“Carnivorous, adj. Addicted to the cruelty of devouring the timorous vegetarian, his heirs and assigns.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ (1911)
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“Don’t take a butcher’s advice on how to cook meat. If he knew, he’d be a chef.”
Andy Rooney
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“But doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
‘Much Ado About Nothing’
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“The English will agree with me that there are plenty of good things for the table in America; but the old proverb says: ‘God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.'”
Captain Frederick Marryat
‘Diary in America’ (1837)
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“The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.”
Neal Barnard, M.D.
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“If we aren’t supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat?”
Jo Brand, British comedian.
~~~
“If animals could speak, as Aesop and other fabulists make them seem to do, they would declare man to be the most voracious animal in existence. There is scarcely any living thing that flies in the air, swims in the sea, or moves on the land, that is not made to minister to his appetite in some region or other.”
Peter Lund Simmonds, ‘The Curiosities of Food’ (1859)
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“Recognize meat for what is really is: the antibiotic and pesticide laden corpse of a tortured animal.”
Ingrid Newkirk (President of PETA)
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“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) ‘Notebooks’
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“My fare is really sumptuous this evening; buffaloe’s humps, tongues and marrowbones, fine trout parched meal pepper and salt, and a good appetite; the last is not considered the least of the luxuries.”
‘Journals of Lewis and Clark’
Thursday, June 13, 1805
~~~
According to a companion, Thackeray, when presented with a half-dozen 6 to 8 inch oysters common at the time:
“He first selected the smallest one…and then bowed his head as though he were saying grace. Opening his mouth very wide, he struggled for a moment, after which all was over. I shall never forget the comic look of despair he cast upon the other five over-occupied shells. I asked him how he felt. ‘Profoundly grateful,’ he said, ‘as if I had swallowed a small baby.'”
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
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“The universal food of the people of Texas, both rich and poor, seems to be corn-dodger and fried bacon.”
Frederick Law Olmstead
‘A Journey Through Texas’ (1856)
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“Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.”
Doug Larson
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“Gourmets! serve the bird roasted, with pink feet, a strip of bacon to cover its modesty, the breast sprinkled with lemon drops.”
Charles Monselet, on partridges
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“I’ve long said that if I were about to be executed and were given a choice of my last meal, it would be bacon and eggs. There are few sights that appeal to me more than the streaks of lean and fat in a good side of bacon, or the lovely round of pinkish meat framed in delicate white fat that is Canadian bacon. Nothing is quite as intoxicating as the smell of bacon frying in the morning, save perhaps the smell of coffee brewing.”
James Beard (1903-1985)
~~~
“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)
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“Bring porridge, bring sausage, bring fish for a start, Bring Kidneys and mushrooms and partridges’ legs, But let the foundation be bacon and eggs.”
A.P. Herbert (1890-1971)
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“I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.”
Dorothy Sayers, British writer (1893-1957
~~~
“The English think their food, if at all edible, is suitable for the English alone. But actually they have successfully imposed their food on other cultures and nothing marks English hegemony more clearly than breakfast. In Scotland, Wales, and even Ireland, you can find English breakfast with the national name – Irish breakfast or Welsh breakfast. But in truth, ham and bacon and eggs in the morning is English.”
Mark Kurlansky, ‘Choice Cuts’ (2002)
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“I’ve long said that if I were about to be executed and were given a choice of my last meal, it would be bacon and eggs. There are few sights that appeal to me more than the streaks of lean and fat in a good side of bacon, or the lovely round of pinkish meat framed in delicate white fat that is Canadian bacon. Nothing is quite as intoxicating as the smell of bacon frying in the morning, save perhaps the smell of coffee brewing.”
James Beard (1903-1985)
~~~
“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)
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“The still hissing bacon and eggs that looked like tufts of primroses.”
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881). ‘Coningsby’ 1844.
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“I am a strong partisan of second causes, and I believe firmly that the entire gallinaceous order (fowl) has been merely created to furnish our larders and our banquets.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
~~~
“Barbecue is a guy thing, a throwback to the spit-roasted woolly mammoth perhaps. It tends to be written about today (and debated in endless detail) like a sporting event, which in fact it has become: thousands of tiny local competitions are rapidly giving way to several major barbecue leagues, with their own playoffs, world series – and six-figure purses.”
Molly O’Neill, ‘American Food Writing’ (2007)
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“Grilling, broiling, barbecuing – whatever you want to call it – is an art, not just a matter of building a pyre and throwing on a piece of meat as a sacrifice to the gods of the stomach.”
James Beard, ‘Beard on Food’ (1974)
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“In the Barbecue is any four footed animal — be it mouse or mastodon — whose dressed carcass is roasted whole…. at its best it is a fat steer, and must be eaten within an hour of when it is cooked. For if ever the sun rises upon Barbecue, its flavor vanishes like Cinderella’s silks, and it becomes cold baked beef — staler in the chill dawn then illicit love.”
William Allen White (1868-1944)
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“I’m a man. Men cook outside. Women make the three-bean salad. That’s the way it is and always has been, since the first settlers of Levittown. That outdoor grilling is a manly pursuit has long been beyond question. If this wasn’t firmly understood, you’d never get grown men to put on those aprons with pictures of dancing wienies and things on the front…”
William Geist, ‘New York Times Magazine’
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“A loaf of bread, the Walrus said, Is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides Are very good indeed– Now if you’re ready, Oysters, dear, We can begin to feed!”
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
(Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
‘Alice Through the Looking-Glass’
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“A tale without love is like beef without mustard, an insipid dish.”
Anatole France, French author
~~~
“Beef is the soul of cooking.”
Marie-Antoine Carême (1784-1833)
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“I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.”
William Shakespeare
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“Any of us would kill a cow, rather than not have beef.”
Samuel Johnson. English writer (1709-1784)
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“Give them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘King Henry V’
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“The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.”
Neal Barnard, M.D.
~~~
“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)
~~~
“Then there is the beefsteak. They have it in Europe, but they don’t know how to cook it. Neither will they cut it right. It comes on the table in a small, round, pewter platter. It lies in the center of this platter, in a bordering bed of grease-soaked potatoes; it is the size, shape, and thickness of a man’s hand with the thumb and fingers cut off. It is a little overdone, is rather dry, it tastes pretty insipidly, it rouses no enthusiasm. Imagine a poor exile contemplating that inert thing, and imagine an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better land and setting before him a mighty porter-house steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an outlying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place; and imagine that the angel also adds a great cup of American home-made coffee, with the cream a-froth on top, some real butter, firm and yellow and fresh, some smoking hot biscuits, a plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup, could words describe the gratitude of this exile?”
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens) ‘A Tramp Abroad’
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“Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and baked potatoes and home-made bread — there may be.”
David Grayson
‘Adventures in Contentment’ (1907)
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“I would like to find a stew that will give me heartburn immediately, instead of at three o’clock in the morning.”
John Barrymore
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“Boeuf a la Bourguignonne (Beef in the Burgundy style): This is the stew of stews, an apotheosis of stew, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the watery, stringy mixture served up in British institutions. It’s a rich, carefully cooked recipe which is served up on special occasions in French homes, and which appears without shame on the menus of high-class restaurants.”
Jane Grigson (1928-1990)
‘The Mushroom Feast’ 1975
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“I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
~~~
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Gloria Steinem
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“I just yell at the bird and hope the meat will fall off.”
Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet
When asked about his carving skills.
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“Goat penis is gray and nondescript, with a rather bland taste but surprisingly crunchy texture.”
Jacob Weaver, ‘Strength in the Pot’
(Gastronomica, Fall 2006)
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“What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what’s the world coming to, eh?”
Dorothy Sayers, British writer
~~~
“Boiled beef is a wholesome food which appeases hunger promptly and is quite easily digestible but by itself has no great restorative powers, as in the process of boiling the meat loses a part of the juices which can be converted into animal matter.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
~~~
People who eat boiled beef:
“First the stick-in-the-muds who eat it because their parents eat it and who, following this practice with blind submissiveness, even expect to be imitated by their children. Secondly the impatient, who abhor inactivity at table and have formed the habit of pouncing upon the first thing that is served (materiam subjectam). Thirdly the couldn’t-care-less brigade, who, not being blessed with the sacred spark, consider meals as forced labour, putting all that can nourish them on the same level and behaving at table ‘like an oyster in its bed’. Fourthly the devourers, having an appetite of which they try to conceal the full extent, who hasten to cram down into their stomachs the first victim which presents itself, to appease the gastric fires consuming them, to serve as a foundation for all the other consignments which they propose to dispatch to the same destination.”
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
~~~
“Beware of meat twice boil’d, & an old foe reconcil’d.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’
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“Professors never eat boiled beef, out of respect for their principles and because they know the incontestable truth that boiled beef is flesh without its juice.”
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
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“But not one word said the hard-boiled egg, The hard-boiled egg, The hard-boiled egg, And what a silly insect the wasp to beg For you can’t get any sense out of a hard-boiled egg!”
Dan Leno [George Galvin] Victorian music-hall comedian.
(1860-1904)
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“Don’t talk to me about taverns! There is just one genuine, clean, decent, palatable thing occasionally to be had in them – namely a boiled egg.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Life and Letters’ (1867)
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“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)
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“When you feel like eating boiled eggs, if you have some truffles in the house, put them in a basket with the eggs and the next day you will have the best boiled eggs you have ever tasted in your gastronomic life.”
M. Des Ombiaux
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“Professors never eat boiled beef, out of respect for their principles and because they know the incontestable truth that boiled beef is flesh without its juice.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
~~~
“Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.”
John le Carré (nom de plume of David John Moore Cornwell) English author. (1931- )
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“Be it known that I, John L. Mason….have invented new and useful Improvements in the Necks of Bottles, Jars &c., Especially such as intended to be air and water tight, such as are used for sweetmeats.”
From John L. Mason’s patent file
‘Charles Wysocki’s Americana Cookbook’
~~~
“Bouillon is the soul and quintessence of sauces.”
F. Marin, 1739
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“….every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves brains, by and by get to have little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon descrimination.”
Herman Mellville, ‘Moby Dick’ (1851)
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“Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brains. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat. Perhaps a couple of whales would be enough.”
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910)
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“Meat! We are going to eat some meat; and what meat! Real game! Still no bread, though.”
Ned Land in Jules Verne’s ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ (1870)
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“…steam was generated beyond the power of the canister to endure. As a natural consequence, the canister burst, the dead turkey sprang from his coffin of tinplate and killed the cook forthwith.”
1852 news report of an early canning industry accident
~~~
Clones “are for researchers, not butchers.”
John Dalli, European Commissioner for Health & Consumer Policy (Press Conference October 19, 2010)
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“When they didn’t give him boiled mutton, they gave him rice pudding, pretending it was a treat. And saved the butcher.”
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
‘The Schoolboy’s Story’ (1853)
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“Don’t take a butcher’s advice on how to cook meat. If he knew, he’d be a chef.”
Andy Rooney
~~~
Dick the Butcher: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘King Henry VI’
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“We have now not infrequently had mutton at table, the flavor of which is quite excellent…..but it is invariably brought to table in lumps or chunks of no particular shape or size, and in which it is utterly impossible to recognize any part of the quadruped creature sheep…..I at length inquired why a decent usual Christian joint of mutton…..was never brought to table: the reply was that the carpenter always cut up the meat…”
Francis and Campbell, on a Georgia plantation, 1839.
~~~
“Culture is what your butcher would have if he were a surgeon.”
Mary Pettibone Poole
‘A Glass Eye at a Keyhole’ (1938).
~~~
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Robert A. Heinlein
~~~
“To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too – it really was – to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.”
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’
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“Your butcher breathes an atmosphere of good living. The beef mingles kindly with his animal nature. He grows fat with the best of it, perhaps with inhaling its very essence; and has no time to grow spare, theoretical and hypochondriacal.”
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), ‘The Seer’