The Food Quote Challenge

I seem to stumble, trip and fall quite frequently… over food that is. I’m not culinarily clumsy, just excitable. But food is best discovered, I say, haphazardly, and with a sense of adventure!

This time however, it landed square in my lap.

“The Food Lover’s Treasury!” it beamed, as my colleague placed it in my hands. There was no exclamation mark in its title, but for story telling purposes, there may have well as been.

A delicious little book, A Food Lover’s Treasury is a book about food, and in particular the food that’s in books. Recently released, it contains a collection of excerpts from the classics, highlighting food as one of the greatest overlooked themes of literature.

“‘There is no such passion in human nature as the passion for gravy among gentlemen. It’s nothing to say a joint won’t yield - a whole criminal wouldn’t yield - the amount of gravy they expect at dinner. And what I have undergone in consequence,’ cried Mrs Todgers, raising her eyes and shaking her head, ‘no-one would believe!’”

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1844)

I’ll admit, I’m an absolute sucker for old-world prose and secretly wish that we all had the oft chance to speak as Elizabeth would speak to Mr Darcy, as so much as the opportunity would allow. But, throw a little food into the mix and you have a food lover cum 18^th century wannabe in absolute raptures.

So as serendipity brought this book to me (rather than the much less romantic notion of it being my job to review them), I cast it back into the world and charge you with the mission of finding, stumbling upon or even catching in your lap, other wonderful food quotes.

Quotes starring in non-food focused literature are best, however all more-ish phrases welcomed.

The Food Quote Challenge will be open until Friday 21^st November, so make sure to send me an email (yasmin@almondandthehazelnut.com) before this date with Food Quote Challenge in the subject line. Please also include the name of the book as well as the author, and if you’re posting it on your blog, a link to your post url too. I’ll be posting the results on Tuesday 25^th November, so make sure to drop in, consume some prose and stuff yourself silly…

“Food is a subject of conversation more spiritually refreshing even than the weather, for the number of possible remarks about the weather is limited, whereas of food you can talk on and on and on. Moreover, no heat of controversy is induced by mention of the atmospheric conditions (seeing that we are all agreed as to what is a good day and what is a bad one) and where there can be no controversy there can be no intimacy in agreement. But tastes in food differ so sharply…that a pronounced agreement in them is of all bonds a union the most intimate. Thus, if a man hates tapioca pudding he is a good fellow and my friend.

A. A. Milne, ‘Lunch’ (1934)