After obsessing over her blog, we knew that Kate Christensen’s autobiography Blue Plate Special, told with a side of some of her most memorable meals, would be an enjoyable read. It’s one of those rare examples of a book that can make you happy, sad, and also really hungry for lapin á la cocotte, and it got us thinking about some other great writers’ pithiest and most appetizing thoughts on food.
“Ice cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn’t illegal.” — Voltaire
“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 taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.” — Ernest Hemingway
“All sorrows are less with bread.” — Cervantes
“I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream.” — Mark Twain
Photo via Chef Janet Rörschåch
“He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” — James Joyce on Leopold Bloom’s favorite foods
“He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.” — P.G. Wodehouse
“The Mexican food is so great in San Francisco that it’s even good at the airport.” — Jennifer Egan
“As for the rye bread, it is the best in the city, but it’s not nearly up to the standards of my cousin Louis. He had a fine old Russian-Jewish bakery in Chicago. It was the Imperial Baking Company and his rye bread was famous. He also made black Russian pumpernickel in huge ovals, each about the size of a three month-old infant. Carrying it home was hard work. No one makes that kind of pumpernickel anymore.” — Saul Bellow
“The plinths supporting stuffed turkeys and chickens were works of architecture, made of a mixture of lard and the fat from sheep’s kidneys.” — Honoré de Balzac
“At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviar aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bèze of 1904.” — Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
“Now, of course, lobster is posh, a delicacy, only a step or two down from caviar. The meat is richer and more substantial than most fish, its taste subtle compared to the marine-gaminess of mussels and clams. In the U.S. pop-food imagination, lobster is now the seafood analog to steak, with which it’s so often twinned as Surf ’n’ Turf on the really expensive part of the chain steak house menu.” — David Foster Wallace
“I would leave and have these two-hour lunches at the Pakistan Tea House and gorge myself on lentils, cauliflower, chicken or a little goat if they had it. I would come back to the office just stinking of lentils and kebabs.” — Gary Shteyngart
“There’s no point in making piecrust from scratch.” — Nora Ephron