Posted on 10/20/2012 2:03:03 PM PDT by sussex
In Chapter VIII of “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Graham, Mr Toad is in prison, steeped in despair when the gaoler’s daughter brings him…..toast….
(Excerpt) Read more at theagedp.com ...
Well, that’s true. There are moments in ones’s life where the food is somehow the absolute culminatiion of the moment. And very often it’s a rather humble food.
Mercy Watson the Pig, another fixture in children’s literature, agrees COMPLETELY
http://heavytable.com/mercy-watson-the-porcine-wonder-talks-toast/
My all time favorite is Melville’s discourse on Chowder in Moby Dick... “Hear me, sweet friends....”
Followed by a quote from the "Blind Samurai' after getting out of a three day jail sentence:
"They beat me for three days....completely relieved my stiff back"
How about the recipes (and descriptions!) in Michener’s The Covenant (layered pudding), Chesapeake (crab-cakes), and Centennial (can’t remember, but I could taste it).
Does she really? Why not post it here so we can see.
Angela’s Ashes:
Every morning Grandma cooks Bill’s dinner and takes it to him at the lime kiln. Mam wonders why he can’t take it with him in the morning and Grandma says, Do you expect me to get up at dawn and boil cabbage and pig’s toes for his lordship to take in his dinner can?
Mam tells her, in another week school will be over and if you give Frank sixpence a week he’ll surely be glad to take Bill Galvin his dinner.
I don’t want to go to Grandma’s every day. I don’t want to take Bill Galvin his dinner all the way down the Dock Road, but Mam says that’s sixpence we could use and if I don’t do it I’m going nowhere else.
You’re staying in the house, she says. You’re not playing with your pals.
Grandma warns me to take the dinner can directly and not be meandering, looking this way and that, kicking canisters and ruining the toes of my shoes. This dinner is hot and that’s the way Bill Galvin wants it.
There’s a lovely smell from the dinner can, boiled bacon and cabbage and two big floury white potatoes. Surely he won’t notice if I try half a potato. He won’t complain to Grandma because he hardly ever talks outside of a snuffle or two.
It’s better if I eat the other half-potato so that he won’t be asking why he got a half. I might as well try the bacon and cabbage too and if I eat the other potato he’ll surely think she didn’t send one at all.
The second potato melts in my mouth and I’ll have to try another bit of cabbage, another morsel of bacon. There isn’t much left now and he’ll be very suspicious so I might as well finish off the rest.
What am I going to do now? Grandma will destroy me, Mam will keep me in for a year. Bill Galvin will bury me in lime. I’ll tell him I was attacked by a dog on the Dock Road and he ate the whole dinner and I’m lucky I escaped with being eaten myself.
Oh, is that so? says Bill Galvin. And what’s that bit of cabbage hanging on your gansey? Did the dog lick you with his cabbagey gob? Go home and tell your grandmother you ate me whole dinner and I’m falling down with the hunger here in the line kiln.
"YEAH TOAST!!!Heywood Banks Live Version (YouTube):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BILAFuSi-i0
Maybe bacause it's actually not all that exciting....
When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries. Toad sat up on end once more, dried his eyes, sipped his tea and munched his toast….
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