Amuse Bouche

Over the next few months Victor visited him several times as a friend, and on two occasions as a doctor. Neruda would greet him in his indigenous poncho and beret, affable and as much a gourmand as ever, more than ready to share a sea bass baked in the oven and a bottle of Chilean wine and to talk… No longer was he the playful joker who dressed up to entertain his friends… … his heart was heavy. He was afraid for Chile.

from A Long Petal Of The Sea by Isabel Allende (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Pic via pixabay

Available via Borrowbox

They went for a coffee ..at the top of the museum’s observation tower. They sat there munching dry cheese sandwiches and looking down at the sun-drenched museum and the crowds growing in size with each moment that passed. Stockholm’s assembled pensioner corps seemed to be there, clutching lethal pieces of bread which would soon be transferred into monstrous, deadly lumps, responsible for the death of more seabirds than the country’s poachers combined.

Though that wasn’t exactly what Paul Helm and Jorge Chavez had on their minds. They were thinking about a murder.

from Europa Blues by Arne Dahl (2001). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

There were pancakes, of course; and sausages; and duck confit and goose-liver terrine; and sweet pink onions, fried mushrooms with herbs, and little tomme cheeses rolled in ash; and pastis gascon, and nut bread, aniseed bread, fouace, olives, chillies and dates. To drink, there was cider and wine and floc, with fruit juices for the children and even a dish of leftovers for the dog, which later curled up by the fire and slept, occasionally twitching its tail and muttering vague obscenities between its teeth.

Outside, the Autan wind gained strength, and we began to hear the rain smacking against the window glass.

from Peaches for Monsieur le Curé by Joanne Harris (2012). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Thierry Puzelat (right front), in L'Atitude two years ago.

What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect about natural wine?

For winemakers, the biggest mistake is to be so involved in the philosophy that they forget their job: making good wine.

For drinkers and winemakers, in our world where everything is immediate, they generally don’t understand that wine and nature need time. 

from Natural Wine for the People by Alice Feiring (2019). Very Highly Recommended. The question is by the author, the answer by Thierry Puzelat, a winemaker from the Loire.

Amuse Bouche

Oh well. She turned her mind back to the weekend shopping. Doris had complained that the shelves were being stripped. ‘Couldn’t get Persil or baked beans, Miss Morris, Weetabix all gone, too. Won’t be the Nazis as causes the shortages - it’ll be our own hoarders!’

from Nemesis by Rory Clements (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Steaming platters of swordfish carved shuddering into slabs and delicate wobbles of eggplant and dishes of Sicilian macaroni thick with peppers and tomatoes and pork under a golden crust. Twists of bread still hot and soft. Calamari wrapped in brown sugar. 

Plato said, of Agrigento, that we build as if we expect to live forever and eat as if we expect to die tomorrow.

If we eat even half of this, Giuseppe said dryly, we likely shall.

from Lampedusa by Steven Price (2019). Very Highly Recommended. Available on Borrow Box

Amuse Bouche

I was able to sneak down… to the dressing room and watch him tog on. Then I would go back to the Glenmorgan and watch him eat dinner. He used to mash everything up and then spoon the food into him and so that was how I had to eat my dinner. Every chap had a favourite player and Ring was my idol. 

from Christy Ring by Tim Horgan (2007). Very Highly Recommended. (The man quoted here is Tipperary hurler Jimmy Doyle).

Amuse Bouche

As they stood there, taking their leave of each other, the cheeses seemed to stink even more. They all seemed to stink together, in a foul cacophony: from the oppressiveness of the heavy Dutch cheeses and the gruyères to the sharp alkaline note of the olivet. From the cantal, Cheshire, and goat’s milk came the sound of the bassoon, punctuated by the sudden, share notes of the neufchâtels, the troyes, and the mont-d’ors. Then the smells went wild and became completely jumbled….. The stench rose and spread… a huge sickening mixture.

from The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola (1873). Translation by Brian Nelson (2007). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Pic via Pixabay

We approached a village….. There was a long table with plastic cups and jugs of water. We stopped and drank and women from the village brought out blankets. They gave us bread and cherries and a small bag of nuts, then they stood back and watched us leave. I realised afterwards that the look I had mistaken for wonder was actually fear, and I imagined swapping places with them, seeing hundreds of people battered by war heading to an unknown future.

from The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Cocaine, it turned out, was as widely available in Dublin as London, and I didn’t have to travel far to get it. I grew up watching films depicting drug dealers as dodgy types, but in 2007 drug dealers in Dublin were lads like me. A few lines went hand in hand with having a few pints. If there were pills or MDMA knocking about, all the better. I was conscientious enough to keep it away from work, which was evidence to me that I didn’t have a problem.

My parents’ divorce went through the year, another unsettling episode I now had to ignore.

from Recovering by Richie Sadlier (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Not far from me, a little girl is sitting on the aisle seat. A peach glows in her hand… She asked her mother, What do we miss the most when we die?….

.. Food, I almost said to the girl. We miss peaches, strawberries, delicacies like Sandhurst curry, kebab pasanda and rogan josh. The dead do not eat marzipan. The smell of bakeries torment them day and night.

… The train is cutting through villages.

from Chef by Jaspreet Singh (2008). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Inès gazed out now at the rows and rows of Pinot Noir grapes that crawled towards the horizon. She wondered if the vines she could see now were descendants of the ones Michel had once cultivated so carefully. Even if they weren’t, certainly they carried a piece of him. His blood had spilled here, seeped into the soil, become part of the earth itself before the Nazis had hauled him away. He had given all he had to this land. And now it would help sustain the granddaughter he never had the chance to know.

from The Winemaker’s Wife by Kristin Harmel (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

That was the staircase where she was once photographed with poor Wilde, on a night when he wore his fame like an ermine stole. Shaking the hands of royalty, accepting kisses from dowagers. Signing autographs with quills dipped in vintage Château d’Yquem. Two years later, he’d be dead.

In that alcove, a peer of the realm sipped champagne from her slipper, whispered suggestions that would make an iceberg blush..

from Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

‘Tea!’ Mrs Howard pushed the door open with a rattling tray. I went to help her, shoving the folder at Derwent so he could hide it. Her eyes were red, up close, and her face was swollen but she smiled at me…

We let her fuss over us, choosing biscuits from the plate she offered, making conversations about… the house and her art. Eventually, reluctantly, Derwent put his mug on the table.

‘Mrs Howard, I need to ask about the letters. Did they come from the prison?’

from Cruel Acts by Jane Casey (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

They’ve been watching a Jamie Oliver cookery show. Her choice. Jamie Oliver’s doing locally sourced fish. Pamela doesn’t even eat fish fingers for fear of choking on the bones, but she is obsessed with Jamie Oliver. She thinks he’s good-looking in a London sort of way. ‘Like Michael Portillo,’ she explains, and Sammy understands this is something to do with the way they are both fleshy about the lip….  Sammy thinks Jamie Oliver is a gobshite. He has no interest in locally sourced fish.

He’d barely had time to get comfortable before Pamela suggested he go upstairs and have a word with Mark.

‘You should go up and talk to him,’ she said.

from The Fire Starters by Jan Carson (2019). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Word came that the cattle and the men would be home by evening….

All day the preparations were hectic. There were pots of soup, simmering. They had been made from peppers and onions, with different leaves for flavouring. In the dairy, women were busy making cheese balls, a speciality which they knew their men loved. … they let me sit among them. We could not communicate, and yet I was happy, content. Although I wanted to go home to my mother and our house, I was reluctant to leave. The place and the peaceful way of life had made me tranquil.

 from Girl by Edna O’Brien (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

‘The kitchen is just about the worst place a woman can be - whether or not she happens to be an artist. I think the same applies to any woman with half a cup of pride. Spend time in the kitchen and you’ll be kept there. I see it all the time, women who slave after their husbands - husbands who have little or no time for them, I might add. You step into the kitchen and you stay there. A kitchen slave for the rest of your life.’

from The Narrow Land by Christine Dwyer Hickey (2019). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

We used to go there on Saturdays, for family outings. There’d be huge bowls of pasta, served with sauce and with stuffed escalopes of veal - alouettes san téte, ‘headless larks’, they were called - and meat balls, all cooked in the same sauce. The rooms would be full of the fragrant smell of tomatoes, basil, thyme and bay leaves. Bottles of rosé wine would be handed round in between bouts of laughter. Meals would always end with a singsong…….

from One Helluva Mess by Jean-Claude Izzo (1995). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Steve Buissinne via Pixabay

It was the smell of bread always baking, the smell of turf-smoke, the smell of onions, of boiling, the green tongue of boiled cabbage, the pink one of bacon with grey scum like sins rising, the smell of rhubarb that grew monstrous at the edge of the dung-heap, the smell of rain in all its iterations… the living smell of wool, the dead smell of stone, the metallic ghost stench of mackerel that disobeyed the laws of nature and like Jesus outlived itself by three days.

from This is Happiness by Niall Williams (2019). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

“First we eat.”

And eat they did, none of the food that appeared at their table ordered by either of them, and none of it on the Marine’s laminated menu or on the list of plats du jour chalked on the blackboard… Before one dish had been see off another arrived: flash-fried fillets of red mullet; a grilled pepper and anchovy salad des Pecheurs; a couple of pavé steaks; a platter of cheese; and, finally, baked apples in Calva.

And all the while, the two men talked. The Cabrille affair… and the shoot-out in Pélisanne.

“The old man was a psycho,’…

from The Dying Minutes by Martin O’Brien (2012). Highly Recommended.