“The art of keeping a good table, consists, not in loading on a variety at each meal, but rather in securing a successive variety, a table neatly and tastefully set, and everything that is on it, cooked in the best manner.”

 

Beecher, C. E. (1846) Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book.

Erma Bombeck on gravy

"I come from a home where gravy is a beverage."

Erma Bombeck

A.A. Gill on Dinner by Heston Blumenthal

We began with meat fruit. This, I suspect, will be the most requested and talked-about dish. A perfect mandarin orange that smells like mandarin, even minutely examined it looks like a mandarin, but, cut open, it is immensely fine chicken liver parfait - like the old Jewish joke: what am I? Chopped liver.

Then I had rice and flesh, a Chinese yellow saffron risotto with that characteristic flavour of dust and closed jewellery boxes and nuggets of calf tail. Salamagundy is an old English pickled salad that can contain any number of ingredients. This one was chicken oysters, the little muscle behind the wing, bone marrow and horseradish. A broth of lamb was so intense, it was like supping melted amber. Roast bone marrow came in a split leg with anchovy, mace and pickled vegetables. Jeremy [Clarkson] had this and his eyes bulged. Hoarsely, he spluttered: "This is the best thing I have ever eaten."

Gill, A.A. (2011) Table Talk: Dinners by Heston Blumenthal. Style. The Sunday Times. 13 Feb. 54-55.

Margaret Visser on the socio-cultural significance of food

"Food is "everyday" - it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all; for most of human history we have spent a much longer portion of our lives worrying about food, and plotting, working, and fighting to attain it, than we have on any other pursuit. As soon as we can count on a food supply (and so take food for granted), and not a moment sooner, we start to civilise ourselves. Civilisation entails shaping, regulating, constraining, and dramatizing ourselves; we echo the preferences and the principles of our culture in the way we treat our food.

...

Food - what is chosen from the possibilities available, how it is presented, how it is eaten, with whom and when, and how much time is allotted to cooking and eating it - is one of the means by which society creates itself and acts out its aims and fantasies. Changing (or unchanging) food choices and presentations are part of every society's tradition and character. Food shapes us and expresses us even more definitively than our furniture or houses or utensils do.

Visser, M. (1986) Much Depends On Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal. New York: Grove Press.

James Beard on tarts and calories

"A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch."

 

James Beard