Amuse Bouche

So there I was in the Jura, ready for my final pilgrimage. I was looking forward to tasting - for the last time - my favourite treats: some Cancoillotte, a bite of mature Comté, and a bottle of Monique Genevez’s Arbois wine. I would tread the last blades of grass, snap the last twigs, before the final plunge. My pilgrimage. My own personal Lourdes… hoping for a miracle..

It came to me during the night, in Monique Genevez’s gîte.

from After The Crash by Michel Bussi (2015). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

All he had to do was drive to a fish warehouse in Oakland, hand a slip of paper to a Chinese kid who worked for Fariq’s organization, and throw the squid into his van. From there, he’d take it to Fremont, put it on the ground, and come back the next day, when it had thawed. Then he’d open it up and pull out the vacuum-sealed loaves of drugs. I used to love squid, he told them later. I can’t eat it anymore.

from Every Man A Menace by Patrick Hoffman (2016). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

I looked at the turkey, which had dropped off the end of the table and slid… to rest ..beside the door. I had ordered a big turkey, even though there were only three of us.

Daddy had always said a small turkey looked mean, and we could make sandwiches and stew from the leftovers, and all those thoughts about the turkey and how many ways I could prepare it went through my head as my husband died, there and then in front of me. I stood in shock in those ten seconds while he fought to breathe, until he was entirely still.

from Lying in Wait by Liz Nugent (2016) Highly Recommended. 

Amuse Bouche

’Cabbage? Red onions? Are you sure? Those ingredients are very…rustic. You know, I do believe he might enjoy something a little more sophisticated. He is a great gourmand, Édouard, you know. Why, once we went to Le Petit Fils and he ate the entire dégustation menu of fourteen course. Can you imagine? I thought he was going to burst by the time the petits fours arrived. But he was so happy…’ She shook her head, as if lost in a reverie. ‘He is a man of such appetites…’

from Paris for One and other stories by JoJo Moyes (2016). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

We ate breakfast without speaking. I waited, half-cringing, for the blows to fall, but Bennett did not accuse me further. His boiled egg rattled against the cup. His spoon clanked in the coffee. In the deathly silence between us, every sound and every motion seemed exaggerated as if in a movie close-up. His slicing off the top of the skull of his egg could be an Andy Warhol epic. Egg, it would be called. Six hours of a man’s hand amputating the top of an egg’s head. Slow motion.

from Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1974). Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

This time two waiters appeared. One placed a cocktail in front of each of us, while the other set down on the table an array of appetizers, traditional fare from the fabled bar upstairs - ’21’ Club mini-burgers, crispy chicken wings, jumbo shrimp cocktail, and a large charcuterie.

“Nobody’s mentioned the mob,” Mike said, dredging a shrimp in the sauce and moving it to his mouth without a single drip. “You know something we don’t?”

from Night Watch by Linda Fairstein (2012) Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

The convoy set out across the Blasket Sound and on their arrival the wedding feast began in earnest… Nine barrels of Bandon Rattler, brewed by Allmans in west Cork, were consumed at this feast, according to Méiní, and the fact that in Maurice Keane’s memory it was eight barrels plus a gallon of whiskey confirms that it was certainly an occasion when thirsty souls were amply refreshed… and no doubt the island musicians did their share.

from Méiní, The Blasket Nurse, by Leslie Matson (1996). Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

The apartment was abjectly appointed on the corner of the second of three poured-concrete stories. The front window gave onto a distressing view of purple Christmas cabbages. Rain raised oily puddles in the grocery parking lot, peacock blue and burnt orange, and until well after midnight a corrosive smell of exhaust stole through the vents. The aisles of the grocery store were filled with college students. They dawdled in formation, and stared in perplexity at fresh produce like they were encountering obscene paintings.

from Kiddio at the Wedding by Mary O’Donoghue, one of the stories in New Irish Writing, a feature in Granta Spring 2016, Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

A Firkin

Men have seen salmon in shallows of the Garravogue where formerly there were deeps…. But there is a tremendous trade in butter from all the western farms. There is still butter going down the Garravogue and excellent things coming up it. Now the men, the few that are most willing, are getting into the trains for Dublin and shipping out to England and beyond. You can sense the press of men behind them, …, held in just as yet by the ramparts of the wishes of their wives. But all in all the war is there and the men of Sligo cannot resist for long…

from The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastien Barry (1998). Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

The exotic atmosphere was soured by the news that Singapore was about to fall. But being one to make the most of a bad situation, McCarthy enjoyed the local hospitality on offer. Years later he would recall the taste of Dutch gin mixed with crushed ice and fresh lime juice, and the colonial feast of ‘riz tafel’ with a multitude of plates of meat, fish, vegetables, curries with steamed rice, all washed down with locally brewed Dutch draught beer.

from A Doctor’s Sword by Bob Jackson (2016). Very Highly Recommended.

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Old church in Dungloe turned into bakery/tearoom

Tootsie gave me a sympathetic smile. “Lieutenant Fitzgerald is a lively young man.”

“Lively,” our father said, “will not put food on a family's table either - and especially not when a great portion of whatever income he does receive goes to drink. His name - Fitzgerald - that’s Irish, you know. And I’ll suppose he's a Catholic. I’m a fair man, but there are good reasons those people have the reputations they do. Baby, you don't want to get ensnared here.”

from Z (A novel of Zelda Fitzgerald) by Therese Anne Fowler (2013)

Amuse Bouche

One day in January 1933 I was sitting with my esteemed publisher Rowohlt in Schlichters Wine Bar in Berlin, enjoying a convivial dinner. Our lady wives and a few bottles of good Franconian wine kept us company. We were, as they say in the Scriptures, filled with good wine, and on this occasion it had a good effect on us too.  … it had put me in in a cheerful and rather jocular, bantering mood, which made me the ideal companion for Rowohlt, who is increasingly transformed by alcohol into a huge two-hundred-pound baby. He sat at the table with alcohol evaporating, in a manner of speaking, from every pore of his body.

from A Stranger in my own Country by Hans Fallada (2009). Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Winemakers elsewhere tried to cash in on the champagne boom… In Burgundy, there was a sparkling Nuits St George, a sparkling Montrachet, and a sparkling Romanée Conti. In Bordeaux, there was a sparkling Sauternes. In the Southern Rhone, one winemaker produced a sparkling Chateauneuf du Pape. Aside from their fizziness, however, they bore no resemblance to genuine champagne. “They are miserable parodies,” one critic said.

Champagne had become unique.

from Champagne by Don and Petie Kladstrup (2005)

Amuse Bouche

..Capa literally went to town with his expense account.. He took old friends like Pamela Churchill out for lavish lunches…. And dined several models..including Bettina Graziani, a bewitching Breton.. He introduced her to his favourite restaurant in Paris: a tiny bistro called Chez Anna, run by the eponymous proprietor, who cooked exquisite rustic French dishes. He adored it not least because Anna owned a pet chicken that would often sit perched on his table as he polished off yet another bottle of champagne.

From Blood and Champagne (The life and times of Robert Capa) by Alex Kershaw (2002)

Amuse Bouche

..they were eating breakfast. There were two big sandwiches of meat and goat cheese apiece, and Robert Jordan had cut thick slices of onion with his clasp knife and put them on each side of the meat and cheese between the chunks of bread.

‘You will have a breath that will carry through the forest to the fascists,’ Augustín said, his own mouth full.

‘Give me the wineskin and I will rinse the mouth,’ Robert Jordan said, his mouth full of meat, cheese, onion and chewed bread.

He ...filled his mouth with wine, ...the wineskin touching the needles of the blind of pine branches that covered the automatic rifle as he lifted his hand…

From For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1941)

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The grown-ups chatted and drank dry sherry and nibbled on what John Dos Passos called “recondite hors d'oeuvres” - probably the delicious little crackers called sables that Honoria still remembers - and then after a while everyone went back to the villa for lunch. They ate at the big table on the terrace under the linden tree - an omelette and salad from the garden, or poached eggs on a bed of creamed corn with sautéed Provencal tomatoes on the side, or a plain dish of new potatoes, freshly dug, with butter from the villa’s cows and fresh parsley, and simple local wine to wash it all down.

from Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill (1998)

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Muddy Waters, too, sometimes played with the travelling medicine shows that passed through Mississippi…..

Elsewhere, in the 1940s and 50s, black musicians were often only able to tour through a segregated United States on the ‘chitlin circuit’ - ‘a string of black-owned honky-tonks, night clubs, and theaters’- so-called because the venues also served up chitlins (chitterlings) and other soul food. In that pre-civil rights era, this circuit sustained the careers of performers such as James Brown, B.B. King, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin.

From Easy Riders, Rolling Stones (on the road in America, from Delta Blues to 70s Rock) by John Scanlan (2015)

Amuse Bouche

As the cook can dispense a number of much-sought-after privileges - a juicy piece of crackling here, a pig’s trotter there, a spot close to the stove for drying socks, a drop of coffee before going out on the dogwatch, etc. - he is always surrounded by a crowd of sycophants seeking his favors. Napoleon benefited from these various acts of kindness without doing a thing to earn them.

From The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys

Amuse Bouche

If rubbing shoulders with the good and great floats your boat, read on… Dr Michael Smurfit invited me to a private dinner at his K Club. His firm, Woodfab, was having problems procuring enough timber from Coillte at the right price. …… The encounter didn't yield any progress… The most memorable feature of the night was that Smurfit drank different wine (Petrus, I think) from us out of his own decanter. Bad manners, methought, even if what we drank was top-notch vino.

from Full On by Ivan Yates (2014). Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

William Ladd also commented on the class differences in beer drinking:

But houses such as most of yours which sell any quantity of draught porter are not the places where a large sale of ale is likely to take place, as it is used by a very different class of customers who usually avoid the other. One house in Patrick St. district would sell more ale than 10 in Barrack St., while the exact contrary is the case with draught porter.

from Beamish & Crawford, The History of an Irish Brewery, by Donal Ó’Drisceoil and Diarmuid Ó’Drisceoil (2015). Recommended.