughts and his eyes unconsciously fastened on these dainties.
'Let us see,' he said to himself, 'how Patsyuk will eat the turnovers. He certainly won't want to bend down to lap them up like the dumplings; besides he couldn't - he must first dip the turnovers in the cream.'
He had hardly time to think this when Patsyuk opened his mouth, looked at the turnovers, and opened his mouth wider still. At that moment a turnover popped out of the bowl, splashed into the cream, turned over on the other side, leaped upward, and flew straight into his mouth. Patsyuk ate it and opened his mouth again, and another turnover went through the same performance. The only trouble he took was to munch it up and swallow it.
'What a miracle!' thought the blacksmith, his mouth open with surprise, and at the same moment he was aware that a turnover was creeping toward him and was already smearing his mouth with cream. Pushing away the turnover and wiping his lips, the blacksmith began to reflect what marvels there are in the world and to what subtle devices the evil spirit may lead a man, saying to himself at the same time that no one but Patsyuk could help him.
'I'll bow to him once more; maybe he will explain properly... He's a devil, though! Why, today is a fast day and he is eating turnovers with meat in them! What a fool I am, really. I am standing here and preparing to sin! Back...!' And the pious blacksmith ran headlong out of the hut.

The Slaves of New York, Tama Janowitz

2009-05-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

Tama Janowitz: one of the most underrated overrated writers ever: overrated for being part of a scene and an era; underrated for her spectacularly anatomized descriptions of how people live and behave.

She is also tremendous on food. A Certain Age, her contemporary take on House of Mirth, is full of terrible and expensive food--comfortless, baroque, absurd. (I would quote from that, but I recently lent it to my mother.) In the following excerpt from her celebrated collection of short stories, a tableau of neuroses, competition, and authenticity (whatever that means) arranges itself against the backdrop of a New York diner, amply illustrated by the distinct pleasures of bad New York–diner food.

"Big Top is really one of my favorite places," I tell everyone when we are seated in a booth. There's something so reassuring about being in here. The boxes of stale chocolate-covered caramels arranged at the cash register behind us, the Muzak--nothing bad, aside from poor service and lousy food, could ever happen here.

Stash can't figure out what to order. "I don't know whether to get dinner or dessert," he says. "I took a nap before we went out, and when I woke up I had angel food cake."

"Mmm," Daria says. "I haven't had angel food cake in years. Who made it?"

"I did," I say.

"You make angel food cake?" Simon says. "Boy, that's really something. She's really something, Stash."

I keep my mouth shut and merely look modest: I don't admit that I made the cake from a mix. Honestly, it tastes better than the same thing made from scratch. A girlfriend of mine works in a restaurant where spectacular angel food cake is served. I begged her to steal the recipe, and she confided that the cake came from a packaged mix. The one time I tried to make the cake from scratch, I used up twelve eggs and ended up with a new plastic product. Stash thought it was delicious: he likes rubbery foods in a big way.

"How can you not be able to figure out what to order when the selection here is so marvelous?" I say. "For example, the Wizard's Fried Clams have always been a favorite of mine."

"Really?" Stash says. "That's funny. That's what I was thinking of getting. But do you think it's safe?"

"What you're getting is something frozen and reconstituted," I say.

"Daria, would you order the Wizard's Fried Clams?" Stash says.

I'm irritated that he's asking her. Why would she know more about the safety of the clams than me?

At the last minute Stash decides to have BLT on white toast, and Simon says, "That sounds good. I think that's what I'll get, too."

"Very good," the waiter says. He's about our age, and resembles a stand-up comedian in a Catskills resort: reedy mustache, red bow tie, a tic in one eye.

"What kind of bread do you have?" Simon says.

"We have rye, wheat, and white."

"I'll have whole wheat," Simon says.

"Good choice, excellent choice!" the waiter says. He notices we're all looking at him--he's like some sorcerer's apprentice. "Well," he says nervously, "there were only three possibilities available to you, for a BLT sand.--rye, wheat, or white. Of course, some people don't get bread at all. Do you want bread?"

"A BLT without bread?" Simon says.

"Sure," the waiter says. "Didn't you ever hear of a tuna sand., hold the sand.?" I love how he calls a sandwich a sand. He goes on, half mumbling, "That means the person just wants tuna on a bed of lettuce."

"I'll have my BLT on rye toast," Simon says.

"Here we call rye 'Robert.'"

"Not 'Roger'?" Simon says.

"'Robert.'"

"Okay, then, a BLT on Robert and a Heineken."

"Something to drink with that?"

"To drink with the Heineken?" Simon says, peeved.

"Oh. I didn't hear that," the waiter says. Daria and Stash give each other a look.

"And I'd like a soda," I say, since no one asks. "I'd like to have mocha-chip ice cream and chocolate syrup." I figure part of my new personality is to make my wants known.

"Wait," the waiter says. "We only have milkshakes, and they're premade--there's only a choice of three flavors. It's a bottled mix."

"I'm very disappointed," I say. "But in that case, I'll have a tuna sand." This isn't what I want at all, but it's good when it comes: in fact, that tuna salad is like a shot of heroin and goes right to my bloodstream. I look at Daria and think, Go ahead, make my life easier. "Your dog," I say. "How did it happen?"

"Oh, he was hit by a car," Daria says.

Trouble for Lucia, E. F. Benson

2009-05-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

By way of a break from children's literature I offer you this excerpt from E. F. Benson's immortal Mapp and Lucia series--which is pretty much British children's literature for adults. Elizabeth Mapp and Lucia Pillson spend their days scheming against each other, although if you asked, each would claim that the other is a dearest friend. In the rather long bit that follows, Elizabeth makes her bid to run the town's summer guest--Miss Leg, a novelist--over a simple country dinner. The excerpt is long, because the meal is punctuated (inflated, really) by conversation made up almost entirely of whoppers told by Elizabeth and her husband, Major Benjy Flint. (The meal, too, is a lie.)

If you've never read these books I cannot commend them highly enough. They are brilliant--light-seeming but utterly savage. And there is plenty of food; in one of Benson's wonderful set pieces, Mapp and Lucia go to sea on an overturned table, all because of a hotly desired recipe. I'm sure you'll be seeing more from these ladies in this space.

Without further ado:

"A very plain simple dinner, dear Miss Leg," said Elizabeth as they sat down. "Just potluck, as I warned you, so I hope you've got a country appetite."

"I know I have, Liz," said Benjy heartily. "A round of golf makes me as hungry as I used to be after a day's tiger shooting in the jungle."

"Those are trophies of yours at Grebe, then," said Miss Leg. "I consider tiger shooting a manly pursuit. That's what I mean by sport, taking your life in your hand instead of sitting in an armchair and firing into flocks of hand-reared pheasants. That kind of 'sportsman' doesn't even load his own gun, I believe. Butchers and poulterers; that's what I called thim in one of my books."

"Withering! Scathing!" cried Elizabeth. "And how well deserved. Benjy gave such a wonderful lecture here the other day about his hairbreadth escapes. You could have heard a pin drop."

"Ah, that's an old story now," said Benjy. "My shikari days are over. And there's not a man in Tilling who's even seen a tiger except through the bars at the Zoo. Georgie Pillson, for instance--"

"Whom I presented to you at tea yesterday, Miss Leg," put in Elizabeth. "Husband of our dear Mayor. Pointed beard. Sketches quite prettily, and does exquisite needlework. My wicked Benjy once dubbed him Miss Milliner Michael-Angelo."

"And that was very withering, too," said Miss Leg, eating lumps of expensive middle-cut salmon with a country appetite.

"Well, well, not very kind, I'm afraid, but I like a man to be a man," said Benjy. "I'll take a bit more fish, Liz. A nice fresh-run fish. And what are you going to give us next?"

"Just a brace of grouse," said Elizabeth.

"Ah, yes. A few old friends with Scotch moors haven't quite forgotten me yet, Miss Leg. Dear old General!"

[. . .]

"Well, I do call that rude," said Diva warmly. "High and lofty, that's what she is. She told me her chef would send me a recipe for cream wafers. I tried it. Muck. I gave one to Paddy, and he was sick. And she rang me up just now to go to tea with her this afternoon. Did she think I was going out to Grebe, just when I was busiest, to eat more muck? Not I. She dined at Elizabeth's last night, and Janet heard from Elizabeth's parlormaid what they had. Tomato soup, middle cut of salmon sent over from Hornbridge, a brace of grouse from Rice's, Melba peaches, but only bottled with custard instead of cream, and tinned caviar. And Elizabeth called it potluck! I never had such luck there, pot or unpot."

Little House On The Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder

2009-05-01T03:12:00.001-07:00

Wow, Emily has been posting some really good ones! Her comment about children's books reminded me of this - I've been meaning to post it for a while, so here it is in all its deliciousness.

Then Pa brought water from the creek, while Mary and Laura helped Ma get supper. Ma measured coffee beans into the coffee-mill and Mary ground them. Laura filled the coffee pot with the water Pa brought, and Ma set the pot in the coals. She set the iron bake-oven in the coals, too.
While it heated, she mixed cornmeal and salt with water and patted it into little cakes. She greased the bake-oven with a pork rind, laid the cornmeal cakes in it, and put on its iron cover. Then Pa raked more coals over the cover, while Ma sliced fat salt pork. She fried the slices in the iron spider. The spider had short legs to stand on in the coals, and that was why it was called a spider. If it had had no legs, it would only have been only a frying pan.
The coffee boiled, the cakes baked, the meat fried, and they all smelled so good that Laura grew hungrier and hungrier.
Pa set the wagon-seat near the fire. He and Ma sat on it, Mary and Laura sat on the wagon tongue. Each of them had a tin plate, and a steel knife and a steel fork with a white bone handle. Ma had a tin cup and Pa had a tin cup, and Baby Carrie had a little one all on her own, but Mary and Laura had to share a tin cup. They drank water. They could not drink coffee until they grew up.
While they were eating supper the purple shadows closed around the camp fire. The vast prairie was dark and still. Only the wind moved stealthily through the grass, and the large, low stars hung glittering from the great sky.
The camp fire was cosy in the big, chill darkness. The slices of pork were crisp and fat, and the corncakes were good. In the dark beyond the wagon, Pet and Patty were eating, too. They bit off bites of grass with sharply crunching sounds.
"We'll camp here a day or two," said Pa, "Maybe we'll stay here. There's good land, timber in the bottoms, plenty of game - everything a man could want. What do you say, Caroline?"

The Trumpet of the Swan, E. B. White

2009-04-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

As I was hunting through my bookshelves (utterly disordered thanks to my two-foot-tall roommate, who likes to take books out and toss them around) for The Wind in the Willows, my hand briefly rested on E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan. And some automatic little voice immediately piped up--"watercress sandwiches," it said.

I could fill this blog with excerpts from children's books--I wonder why that is? Are books for children necessarily more vivid about food than books for adults? Or does it have something to do with the way we remember them?

At any rate, here is Louis the swan, making himself comfortable at the Ritz, in Boston, in E. B. White's simple, decorous, crystalline prose:

On the wall of the bedroom, he found a button that said WAITER. Louis put his beak against the button and pressed hard. In a few minutes, there was a knock at the door and a waiter entered. He was nicely dressed and tried not to show surprise at finding a swan in the room.

"May I get you something?" he asked.

Louis picked up his chalk pencil. "Twelve watercress sandwiches, please," he wrote on the slate.

The waiter thought for a moment. "Are you expecting guests?" he asked.

Louis shook his head.

"And you want twelve watercress sandwiches?"

Louis nodded.

"Very good, sir," said the waiter. "Do you wish them with mayonnaise?"

Louis didn't know what mayonnaise tasted like, but he thought fast. He cleaned his slate and wrote: "One with. Eleven without."

The waiter bowed and left the room. Half an hour later he was back. He rolled a table into the room, placed a huge platter of watercress sandwiches on it, along with a plate, a knife, a fork, a spoon, salt and pepper, a glass of water, and a linen napkin, nicely folded. There was also a butter dish, with several pieces of butter covered with cracked ice. The waiter arranged everything carefully, then handed Louis a bill to sign. The bill said:

12 w/c sandwiches: $18.00

"Goodness!" thought Louis. "This is an expensive place. I hope the Boatman won't be mad when he sees this supper charge on the bill tomorrow morning."

He borrowed a pencil from the waiter and signed the bill: "Louis the Swan."

The waiter took the bill and stood there, waiting.

"I guess he wants a tip," thought Louis. So he opened his moneybag again, drew out two dollars, and handed it to the waiter, who thanked him, bowed again, and went away.

Because a swan has such a long neck, the table was just the right height for Louis. He didn't need a chair; he ate his supper standing up. He tried the sandwich that had mayonnaise on it and decided he didn't like mayonnaise. Then he carefully pulled each sandwich apart. All he really wanted was the watercress. He piled the slices of bread in two neat piles, scooped the watercress onto his plate, and had a nice supper. He did not touch the butter. When he was thirsty, instead of drinking from the glass of water, he walked into the bathroom, drew a basinful of cold water and drank that. Then he took his napkin, wiped his beak, and pushed the table out of the way. He felt much better.

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

2009-04-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

I first read The Wind in the Willows when I was eight, and this scene seems to me as brilliant now as it did then. I remember being amazed that a paragraph in a book could make me so hungry.

The bumptious Toad is in jail, but he is not without friends. Another restorative tale of bread and tea:

When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one's ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats and the twitter of sleepy canaries. Toad sat up on end once more, dried his eyes, sipped his tea and munched his toast, and soon began talking freely about himself, and the house he lived in, and his doings there, and how important he was, and what a lot his friends thought of him.

The gaoler's daughter saw that the topic was doing him as much good as the tea, as indeed it was, and encouraged him to go on.

The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud

2009-04-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

Hello there.

You probably already know that this blog was born in the comments thread to a post at Jezebel--a thread I read with such a thrill of recognition, the feeling of finding something you knew and didn't know you knew until you knew it. If you see what I mean. So what a further thrill to find myself contributing to it.

I had planned to start with something from my usual comfort reading (British fiction from between the wars, or else a little later), but this scene from Bernard Malamud's exquisite story "The Magic Barrel" always tugs at me--I think it's the vivid, controlled language, the real hunger conveyed along with the food itself. I rarely slice a tomato without thinking, "A sliced tomato you have maybe?"

"Please Mr. Salzman, no more"

"But first must come back my strength," Salzman said weakly. He fumbled with the portfolio straps and took out of the leather case an oily paper bag, from which he extracted a hard, seeded roll and a small smoked whitefish. With a quick motion of his hand he stripped the fish out of its skin and began ravenously to chew. "All day in a rush," he muttered.

Leo watched him eat.

"A sliced tomato you have maybe?" Salzman hesitantly inquired.

"No."

The marriage broker shut his eyes and ate. When he had finished he carefully cleaned up the crumbs and rolled up the remains of the fish, in the paper bag. His spectacled eyes roamed the room until he discovered, amid some piles of books, a one-burner gas stove. Lifting his hat he humbly asked, "A glass tea you got, rabbi?"

Conscience-stricken, Leo rose and brewed the tea. He served it with a chunk of lemon and two cubes of lump sugar, delighting Salzman.

After he had drunk his tea, Salzman's strength and good spirits were restored.

New Contributor

2009-04-23T15:14:00.000-07:00

As the few loyal readers of this blog may have noticed, it hasn't been updated for a while. That's because I've been totally overwhelmed with my PhD work. I would like to therefore ask if anyone else would be interested in contributing to this blog with me - it seems a shame to leave it without a new post for so long, and between the two of us we may have a better chance of keeping it updated. If you'd like to, email me at llgb at me dot com, introducing yourself!

Update: Please welcome Emily, the kind soul behind this excerpt, who will now be blogging alongside me. If anyone else would like to contribute too, please email me.

Witch Week, Diana Wynne Jones

2009-04-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

You'll have to bear with me and my long introduction today. As a child, this was one of the books I adored most and read over and over again. Last week, finding a copy in Oxfam for 15p, I picked it up again. I'm always afraid to read the books that I love as a child as an adult - inevitably, in many cases the connection is not there and you now notice clumsy aspects of the writing that you were blissfully unaware of before. But I was pleased to find that I fell in love with Witch Week all over again. It's a children's book that isn't patronising or dumbed down in any sense, and the themes of being different and not belonging still resonate. The book is political but not overhanded - the persecution that witches face by the government is believable and frightening, and the reader is left to draw their own comparisons with contemporary society. The setting is a boarding school for witch orphans in an England that resembles the one we know in every single detail, except that witchcraft is omnipresent and illegal - suspected witches are tortured and burned at the stake.
The action begins when a teacher receives a troubling anonymous note that someone in class 2Y is a witch. The two main characters in the book (although all the characters are drawn vividly and are quite interesting, and the writing is sympathetic even to the nasty ones) are Charles and Nan. Charles is a bespectacled, slightly hostile, intelligent boy who is not popular but given a wide berth due to his confidence and nasty glare. Nan, on the other hand, is plump and bullied, but wildly creative and with a strong independent streak. As a child the scene that stuck with me the most was Nan in P.E, closing her eyes and trying valiantly to climb a rope and feeling elated as she succeeds, only to hear the laughter around her grow louder and louder until she opens her eyes and finds that she's still at the bottom and has only been making climbing movements. The scene is so acutely embarrassing that it stings - but as a child that didn't fit in (and knew the trauma of gym class well), it was one of the most notable times when reading that I felt an instant kinship with a character, and the author is aware of this response in the reader, I think, and treats it delicately.
The book is often compared to Harry Potter, but I think it's far better. The characters in the HP books to me always seemed bland and shallow (particularly Harry, considering the trauma he's been through), and the reader always seems beaten over the head with the whole theme of an evil, intolerant force aiming to take over a society. The one way that the HP may beat out WW, though, is in their delicious descriptions of food - WW instead contains a rather disgusting one. I couldn't help but post it here. The scene begins with Nan, Charles and another student, Nirupam, are invited to the headmistress's table at lunch - all are terrified of this development generally, and the tension is highlighted by the fact that it was just recently that the note was discovered, and the accusations of witchcraft are beginning to fly, so Nan's behaviour is particularly unfortunate.

They stood there, while Miss Cadwallader was saying grace, looking out over the heads of the rest of the school, not very far below, but far enough to make a lot of difference. Perhaps I'm going to faint, Nan thought hopefully. She still knew she was going to behave badly, but she felt very odd as well - and fainting was a fairly respectable way of behaving badly.
She was still conscious at the end of grace. She sat down with the rest, between the glowering Charles and Nirupam. Nirupam had gone pale yellow with dread. To their relief, Miss Cadwallader at once turned to the important lord and began making gracious conversation with him. The ladies from the kitchen brought round a little tray of bowls and handed everybody one.
What was this? It was certainly not a usual part of school dinner. They looked suspiciously at the bowls. They were full of yellow stuff, not quite covering little pink things.
'I believe it may be prawns,' Nirupam said dubiously, 'For a starter.'
Here Miss Cadwallader reached forth a gracious hand. Their heads at once craned round to see what implement she was going to eat out of the bowl with. Her hand picked up a fork. They picked up forks too. Nan poked hers cautiously into her bowl. Instantly she began to behave badly. She could not stop herself. 'I think it's custard,' she said loudly, 'Do prawns mix with custard?' She put one of the pink things into her mouth. It felt rubbery. 'Chewing gum?' she asked. 'No, I think they're jointed worms. Worms in custard.'
'Shut up!' Nirupam hissed.
'But it's not custard,' Nan continued. She could hear her voice saying it, but there seemed no way to stop it. 'The tongue-test proves that the yellow stuff has a strong taste of sour armpits, combined with - yes- just a touch of old drains. It comes from the bottom of a dustbin.'
Charles glared at her. He felt sick. If he had dared, he would have stopped eating at once.
... 'A clean yellow dustbin,' Nan announced, 'The kind they keep the dead fish for Biology in.'
'Prawns are eating curried in India,' Nirupam said loudly.
... What came before them in platefuls next was one of the school's most peculiar dishes. They produced it once a month and its official name was hot-pot. With it came tinned peas and tinned tomatoes. Charles's head and Nirupam's head craned towards Miss Cadwallader again to see what they were supposed to eat this with. Mrs Cadwallader picked up a fork. They picked up forks too, then craned a second time, to make sure that Miss Cadwallader was not going to pick up a knife as well and so make it easier for everyone. She was not. Her fork drove gracefully under a pile of tinned peas. They sighed, and found both their heads turning towards Nan then in a sort of horrified expectation.
They were not disappointed. As Nan levered loose the first greasy ring of potato, the urge to describe came upon her again. It was as if she was possessed.
'Now the aim of this dish,' she said, 'is to use up leftovers. You take old potatoes and soak them in washing-up water that has been used at least twice. The water must be thoroughly scummy.' It's like a gift of tongues! she thought. Only in my case it's a gift of foul-mouth. 'Then you take a dirty old tin and rub it round with socks that have been worn for a fortnight. You fill this tin with alternate layers of scummy potatoes and cat-food, mixed with anything else you may happen to have. Old doughnuts and dead flies have been used in this case... Now these things,' Nan continued, stabbing her for into a tinned tomato, 'are small creatures that have been killed and cleverly skinned. Notice, when you taste them, the slight, sweet savour of their blood-'
Nirupam uttered a small moan and went yellower than ever.
The sound made Nan look up. Hitherto, she had been staring at the table where her plate was, in a daze of terror. Now she saw Mr Wentworth sitting opposite her across the table. He could hear her perfectly. She could tell from the expression on his face. Why doesn't he stop me? she thought. Why do they let me go on? Why doesn't somebody do something?.. And, all the time, she could hear herself talking. 'These did in fact start life as peas. But they have undergone a long and deadly process. They lie for six months in a sewer, absorbing fluids and rich tastes, which is why they are called processed peas. Then-'
.. As Miss Cadwallader talked, and Charles was forced to answer while trying to eat tinned tomatoes - no, they were not skinned mice! - using just a fork, Charles began to feel that he was undergoing a particularly refined form of torture.
... They took the hot-pot away. Charles had not eaten much. Miss Cadwallader continued to talk to him about stately homes in the country, until the pudding arrived.
... 'Rice pudding!' he exclaimed.
'It is agreeable,' Miss Cadwallader said, smiling. 'And so nourishing.' Then, incredibly, she reached to the top of her plate and picked up a fork. Charles stared. He waited. Surely Miss Cadwallader was not going to eat runny rice pudding with just a fork? But she was. She dipped the fork in and brought it up, raining weak white milk.
... Nirupam looked wretchedly down at his brimming plate. 'There is a story in the Arabian Nights,' he said, 'about a woman who ate rice with a pin, grain by grain.' Charles shot a terrified look at Miss Cadwallader, but she was talking to the lord again. 'She turned out to be a ghoul,' Nirupam said, 'She ate her fill of corpses every night.'
Charles's terrified look shot to Nan instead.

Taste, Roald Dahl

2009-03-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

It's worth knowing how all this ends - if you haven't read this short story, seek it out (you won't be disappointed).

The meal began with a plate of whitebait, fried very crisp in butter, and to go with it there was a Moselle... We finished our fish, and the maid came round removing the plates. When she came to Pratt, she saw that he had not yet touched his food, and Pratt noticed her. He waved her away, broke off his conversation, and quickly began to eat, popping the little crisp brown fish quickly into his mouth with rapid jabbing movements of his fork. Then, when he had finished, he reached for his glass, and in two short swallows he tipped the wine down this throat and turned immediately to resume his conversation with Louise Schofield... Soon the maid came forward with the second course. This was a large roast of beef. She placed it on the table in front of Mike who stood up and carved it, cutting the slices very thin, laying them gently on the plates for the maid to take around. When he had served everyone, including himself, he put down the carving knife and leaned forward with both hands on the edge of the table.
'Now,' he said, speaking to all of us but looking at Richard Pratt. 'Now for the claret. I must go and fetch the claret, if you'll excuse me.'

Unseen, Mari Jungstedt

2009-03-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

I've finally, ages later than everyone else, decided to read some Swedish crime fiction and the first book I picked up was this one. It's pretty enjoyable so far. The description of food are loving and plenty, but this one stood out - especially since I've never eaten Swedish food before, and this made me quite curious to try it. If anyone has any more crime fiction recommendations, by the way, please let me know!

The long table was set with blue-flowered Rörstand dishes, the napkins had been festively stuck in the glasses, and the silverware shone. Ceramic pitchers were filled with summer wildflowers: daisies, cranesbills, almond blossoms and fiery red poppies. The herring was arranged on a platter: herring in mustard sauce and in aquavit, pickled herring, and his own homemade herring in sherry, which burned sweetly on the tongue. The new potatoes that had just been set on the table were steaming in their deep bowls, white and tender, with green sprigs of dill that brought out the sweet taste of summer.
The bread basket was filled with crisp bread, rye crackers, and his mother's famous unleavened flat bread that could entice people to come to Gotland just for the sake of buying some of it. It was only sold at his parents' farm in Kappelshamn.
... A sense of unease came over him, but it vanished when his wife brought out the frosty bottles of ice-cold aquavit and set them on the table. He felt a rumbling in his stomach. He sliced off a piece of ripe Västerbotten cheese and quickly stuffed it into his mouth before ringing the old cowbell that they always used to announce that it was time to eat.
"Come and get it, everybody," he shouted.
After the guests had helped themselves from the platters, they all raised their glasses of aquavit, and Knutas welcomed everyone by making a toast to summer.

#43, from The Devil's Larder, Jim Crace

2009-03-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

There was an eating contest after the bride had left with her new husband on their honeymoon and all the duller couples had gone upstairs to their expensive rooms to sleep off the excesses of the day. Just nine men remained amid the debris of the dancing and the meal... All bachelors, all dressed (approximately) in white. That was the wedding theme. All white... That meant a brand-new carpet in the hotel's dining room, redecorated walls and doors, pearl tablecloths (hand-stitched with hearts in matching thread), displays of the very palest roses, lilies and carnations, and of course, a wedding dinner 'cooked from white ingredients'...
It was the barman's fault. He said it was a pity that the waiters had to waste good drinking time clearing up the mess. It was a pity, too, that such eccentric food should go to waste. 'Let's eat the lot,' he said, 'I bet we can.'
'In less than twenty minutes,' said the under-manager, 'or else you lose the bet. I want you out by two.'
The nine of them, keyed up and challenged by the errant spirit of the wedding night, spread out around the tables and set to work on what remained of the feast. There were no rules or etiquette, no social niceties. So lung and lychees shared a fork; fish steaks and sallow andouillettes were sweetened by icing from the wedding cake; baby white aubergines and boiled potatoes were dipped into coconut sauce; prawn crackers scooped up basmati rice, yoghurt dip and cream. The men made sandwiches of white oat bread, buffalo cheese, blanched asparagus and sweetened albumen. Vanilla ice cream went with everything. Speed was the thing...
They filled their glasses with the last dregs from the bottles of white wine, mixed drunkenly with milk, and held them up to toast the bridegroom and the bride, by now a hundred miles away... Somewhere, driving through the night, the honeymooners were in each other's arms, his lips on hers, deep in the lambswool cushions of their white limousine, behind the stiff and blushing chauffeur in his pallid uniform.

Heidi, Johanna Spyri

2009-03-19T05:23:00.001-07:00

'I think, however, that we could eat something first. What is your opinion about that?' asked the old man.
Heidi had been so much interested about her bed that she had forgotten everything else. Now she remembered, and felt suddenly very hungry. She had eaten nothing since breakfast, when she had a piece of bread and a little weak coffee, and had since made a long journey. Heidi replied heartily to her grandfather's question, 'Yes, I think so, indeed.'
...He went over to the fireplace... Next, he held a long iron fork over the fire, with a big piece of cheese on it, which he turned slowly round and round till it was of a golden yellow.
Heidi watched him with a keen interest; but suddenly a idea came into her head, and she sprang away.... When her grandfather came with the pot, and the roasted cheese on a fork, there lay already the round loaf, two plates, two knives, all neatly arranged; for Heidi had noticed everything in the press, and she knew what was needed for the table.
... Heidi seized her little mug, and drank and drank without once stopping; for all the thirst of her journey seemed to rise up at once. Then she drew a long breath - for in her eagerness to drink, she had not been able to stop to breathe - and set down her mug.
'Does the milk taste good?' asked her grandfather.
'I never drank such good milk,' said the child.
'Then you must have more,' said he, and filled the mug again quite to the top, and placed it before the child, who was eating her bread, spread thickly with the hot cheese, which was like butter from the heat, and tasted delicious. She now and then drank her milk, and looked meanwhile perfectly happy.

1933 Was A Bad Year, John Fante

2009-03-18T03:48:00.000-07:00

Dorothy was at the sideboard, breaking eggs and spilling them into a bowl. Just watching the oval things crack in her white fingers and spill forth with a golden plop created a series of small explosions inside me. My calves shuddered as she scrambled them with a fork and they turned yellow like her hair. She poured a bit of cream into the mixture and the silken smoothness of the descending cream had me reeling. I wanted to say, 'Dorothy Parrish, I love you', to take her in my arms, to lift the bowl of scrambled eggs above our heads and pour it over our bodies, to roll on the red tiles with her, smeared with the conquest of eggs, squirming and slithering in the yellow of love.

Boule de Suif, Guy de Maupassant

2009-03-17T04:03:00.000-07:00

As you may know from the story, Boule de Suif is a larger lady - and a prostitute. Her middle-class and hypocritical traveling companions, disgusted by her, at first are insulted that she should be sharing a carriage with them, but after going without food (having neglected to pack any) open up to her once she begins to share her lunch with them. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they end up using and humiliating her terribly. Most of the translations I've seen call her 'Butterball', which I think is far better, but the one I had to hand (no translator named) stuck with the direct translation of Boule de Suif - 'Ball-of-Fat' - which doesn't sound as good, not to mention that suif means 'tallow' (at least it does according to the internet/my high school knowledge of French), which unfortunately brings about less of an image of a big, warm, soft, plump woman than Butterball does, I think. In any case, I've stuck with the translation that I had.

Finally, at three o'clock, when they found themselves in the midst of an interminable plain, without a single village in sight, Ball-of-Fat bending down quickly drew from under the seat a large basket covered with a white napkin.
At first she brought out a little china plate and a silver cup; then a large dish in which there were two whole chickens, cut up and imbedded in their own jelly. And one could still see in the basket other good things, some pâtés, fruits, and sweetmeats, provisions for three days if they should not see the kitchen of an inn. Four necks of bottles were seen among the packages of food. She took a wing of a chicken and began to eat it delicately, with one of those little biscuits called 'Regence' in Normandy.
All looks were turned in her direction. Then the odour spread, enlarging the nostrils and making the mouth water, besides causing a painful contraction of the jaw behind the ears. The scorn of the women for this girl became ferocious, as if they had a desire to kill her and throw her out of the carriage into the snow, her, her silver cup, her basket, provisions and all.
But Loiseau with his eyes devoured the dish of chicken. He said: "Fortunately Madame had more precaution than we. There are some people who know how to think ahead always."
She turned toward him, saying: 'If you would like some of it, sir? It is hard to go without breakfast so long."
He saluted her and replied: "Faith, I frankly cannot refuse; I can stand it no longer. Everything goes in time of war, does it not, Madame?" And then casting a comprehensive glance around, he added: "In moments like this, one can but be pleased to find people who are obliging."
He had a newspaper which he spread out on his knees, that no spot might come to his pantaloons, and upon the point of a knife that he always carried in his pocket, he took up a leg all glistening with jelly between his teeth and masticated it with a satisfaction so evident that there ran through the carriage a great sigh of distress.
Then Ball-of-Fat, in a sweet and humble voice, proposed that the two sisters partake of her collation. They both accepted instantly and, without raising their eyes, began to eat very quickly, after stammering thanks. Cornudet no longer refused the offers of his neighbour, and they formed with the sisters a sort of table, by spreading out some newspaper upon their knees.
... It is the first step that counts. The Rubicon passed, one lends himself to the occasion squarely. The basked was stripped. It still contained a pâté de foie gras, a pâté of larks, a piece of smoked tongue, some preserved pears, a loaf of hard bread, some wafers, and full cup of pickled gherkins and onions, of which condiments Ball-of-Fat, like all women, was extremely fond.
They could not eat this girl's provisions without speaking to her. And so, they chatted, with reserve at first; then, as she carried herself well, with more abandon.

Dearly Devoted Dexter, Jeff Lindsay

2009-03-16T09:17:00.000-07:00

I love Dexter the tv show, and since I haven't yet seen season 3 and am waiting for it on dvd (no spoilers please!), I've been reading the Dexter books in the meanwhile. The first two were a really fun read, and I'm about to start the third. Dexter really is a monster that loves food (I think donuts are mentioned more in the books than death), and he particularly loves medianoches (see here for details, plus a mouthwatering picture) and batidas (Cuban milkshakes made with fruit). Here is a typical description of the former, from the second book.

It was indeed a long wait, well over two hours. I sat in the car and listened to the radio and tried to picture, bite by bite, what it was like to eat a medianoche sandwich: the crackle of the bread crust, so crisp and toasty it scratches the inside of your mouth as you bite down. Then the first taste of mustard, followed by the soothing cheese and the salt of the meat. Next bite - a piece of pickle. Chew it all up; let the flavors mingle. Swallow. Take a big sip of Iron Beer (pronounced Ee-roan Bay-er, and it's a soda). Sigh. Sheer bliss. I would rather eat than do anything else except play with the Dark Passenger. It's a true miracle of genetics that I am not fat.
I was on my third imaginary sandwich when Deborah finally came back to the car. She slid into the driver's seat, closed the door, and just sat there, staring at the rain-splattered windshield. And I knew it wasn't the best thing I could have said, but I couldn't help myself. 'You look beat, Deb. How about lunch?'

The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield

2009-03-12T11:30:00.000-07:00

Today's excerpt comes courtesy of Emily, and reminds me of a moment from my own past involving my sister, myself, and a box of eclairs. Although this excerpt doesn't involve theft, tears, lies, and sibling-on-sibling violence. Good times...

"Godber's has come," announced Sadie, issuing out of the pantry. She had seen the man pass the window.
That meant the cream puffs had come. Godber's were famous for their cream puffs. Nobody ever thought of making them at home.
"Bring them in and put them on the table, my girl," ordered cook.
Sadie brought them in and went back to the door. Of course Laura and Jose were far too grown-up to really care about such things. All the same, they couldn't help agreeing that the puffs looked very attractive. Very. Cook began arranging them, shaking off the extra icing sugar.
"Don't they carry one back to all one's parties?" said Laura.
"I suppose they do," said practical Jose, who never liked to be carried back. "They look beautifully light and feathery, I must say."
"Have one each, my dears," said cook in her comfortable voice. "Yer ma won't know."
Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.

Claudine in Paris, Colette

2009-03-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

Here is an excerpt involving one of my favourite heroines in literature, Colette's Claudine. I can't help but compare her to Melanie from The Magic Toyshop, who readers will remember from this post: both are adolescent girls, and both are slowly discovering a world (particularly a sexual one) beyond their individual childish fantasies of adulthood. But where Melanie is tentative, relucant, and deeply introspective - the half-afraid and half-fascinated subject of Finn's taunting and seduction - Claudine is confident, aware already of her sexuality and its power (particularly over the meek Luce), and frustrated that her passage into adulthood won't go any faster. The difference is also reflected in their accounts of other pleasures - particularly eating - Melanie approaches food practically, concerned over whether there will be enough of it, delighting in its abundance and comfort, imagining adult food to be rationed and sparse. Claudine, on the other hand, delights in taste and texture, and seems to be aware of food only as an indulgence, as in this passage with the chocolate, and its sensual qualities are emphasised, as in her conversation with Marcel.

She was getting married; she was seventeen. And I?... Oh, if only I could be given back Montigny, and last year, and the year before that, and my turbulent, indiscreet prying into other people's affairs! If I could only have back my disappointed love for Madamoiselle's little Aimée and my sensual bullying of Luce - for I've no one here and don't even want to behave badly!
Whoever would have believed that she was revolving such tearful thoughts, this Claudine, sitting cross-legged in a dressing gown before the marble chimneypiece and apparently completely absorbed in roasting one side of a bar of chocolate kept upright between a pair of tongs? When the surface exposed to the fire softened, blackened, crackled, and blistered, I lifted it off in thin layers with my little knife... Exquisite taste, a mixture of grilled almonds and grated vanilla! The melancholy sweetness of savouring the toasted chocolate and, at the same time, staining one's toenails pink with a little rag soaked in Papa's red ink!
The returning sun showed me the absurdity of my desolation of last night. All the more so because Marcel arrived at half past five, lively and beautiful as... as only Marcel can be...
With his woman's grace, a compound of ease and of extraordinary precision of movement, he caught me round the waist and gently breathed on my half-closed eyes. He kept the game up and finally declared, 'You smell of.... cinnamon, Claudine.'
'Why cinnamon?' I asked languidly, leaning against his arm and half tranced by his light breath.
'I don't know. A warm smell, a smell like some exotic sweetmeat.'
'So that's it! An oriental bazaar, in fact?'
'No. A bit like Viennese pastry - a smell good to eat. And what do I smell of?' he demanded, putting his velvety cheek very close to my mouth.
'New-mown hay,' I said, sniffing it. And, as his cheek did not withdraw, I kissed it gently, without pressing. But I would have kissed a bunch of flowers or a ripe peach in just the same way. There are some scents one can only take in properly with one's mouth.

Strawberries, Edwin Morgan

2009-03-09T13:55:00.001-07:00

Another poem today. But quite different from the last.

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon

sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air

in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

Oatmeal, Gary Kinnell

2009-03-08T18:11:00.000-07:00

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal--porridge, as he called it--with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the "Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it--those were his words--
"Oi 'ad a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket,
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend
spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas, and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay \ itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field got him started on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.

The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, James Joyce

2009-02-01T18:09:00.000-08:00

All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled around the edge with glistening drops.

Stephen looked at the plump turkey which had lain, trussed and skewered, on the kitchen table. He knew that his father had paid a guinea for it in Dunn's of D'Olier Street and that the man had prodded it often at the breastbone to show how good it was: and he remembered the man's voice when he had said:

-- Take that one, sir. That's the real Ally Daly.

Why did Mr Barrett in Clongowes call his pandybat a turkey? But Clongowes was far away: and the warm heavy smell of turkey and ham and celery rose from the plates and dishes and the great fire was banked high and red in the grate and the green ivy and red holly made you feel so happy and when dinner was ended the big plum pudding would be carried in, studded with peeled almonds and sprigs of holly, with bluish fire running around it and a little green flag flying from the top.

... It was his first Christmas dinner and he thought of his little brothers and sisters who were waiting in the nursery, as he had often waited, till the pudding came. The deep low collar and the Eton jacket made him feel queer and oldish: and that morning when his mother had brought him down to the parlour, dressed for mass, his father had cried. That was because he was thinking of his own father. And uncle Charles had said so too.

Mr Dedalus covered the dish and began to eat hungrily. Then he said:

-- Poor old Christy, he's nearly lopsided now with roguery.

-- Simon, said Mrs Dedalus, you haven't given Mrs Riordan any sauce.

Mr Dedalus seized the sauceboat.

-- Haven't I? he cried. Mrs Riordan, pity the poor blind. Dante covered her plate with her hands and said:

-- No, thanks.

Mr Dedalus turned to uncle Charles.

-- How are you off, sir?

-- Right as the mail, Simon.

-- You, John?

-- I'm all right. Go on yourself.

-- Mary? Here, Stephen, here's something to make your hair curl.

He poured sauce freely over Stephen's plate and set the boat again on the table. Then he asked Uncle Charles was it tender. Uncle Charles could not speak because his mouth was full; but he nodded that it was.

The Famished Road, Ben Okri

2009-01-29T11:45:00.000-08:00

This is one of my favourite books. I first read it when I was 12 or so, after my father read it. At that time I thought it was fantastic and beautiful, but of course reading it as an adult was a completely different experience. The following passage is one of the few involving food that is somewhat joyous - yet at the same time is also deeply ominous and foreboding (if you've read the book, this will be particularly clear to you). And in terms of this blog, it's a big a change from the crumpets, toast, tea and cake that have so far dominated the excerpts here.

When we got to our new home the children ran out to meet us. The men came to help Dad with the sack, but he didn't want any help. The women talked excitedly. Our door was open. Folding chairs had been arranged all around the tiny space. The centre table was loaded with drinks. There was a bowl of kola-nuts and kaoline on the floor. There was the potent aroma of fresh stew in the air. The room was empty. Dad went to the backyard and we found Mum in the kitchen. She was fanning the wood fire, tears running down her face, a mighty pot on the grate. When she saw us she came out and held Dad tight and picked me up. Dad put the sack down on the kitchen floor. He looked at me for a moment, and said: 'I have kept my promise.'
Then he went out of the kitchen, to the room, came back with towel and soap, fetched water from the well, and had a long bath. I stayed with Mum in the kitchen, coughing when she coughed. The water boiled in the pot. Women of the compound came and helped her with getting the boar out of the sack. They poured boiling water on its skin, loosening its hair. They shaved it. Five men helped them butcher the fierce-looking animal. They decapitated it, cut it to pieces, and gutted out its monstrous intestines. Then the woman began the cooking of the wild animal that Dad had caught in the forest.
When the meat was cooking, on another fire a great pan was sizzling with oil. The whole compound smelt of aromatic stew, peppers, onion, wild earthy herbs and frying bushmeat. When everyone could be seen salivating in anticipation, Mum made me go and bathe. I wore a new set of clothes. Visitors and compound-dwellers came one by one to our room. They took their seats. Mum combed my hair and gave me a parting. Dad also had a parting. Mum bathed. In the bathroom she dressed up in her fine clothes. She did her hair and made her face up in the passage.
Soon our little room was crowded with all kinds of people. Many of them were from our compound, one or two were from our previous habitation, a few of them were total strangers, and a lot of them were children. It was hot in the room and everyone sweated. All the chairs were filled and all the floor space was taken. A woman struck up a song. A man struck up a more vigorous song. The children looked on. Mum came in with a plate of alligator pepper seeds, a saucer of cigarettes, and breadfruit. And then we heard a flourish outside.
It was Dad. He was at the doorway with an empty bottle in one hand, a spoon in the other. He was beating a tune out of glass. He wore a black French suit and had a fresh change of bandages. An eagle's feather stuck out from the back of his head. He looked happy and a little drunk. He came in, beating his metallic tune on glass, dancing and singing to music of his own invention. The crowd laughed, cheering in appreciation. Everyone began to chatter. Voices rose in volume. Jokes passed across the sweating faces. I felt a stranger amidst the celebration of my homecoming.
Then to our delight a woman appeared at the door, sounding a heraldic song. Mum came in with three women, carrying a great steaming pot of stew. Behind her were three more women, bearing basins of jollof rice, yams, beans, eba and fried plaintains. Children brought in paper plates and plastic cutlery. The aroma of the marvellous cooking overpowered the room. Everyone straightened. Faces were bright with aroused appetites. There wasn't a single throat that didn't betray the hopes for a feast of abundant cooking in which all anticipation would be fully rewarded.

The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton

2009-01-25T15:33:00.000-08:00

I'm back! And with an excerpt that haunted my childhood dreams for years after I read it. It's interesting how writing that's so simple, and not that descriptive, can evoke so much for a child. Just a note - this blog won't be daily from now on, but I will try to update it far more often. Enjoy!

How the children hoped the day would be fine! They woke early and jumped out of bed. They pulled their curtains open and looked out. The sky was as blue as cornflowers. The sun shone between the trees, and the shadows lay long and dewy on the grass. The Enchanted Wood stood dark and mysterious behind their garden.
They all had breakfast, then Mother cut sandwiches, and put them in a bag along with three cakes each. She sent Joe to pick some plums from the garden, and told Beth to take two bottles of lemonade. The children were most excited.
Father set off to town, and the children waved goodbye to him from the gate. Then they tore off indoors to get the bag in which their food had been put. They said goodbye to their mother and slammed the cottage door. Ah, adventures were in the air that morning!
...[once they're further up the faraway tree] At this moment the yellow door opened and a small fairy looked out. Her hair was fluffed out around her shoulders, drying, and she was rubbing it with a towel. She stared at the peeping children.
'Did you ring my bell,' she asked, 'What do you want?'
'We just wanted to see who lived in the funny little tree-house,' said Joe, peering in at the dark room inside the tree. The fairy smiled. She had a very sweet face.
'Come in for a moment,' she said, 'My name is Silky, because of my silky hair. Where are you off to?'
'We are climbing the Faraway Tree to see what is at the top,' said Joe.
'Be careful you don't find something horrid,' said Silky, giving them each a chair in her dark little room, 'Sometimes there are delightful places at the top of the tree - but sometimes there are strange lands too. Last week there was the land of Hippety -Hop, which was dreadful. As soon as you got there, you had to hop on one leg, and everything went hippety-hop, even the trees. Nothing ever kept still. It was most tiring.'
'It does sound exciting,' said Beth, 'Where's our food, Joe? Let's ask Silky to have some.'
Silky was pleased. She sat there brushing her beautiful, golden hair and ate sandwiches with them. She brought out a tin of Pop Cakes, which were lovely. As soon as you bit into them they went pop! and you suddenly found your mouth filled with new honey from the middle of the little cakes. Frannie took seven, one after the other, for she was rather greedy.

Hiatus

2008-12-28T17:57:00.000-08:00

I hope that everyone has had a lovely Christmas, and any other festival that you happen to celebrate, and that you all have an equally happy New Year.

This blog will be back in mid-January, due to traveling and other personal reasons.

See you then!

The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring), JRR Tolkien

2008-12-23T17:19:00.000-08:00

A door opened and in came Tom Bombadil. He had now no hat and his thick brown hair was crowned with autumn leaves. He laughed, and going to Goldberry, took her hand.

'Here's my pretty lady! he said, bowing to the hobbits. 'Here's my Goldberry clothed all in silver-green with flowers in her girdle! Is the table laden? I see yellow cream and honeycomb, and white bread, and butter; milk, cheese and green herbs and ripe berries gathered. Is that enough for us? Is the supper ready?'

... Before long, washed and refreshed, the hobbits were seated at the table, two on each side, while at either end sat Goldberry and the Master. It was a long and merry meal. Though the hobbits ate, as only famished hobbits can eat, there was no lack. The drink in their drinking-bowls seemed to be clear cold water, yet it went to their hearts like wine and set free their voices. The guests became suddenly aware that they were singing merrily, as if it was easier and more natural than talking.

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

2008-12-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

My apologies everyone. I've been away from the blog due to a mixture of travel + some other personal reasons. But, I'm back. My absence has also meant that I haven't had time to harvest delicious moments from books, so, today, I provide you with a book we've already covered but a passage we haven't. Hopefully this mountain of food will make up for it all.

Beneath the candelabra, beneath the five tiers bearing towards the distant ceiling pyramids of home-made cakes that were never touched, spread the monotonous opulence of buffets at big balls: coraline lobsters boiled alive, waxy chaud-froids of veal, steely-lined fish immersed in sauce, turkeys gilded by the oven's heat, rosy foie-gras under gelatine armour, boned woodcocks reclining on amber toast decorated with their own chopped guts, dawn-tinted galantine, and a dozen other cruel, coloured delights. At the end of the table two monumental silver tureens held limpid soup, the tint of burnt amber. To prepare this supper the cooks must have sweated away in the vast kitchens from the night before.

'Dear me, what an amount! Donna Margherita knows how to do things well. But it's not for me!'

Scorning the table of drinks, glittering with crystal and silver on the right, he moved left towards that of the sweetmeats. Huge sorrel babas, Mont Blancs snowy with whipped cream, cakes speckled with white almonds and green pistachio nuts, hillocks of chocolate-covered pastry, brown and rich as the top soil of the Catanian plain from which, in fact, through many a twist and turn they had come, pink ices, champagne ices, coffee ices, all parfaits and falling apart with the squelch of a knife cleft; a melody in major of crystallised cherries, acid notes of yellow pineapple, and green pistachio paste of those cakes called 'Triumphs of Gluttony', shameless 'Virgins' cakes' shaped like breasts. Don Fabrizio asked for some of these, and as he held them on his plate looked like a profane caricature of Saint Agatha claiming her own sliced-off breasts. 'Why didn't ever the Holy Office forbid these puddings when it had the chance? 'Triumphs of Gluttony' indeed! (Gluttony, mortal sin!) Saint Agatha's sliced-off teats sold by convents, devoured at dances! Well! Well!'

Ode to Tomatoes, Pablo Neruda

2008-12-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

I am now convinced that the tomato is the best of all fruits (or vegetables, depending on how you feel).

The street
filled with tomatoes
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera,
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhausible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth,
recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

(Translation by Margaret Sayers Peden, original here.)

Three blog recommendations

2008-12-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

I was just shown this blog by a friend - Daily Routines - which is a collection of the various daily working routines of artists, writers, architects, etc. It's fascinating and I can say goodbye to at least 45 mins of my own work this afternoon reading it.

Another blog that is great, and I'm not just mentioning her because she mentioned me, is Queenie Takes Manhattan - as someone who regularly goes between London and the US, and is always trying to figure out which places to eat in New York, her reviews which are coherent (unlike so many), interesting and imbued with a genuine but unpretentious love of food and exploring different places are amongst the most helpful I've found. I now have a big list of restaurants I must go to thanks to her, and perhaps shamefully it was her blog, and not my friend's insistence, that has finally convinced me to take a few days off that I don't have to go to Paris to visit my best friend who's just moved there.

Finally, Forgotten Bookmarks. I buy a good proportion of my books from secondhand bookshops, and am always excited when I find something forgotten lodged between the pages. I've found baby pictures, postcards (the earliest from 1919), grocery lists, decorative ribbons and bills. Strangely, I can't ever throw them away. So this blog, which collects a wide assortment of items, is strange and intriguing - I think I like the photographs the best.

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

2008-12-09T07:10:00.001-08:00

Since there was no post yesterday, here are two from the same book to make up for it. The first which I've seen many people refer to as their favourite food scene from a book, and the second a more entertaining one.

They saw the robin carry food to his mate two or three times, and it was so suggestive of afternoon tea that Colin felt they must have some.

"Go and make one of the men servants bring some in a basket to the rhododendron walk," he said. "And then you and Dickon can bring it here."

It was an agreeable idea, easily carried out, and when the white cloth was spread upon the grass, with hot tea and buttered toast and crumpets, a delightfully hungry meal was eaten, and several birds on domestic errands paused to inquire what was going on and were led into investigating crumbs with great activity. Nut and Shell whisked up trees with pieces of cake and Soot took the entire half of a buttered crumpet into a corner and pecked at and examined and turned it over and made hoarse remarks about it until he decided to swallow it all joyfully in one gulp.

***

It became possible for both Colin and Mary to do more of them each time they tried, and such appetites were the results that but for the basket Dickon put down behind the bush each morning when he arrived they would have been lost. But the little oven in the hollow and Mrs. Sowerby's bounties were so satisfying that Mrs. Medlock and the nurse and Dr. Craven became mystified again. You can trifle with your breakfast and seem to disdain your dinner if you are full to the brim with roasted eggs and potatoes and richly frothed new milk and oatcakes and buns and heather honey and clotted cream.

"They are eating next to nothing," said the nurse. "They'll die of starvation if they can't be persuaded to take some nourishment. And yet see how they look."

"Look!" exclaimed Mrs. Medlock indignantly. "Eh! I'm moithered to death with them. They're a pair of young Satans. Bursting their jackets one day and the next turning up their noses at the best meals Cook can tempt them with. Not a mouthful of that lovely young fowl and bread sauce did they set a fork into yesterday--and the poor woman fair invented a pudding for them--and back it's sent. She almost cried. She's afraid she'll be blamed if they starve themselves into their graves."

Dr. Craven came and looked at Colin long and carefully, He wore an extremely worried expression when the nurse talked with him and showed him the almost untouched tray of breakfast she had saved for him to look at--but it was even more worried when he sat down by Colin's sofa and examined him. He had been called to London on business and had not seen the boy for nearly two weeks. When young things begin to gain health they gain it rapidly. The waxen tinge had left, Colins skin and a warm rose showed through it; his beautiful eyes were clear and the hollows under them and in his cheeks and temples had filled out. His once dark, heavy locks had begun to look as if they sprang healthily from his forehead and were soft and warm with life. His lips were fuller and of a normal color. In fact as an imitation of a boy who was a confirmed invalid he was a disgraceful sight. Dr. Craven held his chin in his hand and thought him over.

"I am sorry to hear that you do not eat any- thing," he said. "That will not do. You will lose all you have gained --and you have gained amazingly. You ate so well a short time ago."

"I told you it was an unnatural appetite," answered Colin.

Mary was sitting on her stool nearby and she suddenly made a very queer sound which she tried so violently to repress that she ended by almost choking.

"What is the matter?" said Dr. Craven, turning to look at her.

Mary became quite severe in her manner.

"It was something between a sneeze and a cough," she replied with reproachful dignity, "and it got into my throat."

"But," she said afterward to Colin, "I couldn't stop myself. It just burst out because all at once I couldn't help remembering that last big potato you ate and the way your mouth stretched when you bit through that thick lovely crust with jam and clotted cream on it."

"Is there any way in which those children can get food secretly?" Dr. Craven inquired of Mrs. Medlock.

"There's no way unless they dig it out of the earth or pick it off the trees," Mrs. Medlock answered. "They stay out in the grounds all day and see no one but each other. And if they want anything different to eat from what's sent up to them they need only ask for it."

"Well," said Dr. Craven, "so long as going without food agrees with them we need not disturb ourselves. The boy is a new creature."

"So is the girl," said Mrs. Medlock. "She's begun to be downright pretty since she's filled out and lost her ugly little sour look. Her hair's grown thick and healthy looking and she's got a bright color. The glummest, ill-natured little thing she used to be and now her and Master Colin laugh together like a pair of crazy young ones. Perhaps they're growing fat on that."

"Perhaps they are," said Dr. Craven. "Let them laugh."

Recipe for The Leopard's macaroni pie

2008-12-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

Picture from Cris at leocarre.com

A little while ago I posted the passage from The Leopard where an amazing macaroni pie is described. Wandering around the internet, I came across this recipe, which is apparently the pie described, and is indeed very pretty and looks like it would taste great.

I now am minded to replicate it at some point...

If anyone does try, please let me know how it went.