Hot milk in a cold heaven
Posted by: Epicurean on: January 5, 2012
Marie thinks her husband is dead … no point in ordering a breakfast for him then. Actually he isn’t dead at all. Then it gets complicated …
Cold Heaven by Brian Moore
Brrrrrr ...
The breakfast waiter put his rump against the swinging doors of the kitchen and backed out into the breakfast room, balancing three trays of cafes complets. He turned around and went to Number 6, a Belgian couple and their daughter, putting in front of each of them a tray containing hot milk, hot coffee, butter pats, jam, marmalade, croissants, and petits pains. ‘Bon appetit,’ he told them and turned to see if any other guests had arrived. Number 24 was there, not the young man, just the young lady. He went over. He remembered that, although she was American, she had spoken French to him yesterday.
‘Bonjour madame. Vous avez bien dormi?’
Yes, Marie said, she had slept well.
‘Et Monsieur? Il arrive, Monsieur? Je vous apporte deuz cafes complets?
No, she said, just one breakfast. Monsieur would not come this morning.
Harry Potter and the mint humbug
Posted by: Epicurean on: December 2, 2011
The young wizard isn’t a vegetarian and school meals at Hogwarts are in a class of their own ….
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling
Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, chips, Yorkshire puddings, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup and, for some strange reason, mint humbugs.
When everybody had eaten as much as they could, the remains of the food faded from the plates, leaving them sparkling clean as before. A moment later the puddings appeared. Blocks of ice cream in every flavour you could think of, applie pies, treacle tarts, chocolate eclairs and jam doughnuts, trifle, strawberries, jelly, rice pudding …
Beans and nymphs
Posted by: Epicurean on: October 23, 2011
A declaration of war makes it hard to get the grass cut…
Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard
Empire of the Setting Sun
As the uncut lawns grew deeper and the formal gardens deteriorated, they spent their time cooking small meals on a charcoal stove which they set up beside the cement statuary on the floor of the arnamental pond. The smell of bean curd and spiced noodles drifted among the disrobing nymphs.
The wisdom of waitresses
Posted by: Epicurean on: October 9, 2011
The world weary line up and think she’s actually interested in what they have to say to her …
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Next please ...
Tamina serves the customers their coffee and Calvados (there are never very many of them; the cafe is invariably half empty) and then goes back to her place behind the bar. There is almost always someone sitting on a bar stool wanting to talk to her. They all like her. She is a good listener.
Summer of 1940
Posted by: Epicurean on: September 24, 2011
A lover recalls the precious seconds of a summer lunch with a doomed fighter pilot during the Battle of Britain in 1940 …
That Summer by Andrew Greig
The meal lingers in my mouth’s mind still. There was a handwritten menu in front of each of us.
Summer of 1940
- Oysters or smoked salmon or grapefruit
Thick or clear soup
Steamed sole
Glazed chicken with vegetables
Iced puddings
Savouries
Coffee
To accompany this we had sherry, hock and champagne, and John and I applied ourselves with zeal to all of them. He explained to me how drink numbs the higher centres that control your repressions, thus giving free play to all your lower centres. I pointed out that I had no repressions so the drink would make little difference to me.
Dining alone
Posted by: Epicurean on: September 18, 2011
Watch out there’s a sociopath about …
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Table for one, but which one?
Tom celebrated by going to a Roman night club and ordering a superb dinner which he ate in elegant solitude at a candlelit table for two. He did not at all mind dining and going to the theatre alone. It gave him the opportunity to concentrate on being Dickie Greenleaf. He broke his bread as Dickie did, thrust his fork into his mouth with his left hand as Dickie did, gazed off at the other tables and at the dancers in such a profound and benevolent trance that the waiter had to speak to him a couple of times to get his attention.
Completing the cure
Posted by: Epicurean on: September 4, 2011
Look away now if you can’t stomach the dark psychology and fatalism of French literature. Trust me, there is no cure for what the ill-starred lovers face. It doesn’t end well.
Therese Raquin by Emile Zola
It's all going to end badly
In the morning, when daylight dispelled the terrors of the night, Laurent dressed at full speed. He only felt at ease and recovered his self-centred calm in the dining room, sitting in front of a large bowl of coffee and milk made for him by Therese. Madame Raquin, now so feeble that she could hardly go down to the shop, watched him with motherly smiles as he ate. As he swallowed his toast and filled his stomach he gradually recovered confidence. After coffee he would take a small glass of cognac and that completed the cure.
Having your cake and not eating it
Posted by: Epicurean on: August 21, 2011
The cake plays host to the spiders who were not invited to the original wedding. Miss Havisham and Pip contemplate time’s inexorable decay …
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated. From that room too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air — like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber, or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness.
Piece of cake, Pip?
It was spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a table with a long tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks stopped all together.
An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite indistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies run home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.
Pass the salt and save the world
Posted by: Epicurean on: August 13, 2011
Meeting the girlfriend’s parents and keeping your mouth shut …
The Crow Road by Iain Banks
Croaaaakkk
Lunch had been trying to convese with Christmas crackers. Her parents talked in mottoes. ‘Too many people worship money nowadays.’ ‘What you never had, you never miss.’ And Harkness’s favourite: ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ It was a while since he had heard that one and when Mary’s mother said it, he felt a brief shock of pleasure, as if he’s pulled a sturgeon out of the Clyde. Perhaps because they had a guest, they seemed determined to range far and wideamong the problems of the world, obliterating each with a scattergun of prejudice. Vandalism was ‘spoiled children’. Africans had been given ‘too much power for their own good’. The unions were killing our society. Throughout the meal they passed cliches back and forth like condiments. Harkness gagged himself with food.
Micro oysters by the glass
Posted by: Epicurean on: July 23, 2011
A Flag on the Island by VS Naipaul
The waiter brought Leonard his six oysters and brought me my hundred. The oysters were of the tiny island variety; six scarcely filled one indentation of Leonard’s oyster plate. My oysters had come in a tumbler. I scooped up about a dozen and swallowed them.
