Champagne and a Chicken
"Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese – toasted, mostly" says the marooned Ben Gunn in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and many people have a favourite food.
The 17th century physician William Butler said of the strawberry, "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did."
The American writer Edna Ferber thought that "Roast beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy."
In Keats's poem The Eve of St Agnes, as well as "candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd", Porphyro sets out for Madeline "jellies soother than the creamy curd, And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon".
In The New Bath Guide (1766), describing a public breakfast, Christopher Anstey lists "coffee, tea, chocolate, butter, and toast".
The 19th-century clergyman and wit Sydney Smith told his friend Richard Barham that "If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world it is a roast pheasant with bread sauce."
Food may be accompanied by wine. In The Lover (1747), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes triumphantly of the moment when, after a long public encounter, privacy is achieved, "And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last."
For some, of course, the interest lies chiefly in what they are going to drink, and here Dr Johnson has a recommendation, recorded in Boswell's Life: "Claret is the liquor for boys; port, for men; but he who aspires to be a hero (smiling) must drink brandy."
Elizabeth Knowles
01/11/2006
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