Amuse Bouche

We went to the garden that evening with some bottles of beer. They were almost the size of wine bottles, the standard in Rwanda. Once Gibson had made sure no one could observe us he drank his beer through a straw. It was the traditional way. In villages men would sit in a circle and pass around a flask of banana beer - a practice the government had outlawed. I think Gibson quietly enjoyed his small subversion.

From Bad News (Last Journalists in a Dictatorship) by Anjan Sundaram (2016)

Amuse Bouche

Édouard Manet boarded the new direct train from Paris to Madrid one summer’s evening in 1865. The uncomfortable journey took a day and a half. He stayed in the Grand Hotel de Paris, supposedly noted for its French cooking, though Manet found the food so inedible he sent every dish back….  ..the overwhelming reason for this hazardous pilgrimage, taken during an outbreak of cholera and without a single Spanish word, was to set eyes on the art of Velázquez.

From The Vanishing Man (in pursuit of Velázquez) by Laura Cumming (2016)

Amuse Bouche

..example of the typical chow eaten by U-boat sailors...

Sunday 30 March (1941) Corned beef, turnips, potatoes, fruit.

Cooked ham, bacon, one pickled cucumber, dripping ersatz (a kind of bread made of  starch and low quality flour soaked in gravy), bread, tea.

31 March Egg-flip (a mix of eggs, potatoes, and salami the Germans called hopped poppel).

Tinned sausages, salt fish, butter, bread, tea.

1 April  Lentils and bacon, one sausage, stewed fruit.

Sausage, cheese, butter, bread and cocoa.

From Code Name Caesar by Jerome Preisler and Kenneth Sewell.

Amuse Bouche

You can’t believe how fertile the land is. You sprinkle seeds on the orange brown soil and within days shoots are pushing up. You only have to stretch your arms to pick ripe plums from the tree-lined boulevards. It is another Garden of Eden. For twenty five cents you can buy a hundred oranges. There’s a green fruit called aquacate that is creamy and smooth – three for just a nickel – and tastes delicious, with lemon juice, salt, and a kind of parsley called cilantro. There are: Purple mountains. Talking birds. Flowers growing wild everywhere. Mangoes. A fruit called papaya that grows to a meter in length, weighs up to three kilos, and tastes delicious with a hint of lime.

From The Price of Escape by David Unger.

Amuse Bouche

I suspect the name is best known nowadays, anyway, for the dish of raw beef slices, with a Dijon mustard sauce, which was devised in 1970 by Giuseppe Cipriani, the owner of Harry’s Bar in Venice, to spare a customer gastric problems. He named it Beef Carpaccio, off the top of his head, because the look of the beef reminded him of Carpaccio’s characteristically red pigments.

from Ciao Carpaccio by Jan Morris (2014)

Amuse Bouche

One day, having gone to Lugo to make a speech, he caused an incident in a restaurant on a día sin postre (a day without pudding), one of various austerity measures adopted in the Nationalist zone.

Being a Gallego, he was singing the praises of Gallego cuisine and asked the waiter to bring him queso de tetilla (a soft, mild cheese in the form of a woman’s breast).  Wrongly suspecting a test, the waiter reminded him it was a día sin postre. ‘Do you know who I am?’ thundered the glorioso mutilado. ‘Yes, Your Excellency, General Millan Astray.’ When the waiter hesitated, the general lost control of himself and began to hit the unfortunate man about the head.

From ¡Comrades! By Paul Preston (1999)

Amuse Bouche

“They take anything besides jewelry?”

“One of them..knew his wine. He went through our storage rack and took my two bottles of ‘eighty-two Lafite…. and left the the nineteen eighthy. The ‘eighty-two is worth fifty times what the ‘eighty is worth and will taste fifty times as good. He knew that.”

Bosch nodded. He realized the wine might be more important to the case than the jewelry. If Ellis had kept it to himself, there might still be a bottle..in his possession.

from The Crossing by Michael Connelly

Amuse Bouche

Ingredients wise, it may not be organic or locally sourced but the only club forced to withdraw pies during the 2013 horsemeat scandal was Aberdeen. Intriguingly, over the last five years a better class of pie has got a look in. Of course, some redoubts of the craft in the north have been producing excellent products for a long time, Poole’s Pies in Wigan being a notable example. ...Morecambe FC’s Chicken, Ham and Leek, competing well beyond the comfort zone of football-only goods, won the title of Supreme Champion at the British Pie Awards 2012. The Scottish Football Pie of the Year was won by old-school Highland butchers, showcasing the distinctive mince and pepper Scotch football pie.

from The Game of our Lives by David Goldblatt (2014)

Amuse Bouche. Bank Holiday special

------------ our friend Joyce began to open his oysters, which he made us eat au naturel, without bread or potatoes...... and we were obliged to wash them down with native Potcheen, less adulterated with water than we would have wished.

Nor did this suffice; Martin deemed himself a cook, and set about dressing scallops for our entertainment. He opened them, called for butter – and such butter! It was added to the fish, which were fried in the shell. And we were actually obliged to eat of this ragout, until I saw my companion’s face utterly discomposed by the extremity of his distress.

From Tom Robinson’s Connemara, A Little Gaelic Kingdom.

Amuse Bouche

As they left, she bribed the barman to part with a full bottle of Booth’s gin.

On the road back.., he asked, “What’s so special? One gin is much the same as another.”

“No, it’s not. You just take a sniff.”

She uncorked the bottle and wafted it under his nose as he drove.

“See? It’s sort of flowery and oily at the same time. Reminds me of home. God knows why. It’s as though they’d mingled summer and autumn - summer scents and autumn drizzle. A bit of England in a bottle.”

from A Lily of the Field by John Lawton

Amuse Bouche

The next day was Martha’s twenty-ninth birthday, and after she woke, somewhat the worse for wear, at one in the afternoon, Matthews gave her a huge basket of flowers and pulled together a lavish feast of caviar, pâté en croûte, Christmas pudding, and ham, to which Hemingway added bottles of Champagne and Chateau d'Yquem. She didn't feel very celebratory, however; she’d just heard word was out in the United States about her relationship with Hemingway, and she dreaded the consequences….

from Hotel Florida by Amanda Vaill (2014)

Amuse Bouche

If we had waterproof coats it would have been pleasant enough to drive in that spring rain. As it was we sought the shelter of trees or halted at cafés alongside the road. We had a marvellous lunch from the hotel at Lyon, an excellent truffled roast chicken, delicious bread and white Mâcon wine and Scott was very happy when we drank the white Mâconnais at each of our stops. At Mâcon I had bought four more bottles of excellent wine which I uncorked as we needed them.

I am not sure that Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before…

from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1936)

Amuse Bouche

Hadley was embarrassed at the gamey waft coming in from the kitchen. Often, Ernest went to the Jardin du Luxembourg and, when the gendarme turned his back, he would choose the fattest pigeon and strangle it in the park, then smuggle the bird out in Bumby’s carriage. One time he had brought a bird home and it was still alive. There was a whiff of it now from the stove. She had grown tired of roast pigeon that winter.

from Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood (2014)

Amuse Bouche

Their waiter shoved his nose deep into the balloon glass, his brow furrowed, critically assessing the wine he was about to to serve. He raised his eyebrows, a facial shrug. “Pas mal,” he said.”It is not bad.” He had to slide and dance and spin to get around the table to pour the wine correctly, sidestepping other patrons and other staff, the wayward limbs of gesticulating guests.

from The Expats by Chris Pavone (2012)

Amuse Bouche

For the evening they were sliding down the hill into the village, on those little sleds which serve the same purpose as gondolas do in Venice. Their destination was a hotel with an old-fashioned Swiss tap-room, wooden and resounding, a room of clocks, kegs, steins, and antlers. Many parties at long tables blurred into one great party and ate fondue - a peculiarly indigestible form of Welsh rarebit, mitigated by hot spiced wine.

from Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)

Amuse Bouche

Then, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of thin air, Snoop Dogg had something else in his hand: a large blunt the size of a Sharpie pen. Then a lighter. And a few seconds later he was smoking weed, ferociously. Seeing this, his entourage assumed it was okay to light up in the Twitter offices, so naturally they pulled out joints that had been in their pockets or tucked behind their ears.

In a matter of minutes, the cafeteria had become the stage for an impromptu Snoop Dogg concert, with a dozen large blunts being passed around among famous rappers and Twitter employees…

from Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton (2014)

Amuse Bouche

‘I wish to announce that the strike is over,’ Kilroy said simply. I waited on in Kilroy’s cell to write an announcement of the end of the strike for our Press outside, and I was still there when a nurse came in with the first egg-flips and brandy. You have missed one of life’s great moments if you haven’t tasted a brandy egg-flip after a forty one day’s fast.

from The Gates Flew Open by Peadar O’Donnell

Amuse Bouche

It is summer in Sydney. Cherries, pawpaws, mangoes and watermelon render apples, bananas and oranges the most banal-tasting objects to set foot in a human mouth; waves foreclose on children’s sandcastles; shopping-centre Christmas decorations hang tackily over swarthy Santas with heat exhaustion; bushfires rage out of control and everywhere is ash, and a burning red moon of a bushfire hangs over the city, over the ocean, over Aldo ripening like garbage on his dreary rock.

from Quicksand by Steve Toltz (2015)

Amuse Bouche

They were sitting at the Bar Gaucho, Gerald, Sara, Ernest and Hadley and Pauline. Ernest, Gerald noticed, seemed to know everyone in Pamplona, even the pilgrims and the peasants who’d traveled to the festival. He ordered them pintxos from inside and small plates kept arriving; a dinner of deliciously oil anchovies, cured ham, tortilla de patatas, and stuffed peppers, all atop slices of crusty bread and speared with a toothpick.

They were drinking a young white wine, also chosen by Ernest, who seemed to be consuming most of it.

from Villa America by Liza Klaussmann (2015)

Amuse Bouche

I stopped going to the farmer’s market years ago when some hipster chick came screeching at me “DON’T TOUCH THE PEAS!” After that, we just ordered directly from the farm and had it delivered to the restaurant. Of course, I'm in love with the toothless guy...He’s everything I grew up with, he’s the end of an era, he’s the last of what it was like to just be a good eater and a good grower. A time when we just grew it and cooked it and ate it and didn't talk so much about it. When we didn’t crow all over town about your artisanal, local, organic fwa fwa. We just went to the farm and bought the milk. I bought everything I could from that old guy.

from The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton