Amuse Bouche

After the ceremony, Miguella and I shared a lunch of snails and roast pork in nearby Guimerà.... before driving back to Barcelona, feeling all the better for having honoured the legendary Cruyff, and discussing Messi, a player who owes part of his success to the Dutchman’s influence at FC Barcelona, and Miguella’s mediation.

Miguella shared his story thus: ‘When the financial crisis hit Argentina…. A friend of mine, an Argentine lawyer called Juan Mateo Walter, rings me and says, “Look, there is this incredible kid from Rosario I have for you.”..’

from Cristiano & Leo by Jimmy Burns (2018). Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

“Before you take wine into you,” Gocha said, “before you put wine on its feet, caressing it is necessary. Something so sacred, divine, and godly should become the core of your being. Making and drinking wine is a process of gratitude. When a person is full of love, that love becomes more intense because of wine. The drink is not merely an alcoholic beverage. It is the means for deep communication with other people. And in this way, life and wine need caressing.”

from For The Love Of Wine by Alice Feiring (2016). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Tonight, after all the week in Crete had demanded of him… drinking the smallest amount of wine would knock him under one of the Czar’s tables. He hung on to a half-filled glass of Dafni for dear life. “What is it, Kapitan, you don’t like the wine? You’re not drinking.”

..

“Mr Deputy Chairman, the wine is excellent.”

“Then drink it. You travelled nearly four thousand miles to secure it, did you not? Do justice to this fine vintage.”

from The Road to Ithaca by Ben Pastor  (2014). Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

-Do they want wine? said Jimmy Sr when he’d everything else in order.

-Yeah, said Darren.

-Black or blue?

-Blue.

Jimmy Sr ducked in under the hot plate and got out a bottle of Blue Nun.

-Do the business with tha’, he said to Darren, and he held out the bottle to him.

-I’d better get back for their sweets, said Darren.

Jimmy Sr turned to Bimbo.

-There, he said. - Suck the cork ou’ a tha’.

from The Van by Roddy Doyle (1991). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

The roller-coaster emotions of the day kept him off balance but had worked up his appetite. His brain was numb but his stomach growled. ….

He imagined a big bowl of hand-pulled noodles, beef lai meen, and a side of spicy tofu at one of the Fukienese soup shack on Eighth Avenue. A round of cold beers from the fridge couldn't hurt either, he thought, urging the Mustang home through the waking neon colours of the Bowery.

from Lucky by Henry Chang (2017). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

“I mean people act like every single malt is superior to every blended whiskey, but that’s just ridiculous. Some of them taste like ass. And frankly, I don’t really want a bunch of weird flavours in my scotch. I want it to go down smooth and not give me a hangover the next day. I’d take a gold label over a random eighteen-year-old any day of the week…” He was further expounding on this topic to another friend when a cool hand slipped around his neck and some kind of expensive perfume wafted over him.

“Random eighteen-year-olds been bothering you lately?”

from Dijin City by Saad Z. Hossan (2017). Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

They were sat at the special guest table. The cloistered, white-clothed mafia table had been generally unoccupied since the Irish brotherhood - na fir maith - were forced to close the government tab back in ’97, when one of its very coked-up boys let the cat out of the hotel window, instigating the Moriarty Tribunal. (The coke and the pussy and the hotel room had been paid for by the public purse. …. A helicopter to the races was the new working weekend.)

from Orchid & the Wasp (2018) by Caoilinn Hughes. (Recommended)

Amuse Bouche

She poured her coffee, raised her mug. Could a woman sit in her kitchen and drink coffee and wait for a muffin to pop in her toaster, and then smother it with apple jelly and bite into it and not weep for her dead son lost beneath the rubble? Could she listen to the news, the weather, the stock reports, the live phone-ins full of grief and outrage, and mentally calculate what her stock was worth. And still be a mother?

from Academy Street by Mary Costello (2014). Recommended

Amuse Bouche

Emi’s daughter awakens her with a gentle squeeze.. 

‘Breakfast is ready,” YoonHui says.

Emi smells freshly brewed coffee, along with boiled rice and pan-fried white fish. Her stomach grumbles….

Her daughter has outdone herself. An array of dishes on small porcelain plates sits on the breakfast table next to two steaming bowls of rice.

‘You made my favourite banchan,’ Emi exclaims..

Yoonhui swallows and stare at her coffee mug.. and doesn’t look up when she speaks.

‘Were you a “comfort woman”?’ Silence falls between them like an invisible sheet.

from White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn Bracht (2018). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Dr Joseph Fry opened his chocolate company in the mid-1700s, marketing the powder for medicinal purposes, but it was his grandson, Joseph Storrs-Fry, who achieved the historic breakthrough. Combining Van Houten’s pressing machine with the Watt steam engine, he began mass-producing cocoa cakes and experimenting with the mix of butter and flavourings to produce something they could mould into shapes. By 1847, Fry had the balance..just right, and began selling..the world’s first chocolate bars.

from Dictatorland, The Men Who Stole Africa, by Paul Kenyon (2018). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Soap clicked his fingers and called for the coats, his voice somehow able to compete with the string quartet’s crescendo. The maître d’ approached tentatively. His voice, when he was within earshot.. was honey; too sweet to be wholesome.

“And how would sir wish to settle the bill tonight?”

“He wouldn’t,” Soap said.

“I don’t quite follow. Is it the lady’s treat, perhaps?”

“No.” Soap puffed his chest.”The food was atrocious and the wine was mediocre. You phoney bastards don’t deserve a dime.”

“Sir, if there’s been—“

“This isn’t a negotiation, pal. Chalk it up to customer dissatisfaction and step aside."

“Surely there is some way we can settle this amicably?”

….

“Yeah, you can get the fuck out of my way, and put a little more effort in next time.”

from Disorder by Gerard Brennan (2018). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Joan’s lemon meringue pie was one of the most glorious things I had ever put in my mouth: warm, painfully sharp lemon filling, the most airy pastry imaginable and a billowing hat of thick, teeth-judderingly sweet meringue. She squeezed the juice of five lemons into the filling, enough to make you close one eye and shudder. The pie was always served warm, so the filling oozed out like a ripe Vacherin.

from Toast by Nigel Slater (2003). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

She opened the top and the smell of bacon and warm bread billowed out. Her stomach growled.

‘It’s good,’ the man said. ‘I had one earlier. Eat.’

Andra knew she shouldn’t. He could have put anything in it. But the smell. And she was so hungry. She reached inside the bag, pulled out half a sandwich, took a bite.

‘Why don’t you sit down,’ he said. ‘Give me five minutes to explain.’

She perched on the edge of the bed, chewed, swallowed. ‘You’ve got till the end of this sandwich,’ she said. ‘Now talk.’

from Here and Gone by Haylen Beck (2017). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

Lismore

The buying of the car was another attempt on the Captain’s part to rescue his daughter from her isolation…. ‘Today, the races?’ he suggested and they would set out for Lismore or Clonmel. He took her to the Opera House in Cork, dinner first in the Victoria Hotel, where an old woman once stood up and in a quivering voice sang the last few lines of an aria from Tannhaüser. The diners applauded and the Captain was reminded of the afternoon in the Città Alta..”

from The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor (2002). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

“Everyone who comes to Fatty Boom Boom’s is a drinker, Mother. Otherwise Fatty herself will show you the door.”

“In that case what do you have?”

“Wine, gin, whiskey, brandy, umqombothi-“

I cut off her recitation.”I will have a small glass of umqombothi.”

The girl laughs.”Fatty is a big woman, Mother, and she believes in big glasses. You will find nothing small here.”

The home-brewed traditional African beer I have ordered is illegal…

from Hum if you don’t know the words by Bianca Marais (2017). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

So Johel stressed over the menu: huge platters of fried plantains,

Scotch Bonnett Chili by Temaciejewski

mountains of griot marinated in lemons and Scotch bonnet chilis; beef tassot made the way his grandmother liked it, soaked in orange juice for a night, then boiled and fried; and tray after tray of deep-fried akra. Everything was drenched in piklis, so spicy the waiters carrying the platters out from the kitchen kept rubbing their eyes with the back of their tuxedoed sleeves. Not to mention the drinks: vats of Prestige in big steel buckets, and on every table a bottle of five-star Barbancourt and pitchers of cocktails made from Haitian grapefruit, available at a Haitian greengrocer in Flatbush.

from Peacekeeping by Mischa Berlinski (2016). Very Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

...in the main street of Long Grass a whole beef had been roasted and a large black butcher was carving it up and handing hefty slabs to cowboys and dignitaries alike. One hundred pheasants from Virginia were fast consumed. Doc Holliday, a stranger to quail’s eggs until that day, liked them so much that he ate forty. A veritable river of drink was imbibed. Food disappeared so quickly that a second beef was roasted, from which Lord Erne himself cooked the sweetbreads.

from The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry.

Amuse Bouche

“in 1205, Bishop Juan de Prejano established the food rations for all workers in the lands of the Albelda monastery in La Rioja, and they included wine for three meals a day. So, bread, cheese and wine were to be had at midday, bread and wine in the afternoon, and bread, meat, and wine in the evening.” 

From The Finest Wines of Rioja by Jesus Barquin, Luis Gutierrez and Victor de la Serna.

Amuse Bouche for the Bank Holiday

On November 22, 1963, Aretha was seven months pregnant with her third son and in the Broadway Market in Detroit, a gourmet-food outlet, when she heard news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In her book, she recalls that among her strongest memories of that day were the powerful smells of hanging hams, salamis, and cheeses. On other occasions, she reflected that, in the aftermath of the president’s death, she found comfort in the presence of her father.

from RESPECT, The Life of Aretha Franklin, by David Ritz (2014). Highly Recommended.

Amuse Bouche

…there was famine everywhere. In 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, the true face of our revolution was revealed. Why did our leaders dream that every farmer could be reborn as a steelmaker? How did they imagine that a boy who had studied the fields all his life could make iron ore out of nothing? …… Here in this village, the communal kitchen was shut down for lack of food. The ground and the trees were stripped bare. Nobody had a pot to cook their soup in, let alone soup itself. In six months, half the people starved, first the children and the old, then the rest.

from Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (2016). Very Highly Recommended.