slipping off a piece of toast

Her Serene Highness made one of her characteristic exits, which Lady Caroline declared always reminded her of a scrambled egg slipping off a piece of toast.

'Saki' (H. H. Munro)

The Unbearable Bassington (1912)

I can't believe I've never reviewed any Saki. 
Wonderful short stories ('Tobermory', the talking cat!) 
and this rather odd novel (also here). 
See reviews by desperate reader, stuck in a book, 
& i prefer reading.

Poor Saki.

Really wikipedia does not do him justice...

an old box of wedding cake.. with a burning brandy sauce

It was she who suddenly remembered that it was Christmas day. "And this is our Christmas dinner," observed McVay regretfully. "Oh, no," returned the girl, "this is luncheon. I'll cook your dinner. You'll see."

... 

She proved herself infinitely more capable than the two men had been, discovering tins of butter and soup and sardines, a package of hominy, apples and potatoes in the cellar, and an old box of wedding cake, which, with a burning brandy sauce, she declared would serve very well for plum-pudding.

...they presently sat down to their Christmas dinner, of which they all expressed themselves as inordinately proud. There was canned soup, and sardines and toasted biscuits, canned corned beef, potatoes and fried hominy, bacon and a potato salad, a bottle of champagne, and finally the wedding cake.

Alice Duer Miller

The Burglar and the Blizzard (?1914)

I really enjoyed her Come Out of the Kitchen (1916) which I described last year as: "Another lost classic (rediscovered by fleur in her world): a rich young man rents a house from an impoverished family, only to discover a host of servant problems - such as the world's prettiest cook."

small cress sandwiches

In her brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her. He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was limited. Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which are so frequent in family life that they might almost be called brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money and a sense of repose, and their one child had the brilliant virtue of never saying anything which even its parents could consider worth repeating. Then he had gone into Parliament, possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death can produce the item "another by-election" on the news posters can be wholly a nonentity.

Saki [H. H. Munro]

The Unbearable Bassington (1912)

olives... green things they are

The Major's wife and the daughter's been to Europe, and my wife tells me since they got back they make tea there every afternoon about five o'clock, and drink it. Seems to me it would go against a person's stomach, just before supper like that, and anyway tea isn't fit for much--not unless you're sick or something. My wife says Ambersons don't make lettuce salad the way other people do; they don't chop it up with sugar and vinegar at all. They pour olive oil on it with their vinegar, and they have it separate--not along with the rest of the meal. And they eat these olives, too: green things they are, something like a hard plum, but a friend of mine told me they tasted a good deal like a bad hickory-nut. My wife says she's going to buy some; you got to eat nine and then you get to like 'em, she says. Well, I wouldn't eat nine bad hickory-nuts to get to like them, and I'm going to let these olives alone. Kind of a woman's dish, anyway, I suspect...

Booth Tarkington

The Magnificent Ambersons (1918)

(I wrote about this book here)