Down and Out 2 – the truth about garlic bread

No money to pay for food but the back of an envelope to create a mouth-watering menu …

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Two bad days followed. We had only sixty centimes left and we spent it on a pound of bread, with a pice of garlic to rub it with. The point of rubbing garlic on bread is that the taste lingers and gives one the illusion of having fed recently.We sat most of that day in the Jardin des Plantes. Boris had shots with stones at the tame pigeons but always missed them, and after that we wrote dinner menus on the backs of envelopes. We were too hungry event to try and think of anything except food. I remember the dinner Boris finally selected for himself. It was: a dozen oysters, borscht soup (the red, sweet beetroot soup with cream on top), crayfishes, a young chicken en casserole, beef with stewed plums, new potatoes, a salad, suet pudding and Roquefort cheese, with a litre of Burgundy and some old brandy. Boris had international tastes in food. Later on, when we were prosperous, I occasionally saw him eat meals almost as large without difficulty.

For Whom the Breakfast Waits

Deep breaths and you’re there at the entrance to the cave …

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Good morning!

Robert Jordan pushed aside the saddle blanket that hung over the mouth of the cave and, stepping out, took a deep breath of the cold night air. The mist had cleared away and the stars were out. There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odour of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odours of different herbs whose names he did not know that hung in bunches from the ceiling, with long ropes of garlic, away now from the copper-penny, red wine and garlic, horse sweat and man sweat dried in the clothing (acrid and grey the man sweat, sweet and sickly the dried brushed off lather of horse sweat) of the men at the table, Robert Jordan breathed deeply of the cold night air of the mountains that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream.