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Quote by Victoria Abbott Riccardi

“Although Japanese cooking aims to spotlight the natural flavors of ingredients, zesty accents often appear to provide contrast. A blast of pungent wasabi counterposes the oily richness of raw fish. A shake of spicy herbal sansho cuts through the fatty succulence of grilled eel. And a dab of stinging yellow mustard offsets the mild sweetness of boiled greens.”

Quote by Victoria Abbott Riccardi

Book:Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto
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Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

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Victoria Abbott Riccardi

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“We're quite happy to shrug and swap raisins for currants, if that's what we happen to have in our cupboard, an orange for a lemon, a chicken for a rabbit, a saucepan for a frying pan, and I suppose that attitude stimulates inventiveness. (But rule-breaking and multifariousness aren't good for a writer who is striving to discern patterns and draw tidy conclusions.) One of the privileges of researching a book of this kind is the opportunity to travel, and I have seen different versions of England over the past year--- the England of new red-brick bungalows and modern white-tiled factories and the coal-blackened terraces of Industrial Revolution England. I've visited timeless cathedral-city England, the landscapes of Wordsworth and Jane Austen, recognizable still, and the England of village greens and fleeces and orchards full of shiny apples. I've seen silenced shipyards, rusting cranes and queues outside Labour Exchanges, and the England of lidos, motor cafés and nightclubs, all presently coexisting, and I've been struck by what a land of contrasts and contradictions this is. As much as I have asked myself "What is English food?," I have pondered, "Where---and what--- is England?" A land of contrasts (and it always has been, I suspect) creates a food of contrasts. English food is elaborate and simple, conservative and adventurous, regionalized and international.”

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“Germany at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries offers an example of the high efflorescence of culture; it then became famed as the land of ‘poets and philosophers’. Few epochs have displayed as much will to genius. In the course of several decades the world was enriched by such geniuses as Lessing and Herder, Goethe and Schiller, Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, Schleiermacher and Schopenhauer, Novalis and all the romantics. Succeeding ages will look back with envy at this great age. Windelband, the philosopher of its decline, remembers this time of spiritual integrity and spiritual genius as a lost paradise. But had the age of Goethe and Kant, Hegel and Novalis, attained to the authentic higher ‘life’? All evidence tends to show that everyday life in Germany was then poor, middle class and oppressed. Germany was weak, wretched and split up into minute states; the power of ‘life’ had nowhere been realized; and the cultural efflorescence affected only the highest strata of the people whose general condition was lamentable enough.”

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Book:The Meaning of History
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