“The damnable agent of necromancers and sorcerers. It is well to abstain from chocolate in order to avoid the familiarity and company of a nation so suspected of sorcery [Spain].”
French cleric (1620)
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“The Spanish ladies of the New World are madly addicted to chocolate, to such a point that, not content to drink it several times each day, they even have it served to them in church.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)
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“I doubt the world holds for anyone a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice cream.”
Heywood Campbell Broun (1888-1939)
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“Chewing gum! A new and superior preparation of Spruce Gum.”
Chicago ‘Daily Democrat’
Advertisement for the first commercial chewing gum, October 25, 1850
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“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate—that’s my philosophy.”
Thornton Wilder
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“Honey comes out of the air….Whether this is the perspiration of the sky ….or the moisture of the air purging itself….it brings with it the great pleasure of its heavenly nature.”
Pliny (A.D. 23-79) ‘Natural History,’ book 20
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“….the egg creams of Avenue A in New York and the root beer float….are among the high points of American gastronomic inventiveness.”
Mark Kurlansky, ‘Choice Cuts’ (2002)
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“Almost everything that I behold in this wonderful country bears traces of improvement and reform – everything except Pie.”
George Augustus Sala, British journalist.
‘America Revisited’ (1882)
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“Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink That is the finest of suppers, I think When I’m grown up and can have what I please, I think I shall always insist upon these.”
Christopher Morley
(Founder of ‘Saturday Review’, 1924-1941)
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“The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness, and in the taste confounds the appetite.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
‘Romeo and Juliet’
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“The natural term of an apple-pie is but twelve hours. It reaches its highest state about one hour after it comes from the oven, and just before its natural heat has quite departed. But every hour afterward is a declension. And after it is one day old, it is thence-forward but the ghastly corpse of apple-pie.”
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
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The pie should be eaten “while it is yet florescent, white or creamy yellow, with the merest drip of candied juice along the edges, (as if the flavor were so good to itself that its own lips watered!) of a mild and modest warmth, the sugar suggesting jelly, yet not jellied, the morsels of apple neither dissolved nor yet in original substance, but hanging as it were in a trance between the spirit and the flesh of applehood…then, O blessed man, favored by all the divinities! eat, give thanks, and go forth, ‘in apple-pie order!'”
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (on eating apple pie).
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“Thy breath is like the steame of apple-pyes.”
Robert Greene (1590) ‘Arcadia’
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“But I, when I undress me Each night, upon my knees Will ask the Lord to bless me With apple-pie and cheese.”
Eugene Field, ‘Apple-Pie and Cheese’
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“Apple-pie is used through the whole year, and when fresh apples are no longer to be had, dried ones are used. It is the evening meal of children. house-pie, in country places, is made of apples neither peeled nor freed from their cores, and its crust is not broken if a wagon wheel goes over it.”
Swedish parson, Dr. Acrelius writing home from America (1758)
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“God bless my soul! No apple pie.”
Robert Oliver, ‘An Apple A Day’
Commenting when no apple pie was served
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“Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.”
Jane Austen
~~~
“To a foreigner a Yankee is an American. To an American a Yankee is a Northerner. To a Northerner a Yankee is a New Englander. To a New Englander a Yankee is a Vermonter. To a Vermonter a Yankee is a person who eats apple pie for breakfast.”
(Traditional saying) Michael Owen Jones
Journal of American Folklore (Spring 2007)
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“….No phrase is more carelessly or frequently used than the saying, ‘Apple-pie order.’ How few who say so reflect at the time upon either apple-pie or the true order of apple-pie! Perhaps they have been reared without instruction. They may have been born in families that were ignorant of apple-pie; or who were left to the guilt of calling two tough pieces of half-cooked dough, with a thin streak of macerated dried apple between them, of leather color, and of taste and texture not unbecoming the same, – an apple-pie!”
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
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“I have no truck with lettuce, cabbage, and similar chlorophyll. Any dietitian will tell you that a running foot of apple strudel contains four times the vitamins of a bushel of beans.”
S.J. Perelman
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“The friendly cow, all red and white, I love with all my heart; She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
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“There was an Old Person of Pett, Who was partly consumed by regret; He sate in a cart, and ate cold apple tart, Which relieved that Old Person of Pett.”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; known for his ‘literary nonsense’ & limericks (1812-1888)
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“A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.”
chef’s list
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“Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands — and then eat just one of the pieces.”
Judith Viorst (1931–)
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“When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin. I wonder would they know it was me?”
J.P. Donleavy
~~~
“’Bee vomit,’ my brother said once, ‘that’s all honey is,’ so that I could not put my tongue to its jellied flame without tasting regurgitated blossoms.”
Rita Dove, ‘In the Old Neighborhood’
~~~
“The pedigree of Honey does not concern the Bee – A Clover, any time, to him, Is Aristocracy.”
Emily Dickinson, American poet (1830-1886)
~~~
“The Honey is sweet, but the Bee has a Sting.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’
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“There was an old person so silly, He poked his head into a lily; But six bees who lived there, filled him full of despair, For they stung that old person so silly.”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; known for his ‘literary nonsense’ & limericks (1812-1888)
~~~
“As for rosemary, I let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and to friendship, whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language.”
Sir Thomas More
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“O, blackberry tart, with berries as big as your thumb, purple and black, and thick with juice, and a crust to endear them that will go to cream in your mouth, and both passing down with such a taste that will make you close your eyes and wish you might live forever in the wideness of that rich moment.”
Richard Llewellyn, Welsh novelist (1907-1983)
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“Dessert should close the meal gently and not in a pyrotechnic blaze of glory. No cultivated feeder, already well fed, thanks his host for confronting him with a dessert so elaborate that not to eat it is simply rude – like refusing to watch one’s host blow up Bloomingdale’s.”
Alan Koehler (‘Madison Avenue Cook Book’)