“Acorns were good till bread was found.”
Francis Bacon
English philosopher, statesman (1561-1626)
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“Bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing room, is ambrosia eating under a tree.”
Elizabeth Russell
(Mary Annette Russell, Countess von Arnim)
(1866-1941) English novelist
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“You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.”
Henry Miller, American writer (1891-1980)
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“Good bread is the great need in poor homes, and oftentimes the best appreciated luxury in the homes of the very rich.”
‘A Book for A Cook’, The Pillsbury Co. (1905)
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“Bachelor’s fare: bread and cheese, and kisses.”
Jonathan Swift, (1667-1745).
~~~
“An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different.”
Oscar Wilde(1854-1900)
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“Age is something that doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese.”
Luis Buñuel(1900-1983)
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“How much cheese is a handful? How much more or less is a cupful? What is the capacity of a glass, a tumbler, or a soup ladle? What is the difference between a suspicion and a pinch? How much more is a good pinch? How much wine is a little, how many olives a few? When a book says a tin of chopped almonds or pomegranate juice what are you supposed to understand by that?”
Elizabeth David (1913-1992)
‘Spices, Salt & Aromatics in the English Kitchen’
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“Hunger never saw bad bread.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’
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“Baker’s Bread is often made of musty, sour, or other bad flour, which is made to look light, and the bad taste removed by unheallthy drugs.”
Catharine E. Beecher,
‘Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book’ (1846)
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“The North thinks it know how to make corn bread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it.”
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
(1835-1910) From an autobiographical sketch, 1898
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“A woman should be ashamed to have poor bread, far more so, than to speak bad grammar, or to have a dress out of the fashion.”
Catharine E. Beecher,
‘Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book’ (1846)
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“Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance.”
John Steinbeck (on change)
‘Travels With Charley: In Search of America’ (1962)
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“A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk.”
James Joyce, Irish writer(1882-1941)
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“A bagel creation that would have my parents turning over in their graves is the oat-bran bagel with blueberries and strawberries. It’s a bagel nightmare, an ill-conceived bagel form if there ever was one.”
Ed Levine, ‘New York Eats’
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“the first printed mention of bagels…is to be found in the Community Regulations of Kracow, Poland, for the year 1610 which stated that bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth.”
‘The Joys of Yiddish’ by Leo Rosten
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According to John Mariani in ‘The Dictionary of American Food and Drink’:
“The bagel was first mentioned in American print only in 1932.”
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“The bagel is a lonely roll to eat all by yourself because in order for the true taste to come out you need your family. One to cut the bagels, one to toast them, one to put on the cream cheese and the lox, one to put them on the table and one to supervise.”
Gertrude Berg (1899-1966)
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“The bagel [is] an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.”
Beatrice and Ira Freeman,
‘About Bagels’, ‘NY Times’ May 22, 1960
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“Baker’s Bread is often made of musty, sour, or other bad flour, which is made to look light, and the bad taste removed by unheallthy drugs.”
Catharine E. Beecher,
‘Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book’ (1846)
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“Bakers of bread rolls and pastry cooks will not buy grain before eleven o’clock in winter and noon in summer; bakers of large loaves will not buy grain before two o’clock. This will enable the people of the town to obtain their supply first. Bakers shall put a distinctive trademark on their loaves, and keep weights and scales in their shops, under penalty of having their licences removed.”
1635 law introduced by Cardinal Richelieu
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“In Paris today millions of pounds of bread are sold daily, made during the previous night by those strange, half-naked beings one glimpses through cellar windows, whose wild-seeming cries floating out of those depths always makes a painful impression. In the morning, one sees these pale men, still white with flour, carrying a loaf under one arm, going off to rest and gather new strength to renew their hard and useful labor when night comes again. I have always highly esteemed the brave and humble workers who labor all night to produce those soft but crusty loaves that look more like cake than bread.”
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
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“[Breadbaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells…there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.”
M. F. K. Fisher, ‘The Art of Eating’
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“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.”
M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992)
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“Among those kinds of food which the good housekeeper should scrupulously banish from her table, is that of hot leavened bread….I believe it more often lays the foundation of diseases of the stomach, than any other kind of nourishment, used among us.”
Sarah Josepha Hale
‘The Good Housekeeper’ (1839)
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Butter is:
“the most delicate of foods among barbarous nations, and one which distinguishes the wealthy from the multitude at large.”
Pliny
~~~
“Milk is valued for giving a part of its whiteness to the skin of women. Poppea, wife of Domitius Nero, took 500 nursing asses everywhere in her travelling party, and soaked herself completely in a bath of this milk, in the belief that it would make her skin more supple.”
Pliny
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“A Béarnaise sauce is simply an egg yolk, a shallot, a little tarragon vinegar, and butter, but it takes years of practice for the result to be perfect.”
Fernand Point (1897-1955) ‘Ma gastronomie’
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“This is the most laborious of cakes, and also the most unwholesome, even when made in the best manner. We do not recommend it; but there is no accounting for tastes. Children would not eat these biscuits – nor grown persons either, if they can get any other sort of bread. When living in a town where there are bakers, there is no excuse for making Maryland biscuit. Believe nobody that says they are not unwholesome…..Better to live on Indian cakes.”
Eliza Leslie, ‘New Cookery Book’ (1857)
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“In the Virginia of the olden time no breakfast or tea-table was thought to be properly furnished without a plate of these indispensable biscuits…..Let one spend the night at some gentleman-farmer’s home, and the first sound heard in the morning, after the crowing of the cock, was the heavy, regular fall of the cook’s axe, as she beat and beat her biscuit dough…..Nowadays beaten biscuits are a rarity, found here and there, but soda and modern institutions have caused them to be sadly out of vogue.”
‘Virginia Cookery Book’ (1885)
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“I don’t believe you have to be a cow to know what milk is.”
Ann Landers
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“Even the biscuit was so full of worms that, God help me, I saw many wait until nightfall to eat the porridge made of it so as not to see the worms.”
Crew member, on Columbus 4th voyage, 15th century
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“If your slave commits a fault, do not smash his teeth with your fists; give him some of the (hard) biscuit which famous Rhodes has sent you.”
Marcus Valerius Martialis
Roman poet,1st century B.C.
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“…instead of offering me a Garibaldi biscuit, she asked me with that faint lisp of hers, to ‘have some squashed flies, George’.”
H.G. Wells in ‘Tono-Bungay’ (1909)
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“…cheese is the biscuit of drunkards.”
Grimod de la Reynière (1758-1838)
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Beaten biscuits “This is the most laborious of cakes, and also the most unwholesome, even when made in the best manner. We do not recommend it; but there is no accounting for tastes. Children would not eat these biscuits – nor grown persons either, if they can get any other sort of bread. When living in a town where there are bakers, there is no excuse for making Maryland biscuit. Believe nobody that says they are not unwholesome…..Better to live on Indian cakes.”
Eliza Leslie, ‘New Cookery Book’ (1857)
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“In the Virginia of the olden time no breakfast or tea-table was thought to be properly furnished without a plate of these indispensable biscuits…..Let one spend the night at some gentleman-farmer’s home, and the first sound heard in the morning, after the crowing of the cock, was the heavy, regular fall of the cook’s axe, as she beat and beat her biscuit dough…..Nowadays beaten biscuits are a rarity, found here and there, but soda and modern institutions have caused them to be sadly out of vogue.”
‘Virginia Cookery Book’ (1885)
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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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“Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread. Without it, it’s flat.”
Carmen McRae, Jazz vocalist and pianist. (1920-1994)
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“The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes: insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution.”
Tobias Smollett, ‘The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker’ (1771)
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“I would say to housewives, be not daunted by one failure, nor by twenty. Resolve that you will have good bread, and never cease striving after this result till you have effected it. If persons without brains can accomplish this, why cannot you?”
’Housekeeping In Old Virginia’ Marion Cabell Tyree ed. (1878)
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“Sometimes I pray to Cod for the veal-power to stop playing with my food words, but I fear it’s too bread into me. For all I know, the wurst may be yet to come.
Mark Morton, ‘Arts & Scantlings’ (Gastronomica, Fall 2006)
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“Bread is a staple article of diet in theory, rather than in practice. There are few who are truly fond of bread in its simplest, most pure, and most healthful state….Is there one person in a thousand who would truly enjoy a meal of simple bread of two days old?”
William Andrus Alcott, ‘The Young House-keeper’ (1846)
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“Good bread is the great need in poor homes, and oftentimes the best appreciated luxury in the homes of the very rich.”
‘A Book for A Cook’, The Pillsbury Co. (1905)
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“Give me yesterday’s Bread, this Day’s Flesh, and last Year’s Cyder.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’
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“Oh, God above, if heaven has a taste it must be an egg with butter and salt, and after the egg is there anything in the world lovlier than fresh warm bread and a mug of sweet golden tea?”
Frank McCourt, ‘Angela’s Ashes’ (1996)
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“In the social state to which we have come today, it is hard to imagine a nation which would live solely on bread and vegetables.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)
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“Bread is the king of the table and all else is merely the court that surrounds the king. The countries are the soup, the meat, the vegetables, the salad but bread is king.”
Louis Bromfield, American novelist (1896-1956)
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“….do not, as you value the health and happiness of those who sit at your table, place before them hot leavened bread or biscuit.”
Sarah Josepha Hale, ‘The Good Housekeeper’ (1839)
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“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
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“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.”
James Beard (1903-1985)
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“If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.”
Robert Browning (1812-1889) English poet
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“How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?”
Julia Child
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“Bread is the warmest, kindest of all words. Write it always with a capital letter, like your own name.”
from a café sign
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“If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second.”
Edward Bellamy, American writer (1850-1898)
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“The first time I ate organic whole-grain bread I swear it tasted like roofing material.”
Robin Williams
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“In Paris today millions of pounds of bread are sold daily, made during the previous night by those strange, half-naked beings one glimpses through cellar windows, whose wild-seeming cries floating out of those depths always makes a painful impression. In the morning, one sees these pale men, still white with flour, carrying a loaf under one arm, going off to rest and gather new strength to renew their hard and useful labor when night comes again. I have always highly esteemed the brave and humble workers who labor all night to produce those soft but crusty loaves that look more like cake than bread.”
Alexandre Dumas, French writer (1802-1870)
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“Honest bread is very well – it’s the butter that makes the temptation.”
Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)
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“I am going to learn to make bread to-morrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, saleratus, etc., with a deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.”
Emily Dickinson, American poet (1830-1886)
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“Of all smells, bread; of all tastes, salt.”
George Herbert, English poet (1593-1633)
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“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.”
M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992)
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“Without bread all is misery.”
William Cobbett, British journalist (1763?-1835)
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“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight…”
M. F. K. Fisher, ‘The Art of Eating’
~~~
“[Breadbaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells…there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.”
M. F. K. Fisher, ‘The Art of Eating’
~~~
“Sesame seeds and Poppy seeds are the only officially acceptable “spots” that should be seen on the surface of any loaf of bread. Fuzzy and hairy looking white or green growth areas are a good indication that your bread has turned into a pharmaceutical laboratory experiment.”
unknown
~~~
“The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.”
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) ‘Sea and Sardinia’
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“You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.”
Henry Miller, American writer (1891-1980)
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“Bread deals with living things, with giving life, with growth, with the seed, the grain that nurtures. Its not coincidence that we say bread is the staff of life.”
Lionel Poilne
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“Bread is like dressed, hats and shoes — in other words, essential!”
Emily Post
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“There would have to be bread, some rich, whole-grain bread and zwieback, and perhaps on a long, narrow dish some pale Westphalian ham laced with strips of white fat like an evening sky with bands of clouds. There would be some tea ready to be drunk, yellowish golden tea in glasses with silver saucers, giving off a faint fragrance.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
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“Who hath not met with home-made bread, A heavy compound of putty and lead.”
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
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“An egg of one hour old, bread of one day, a goat of one month, wine of six months, flesh of a year, fish of ten years and a wife of twenty years, a friend among a hundred, are the best of all number.”
John Wodroephe, English commentator. ‘Spared Hours’ 1623
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“Without wishing in the slightest degree to disparage the skill and labour of breadmakers by trade, truth compels us to assert our conviction of the superior wholesomeness of bread made in our own homes.”
Eliza Acton, ‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ (1845)
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“Ron’s wreck of a mother used to give us buttered bread with hundreds and thousands on it. It was like being handed a slice of powdered rainbow.”
Clive Thomas, ‘Unreliable Memoirs’ (1980)
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“Butter is the great staple article for breakfast & tea among all classes. The idea of restraining children from a liberal use of good fresh butter is exploded, & they almost live upon bread & butter in this city.”
John Pintard (1759-1844) writing from New York to his daughter in New Orleans.
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“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.”
James Beard (1903-1985)
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“There was an Old Man of Calcutta, Who perpetually ate bread and butter; Till a great bit of muffin, on which he was stuffing, Choked that horrid Old Man of Calcutta.”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; known for his ‘literary nonsense’ & limericks (1812-1888)
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“The coffee was boiling over a charcoal fire, and large slices of bread and butter were piled one upon the other like deals in a lumber yard.”
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
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“The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.”
Steven Wright
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“Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet, while bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.”
Epicurus (341?-270 BC)
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“The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.”
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) ‘Sea and Sardinia’
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“During the day-time, Violet chiefly occupied herself in putting salt-water into a churn, while her three brothers churned it violently, in the hope that it would turn into butter, which it seldom, if ever did….”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; known for his ‘literary nonsense’ & limericks (1812-1888) ‘The Story of Four Little Children Who Went Round the World’
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“Butter is the great staple article for breakfast & tea among all classes. The idea of restraining children from a liberal use of good fresh butter is exploded, & they almost live upon bread & butter in this city.”
John Pintard (1759-1844) writing from New York to his daughter in New Orleans.
~~~
“Eat butter first, and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be past.”
Old Dutch proverb
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Butter is “…the most delicate of foods among barbarous nations, and one which distinguishes the wealthy from the multitude at large.”
Pliny
~~~
“There was an Old Person of Prague, Who was suddenly seized with the plague; But they gave him some butter, which caused him to mutter, And cured that Old Person of Prague.”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; known for his ‘literary nonsense’ & limericks (1812-1888)
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“Unbuttered toast is a substance half complete, and to be forced to eat it in that state is necessarily to feel deprived.”
John Thorne, ‘Pot on the Fire’ (2000)
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“I don’t even butter my bread. I consider that cooking.”
Katherine Cebrian, Artist, writer
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“I am in a very unsettled condition, as the oyster said when they poured melted butter all over his back.”
Edward Lear, ‘literary nonsense’ (1812-1888)
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“Bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing room, is ambrosia eating under a tree.”
Elizabeth Russell (Mary Annette Russell, Countess von Arnim) (1866-1941) English novelist
~~~
“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.”
James Beard (1903-1985)
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“My dear boy, when curds are churned, the finest part rises upward and turns into butter. So too, dear boy, when food is eaten the choice parts rise upward and become mind.”
Chandogya Upanishad
(‘Choice Cuts’ by Mark Kurlansky, 2002)
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“The coffee was boiling over a charcoal fire, and large slices of bread and butter were piled one upon the other like deals in a lumber yard.”
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
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“Never allow butter, soup or other food to remain on your whiskers. Use the napkin frequently.”
‘Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms: Etiquette of the Table’ (1880)
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“Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.”
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), ‘The Seer’