Dig In!

Thanksgiving is coming up next week, and what better way to celebrate the tastiest holiday in America with a blog post composed entirely of me skipping ahead to the sauciest bits in the foodiest books in the UBC? Bon Apétit!

Goblin Market, Christina Rosetti

"I ate and ate my fill,

Yet my mouth waters still;

To-morrow night I will

Buy more," and kissed her.

"Have done with sorrow;

I'll bring you plums to-morrow

Fresh on their mother twigs,

Cherries worth getting;

You cannot think what figs

My teeth have met in,

What melons, icy-cold 

Piled on a dish of gold

Too huge for me to hold, 

What peaches with a velvet nap,

Pellucid grapes without one seed:

Odorous indeed must be the mead

Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink,

With lilies at the brink,

And sugar-sweet their sap."

Farmer Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder:
"Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate the mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie."

The Devil's Larder, Jim Crace
"She liked the aubergine's affinity with olive oil and garlic, its generous response to mushrooms or tomatoes. It kept good company. She liked its versatility, just as happy to be stuffed as fried, just as tasty in a moussaka or ratatouille as in a dip or served as Fainting Priest."

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Yeah I know they all get poisoned from the crabmeat but OMG this is the tastiest spread in literature:

"Arrayed on the Ladies' Day banquet table were yellow-green avocado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise, and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a cut-glass bowl heaped with black caviar. [..] Before I came to New York I'd never eaten out in a proper restaurant. I don't count Howard Johnson's, where I only had french fries and cheeseburgers and vanilla frappes with people like Buddy Willard. I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else. [...] My favorite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream."

Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
This book! Recipes in every chapter and saucy descriptions like gangbusters! Here's a teaser:


"It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being in the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quails, in the wine, in every one of the meal's aromas."

A Movable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea."

The Book of Salt, Monique Truong

Photo ©Rebecca Perriello

"I wanted to tell her that I would cut the first pineapple into paper-thin rounds and saute them with shallots and slices of beef; that the sugar in the pineapple would caramelized during cooking, imparting a faint smokiness that is addictive; [...] I would cut the second pineapple into bite-sized pieces, soak them in kirsch, make them into a drunken bed for spoonfuls of tangerine sorbet; that I would pipe unsweetened cream around the edges, a ring of ivory-colored rosettes."