books are for eating

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The warm kitchen seemed full of people and their voices, and of a mingled scent of brewing tea and warm butter and — could it be a whiff of perfume: *tréfle*? The tea-table was crowded with Mrs. Roberts' gayest crockery, with her largest black teapot, with mounds of yellow light-cakes and clusters of brown eggs and great slabs of Welsh farmhouse bread-and-butter. In the middle a glass jug held a bouquet of heather and honeysuckle and blue scabious. There was a dish of damson jam, and a very golden, "shoppy" cake.

His Official Fiancee, by Berta Ruck

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"Buck up, Cis, and eat some really good scrambled eggs with little bits of ham chopped up in them. And then there's some glass loganberries, hot; and somebody's been what Mrs. Skinner calls 'pampering the milk,' so I got a brown jar of cream for them. *One* comfort of living in a *ménage* without any *men* (a joke, so please laugh) is that we can eat what we *like*, instead of stodging horrible, gristly chops and steaks and potatoes every night of our lives. And I brought in some red ink—not Veuve Emu this time, but really decent Burgundy to cheer us up—"

His Official Fiancee, by Berta Ruck

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Over glasses of hot milk and the poached eggs-on-toast, the plates of which rasped on the marble-topped table of the shop that *always* smells of steak-and-kidney pie, the other girls made themselves specially agreeable to the colleague who was preparing for the sack in another hour.

His Official Fiancee, by Berta Ruck

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They were about to step into the carriage when the Vicar remembered that no one had given him his egg. They knew that he must have an egg for his voice, there were two women in the house, and no one had the least regard for his comfort. Mrs. Carey scolded Mary Ann, and Mary Ann answered that she could not think of everything. She hurried away to fetch an egg, and Mrs. Carey beat it up in a glass of sherry. The Vicar swallowed it at a gulp. The communion plate was stowed in the carriage, and they set off.

Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham

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Luke Raven, who had been communing quietly with a Kurd in a corner, raised first his eyes and then his long and beautiful hands. Broodingly he gazed at these, as if taking satisfaction in penetrating to their enduring skeleton. “Disturbing?” he echoed. “Know that what disturbs our blood is but its longing for the tomb.” He took out his watch and gazed at it as one who knows that every second spans out man’s mortality. “I wonder,” he said, “if they managed to get any potatoes? There are few things so good as a roast potato for allaying the fever of the bone.”

Appleby's End, by Michael Innes

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With a clattering of chairs, upended shell cases, benches, and ottomans, Pirate's mob gather at the shores of the great refectory table, a southern island well across a tropic or two from chill Corydon Throsp's mediaeval fantasies, crowded now over the swirling dark grain of its walnut uplands with banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casseroles, mashed bananas molded in the shape of a British lion rampant, blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to spell out the words C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attributed to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade) which Pirate has appropriated as his motto... tall cruets of pale banana syrup to pour oozing over banana waffles, a giant glazed crock where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead... banana croissants and banana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread, and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing a clandestine radio transmitter...

Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon

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"I know—it was a thrilling story. Well, good-by till Monday, Anna Black. I'm going home now, to have some lovely prunes and some real dried beef, and maybe a glass of almost-milk if I can persuade the landlady I need it." "Mine prefers dried apricots," responded Miss Black cheerfully, "but she never has anything but canned milk in the house, thus sparing us the embarrassment of asking for real. Good-by—good luck!"

The Rose-Garden Husband, by Margaret Widdemer

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The feast consisted of a pot-au-feu, which Miss Chalice had made, of a leg of mutton roasted round the corner and brought round hot and savoury (Miss Chalice had cooked the potatoes, and the studio was redolent of the carrots she had fried; fried carrots were her specialty); and this was to be followed by poires flambees, pears with burning brandy, which Cronshaw had volunteered to make. The meal was to finish with an enormous fromage de Brie, which stood near the window and added fragrant odours to all the others which filled the studio.

Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham

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He partook lavishly of every dish and was so much moved by the excellence of the Davenport fowls, stuffed, parboiled, and stewed in butter, that he sent a complimentary message to the cook and congratulated Carlyon on having acquired such a treasure. By the time he had worked his way from the Hessian soup and ragout which began the repast through a baked carp dressed in the Portuguese way, some beefsteaks with oyster sauce, the fowls, and a floating island, with a fruit pie as a remove, he was so far reconciled to his nephew’s death as to be able to recount three of the latest good stories circulating town and to confide to Carlyon as he ecstatically savored the bouquet of the port, that he really could not agree with his old friend Brummell in deeming it a wine only fit for the lower orders to drink.

The Reluctant Widow, by Georgette Heyer

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'Cousin Tom,' said mother, and trying to get so that Annie and I could not hear her; 'it would be a sad and unkinlike thing for you to despise our dwelling-house. We cannot entertain you, as the lordly inns on the road do; and we have small change of victuals. But the men will go home, being Saturday; and so you will have the fireside all to yourself and the children. There are some few collops of red deer's flesh, and a ham just down from the chimney, and some dried salmon from Lynmouth weir, and cold roast-pig, and some oysters. And if none of those be to your liking, we could roast two woodcocks in half an hour, and Annie would make the toast for them. And the good folk made some mistake last week, going up the country, and left a keg of old Holland cordial in the coving of the wood-rick, having borrowed our Smiler, without asking leave. I fear there is something unrighteous about it. But what can a poor widow do? John Fry would have taken it, but for our Jack. Our Jack was a little too sharp for him.'

Lorna Doone, by RD Blackmore

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In the royal kitchens two hundred and twenty cooks, four hundred scullions, as many servingmen, and five hundred kitchen maids worked like mad, baking cakes and pies and pastries. They stuffed swans and peacocks and boars’ heads and made wonderful sweets—marzipan trees hung with crystalized cherries, and castles and dragons and great ships of sugar candy. Five cooks from Italy worked on the christening cake, which was decorated with hundreds of sugar bells and crystalized roses, and was so tall that they had to stand on silver stepladders to ice it.

The Ordinary Princess, by MM Kaye

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The young couple dined tete-a-tete at the fashionable late hour of eight o'clock on their first evening in their new home, sitting opposite one another in their smart dining-room, and waited on by a butler whose spare frame and pallid countenance seemed to indicate that he was of a suitably abstemious character. The dinner, which consisted of a broiled fowl with mushrooms, preceded by a dressed lobster and a delicacy of cockscombs served in a wine sauce, and followed by a pupton of pears, in the old style, and a trifle, was excellently cooked, and earned the Viscount's praise.

Friday's Child, by Georgette Heyer

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In the moment when that glass passed from his hand to mine, something sent up a high wild warning cry in the back of my mind. Persephone’s irrevocable pomegranate seeds, Never take food from strangers; old stories where one sip or bite seals the spellbound walls forever, dissolves the road home into mist and blows it away on the wind.

The Likeness, by Tana French

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'Yes, all those dishes on the sideboard. When my husband was alive, we'd have three or four different hot dishes and cold ham when there were only the three of us at breakfast.' 'Ah, yes,' said Jane eagerly; 'kidneys and bacon and scrambled egg and boiled eggs, perhaps haddock too, not to mention porridge. I used to read about it in novels about Edwardian country house parties.' 'Now we've done away with all that,' said Mrs. Lyall, 'and it's such a relief. I just have tea and toast. Edward likes coffee and a cereal of some kind. He might have a boiled egg or a rasher of bacon occasionally.'

Jane and Prudence, by Barbara Pym

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Then they brought in the aromatic pie, which had small birds under its pastry, some stuffed with meat and some with eggs, and some fried in grape juice and limes, and the lambs stuffed with meat and ground pistachio nuts and cooked in sesame oil, and the sturgeon in broth, and the ground figs, cloves and mace, and the coloured jellies shaped like flowers and trees, and the golden spice plates with sugar plums and suckets wrapped in rolled aniseed leaves, and nougat and marzipan, and more spiced claret with honey, and Diccon Chancellor forgot everything else, looking at his son's scarlet face.

The Ringed Castle, by Dorothy Dunnett

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'We each received seven goblets of Burgundy and seven each of Rhenish wine, muscatel, white wine, Canary, Alicant and malmsey, twelve measures of hydromel and a quantity of food, among which I remember eight dishes of roast swan, eight of spiced crane, several of cocks dressed with ginger, boned fowls, blackcock cooked in saffron, hazel-grouse cooked in cream, ducks with cucumber, geese with rice, hares with dumplings and turnips, elks' brains, cakes and pies of meat and of cheese, pancakes, fritters, jellies, creams and preserved walnuts, which I escorted myself half the way from Astrakhan.'

The Ringed Castle, by Dorothy Dunnett

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Porcelain bowls on porcelain saucers had replaced the preserved lemon flowers, the pastes and cream and pistachios. In them were sherbets of raisin juice and rhubarb and rose-leaves; lotus, tamarind and grapes, honey, violets and melons.

Pawn in Frankincense, by Dorothy Dunnett