What are the best descriptions of food you know of?
April 26, 2013 8:22 AM Subscribe
In a training I am running I want to include a description of food that is so good it would make your mouth water. Ideally, I would read it out, but I could also play a video. I'm drawing a blank though on actually finding such a description. Anything spring to mind for you guys? Ideally it would be more literary than straight-up food writing, but I am open to anything.
Best answer: "On this morning there was brioche and red raspberry preserve and the eggs were boiled and there was a pat of butter that melted as they stirred them and salted them lightly with ground pepper over them in the cups. They were big eggs and fresh and the girl's were not cooked quite as long as the young man's. He remembered that easily and he was happy with his which he diced up with the spoon and ate with only the flow of the butter to moisten them and the fresh early morning texture and the bite of the coarsely ground pepper grains and the hot coffee and the chickory-fragrant bowl of cafe au lait."
"I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine....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."
Both from Hemingway.
posted by seemoreglass at 8:58 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
"I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine....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."
Both from Hemingway.
posted by seemoreglass at 8:58 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
There's a show on the Food Network called: The Best Thing I Ever Ate. They have videos. It's stupid mouth watering, so much so...I can't watch it.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 9:03 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 9:03 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
Read Ruth Reichl's book Garlic and Sapphires
posted by bobdow at 9:21 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by bobdow at 9:21 AM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
Definitely Garlic and Sapphires!
For movies, perhaps that scene in Ratatouille with the fireworks?
posted by jetlagaddict at 9:44 AM on April 26, 2013
For movies, perhaps that scene in Ratatouille with the fireworks?
posted by jetlagaddict at 9:44 AM on April 26, 2013
Best answer: There's actually a blog for this very thing.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:50 AM on April 26, 2013 [5 favorites]
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:50 AM on April 26, 2013 [5 favorites]
From Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe:
They fed stupendously. Eugene began to observe the food and the seasons. In the autumn, they barrelled huge frosty apples in the cellar. Gant bought whole hogs from the butcher, returning home early to salt them, wearing a long work-apron, and rolling his sleeves half up his lean hairy arms. Smoked bacons hung in the pantry, the great bins were full of flour, the dark recessed shelves groaned with preserved cherries, peaches, plums, quinces, apples, pears. All that he touched waxed in rich pungent life: his Spring gardens, wrought in the black wet earth below the fruit trees, flourished in huge crinkled lettuces that wrenched cleanly from the loamy soil with small black clots stuck to their crisp stocks; fat red radishes; heavy tomatoes. The rich plums lay bursted on the grass; his huge cherry trees oozed with heavy gum jewels; his apple trees bent with thick green clusters. The earth was spermy for him like a big woman.
Spring was full of cool dewy mornings, spurting winds, and storms of intoxicating blossoms, and in this enchantment Eugene first felt the mixed lonely ache and promise of the seasons.
In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima-beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits— cherries, pears, peaches. At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.
For the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts four heavy turkeys were bought and fattened for weeks: Eugene fed them with cans of shelled corn several times a day, but he could not bear to be present at their executions, because by that time their cheerful excited gobbles made echoes in his heart. Eliza baked for weeks in advance: the whole energy of the family focussed upon the great ritual of the feast. A day or two before, the auxiliary dainties arrived in piled grocer’s boxes—the magic of strange foods and fruits was added to familiar fare: there were glossed sticky dates, cold rich figs, cramped belly to belly in small boxes, dusty raisins, mixed nuts—the almond, pecan, the meaty nigger-toe, the walnut, sacks of assorted candies, piles of yellow Florida oranges, tangerines, sharp, acrid, nostalgic odors.
Seated before a roast or a fowl, Gant began a heavy clangor on his steel and carving knife, distributing thereafter Gargantuan portions to each plate. Eugene feasted from a high chair by his father’s side, filled his distending belly until it was drum-tight, and was permitted to stop eating by his watchful sire only when his stomach was impregnable to the heavy prod of Gant’s big finger.
posted by Mendl at 10:35 AM on April 26, 2013
They fed stupendously. Eugene began to observe the food and the seasons. In the autumn, they barrelled huge frosty apples in the cellar. Gant bought whole hogs from the butcher, returning home early to salt them, wearing a long work-apron, and rolling his sleeves half up his lean hairy arms. Smoked bacons hung in the pantry, the great bins were full of flour, the dark recessed shelves groaned with preserved cherries, peaches, plums, quinces, apples, pears. All that he touched waxed in rich pungent life: his Spring gardens, wrought in the black wet earth below the fruit trees, flourished in huge crinkled lettuces that wrenched cleanly from the loamy soil with small black clots stuck to their crisp stocks; fat red radishes; heavy tomatoes. The rich plums lay bursted on the grass; his huge cherry trees oozed with heavy gum jewels; his apple trees bent with thick green clusters. The earth was spermy for him like a big woman.
Spring was full of cool dewy mornings, spurting winds, and storms of intoxicating blossoms, and in this enchantment Eugene first felt the mixed lonely ache and promise of the seasons.
In the morning they rose in a house pungent with breakfast cookery, and they sat at a smoking table loaded with brains and eggs, ham, hot biscuit, fried apples seething in their gummed syrups, honey, golden butter, fried steak, scalding coffee. Or there were stacked batter-cakes, rum-colored molasses, fragrant brown sausages, a bowl of wet cherries, plums, fat juicy bacon, jam. At the mid-day meal, they ate heavily: a huge hot roast of beef, fat buttered lima-beans, tender corn smoking on the cob, thick red slabs of sliced tomatoes, rough savory spinach, hot yellow corn-bread, flaky biscuits, a deep-dish peach and apple cobbler spiced with cinnamon, tender cabbage, deep glass dishes piled with preserved fruits— cherries, pears, peaches. At night they might eat fried steak, hot squares of grits fried in egg and butter, pork-chops, fish, young fried chicken.
For the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts four heavy turkeys were bought and fattened for weeks: Eugene fed them with cans of shelled corn several times a day, but he could not bear to be present at their executions, because by that time their cheerful excited gobbles made echoes in his heart. Eliza baked for weeks in advance: the whole energy of the family focussed upon the great ritual of the feast. A day or two before, the auxiliary dainties arrived in piled grocer’s boxes—the magic of strange foods and fruits was added to familiar fare: there were glossed sticky dates, cold rich figs, cramped belly to belly in small boxes, dusty raisins, mixed nuts—the almond, pecan, the meaty nigger-toe, the walnut, sacks of assorted candies, piles of yellow Florida oranges, tangerines, sharp, acrid, nostalgic odors.
Seated before a roast or a fowl, Gant began a heavy clangor on his steel and carving knife, distributing thereafter Gargantuan portions to each plate. Eugene feasted from a high chair by his father’s side, filled his distending belly until it was drum-tight, and was permitted to stop eating by his watchful sire only when his stomach was impregnable to the heavy prod of Gant’s big finger.
posted by Mendl at 10:35 AM on April 26, 2013
Brian Jacques, known mostly for the Redwall series, made his writing as descriptive as possible at least in part for the sake of the blind children at a school where he was a volunteer/milk-deliveryman.
The food scenes in the Redwall series (and the battle scenes, for that matter) are very vivid and very specific.
See The Redwall Kitchen.
More here.
posted by ablazingsaddle at 1:27 PM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
The food scenes in the Redwall series (and the battle scenes, for that matter) are very vivid and very specific.
See The Redwall Kitchen.
More here.
posted by ablazingsaddle at 1:27 PM on April 26, 2013 [1 favorite]
The film Tampopo has some wonderful passages about noodles.
posted by glasseyes at 7:09 PM on April 26, 2013
posted by glasseyes at 7:09 PM on April 26, 2013
Farmer Boy, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Actually, any of the Little House books should do.
posted by mynameisluka at 9:45 PM on April 26, 2013
posted by mynameisluka at 9:45 PM on April 26, 2013
Umberto Eco's Prague Cemetery is full of colorful descriptions of Italian food from the turn of the century.
posted by Lucubrator at 11:22 AM on April 27, 2013
posted by Lucubrator at 11:22 AM on April 27, 2013
« Older Thinking of moving to Asheville. Scouting soon. | Paterson, New Jersey, or nearby temporary... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:43 AM on April 26, 2013