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Dinner Quotes

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Dinner Quotes

“All worries are less with wine.”

“If you had any ingredients at your disposal, what would you make?" "You said it was a small dinner?" "Yes," he affirmed. "In that case, I would begin with a gustatio of salad with peppers and cucumbers, melon with mint, whole-meal bread, soft cheese, and honey cake." I tried to draw on my memory of one of the last meals I'd made for Maximus. Apicius licked his lips. "Yes, yes, go on." "Then pomegranate ice to cleanse the palate, followed by a cena prima of saffron chickpeas, Parthian chicken, peppered morels in wine, mussels, and oysters. If I had more time, I would also serve a stuffed suckling pig. And to close, a pear patina, along with deep-fried honey fritters, snails, olives, and, if you have it on hand, some wine from Chios or Puglia." "Perfect. Simple and the flavors would blend nicely at the beginning of the meal.”

“In your name, the family name is at last because it's the family name that lasts.”

“Many a death was precipitated by the food, the job, or the medication whose main function was to postpone it.”

“Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.”

“In united families, they might sleep with half filled stomach but no one sleeps with empty stomach.”

“You can take the Indian out of the family, but you cannot take the family out of the Indian.”

“Dinner was served on mismatched plates with paper napkins and silverware that looked like it had been stolen from a school cafeteria. The spaghetti was from a box that was still poking out of the garbage pail, the sauce from a jar that was sitting beside the sink. I got the definite impression that he chose to make dinner because he couldn't afford to take me out.”

“Hunger gives flavour to the food.”

“Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.”

“SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.”

“What am I doing here?” she demanded, bewildered. “You’re having dinner,” her little brother said. “Stop it! I’m not hungry. Stop it!” John held the spoon in front of her. His cherubic face was dark with anger. “You said you wouldn’t leave me.” “What are you talking about?” Mary demanded. “You said you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t leave me alone,” John said. “But you tried, didn’t you?” “I don’t know what you’re babbling about.” She noticed Astrid then, leaning against a filing cabinet. Astrid looked like she’d been dragged through the middle of a dog fight. Little Pete was sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth. He was chanting, “Good-bye, Nestor. Good-bye, Nestor.” “Mary, you have an eating disorder,” Astrid said. “The secret is out. So cut the crap.” “Eat,” John ordered, and shoved a spoonful of food in her mouth. None too gently. “Swallow,” John ordered. “Let me—” “Shut up, Mary.”

“One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only the evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of us consume the bulk--a sadly appropriate word here--of our calories in the evening and take them to bed with us, a practice that doesn't do any good at all.”

“Theatres are curious places, magician's trick-boxes where the golden memories of dramtic triumphs linger like nostalgic ghosts, and where the unexplainable, the fantastic, the tragic, the comic and the absurd are routine occurences on and off the stage. Murders, mayhem, politcal intrigue, lucrative business, secret assignations, and of course, dinner.”

“Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smelling of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper. He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because someewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.”

“Crawford and I are enjoying a hotly-contested game of tiddlywinks when Dad arrives to announce that dinner is ready. We make our way through to the dining room and take our seats at the old mahogany table, which is full of food. We all spend the obligatory few seconds oohing and aahing over the wonderful job Dad’s done, before tucking in. Within five minutes, the room is alive with conversation. To my left, Sophie is trying to decide which fictional world she would most like to live in, while at the other end of the table, Pete is holding forth to my parents about something that appears to involve salt, pepper, and both his forks. Across from me, Crawford is complaining loudly that the sauce on his pasta’s the wrong colour, and Rose is rattling off the impressive list of things that’ll be taken away from him if he doesn’t eat it. Ellie, bless her, is oblivious. She’s planted in her booster seat beside Rose, and most of her pasta is on her face or in her lap.”

“Why are breakfast food breakfast foods?" I asked them. "Like, why don't we have curry for breakfast?" "Hazel, eat." "But why?" I asked. "I mean seriously: How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it's a breakfast sandwich.” Dad answered with his mouth full. "When you come back, we'll have breakfast for dinner deal?" “I don't want to have breakfast for dinner." I answered, crossing knife and fork over my mostly full plate, "I want to have scrambled eggs for dinner without this ridiculous construction that a scrambled egg inclusive meal is breakfast even when it occurs at dinner time." “You gotta pick your battles in this world Hazel.” My mom said, “But if this is the issue you want to champion, we will stand behind you.” “Quite a bit behind you.” My dad added, and mom laughed. Anyway, I knew it was stupid, but I felt kind of bad for scrambled eggs.”

“He ordered oxtail soup and enjoyed it heartily. Then he glanced at the menu for the fish, ordered a haddock and, seized with a sudden pang of hunger at the sight of so many people relishing their food, he ate some roast beef and drank two pints of ale, stimulated by the flavor of a cow-shed which this fine, pale beer exhaled. His hunger persisted. He lingered over a piece of blue Stilton cheese, made quick work of a rhubarb tart, and to vary his drinking, quenched his thirst with porter, that dark beer which smells of Spanish licorice but which does not have its sugary taste. He breathed deeply. Not for years had he eaten and drunk so much. This change of habit, this choice of unexpected and solid food had awakened his stomach from its long sleep. He leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and prepared to sip his coffee into which gin had been poured.”

“Trailing veils of steam, Grandma came and went and came again with covered dishes from kitchen to table while the assembled company waited in silence. No one lifted lids to peer in at the hidden victuals. At last Grandma sat down, Grandpa said grace, and immediately thereafter the silverware flew up like a plague of locusts on the air. When everyone's mouths were absolutely crammed full of miracles, Grandmother sat back and said, "Well, how do you like it?" And the relatives, including Aunt Rose, and the boarders, their teeth deliciously mortared together at this moment, faced a terrible dilemma. Speak and break the spell, or continue allowing this honey-syrup food of the gods to dissolve and melt away to glory in their mouths? They looked as if they might laugh or cry at the cruel dilemma. They looked as if they might sit there forever, untouched by fire or earthquake, or shooting in the street, a massacre of innocents in the yard, overwhelmed with effluviums and promises of immortality. All villains were innocent in this moment of tender herbs, sweet celeries, luscious roots. The eye sped over a snow field where lay fricassees, salmagundis, gumbos, freshly invented succotashes, chowders, ragouts.”

“I hacked an old Crock-Pot and turned it into a sous vide machine, and did a turkey breast, and then seared the skin on the stovetop, so it is totally crispy, but the meat is BEYOND juicy. And the stuffing is a combination of homemade corn bread, homemade buttermilk biscuits, and brioche, with sage and thyme and celery and onion and shallot. And I tried the Robuchon Pommes Puree, and thought that there was no way to put THAT much butter into that much potato, but holy moley is it amazeballs! And I did a butternut squash soup with fried ginger and almond cake with apple compote." All the bustle has roused Volnay, who wanders over to greet Benji, and receives a dog biscuit for her trouble from Eloise. "Honey, breathe a little," I say, laughing. "It's just... I... I mean... THANKSGIVING!" he says, which cracks us all up.”

“If the food that one ate the night before were somehow able to be seen and identified through one’s clothes throughout the day, millions of employees would each fast ten or so days before their payday.”

“When you think you can stand no more of the wolf's snuffing under the door and keening softly on cold nights, throw discretion into the laundry bag, put candles on the table, and for your own good if not the pleasure of an admiring audience make one or another of the recipes in this chapter. And buy yourself a bottle of wine, or make a few cocktails, or have a long open-hearted discussion of cheeses with the man on the corner who is an alien but still loyal if bewildered.”

“That´s the problem with planning a late night supper after the opera, not only does the hero or the heroine die singing, but you end up famished after the last notes of the finale.”