Amuse Bouche

Alfred, meanwhile, busied himself in the vegetable garden. … Here, among his asparagus and runner beans, his buckets and hoes, and wearing lederhosen and a loose shirt, Alfred whiled away his mornings, digging the dirt and watering his vegetables…. Alfred also built himself an enormous greenhouse which he named his ‘orangerie’, a reference to the ornate construction dominating the royal palace gardens of Sanssouci, Potsdam, a few kilometres to the south.

from The House by the Lake by Thomas Harding (2015) Very Highly Recommended!

Amuse Bouche

On Friday morning…. the British presence … had decreased.. Only cursory ‘pot shots’ were exchanged. For breakfast, the women ‘fried veal cutlets and gave the men a good feed’. Bob Holland was hopeful of having some meat from the beast he had killed for dinner, but he had to make do with a can of soup and some bread made by Cumann na mBan members.  He was told this was more suitable for a Friday, but Rose McNamara enjoyed ‘a meat dinner, potatoes, etc.’. Colbert and Holland had time to reminisce..before British troops reappeared at Rialto Bridge…

Fish on Friday boy. No meat.

From 16 Lives Con Colbert by John O’Callaghan (2015)

Amuse Bouche

I caught the train into town, walked from the station to Waterstone’s and went straight to the cookery section. I made my choice by width: I wanted the book with the most recipes. Rose Elliot’s Complete Vegetarian Cookbook won by a good half-inch. I took it with me to the only wholefood shop in central Belfast and set about restocking my cupboard. I bought home a lot of lentils.

From Here’s Me Here (Further Reflections of a Lapsed Protestant)  by Glenn Patterson (2015)

Amuse Bouche

..there, just outside the door, he preserved traditional delicacies - brisket, liver sausage and whale blubber, supplied by a local shopkeeper - in a small bucket of sour whey. Erlendur topped up the bucket on a regular basis. He often got into arguments about eating habits with Gardar, who was a big fan of American fast food. To Erlendur, all Gardar’s impassioned talk of pizzas and hamburgers was gibberish.

from Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indridason

Amuse Bouche

Amuse Bouche

Thanh is in the kitchen preparing our food…. Today’s meal will feature a gelatinous rice-powder ball with burger meat inside. We’ll flavour it with odoriferous fish sauce from a bottle….

It wouldn't be possible to narrate all that happened to this man in the jagged space between 1975 and 1990, but this would be some of it: they broke his eye-lid, his jaw. They shackled him at the ankle and put him into a box about the size of a man's coffin..

From The Living and The Dead by Paul Hendrickson (1997)

Amuse Bouche

We lunched upstairs at Botin’s. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Brett did not eat much. I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.

‘How do you feel, Jake?’ Brett asked. ‘My God! what a meal you’ve eaten.’

‘I feel fine. Do you want a dessert?’

‘Lord, no.’

From Fiesta by Ernest Hemingway (1927)

Amuse Bouche

...the Moncadistas were permitted to receive regular visitors and had plenty of opportunities for exercise, and even to enhance their culinary skills (steak with guava jelly, spaghetti and omelettes were some of Castro’s specialities). With a regular supply of books, food, and, crucially, cigars - the floor of his cell was, Castro confessed, ‘strewn with butts’ - life could certainly have been a lot worse.

From 1956 (The World in Revolt) by Simon Hall (2016)

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He remembered him with a wearied but amused affection: there was the time Litvinoff dyed all his shirts pink in the bathtub and then climbed in and dyed himself pink too; the time they went to a restaurant and he ordered his dinner in reverse, beginning with a syrup pudding; the times when he disappeared leaving Whidborne to clear up his chaos.

from Jumpin’ Jack Flash by Kieron Pim (2016)

Amuse Bouche

Indeed, starvation wages were paid to those who were hired….landowners proclaimed that unemployment was an invention of the Republic…… In Jaén, the gathering of acorns, normally kept for pigs, or of windfall olives, the watering of beasts and even the gathering of firewood were denounced as ‘collective kleptomania’. Hungry peasants caught doing such things were savagely beaten by the Civil Guard or by armed estate guards.

From The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston (2012)

Amuse Bouche

Champagne has about the same alcohol content as other French white wines, but its alcohol becomes effective more quickly because the dissolved carbon dioxide in the wine goes straight to your bloodstream. Your circulation reacts by speeding up, just as it does when you are running, to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. So a faster bloodstream carries the alcohol around your system. You giggle sooner, but the effects pass off more rapidly.

From How To Enjoy Your Wine by Hugh Johnson (1985)

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)

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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)

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..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.

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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.

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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)

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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)

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“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

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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.

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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