“Push-button motorbike horns, once aroused into action, were like a gaggle of intermittently disgruntled geese caught a in the middle of a very large swarm of fat and lumbering bees: a rumbling engine noise. The bees lurch, barge, and buzz. The geese grumble, natter, and quack. Every day the geese and the bees wake up in the same mood and in the same place.”
Source: Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table
“It is nine o'clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they might their pre-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven o'clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James's, upon whom one, two, and three o'clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon.
I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information, when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole per mensem for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict jackets, that some M'Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky ; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, covered with that circular layer - abominable disc! - of oleaginous nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that surrounds the truffle bedecked pate de foie gras. Say, Elizabeth Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat, game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine o'clock breakfasts.”
Source: Twice Round the Clock, or the Hours of the Day and Night in London
“How many would protest if restaurants began serving puppy and kitten flesh instead of calves? Robins instead of hens? Squirrels instead of pigs?”
Source: Destination Eden
“The point (I was starting to realize) was about putting it together. The point was making people feel at home, about finding your own style, whatever it was, and committing to it. The point was about giving up neurosis where food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fit into your life.”
Source: I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
“Ala!" Echo sprang to her feet, legs tangled in the sheets. The Ala was here. The Ala had brought food. The Ala was a goddess”
Source: The Shadow Hour
“[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being -- a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner...the true convivium -- the long Session that brings us nearly home.”
Source: The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection
“I am a miserable cook but an extremely talented eater.”
“I really like to cook. I used to do it lots for Mom, who's almost as useless as you, and it means I can practice describing all the different dishes. That always makes narratives seem less repetitive - and you can use them as metaphors, too.”
Source: New Moan: The First Book in The Twishite Saga: A Parody
“Food—like art, like music— brings people together, it’s true. It begins, though, with a private experience, a single person stirred, moved, and wanting company in that altered stated. So we say, “You have to taste this.” We say, “Please, take a bite.”
Source: Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home
“A meal was no more than a fragile defense against the inevitability of the next meal. Food itself could never answer the question of food; it only delayed the moment when the question would have to be asked in earnest.”
Source: The New York Trilogy