Showing posts with label sugar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sugar. Show all posts

Friday, 27 March 2015

Livers of fat geese. There's a pie!


"Now, look here!" he said. "In this paper," which was nicely folded, "is a piece of the best plum-cake that can be got for money — sugar on the outside an inch thick, like fat on mutton chops. Here's a little pie (a gem this is, both for size and quality), made in France. And what do you suppose it's made of? Livers of fat geese. There's a pie! Now let's see you eat 'em." 
"Thank you, sir," I replied; "thank you very much indeed, but I hope you won't be offended — they are too rich for me." 
"Floored again!" said the gentleman, which I didn't at all understand, and threw them both out of window.
Bleak House (1853) 
Charles Dickens


Saturday, 28 June 2014

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)