Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet (Modern Library Food) - Softcover

Gourmet Magazine Editors, Gourmet Magazine Editors

 
9780375759925: Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet (Modern Library Food)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375759921 ISBN 13: 9780375759925
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Contributors to endless feasts include:

James Beard/Cooking with James Beard: Pasta
Ray Bradbury/Dandelion Wine
Robert P. Coffin/Night of Lobster
Laurie Colwin/A Harried Cook’s Guide to Some Fast Food
Pat Conroy/The Romance of Umbria
Elizabeth David/Edouard de Pomiane
M.F.K. Fisher/Three Swiss Inns
Ruth Harkness/In a Tibetan Lamasery
Madhur Jaffrey/An Indian Reminiscence
Anita Loos/Cocktail Parties of the Twenties
George Plimpton/I, Bon Vivant, Who, Me?
E. Annie Proulx/The Garlic War
Claudia Roden/The Arabian Picnic
Jane and Michael Stern/Two for the Road: Havana, North Dakota
Paul Theroux/All Aboard! Cross the Rockies in Style

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruth Reichl is the New York Times bestselling author of five memoirs, two works of fiction (The Paris Novel and Delicious!), and the cookbook My Kitchen Year. She was editor in chief of Gourmet magazine and previously served as restaurant critic for The New York Times, as well as food editor and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times. She has been honored with six James Beard Awards.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Contributors to endless feasts include:
James Beard/Cooking with James Beard: Pasta
Ray Bradbury/Dandelion Wine
Robert P. Coffin/Night of Lobster
Laurie Colwin/A Harried Cook's Guide to Some Fast Food
Pat Conroy/The Romance of Umbria
Elizabeth David/Edouard de Pomiane
M.F.K. Fisher/Three Swiss Inns
Ruth Harkness/In a Tibetan Lamasery
Madhur Jaffrey/An Indian Reminiscence
Anita Loos/Cocktail Parties of the Twenties
George Plimpton/I, Bon Vivant, Who, Me?
E. Annie Proulx/The Garlic War
Claudia Roden/The Arabian Picnic
Jane and Michael Stern/Two for the Road: Havana, North Dakota
Paul Theroux/All Aboard! Cross the Rockies in Style

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Three Swiss Inns
M.F.K. Fisher

I remember three restaurants in Switzerland with a special clearness: one on the lake near Lausanne, another behind it in the high hills toward Berne, and the last on the road to Lucerne, in German speaking country.

When we went back, in June of 1939, to pack our furniture and bolt the shutters, we could not believe our friends were right to make us do it. All of Europe stretched and sang under a warm sun; the crops were good; people walked about and ate and drank and smiled dreamily, like drugged cancer sufferers. Everyone was kind to us, not consciously thinking that we might never meet again, but actually knowing that it was so.

We drove toward Lucerne one day. Children were selling the first early Alpine roses along the roads—tight ugly posies, the same color as the mottled purple that the little girls’ cheeks had.

At Malters, one of the few villages of that part of the country not almost overpoweringly quaint and pretty, we stopped at the Gasthaus zum Kreuz. We wondered if Frau Weber would remember us, and if her neurasthenic daughter Anneli would be yearning still to be a chamber-maid in London, and if—most important—if there would still be trout swimming in the little tank of icy water that stood in the dining room.

Frau Weber, looking more than ever like a virile Queen Victoria, did indeed remember us, discreetly, at first, and then with floods of questions and handshakings and general delight. Anneli was there, fat, pale, still yearning, but this time for Croydon, where she hoped to exchange her Cockney accent for a more refined one. And the trout still darted behind glass in the bubbling water.

We stayed there for many hours, eating and drinking and remembering incredulously that once we had almost driven past the Kreuz without stopping.

That incident was several years ago, when my husband and I were roaming about the country with my parents. The chauffeur was sleepy after a night spent in a hotel filled with unusually pretty kitchen maids, and he lost the way. We went along roads, mazily, that led where we did not want to go at all; and we all got very hungry and perhaps a little too polite.

Finally we said to stop at the first gasthaus, no matter what it looked like. We could certainly count on beer and cheese, at the least.

Pierre stifled a yawn, and his neck got a little pinker; and in perhaps a minute we had come to an impressive stop in front of one of the least attractive buildings of German Switzerland, in the tight village of Malters.

The place had a sharp peaked roof and many little windows; but there were no flowers on the wooden ledges, and a smell of blood came from the sausage shop on the ground floor. Dark stairs led up from the street through a forbidding hallway.

We wanted to go on. It was late, though; and we were hungry and cramped and full of latent snarls. I told Pierre to see what the place looked like.

He yawned again, painfully, and went with false briskness up the dour, dark stairs. Soon he was back, beaming, no longer sleepy. We crawled out, not caring how many pretty girls he had found if there was something in their kitchen for us, too.

Soon life looked better. Frau Weber herself had led us solicitously to ancient but sparkling toilets, and we had washed in a porcelain bowl enameled with swans and lavender chrysanthemums, and were all met again in a little piney honey-colored room full of family photographs. There was a long table with chairs primly about it, and cupboards and a beautiful rococo couch. We felt happy, and toasted one another with small glasses of a strange, potent bitters.

“Whatever you have,” we said to Frau Weber, and sat back complacently waiting for some sausage from her shop and maybe a salad. We watched the trout swimming in a tank by one of the windows, and thought them an odd, enormous decoration.

Anneli came in. She was pretty, in a discontented way; and we knew Pierre would have a pleasant lunch. We talked to her about England, which she apparently loved as some women love men or some men the bottle. She set the table, and then came back with a net and a platter. She swooped up a trout, held it by the tail, and before we could close our ears or even wince, had cracked its skull smartly on the sideboard.

My mother lay back farther on the couch and gulped wanly at her bitters; and Father muttered with a kind of sick admiration, “That’s the way! By George, that’s the way!” as Anneli whacked the brains loose in some ten trout.

She smiled and said, “You ’aven’t long to wite naow,” and hurried from the room.

By then we were eating slices of various strange sausages, surprisingly delicate, and drinking cold, thin white wine of the country. Nothing else much mattered.

Frau Weber and her daughter came in carrying a long shallow copper pan between them. They set it down carefully; and Anneli stood back puffing while the older woman lifted the lid, her white hair bristling upward in a regal pompadour, and her face flushed and dewy.

The trout lay staring up at us, their eyes hard and yet somehow benevolent. Our heads drew nearer to the pan, willy-nilly, pulled by one of the finest smells we had ever met. We sniffed and murmured. Frau Weber beamed. Then she scolded at the girl, who ran from the room for little white potatoes and a great bowl of hot buttered peas from the garden. The mother served the fish herself, and then disappeared proudly.

It was, of course, the most delicious dish that we had ever eaten. We knew that we were hungry, and that even if it had been bad it would have been good . . . but we knew, too, that nevertheless it was one of the subtlest, rarest things that had ever come our way. It was incredibly delicate, as fresh as clover.

We talked about it later, and Frau Weber told us willingly about it, but in such a vague way that all I can remember now is hot unsalted butter, herbs left in for a few seconds, cream, a shallot flicked over, the fish laid in, the cover put on. I can almost see it, smell it, taste it now; but I know that I could never copy it, nor could anyone alive, probably.

Finally we were eating large, fragrant strawberries and drinking quite a lot more wine. It amused Anneli that we wanted our coffee in the tall porcelain goblets we saw in the cupboard. But it is the trout that really mattered. They were more important than getting to Lucerne, or than the pride of Frau Weber, or than the girl Anneli, frustrated and yearning. They were, we felt, important like a grisaille window or the coming of Spring.

And we went back many times to the Kreuz, and the trout were always that way . . . important.

The second restaurant I remember now was near our old home in Châtel St. Denis, where the army used to send its ski-learners to use the fine, easy slopes all around. It was called the Hôtel des XIII Cantons.

We knew Mademoiselle Berthe there. Tall, she had a thin, spirited face; and her dark hair was rolled in odd corkscrews behind each ear, in the disappearing fashion of her village. She had hips that were wide and firm, hung low on her legs; and her feet, on which she always wore exotic beach sandals, were very long and flat. She flapped about on them, and was the best waitress that I have ever known, in Europe or America.

The upstairs room held perhaps fifty people on market days and times like Easter; yet Berthe was always alone and always unruffled. Sometimes in winter, when army officers were there, teasing and flirting and barking, she got more taciturn than usual. But no matter what kind of people she served, she was always skillful and the most impersonal woman I have ever watched.

She never made mistakes; and no matter how many people...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375759921
ISBN 13 
9780375759925
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Herausgeber
Reichl Ruth
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780679642503: Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet (Modern Library Food)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0679642501 ISBN 13:  9780679642503
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2002
Hardcover