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260b87c "To make a tarte of strawberyes," wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, "take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four eggs, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it." And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant's Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to "cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast." Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another." old-english poultry transformations jess-bach old-books tudor fauna Allegra Goodman
8441563 For the first time Gersen saw indigenous fauna of Moudervelt: a band of lizard-foxes, with gray-green pangolin scales and a single optic orb. They reared high to watch Gersen pass by; when he slowed the car they advanced with dancing sidelong steps, for purposes Gersen could not guess. He drove on, leaving the troop staring after him. dream-like fauna foxes kafkaesque surreal eerie Jack Vance