“I seem to you cruel and too much addicted to gluttony, when I beat my cook for sending up a bad dinner. If that seems to you too trifling a cause, pray tell for what cause you would have a cook flogged?”
Marcus Valerius Martialis
Roman poet 1st century B.C.
~~~
“When the waitress puts the dinner on the table the old men look at the dinner. The young men look at the waitress.”
Gelett Burgess
‘Look Eleven Years Younger’ (1937).
~~~
“Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening.”
Art Buchwald
~~~
“There is nothing like a morning funeral for sharpening the appetite for lunch.”
Arthur Marshall
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“In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiner’s Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island Duck, he might have written a masterpiece.”
A.J. Liebling
~~~
“Civilized adults do not take apple juice with dinner.”
Fran Lebowitz, ‘Metropolitan Life’ (1978)
~~~
“But, lady, as women, what wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo spoke well when he said: how well one may philosophize when preparing dinner. And I often say, when observing these trivial details: had Aristotle prepared vituals [sic], he would have written more.”
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
a Mexican nun three hundred years ago
~~~
“Serve the dinner backward, do anything – but for goodness sake, do something weird.”
Elsa Maxwell
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“I rose at 5 o’clock in the morning and read a chapter in Hebrew and 200 verses in Homer’s Odyssey. I ate milk for breakfast, I said my prayers…I danced my dance. I read law in the morning and Italian in the afternoon. I ate tough chicken for dinner.”
Diary of William Byrd, 1709
~~~
“Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.”
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) ‘The Seer’
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“It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees.”
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
~~~
“Bad dinners go hand in hand with total depravity, while a man properly fed is already half-saved.”
anonymous
~~~
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898)
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“The walk downstairs to the breakfast table is excercise enough for any gentleman.”
Chauncey Mitchell Depew (1834-1928)
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“He smiled rather too much. He smiled at breakfast, you know.”
Charles Wheeler, British journalist.(1923-2008)
~~~
“Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.”
Marlene Dietrich, actress, singer. (1901-1992)
~~~
“She lifted her hands from her eyes – her face was wet with tears and her eyes were haggard – and said….’I cannot any longer endure being served breakfast in bed by a hairy man in his underwear.’”
John Cheever, ‘The Chimera’ (1951)
~~~
“The critical period in matrimony is breakfast time.”
Sir Alan Patrick Herbert, English journalist and writer. (1890-1971)
~~~
“breakfast – which I didn’t mind skipping; if the eggs had been any runnier and the bacon a little less fatty, I could have raced them against each other around my plate….”
Jules Truffaut in ‘Galaxy Blues’ by Allen M. Steele (2008)
~~~
“Queequeg sat there among them….His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast….he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare.”
Herman Melville, ‘Moby Dick’ (1851)
~~~
“It takes some skill to spoil a breakfast – even the English can’t do it.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘Quotable Feast’ by Sarah E. Parvis (2001)
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“I didn’t forget your breakfast. I didn’t bring your breakfast. Because you didn’t eat your din-din.”
Bette Davis, American actress (1908-1989)
‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’
~~~
Mecaenas: “Eight wild-boars roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve persons there; is this true?”
Enobarbus: “This was but as a fly by an eagle: we had much more monstrous matter of feast, which worthily deserved noting.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘Antony and Cleopatra’
~~~
“Our breakfast was admirable, excellent coffee with delicious cream, and that capital, national dish of South Carolina, snow-white homminy brought hot to table like maccaroni, which ought always to be eaten, with lumps of sweet fresh butter buried in it! This is certainly one of the best things imaginable to begin the day liberally with.”
G.W. Featherstonhaugh, an Englishman traveling in the South (1837)
(A little bit of trivia within trivia: Featherstonhaugh is a rare name, and it is pronounced ‘Fanshaw’!!! G.W. married the daughter of a former New York City mayor in 1808, was the first U.S. government geologist, and ended up in 1844 as the British consul in Le Havre, France.)
~~~
“To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.”
W. Somerset Maugham
~~~
“My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked.”
Winston Churchill
~~~
“All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.”
John Gunther
~~~
“Rather go to bed supperless, than run in debt for a Breakfast.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’
~~~
“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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“A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one’s husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.”
Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh
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“Oysters are the usual opening to a winter breakfast;;;;Indeed, they are almost indispensable.”
Grimod de la Reyniere (1758-1838)
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“Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and well-provisioned breakfast table.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
~~~
“Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.”
Oscar Wilde
~~~
“I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.”
Steven Wright
~~~
“Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”
Adelle Davis (1904-1974)
~~~
“Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first.”
Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) (1818-1885)
~~~
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898)
~~~
“Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed.”
Elizabeth Russell (Mary Annette Russell, Countess von Arnim) (1866-1941) English novelist
~~~
“‘When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,’ said Piglet at last, ‘what’s the first thing you say to yourself?’ ‘What’s for breakfast?’ said Pooh. ‘What do you say, Piglet?’ ‘I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?’ said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s the same thing,’ he said.”
A. A. Milne, ‘The House at Pooh Corner’
~~~
“Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table. We come to it freshly, in the dewy youth of the day, and when our spiritual and sensual elements are in better accord than at a later period; so that the material delights of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed, without any very grievous reproaches, whether gastric or conscientious, for yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal department of our nature.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ (1851)
~~~
“We plan, we toil, we suffer — in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol’s eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake up just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs. And, again I cry, how rarely it happens! But when it does happen — then what a moment, what a morning, what a delight!”
J. B. Priestley, British author (1894-1984)
~~~
“There is a vast difference between the savage and the civilised man, but it is never apparent to their wives until after breakfast.”
Helen Rowland (1876-1950) ‘A Guide to Men’
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“I think breakfast so pleasant because no-one is conceited before one o’clock.”
Sydney Smith, English writer (1771-1845)
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“I advertise all such as have plethorick and full bodies, especially living at rest, and which are of a phlegmatick temperamant, that they not only exchew the use of breakfasts, but also oftentimes content themselves with one meal a day.”
Tobias Venner (1577-1660)
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“Breakfast cereals that come in the same colors as polyester leisure suits make oversleeping a virtue.”
Fran Lebowitz, journalist
~~~
“I tell kids they should throw away the cereal and eat the box. At least they’d get some fiber.”
Richard Holstein, D.D.S.
~~~
“The breakfast food idea made its appearance in a little third-story room on the corner of 28th Street and Third Avenue, New York City….My cooking facilities were very limited, [making it] very difficult to prepare cereals. It often occurred to me that it should be possible to purchase cereals at groceries already cooked and ready to eat, and I considered different ways in which this might be done.”
John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943)
~~~
“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”
Roald Dahl (British writer)
‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’
~~~
“It was a nice breakfast – two hard boiled eggs, a piece of Danish, and a Coca-Cola spiked with gin.”
John Cheever, ‘The Chimera’ (1951)
~~~
“The table was set up inside the cartshed. On it there were four sirloins of beef, six fricassees of chicken, casseroled veal, three legs of mutton and, in the centre, a beautiful roasted sucking pig, flanked by four chitterlings with sorrel.”
Gustave Flaubert
The wedding breakfast from ‘Madame Bovary’
~~~
“Coffee and cigarettes, you know? That’s, like, the breakfast of champions.”
Jim Jarmusch, ‘Blue in the Face’ (film)
~~~
“But fried hog’s feet were nearly the best of hog killing. After boiling tender, the feet were split lengthwise in half, rolled in sifted cornmeal, salted and peppered, and fried crisp in plenty of boiling hot fat. Served with hot biscuit, and stewed sundried peaches, along with strong coffee, brown and fragrant, they made a supper or breakfast one could rejoice in.”
‘Dishes & Beverages Of The Old South’
Martha McCulloch-Williams (1913)
~~~
J.M. Brinnin describing Dylan Thomas’ arrival at Idlewild Airport at 7 a.m. “When finally he was processed through customs, he came jauntily toward me; we shook hands gingerly, picked up his string-tied bundle of luggage, and went straight to the airport bar for a breakfast of double scotch and soda.”
~~~
“What a breakfast! Pot of hare; ditto of trout; pot of prepared shrimps; tin of sardines; beautiful beefsteak; eggs, mutton, large loaf and butter, not forgetting capital tea. There’s a breakfast for you!”
George Borrow, English writer (1803-1881)
‘Wild Wales’ (1862)
~~~
“Do not be afraid of simplicity. If you have a cold chicken for supper, why cover it with a tasteless white sauce which makes it look like a pretentious dish on the buffet table at some fancy dress ball?”
Marcel Boulestin, chef, food writer (1878-1943)
‘Simple French Cooking for English Homes’ (1923)
~~~
“Bathing should never follow a meal, as it withdraws the blood and nervous vigor demanded for digestion, from the stomach to the skin.”
Catharine E. Beecher,
‘Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book’ (1846)