'Homemade' begs one question. Whose home? Have you actually seen people's homes? Why should biscuits made at home be better than those baked in a factory, a factory that specialises in biscuits? I'm thinking here of Nairn's Oatcakes, Rakusen's Matzo Crackers and Carr's Water Biscuits. We don't seek treatment from amateur surgeons and Sunday dentists.
J. Meades, The plagiarist in the kitchen (2017), 143
SAUTE POTATOES
Do peel the potatoes - unpeeled potatoes are an abomination
Do not blanch them let alone boil them
Cut them into pieces the size of a malnourished walnut
J. Meades, The plagiarist in the kitchen (2017), 121
It [Lancashire Hotpot] needs very slow cooking in an oven. Into a family-sized, brown, oval-shaped dish with a lid, you place the following ingredients: best end of neck of lamb, trimmed of all fat; potatoes and onions thickly sliced. These go in alternate layers. Season well, cover with good stock, top with oysters, or, if you wish, sliced beef kidneys. There is no need for officious timing: you will know when it is done. Serve with pickled red cabbage and a cheap claret. In his novel The human factor, Mr Graham Greene has the effrontery to add carrots to the dish. He promised to remove these carrots in a re-issue of the book, but they are still wrongly and redly there.
Anthony Burgess, cited in J. Meades, The plagiarist in the kitchen (2017), 83-4
The best known recipe in the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is for hashish fudge. She got the recipe from Brion Gibson who had got it in Tangier where it would have ben known as mahjoun. It is of Berber origin. The problem with it is the problem of cannabis in any form - it turns the most delightful people into dull obsessives or insensate, giggling bores or borderline psychotics. Protracted exposure to the wretched stuff causes brain damage. Avoid. Stick to acid and opium
J. Meades, The plagiarist in the kitchen (2017), 71
IN the years since, there have been endless request to license the song [Tubthumping]. Almost always, the band say no. On specific occasions, they do make exceptions. One year, the US car company Chrysler offered them £100,000 to use the track on a TV ad. The band knew there'd been a long-running dispute at Chrysler's Detroit plant, it's workers striking for better wages, improved conditions. They agree to license the song, then donated all the money - very publicly - to its striking workforce. 'Chrysler were infuriated,' Whalley notes.
N. Duerden, Exit stage left: the curious afterlife of popstars (2022), 262-3
In Liverpool, Brian Nash [from Frankie Goes to Hollywood] - Nasher - is a very good funeral celebrant.
'I tell you, doing funerals is better than doing an acoustic gig any day,' he says, 'because at least every cunt shuts up while you're talking, and there's no on standing at the bar with beer bottles chatting shit cos they're full of coke.'
N. Duerden, Exit stage left: the curious afterlife of popstars (2022), 112
In 1993, Billy Joel released his last album, River of Dreams, and aside from one further album of classical piano pieces, has felt no compulsion to write anything else. He still enjoys playing his catalogue live, he's sold hundreds of millions of records, and he's proved his worth. What else is there to say?
'I know some artists struggle with the idea of being relevant, [but] I stopped buying that a long time ago,' Joel told Billboard magazine in 2019.
N. Duerden, Exit stage left: the curious afterlife of popstars (2022), 14
Lyndon, apparently you Texans haven’t learned one of the first things we learned up in New York State, and that is when the election is over, you have to sit on the ballot boxes.
FDR, cited in R. Caro, the years of Lyndon Johnson, volume 1: the path to power (1982), 742
The new power he possessed did not derive from Roosevelt’s friendship, or from Rayburn’s. It did not derive from seniority in the House, not even – despite the relationship that power in a democracy bears to the votes of the electorate – to his seat in it. His power was simply the power of money. To a considerable extent, the money was Herman Brown’s…. His power base wasn’t his congressional district, it was Herman Brown’s bank account
R. Caro, the years of Lyndon Johnson, volume 1: the path to power (1982), 659
The Vatican advised that Pope Pius X would grant him an audience on the fifth of April, providing that he did not embarrass his Holiness by associating with any Methodists in Rome
E. Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (2010), 35
“Trinkets,” Alice said, when asked if she was still short of anything. “Preferably diamond trinkets.”
E. Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), 436
[At Yosemite, in 1903] For the next forty-eight hours, the boy in Roosevelt, never quite supressed, reveled in his wild surroundings. “This is bully!” he yelled, when Muir burned a dead tree for him and the sparks hurtled skyward. After another night our, he awoke at Glacier Point, and was intrigued to find himself buried under four inches of snow. “This is bullier!”
E. Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), 238
Petitioners visiting the Executive Office learned to keep talking, because the president usually had an open book on his desk, and was quite capable of snatching it up when conversation flagged.
E. Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), 108
Yet there was no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified to be President of all the people. Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character. A random survey of his achievements might show him mastering German, French and the contrasted dialects of Harvard and Dakota Territory; assembling fossil skeletons with paleontological skill; fighting for an amateur boxing championship; transcribing birdsong into a private system of phonetics; chasing boat thieves with a star on his breast and Tolstoy in his pocket; founding a finance club, a stockman’s association, and hunting-conservation society; reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own; climbing the Matterhorn; promulgating a flying machine; and becoming a world authority on North American game mammals. Any Roosevelt watcher could make up a different but equally varied list.
E. Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), 11
Teddy is consumed with energy as long as he is doing something and fighting somebody … he always finds something to do and somebody to fight. Poor Cabot must be successful; while Teddy is happiest when he conquers, but quite happy if he only fights.
Cecil Spring Rice, cited in E. Morris, The rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), 486
Today the book [Roosevelt’s biography of Benton] is dismissed as historical hackwork. This reputation is not fair. Benton may be unread, but it is not unreadable. Certainly there are long stretches of of rather dogged narrative, such as the chapters devoted to the politics of nullification and the redistribution of federal surplus funds. One can read the book from cover to cover without finding our what its subject looked like. Secondary characters, such as Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, are merely referred to, like names in an encyclopedia. The only personality whose lusty presence stamps every page is that of Theodore Roosevelt. Herein lies the book’s main appeal, but its scholarship is so dated to be spurious now.
E. Morris, The rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), 329
[at 14, Roosevelt was] puzzled by a shopkeeper’s refusal to sell him, on sight, a full pound of arsenic. “I was informed that I must bring a witness to prove that I was not going to commit murder, suicide or any such dreadful thing, before I could have it!”
E. Morris, The rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979), 37
I am told that he no sooner thinks than he talks, which is a miracle not wholly in accord with an educational theory of forming an opinion.
Woodrow Wilson, cited in E. Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (2010), 349
When dining alone, we should all be a bit more like Lucullus. Lucullus was an ancient Roman general known for his extravagant hospitality. One night, his chef presented Lucullus with a small and inexpensive dinner, because he was not expecting any guests. The general exploded with rage. ‘What? Does thou not know that tonight Lucullus dines with Lucullus?
B. Wilson, The secret of cooking (2023), 325
What does ‘from scratch’ really mean, anyway? It is all relative. We do not tell ourselves we are cheating when we buy packs of ready churned butter and bags of ready-ground sugar and flour, even though to cooks of earlier generation these would have seemed unimaginable luxuries. If a Victorian cooks wished to make a dish involving sugar, he or she would first have to chisel off a lump of hard sugar from a larger loaf and then grind this into a powder before finally pushing it through a series of sieves until it was fine enough to use
B. Wilson, The secret of cooking (2023), 13
