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A Food Lover's Treasury

by Julie Rugg and Lynda Murphy

If you are a fan of the Food Quotes section of Foodreference.com, you will delight in reading this compilation of longer excerpts about food from a wide variety of literary sources.

Description
Food may not rank with white whales or the family as the most important literary subject, but in fact, major writers past and present have had plenty to say about it. This delightful divertissement brings together a tasty menu of literary gems about food. Anthony Trollope discusses cake while Paul Auster laments the bitter breaking of two eggs. Other scrumptious entries riff on American and foreign cuisine, restaurants, cooking, table manners, Dickens' famous Christmas pudding, Proust's Madeleine, and Solzhenitsyn's challenging cabbage.

Searching through the treasures of world literature from Pliny to Chaucer to Dickens to Brillat-Savarin ("there is no more charming sight than a pretty gourmand in action"), and including such modern voices as John Lanchester and lan McEwan, the authors provide us with a groaning board of delights.

Although packed with plenty of pithy quotations, A Food Lover's Treasury is not merely a collection of bon mots; the authors excel at the extract, providing many long excerpts that will entice the reader back to the original material. Many a reader will be tempted to keep notes for future reading when dipping into the delights at hand in this volume.

The more than 400 entries are organized by philosophy, taste, local delicacies, shopping and cooking, meals, mood, places to eat, going without, and manners & morals, and is sure to provide something for everyone's taste; Proust's Madeleine ("Suddenly memory revealed itself"), Algernon in 'The Importance of Being Ernest' ("I am particularly fond of muffins"), Eudora Welty's summer drink of Lake's Celery ("What else could it be called? It was made by Mr. Lake out of celery"), and D.H. Lawrence's Sardinian marketplace ("Only one lovely place: raw ham, boiled ham, chickens in aspic, chicken vol-au-vents, sweet curds, curd cheese, rustic cheesecake, smoked sausages, beautiful fresh mortadella, huge Mediterranean red lobsters, and those lobsters without claws.' So good! So good!' We stand and cry it aloud").