Lamb Food Quotes

Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless. Christmas dinner's dark and blue. When you stop and try to see it From the turkey's point of view. Sunday dinner isn't sunny. Easter feasts are just bad luck. When you see it from the viewpoint of a chicken or a duck. Oh how I once loved tuna salad Pork and lobsters, lamb chops too Till I stopped and looked at dinner From the dinner's point of view.

I'll be busy for the next eight weeks, so let's set this for November 15th. MENU I want lamb or venison steak. Baked potatoes with honey butter. Corn on the cob. Rolls. And apple pie, like the one you made before. I really liked it. I want it with ice cream. You owe me one naked dinner, but I'm not a complete beast, so you can wear a bra and panties if you so wish. The blue ones with the bow will do. Curran, Beast Lord of Atlanta

A human body in no way resembles those that were born for ravenousness; it hath no hawk’s bill, no sharp talon, no roughness of teeth, no such strength of stomach or heat of digestion, as can be sufficient to convert or alter such heavy and fleshy fare. But if you will contend that you were born to an inclination to such food as you have now a mind to eat, do you then yourself kill what you would eat. But do it yourself, without the help of a chopping-knife, mallet or axe, as wolves, bears, and lions do, who kill and eat at once. Rend an ox with thy teeth, worry a hog with thy mouth, tear a lamb or a hare in pieces, and fall on and eat it alive as they do. But if thou had rather stay until what thou eat is to become dead, and if thou art loath to force a soul out of its body, why then dost thou against nature eat an animate thing? There is nobody that is willing to eat even a lifeless and a dead thing even as it is; so they boil it, and roast it, and alter it by fire and medicines, as it were, changing and quenching the slaughtered gore with thousands of sweet sauces, that the palate being thereby deceived may admit of such uncouth fare.

It might not be the circle of life,” Lamb says. “But it is the food chain. I didn’t see you feeling sorry for that pig we had for lunch. Or that rabbit you had for dessert. Everything eats something else.” I swing my head towards him. “What eats you?” He raises an eyebrow, giving me a taste of my own medicine. “Existential despair.

To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste.

By now she has learned that her husband likes his food on the salty side, that his favorite thing about lamb curry is the potatoes, and that he likes to finish his dinner with a small final helping of rice and dal.

In the newspapers the row about the prospect of genetically modified food raged on, and yet here were consumers effectively demanding lambs with four back legs.

What are you asking God for?” I joked. “A million dollars? Two million?” “I’m not asking Him for anything,” he said. “I’m thanking Him for good food and wine, good health and famiglia.

The sweet-smelling aroma of the island spices still hung in the air. It filled his nostrils and titillated his appetite all over again. His appetite drove him mad for something much more than food.

We live in an age in which saving is subterfuge for spending. No doubt you sincerely believe that there is margarine in your refrigerator because it is more economical than butter. But you are wrong. Look in your bread drawer. How many boxes of cute snack crackers are there? How many packages of commercial cookies reeking of imitation vanilla badly masked with oil of coconut? How many presweetened breakfast cereals? Tell me now that you bought the margarine because you couldn't afford butter. You see - you can't. You bought the bread drawer of goodies because you were conned into them; and you omitted the butter because you were conned out of it. The world has slipped you culinary diagrams instead of food. It counts on your palate being not only wooden, but buried under ten coats of synthetic varnish as well. Therefore, the next time you go to check out of the supermarket, simply put back one box of crackers, circle round the dairy case again, swap your margarine for a pound of butter and walk up to the checker with your head held high, like the last of the big spenders. This is no time for cost-counters: It is time to be very rich or very poor - or both at once.

Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than useful.

A great empire cannot bring freedom by its own decay to those corners in it where a subject people are prevented from discussing the fundamentals of life. The people feel like children turned adrift to fend for themselves when the imperial routine breaks down; and they wander to and fro, given up to instinctive fears and antagonisms and exaltation until reason dares to take control. I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood. I learned now that it might follow, because an empire passed, that a world full of strong men and women and rich food and heady wine might nevertheless seem like a shadow-show: that a man of every excellence might sit by a fire warming his hands in the vain hope of casting out a chill that lived not in the flesh.

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits - witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling.

They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself.

In the whole vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom. As soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom, you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die, and how many are killed. But from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A power of violence at once hidden and palpable … has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. Thus there are insects of prey, reptiles of prey, birds of prey, fishes of prey, quadrupeds of prey. There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself. He kills to adorn himself, he kills in order to attack, and he kills in order to defend himself. He kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself. He kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him. From the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound ... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses ... And who in all of this will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man ... So it is accomplished ... the first law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.

The Wolf And The Lamb   WOLF, meeting with a Lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea to justify to the Lamb the Wolf's right to eat him. He thus addressed him: "Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me." "Indeed," bleated the Lamb in a mournful tone of voice, "I was not then born." Then said the Wolf, "You feed in my pasture." "No, good sir," replied the Lamb, "I have not yet tasted grass." Again said the Wolf, "You drink of my well." "No," exclaimed the Lamb, "I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother's milk is both food and drink to me." Upon which the Wolf seized him and ate him up, saying, "Well! I won't remain supperless, even though you refute every one of my imputations." The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.

Dad says that everyone invented baklava.” It occurs to me now to wonder what that means. Aunt Aya rolls her eyes. “Your father? He is the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food but these walnuts were not grown from Jordanian earth and this butter was not made from Jordanian lambs. He is eating the shadow of a memory. He cooks to remember but the more he eats, the more he forgets.

We do know, however that almost no animal routinely kills prey animal on an indiscriminate basis. The only wild animal I’ve seen who will sometimes violate this rule is the coyote. Most of the time a coyote eats the animals he kills, but occasionally coyotes will go on a lamb-killing spree, killing twenty and eating only one. I believe it’s possible coyotes have lost some of their economy of behavior by living in close proximity to humans and overabundant food supplies. A coyote that kills twenty lambs and eats only one isn’t going to have to trek a hundred miles to find more lambs next week. Any sheep rancher will have several hundred other lambs that will be just as easy to catch later on, and the coyote knows it. Wild coyotes have probably lost the knowledge that you shouldn't waste food or energy.

Two of the most nutritious plants in the world —lamb’s quarters and purslane—are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens.

Jesus lies on his back, holding the end of the cord to prevent the lamb from escaping, an unnecessary precaution, the poor animal has no strength, not only because of its tender age but also because of all the excitement, the constant motion back and forth, not to mention the meager food it was given this morning, for it is considered neither fitting nor decent for anyone, lamb or martyr, to die with a full belly.

Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of Fate, All but the page prescrib'd, their present state; From brutes what men, from men what spirits know: Or who could suffer Being here below? The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play? Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food, And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood. Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv'n, That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heav'n; Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall.

I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.

Mr. Nord, bald and boring, sold equipment to hospitals and was gone a lot on overnight trips. Mrs. Nord wore eye shadow and headbands that matched her shell tops and Bermudas. For lunch she made us foods she’d seen in the pages of her women’s magazines: baked hot dogs coated in crushed Special K; English muffin pizzas; Telstar coolers (lemonade and club soda afloat with a toothpick-speared maraschino cherry—a sort of edible satellite that jabbed your lip as you drank).

The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It's no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it's no more or less pea for being pea or pod. Grappa is made from the spent skins and stems and seeds of wine grapes; marmalade from the peels of oranges. The wine behind grappa is great, but there are moments when only grappa will do; the fruit of the orange is delicious, but it cannot be satisfactorily spread. “The skins of onions, green tops from leeks, stems from herbs must all be swept directly into a pot instead of the garbage. Along with the bones from a chicken, raw or cooked, they are what it takes to make chicken stock, which you need never buy, once you decide to keep its ingredients instead of throwing them away. If you have bones from fish, it's fish stock. If there are bones from pork or lamb, you will have pork or lamb stock.

Under the mellowing influence of good food and good music, Adam relaxed, and I discovered that underneath that overbearing, hot-tempered Alpha disguise he usually wore was a charming, over-bearing, hot-tempered man. He seemed to enjoy finding out that I was as stubborn and disrespectful of authority as he’d always suspected. He ordered dessert without consulting me. I’d have been angrier, but it was something I could never have ordered for myself: chocolate, caramel, nuts, ice cream, real whipped cream, and cake so rich it might as well have been a brownie. “So,” he said, as I finished the last bit, “I’m forgiven?” “You are arrogant and overstep your bounds,” I told him, pointing my clean fork at him. “I try,” he said with false modesty. Then his eyes darkened and he reached across the table and ran his thumb over my bottom lip. He watched me as he licked the caramel from his skin. I thumped my hands down on the table and leaned forward. “That is not fair. I’ll eat your dessert and like it—but you can’t use sex to keep me from getting mad.” He laughed, one of those soft laughs that start in the belly and rise up through the chest: a relaxed, happy sort of laugh. To change the subject, because matters were heating up faster than I was comfortable with, I said, “So Bran tells me that he ordered you to keep an eye out for me.” He stopped laughing and raised both eyebrows. “Yes. Now ask me if I was watching you for Bran.” It was a trick question. I could see the amusement in his eyes. I hesitated, but decided I wanted to know anyway. “Okay, I’ll bite. Were you watching me for Bran?” “Honey,” he drawled, pulling on his Southern roots. “When a wolf watches a lamb, he’s not thinking of the lamb’s mommy.” I grinned. I couldn’t help it. The idea of Bran as a lamb’s mommy was too funny. “I’m not much of a lamb,” I said. He just smiled.

At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time-and still bothers ours-is that he showed this bone crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.

When he was finished, he set his plate down, looked at me, and raised an eyebrow. I leaned forward and whispered angrily, “I am not going to sit on your lap, so don’t get your hopes up, Mister.” He still waited until I picked up a fork and took a few bites. I speared a bite of macadamia nut crusted ruby snapper and said, “Whew. Time’s up. Isn’t it? The clock is ticking. You must be sweating it, huh? I mean, you could turn any second.” He just took a bite of curried lamb and then some saffron rice and sat there chewing as cool as a cucumber. I watched him closely for a full two minutes and then folded up my napkin. “Okay, I give. Why are you acting so smug and confident? When are you going to tell me what’s going on?” He wiped his mouth carefully and took a sip of water. “What’s going on, my prema, is that the curse has been lifted.” My mouth dropped open. “What? If it was lifted, why were you a tiger for the last two days?” “Well, to be clear, the curse is not completely gone. I seem to have been granted a partial removal of the curse.” “Partial? Partial meaning what, exactly?” “Partial, meaning a certain number of hours per day. Six hours to be exact.” I recited the prophecy in my mind and remembered that there were four sides to the monolith, and four times six was…”Twenty-four.” He paused. “Twenty-four what?” “Well, six hours makes sense because there are four gifts to obtain for Durga and four sides of the monolith. We’ve only completed one of the tasks, so you only get six hours.” He smiled. “I guess I get to keep you around then, at least until the other tasks are finished.” I snorted. “Don’t hold your breath, Tarzan. I might not need to be present for the other tasks. Now that you’re a man part of the time, you and Kishan can resolve this problem yourselves, I’m sure.” He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t underestimate your level of…involvement, Kelsey. Even if you weren’t needed anymore to break the curse, do you think I’d simply let you go? Let you walk out of my life without a backward glance?” I nervously began toying with my food and decided to say nothing. That was exactly what I’d been planning to do. Something had changed. The hurt and confused Ren that made me feel guilty for rejecting him in Kishkindha was gone. He was now supremely confident, almost arrogant, and very sure of himself.

[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being -- a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner...the true convivium -- the long Session that brings us nearly home.

Nettie set out a loaf of sourdough bread from Baker's Way Bakers, a wodge of runny Camembert, and a container of leftover lamb, rich with garlic and rosemary, nestled on a bed of spicy arugula from the home garden. She'd plucked two sharp green apples from one of the trees in their tiny orchard, and she placed a waxed bag of caramel shortbread beside them.

Then I took the knife next to the plate of food, and proceed to hurl it at him.

Eating is self punishment; punish the food instead. Strangle a loaf of Italian bread. Throw darts at a cheesecake. Chain a lamb chop to the bed. Beat up a cookie.

Hey, here’s something crazy: In the Word, poverty, widows, hunger—these are not metaphors. There are billions of lambs that literally need to be fed. With food.

Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and, for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs. The Dursleys had never exactly starved Harry, but he’d never been allowed to eat as much as he liked. Dudley had always taken anything that Harry really wanted, even if it made him sick. Harry piled his plate with a bit of everything except the peppermints and began to eat. It was all delicious. “That does look good,” said the ghost in the ruff sadly, watching Harry cut up his steak.

Real eating restores a sense of of the festivity of being. Food does not exist merely for the sake of its nutritional value. To see it so is to knuckle under still further to the desubstantialization of man, to regard not what things are, but what they mean to us - to become in short solemn idolaters spiritualizing what should be loved as matter. A man's daily meal ought to be an exultation over the smack of desirability which lies at the root of creation. To break real bread is to break the loveless hold of hell upon the world, and, by just that much, to set the secular free.

Both the ferial and the festal cuisine, therefore, must be seen as styles of unabashed eating. Neither attempts to do anything to food other than render it delectable. Their distinction is grounded, not in sordid dietetic tricks, but in a choice between honest frugality or generous expense. Both aim only at excellence; accordingly, neither is suitable for dieting. Should a true man want to lose weight, let him fast. Let him sit down to nothing but coffee and conversation, if religion or reason bid him to do so; only let him not try to eat his cake without having it. Any cake he could do that with would be a pretty spooky proposition - a little golden calf with dietetic icing, and no taste at all worth having. Let us fast, then - whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat. Festally, first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored. But both ways let us eat with a glad good will, and with a conscience formed by considerations of excellence, not by fear of Ghosts.

A chilled pea soup of insane simplicity, garnished with creme fraiche and celery leaves. Roasted beet salad with poached pears and goat cheese. Rack of lamb wrapped in crispy prosciutto, served over a celery root and horseradish puree, with sautéed spicy black kale. A thin-as-paper apple galette with fig glaze. Everything turned out brilliantly, including Patrick, who roused himself as I was pulling the lamb from the oven to rest before carving. He disappeared into the bathroom for ten minutes and came out shiny; green pallor and under-eye bags gone like magic. Pink with health and vitality, polished and ridiculously handsome, he looked as if he could run a marathon, and I was gobsmacked. He came up behind me just as I was finishing his port sauce for the lamb with a sprinkle of honey vinegar and a bit of butter, the only changes I made to any of his recipes, finding the sauce without them a bit one-dimensional and in need of edge smoothing.

A storm of fruity sweetness! A concerto of seafood and herbs! And a fragrant duet of thick lamb mousse and creamed root vegetables! All three glasses present their own colorful tableau that unfolds across your tongue! "Though each glass maintains a clear and unique flavor profile... ... from creamed raw sea urchin to smoked scallop mousse- the perfect accenting layer is always slipped into the perfect place. It's like a gorgeous richly colored show of mousses is dancing in my mouth!

We do know, however that almost no animal routinely kills prey animal on an indiscriminate basis. The only wild animal I’ve seen who will sometimes violate this rule is the coyote. Most of the time a coyote eats the animals he kills, but occasionally coyotes will go on a lamb-killing spree, killing twenty and eating only one. I believe it’s possible coyotes have lost some of their economy of behavior by living in close proximity to humans and overabundant food supplies. A coyote that kills twenty lambs and eats only one isn’t going to have to trek a hundred miles to find more lambs next week. Any sheep rancher will have several hundred other lambs that will be just as easy to catch later on, and the coyote knows it. Wild coyotes have probably lost the knowledge taht you shouldn't waste food or energy.

In Taipei we had oyster omelets and stinky tofu at Shilin Night Market and discovered what is arguably the world's greatest noodle soup, Taiwanese beef noodle, chewy flour noodles served with hefty chunks of stewed shank and a meaty broth so rich it's practically a gravy. In Beijing we trekked a mile in six inches of snow to eat spicy hot pot, dipping thin slivers of lamb, porous wheels of crunchy lotus root, and earthy stems of watercress into bubbling, nuclear broth packed with chiles and Sichuan peppercorns. In Shanghai we devoured towers of bamboo steamers full of soup dumplings, addicted to the taste of the savory broth gushing forth from soft, gelatinous skins. In Japan we slurped decadent tonkotsu ramen, bit cautiously into steaming takoyaki topped with dancing bonito flakes and got hammered on whisky highballs.

Surely it is an excellent plan, when you are seated before delicacies and choice foods, to impress upon your imagination that this is the dead body of a fish, that the dead body of a bird or a pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is grape juice and that robe of purple a lamb's fleece dipped in a shellfish's blood; and in matters of sex intercourse, that it is the attrition of an entrail and a convulsive expulsion of a mere mucus. Surely these are excellent imaginations, going to the heart of actual facts and penetrating them so as to see the kind of things they really are. You should adopt this practice all through your life, and where things make an impression which is very plausible, uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt themselves. For pride is an arch-seducer of reason, and just when you fancy you are most certainly busy in good works, then you are mostly certainly guilty of imposture.

This is not to say that she clung obsessively to her ascetic menus. If she felt a strong desire for meat, she would pop into a restaurant and order a thick steak or lamb chops. She believed that an unbearable desire for a particular food meant that the body was sending signals for something it truly needed, and she would follow the call of nature.

Dr. Lecter toyed with his food while he wrote and drew and doodled on his pad with a felt-tipped pen. He flipped over the cassette in the tape player chained to the table leg and punched the play button. Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the piano. The music, beautiful beyond plight and time, filled the bright cage and the room where the warders sat.

Father never used a knife to cut mangoes, he would suck them. He would eat several at a sitting, one by one, all varieties, sandhoori, dusshairi, langra, choussa, alphonso. He loved good food. Good chutney. He was right-handed but held a chapatti in his left; he scooped up the chutney with a torn bit of chapatti. If curried lamb was served, he liked gravy more than the pieces. He ate kebabs without a piyaz.

The smart way to be assured of quality organic food is to join a community-sponsored agriculture (CSA) cooperative and buy a share in a local organic farm every year. Every week for an average of twenty-four weeks in the North, and all year round in the South, you share the harvest, which can include fresh vegetables, fruit, and free-range eggs, chicken, and lamb. (See the Resources section for information on CSAs.)

Two of the most nutritious plants in the world —lamb’s quarters and purslane—are weeds, and some of the healthiest traditional diets, like the Mediterranean, make frequent use of wild greens. The fields and forests are crowded with plants containing higher levels of various phytochemicals than their domesticated cousins. Why? Because these plants have to defend themselves against pests and diseases without any help from us,

As a boy, in my own backyard I could catch a basket of blue crabs, a string of flounder, a dozen redfish, or a net full of white shrimp. All this I could do in a city enchanting enough to charm cobras out of baskets, one so corniced and filigreed and elaborate that it leaves strangers awed and natives self-satisfied. In its shadows you can find metal work as delicate as lace and spiral staircases as elaborate as yachts. In the secrecy of its gardens you can discover jasmine and camellias and hundreds of other plants that look embroidered and stolen from the Garden of Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from the gods. In its kitchens, the stoves are lit up in happiness as the lamb is marinating in red wine sauce, vinaigrette is prepared for the salad, crabmeat is anointed with sherry, custards are baked in the oven, and buttermilk biscuits cool on the counter.

Before we knew it a year had passed, then two more, and we were celebrating the passage of Joshua’s seventeenth birthday in the fortress. Balthasar had the girls prepare a feast of Chinese delicacies and we drank wine late into the night. (And long after that, and even when we had returned to Israel, we always ate Chinese food on Joshua’s birthday. I’m told it became a tradition not only with those of us who knew Joshua, but with Jews everywhere.)

Let the advocate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the streaming blood; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say 'Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent.

She had made a cheddar-and-parsley roulade. Lina had made a lentil goulash, plus almond-and-white-chocolate blondies. Emmeline had made two different types of risotto. Erin had made lamb-and-asparagus mini pies and a strawberry-and-spinach salad. Renni had made bread-and-butter pudding using chocolate croissants. Andrea had made a hearty beef goulash plus zucchini with feta and mint. Sash had made a giant pumpkin cheesecake. The kitchen was a kaleidoscope of smells.

Memories fill my mind, as though they are my own, of not just events from Gideon's life, but of various flavors and textures: breast milk running easily down into my stomach, chicken cooked with butter and parsley, split peas and runner beans and butter beans, and oranges and peaches, strawberries freshly picked from the plant; hot, strong coffees each morning; pasta and walnuts and bread and brie; then something sweet: a pan cotta, with rose and saffron, and a white wine: tannin, soil, stone fruits, white blossom; and---oh my god---ramen, soba, udon, topped with nori and sesame seeds; miso with tofu and spring onions, fugu and tuna sashimi dipped in soy sauce, onigiri with a soured plum stuffed in the middle; and then something I don't know, something unfamiliar but at the same time deeply familiar, something I didn't realize I craved: crispy ground lamb, thick, broken noodles, chili oil, fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk, tamarind... and then a bright green dessert---the sweet, floral flavor of pandan fills my mouth.

Rognons de Veau à la Bordelaise is simplicity itself to make; no different, essentially, from Poulet Sauté, and no different, especially, from Bifteck Sauté Bercy. In fact, making it that night felt like falling into a time warp- I stood before the stove, melting butter and browning meat and smelling the smells of wine deglazing and shallots softening- but the dishes changed before my eyes, and I heard Julia warbling, "Boeuf Bourguignon is the same as Coq au Vin. You can use lamb, you can use veal, you can use pork....

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

I make my way back whistling. Gerry nods towards Mrs Brady who is standing beside the trolleys. Morning, Mrs Brady, I say cheerfully. I push her provisions out to the car. Things are something terrible, she says. You can't trust anybody. No. It's come to a sorry pass. It has. There's hormones in the beef and tranquillizers in the bacon. There's men with breasts and women with mickeys. All from eating meat. Now. I steer a path between a crowd of people while she keeps step alongside. Can you believe it - they're feeding the pigs Valium. If you boil a bit of bacon you have to lie down afterwards. Dear oh dear. Yes, I nod. The thought of food makes me ill. The pigs are getting depressed in those sheds. If they get depressed they lose weight. So they tranquillize them. Where will it end? I don't know, Mrs Brady, I say. I begin filling the boot. That's why I started buying lamb. Then along came Chernobyl. Now you can't even have lamb stew or you'll light up at night! I swear. And when they've left you with nothing safe to eat, next thing they come along and tell you you can't live in your own house. I haven't heard of that one, Mrs Brady. Listen to me. She took my elbow. It could all happen that you're in your own house and the next thing is there's radiation bubbling under the floorboards. What? It comes right at you through the foundations. Watch the yogurts. Did you hear of that? No. I saw it in the Champion. Did you not see it in the Champion? I might have. No wonder we're not right. I brought the lid of the boot down. She sits into the car very decorously and snaps her bag open on her lap. She winds down the window and gives me 50p for myself and £1 for the trolley.

Um-Nadia says that great food needs darkness. It requires letting the dough inhale the very early morning and letting the kabobs drink up wine and garlic all night long, and- on occasion- it requires stuffing the small birds, squabs, pigeons, and other sweet, wild game under the round moon, "when they have let go of their songs," Um-Nadia says. Sirine dreams of cooking and wakes to thoughts of cooking- even when she can't stand the old smells of rancid butter and oils hanging in her hair. She still wakes too early, to grind and salt the lamb by hand, to fan the parsley over the chopping block.

They walked quickly through the kitchen. A woman in a blue salwar kameez skewered bright orange pieces of chicken to go into the tandoor. An older woman was peeling and slicing a bag of onions. Two cooks in white aprons stirred pots full of spicy potatoes, braised lamb, and chunks of paneer swimming in creamy spinach. At the back of the kitchen, the cook who had glared at him when he had come to talk to Nasir used a giant paddle to stir a vat of what appeared to be goat curry. Sam breathed in the sweet mixed aroma of cardamom, turmeric, garam masala, and fresh chilies as Daisy led him past the stainless steel counters. It was the smell of his mother's kitchen last night when they'd had dinner together. The scent of home.

She had never eaten food like this before. No: she had never eaten before. It was as if these flavors had always existed, had always been there in her imagination, but now she was tasting them properly for the very first time. Each course was more intense than the last. The spaghetti was coated in a thick sauce of meat, tomatoes, and wine, rich, pungent, and sticky. The lamb, by contrast, was pink and sweet, so tender it seemed to dissolve in her mouth. It was served without vegetables, but afterward Tommaso brought the first of the contorni to the table: a whole artichoke, slathered in warm olive oil and lemon juice and sprinkled with chopped mint. Laura licked every drop of oil off her fingers, amazed by the depth of the flavor.

The soul of Sardinia lies in the hills of the interior and the villages peppered among them. There, in areas such as Nuoro and Ozieri, women bake bread by the flame of the communal oven, winemakers produce their potions from small caches of grapes adapted to the stubborn soil and acrid climate, and shepherds lead their flocks through the peaks and valleys in search of the fickle flora that fuels Sardinia's extraordinary cheese culture. There are more sheep than humans roaming this island- and sheep can't graze on sand. On the table, the food stands out as something only loosely connected to the cuisine of Italy's mainland. Here, every piece of the broader puzzle has its own identity: pane carasau, the island's main staple, eats more like a cracker than a loaf of bread, built to last for shepherds who spent weeks away from home. Cheese means sheep's milk manipulated in a hundred different ways, from the salt-and-spice punch of Fiore Sardo to the infamous maggot-infested casu marzu. Fish and seafood may be abundant, but they take a backseat to four-legged animals: sheep, lamb, and suckling pig. Historically, pasta came after bread in the island's hierarchy of carbs, often made by the poorest from the dregs of the wheat harvest, but you'll still find hundreds of shapes and sizes unfamiliar to a mainland Italian. All of it washed down with wine made from grapes that most people have never heard of- Cannonau, Vermentino, Torbato- that have little market beyond the island.

His antipasto was the classic Roman fritto misto---tiny morsels of mixed offal, including slivers of poached brains and liver, along with snails, artichokes, apples, pears, and bread dipped in milk, all deep-fried in a crisp egg-and-bread-crumb batter. This was to be followed by a primo of rigatoni alla pajata---pasta served with intestines from a baby calf so young that they were still full of its mother's milk, simmered with onions, white wine, tomatoes, cloves, and garlic. For the secondo they would be having milza in umido--- a stewed lamb's spleen, cooked with sage, anchovies, and pepper. A bitter salad of puntarelle al' acciuga---chicory sprouts with anchovy---would cleanse the palate, to be followed by a simple dolce of fragole in aceto, gorella strawberries in vinegar.

Sirine learned about food from her parents. Even though her mother was American, her father always said his wife thought about food like an Arab. Sirine's mother strained the salted yogurt through cheesecloth to make creamy labneh, stirred the onion and lentils together in a heavy iron pan to make mjeddrah, and studded joints of lamb with fat cloves of garlic to make roasted kharuf. Sirine's earliest memory was of sitting on a phone book on a kitchen chair, the sour-tart smell of pickled grape leaves in the air. Her mother spread the leaves flat on the table like little floating hands, placed the spoonful of rice and meat at the center of each one, and Sirine with her tiny fingers rolled the leaves up tighter and neater than anyone else could- tender, garlicky, meaty packages that burst in the mouth.

I ordered a salad with smoked salmon. I know that doesn't sound like a particularly decadent repast, but it is. That's because the French long ago mastered the art of serving salad so it doesn't feel like a punishment for something. There are always a few caramel-crusted potatoes on your salade niçoise, or a plump chicken liver or two bedded down in a nest of lamb's lettuce. A lot of this has to do with what is called a tartine- a large thin slice of country bread (Poilâne if you're lucky) topped with anything from melted goat cheese to shrimp and avocado. My lunch arrived, a well-worn wooden planche heaped with pillowy green lettuce, folded in a creamy, cloudy, mustardy vinaigrette. Balanced on top where three half slices of pain Poilâne, spread with the merest millimeter of butter, topped with coral folds of salmon.

The carciofini were good at the moment, no doubt about it, particularly the romagnolo, a variety of artichoke exclusive to the region, so sweet and tender it could even be eaten raw. Puntarelle, a local bitter chicory, would make a heavenly salad. In the Vini e Olio he found a rare Torre Ercolana, a wine that combined Cabernet and Merlot with the local Cesanese grape. The latter had been paired with the flavors of Roman cuisine for over a thousand years: they went together like an old married couple. There was spring lamb in abundance, and he was able to track down some good abbachio, suckling lamb that had been slaughtered even before it had tasted grass. From opportunities like these, he began to fashion a menu, letting the theme develop in his mind. A Roman meal, yes, but more than that. A springtime feast, in which every morsel spoke of resurgence and renewal, old flavors restated with tenderness and delicacy, just as they had been every spring since time began. He bought a bottle of oil that came from a tiny estate he knew of, a fresh pressing whose green, youthful flavors tasted like a bowl of olives just off the tree. He hesitated before a stall full of fat white asparagus from Bassano del Grappa, on the banks of the fast-flowing river Brenta. It was outrageously expensive, but worth it for such quality, he decided, as the stallholder wrapped a dozen of the pale spears in damp paper and handed it to Bruno with a flourish, like a bouquet of the finest flowers. His theme clarified itself the more he thought about it. It was to be a celebration of youth---youth cut short, youth triumphant, youth that must be seized and celebrated.

The next day they went to pick fragole di bosco, wild strawberries, and made love in a deserted old barn above the pastures, their lips still smeared with the pulp of the fruit. The next day it was misticanza, wild leaves for salad. Benedetta was scrupulous that they must always pick first. If anyone saw them walking home with empty baskets, she warned, tongues would start wagging instantly. So they filled their baskets with rocket, wild fennel, dandelion, and lamb's lettuce before temptation overcame them and they collapsed into a quiet corner of a field, hidden only by the tall fronds of the finocchio stalks. Bruno made her close her eyes, teasing her naked body with a spray of fennel: when he kissed her between her legs, the aniseed mingled with the faint, faraway taste of the sea. We were all fish once, he thought, and this is the proof of it, this whisper of oceans in the deepest recesses of the body.

I was always crazy about any Chinese takeout since everything on those long menus is so tempting, but when the craving really hit, the folks at Panda Delight over on Richmond almost knew without asking to pack me up an order of wings, a couple of egg rolls, shrimp dumplings, pork fried rice, and the best General Tso's chicken this side of Hong Kong. When my friend at the shelter, Eileen Silvers, got married at Temple Beth Yeshurum, I had a field day over the roast turkey and lamb and rice and baked salmon and jelly cakes on the reception buffet, and when me and Lyman would go out to Pancho's Cantina for Mexican, nothing would do but to follow up margaritas and a bowl of chunky guacamole and a platter of beef fajitas with a full order of pork carnitas and a few green chile sausages. And don't even ask about the barbecue and links and jalapeño cheese bread and pecan pie at Tinhorn BBQ. Just the thought still makes me drool.

You Are What You Eat Take food for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself - as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gerard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer.How does a plate of sheep brain's sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That's revolting. Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig's shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin', but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what's their rationale? And what about all the expectations? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff 'em in an intestine, and you've got yourself respectable sausage or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years aqo by an advertising hired to sell more bacon, and the Dutch eat their fries with mayonnaise, not ketchup. Think it's rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc - three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and the way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimps, crabs, and lobsters are all anthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don't talk about bugs' disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average. A fact sheet from Ohio State University estimates that Americans unknowingly eat an average of between one and two pounds of insects per year. An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Mini-livestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company's logo: "Mmm. That's good Land Shrimp!" Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. (20-21)

After a lineup of stellar secondi- braised tripe, fried lamb chops, veal braciola simmered in tomato sauce- Andrea and I wander into the kitchen to talk with Leonardo Vignoli, the man behind the near-perfect meal. Cesare al Casaletto had been a neighborhood anchor since the 1950's, but when Leonardo and his wife, Maria Pia Cicconi, bought it in 2009, they began implementing small changes to modernize the food. Eleven years working in Michelin-starred restaurants in France gave Leonardo a perspective and a set of skills to bring back to Rome. "I wanted to bring my technical base to the flavors and aromas I grew up on." From the look of the menu, Cesare could be any other trattoria in Rome; it's not until you twirl that otherworldly cacio e pepe (which Leonardo makes using ice in the pan to form a thicker, more stable emulsion) and attack his antipasti- polpette di bollito, crunchy croquettes made from luscious strands of long-simmered veal; a paper cone filled with fried squid, sweet and supple, light and greaseless- that you understand what makes this place special.

SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.

may sound strange to American readers that by “eating their own lambs” the Heddles were breaking the law. The fact is that during the war, and for several years after, the people of Britain were strictly rationed. Each person was provided with a book containing coupons for food and clothing. Rationed food included meat, eggs, bacon, cheese, sugar, tea, butter, and fats, etc., etc. The coupons were given up every week for the food. In this way everyone was able to obtain a fair share of the very limited supply of necessary food. Greedy people who had no conscience and plenty of money were able to obtain extra food “under the counter” but the law was strictly enforced. Even farmers were not allowed to kill and eat their own animals, so by killing and eating their lambs the Heddles were liable to severe penalties. The rations allowed by law were very frugal and everybody lost weight but it did us no harm and we were doing it as part of the war effort so nobody grumbled. Many factories in Britain were requisitioned to make precision instruments and other articles which were needed for the war so it soon became impossible to buy clocks and kettles and pots and pans and hairpins. D.

The night before, Um-Nadia came over with her small wooden box stuffed with handwritten recipes, dishes Um-Nadia hadn't prepared or eaten in the thirty-five years since she and Mireille had left Lebanon. Some were recipes for simple, elegant dishes of rice pilafs and roasted meats, others were more exotic dishes of steamed whole pigeons and couscous or braised lambs' brains in broth. And they discussed ingredients and techniques until late in the night. Um-Nadia eventually fell asleep on the hard couch in the living room, while Sirine's uncle dozed across from her in his armchair. But Sirine stayed up all night, checking recipes, chopping, and preparing. She looked up Iraqi dishes, trying to find the childhood foods that she'd heard Han speak of, the sfeehas- savory pies stuffed with meat and spinach- and round mensaf trays piled with lamb and rice and yogurt sauce with onions, and for dessert, tender ma'mul cookies that dissolve in the mouth. She stuffed the turkey with rice, onions, cinnamon, and ground lamb. Now there are pans of sautéed greens with bittersweet vinegar, and lentils with tomato, onion, and garlic on the stove, as well as maple-glazed sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, and pumpkin soufflé.

But between them and the foot of the sky there was something so white on the green grass that even with their eagles’ eyes they could hardly look at it. They came on and saw that it was a Lamb. “Come and have breakfast,” said the Lamb in its sweet milky voice. Then they noticed for the first time that there was a fire lit on the grass and fish roasting on it. They sat down and ate the fish, hungry now for the first time for many days. And it was the most delicious food they had ever tasted. “Please, Lamb,” said Lucy, “is this the way to Aslan’s country?” “Not for you,” said the Lamb. “For you the door into Aslan’s country is from your own world.” “What!” said Edmund. “Is there a way into Aslan’s country from our world too?” “There is a way into my country from all the worlds,” said the Lamb; but as he spoke his snowy white flushed into tawny gold and his size changed and he was Aslan himself, towering above them and scattering light from his mane. Oh, Aslan,” said Lucy. “Will you tell us how to get into your country from our world?” “I shall be telling you all the time,” said Aslan. “But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.

Immigrants' resistance to formal and informal pressures to Americanize their food habits varied. Only the most frugal could resist taking advantage of the greater availability of high-status foods which had rarely graced their tables in Europe. They commonly ate more meat in America, particularly beef but also poultry, lamb, and pork. They also indulged more in sweets, particularly sweet cakes and rolls, something many regarded as a peculiarly American habit. Coffee drinking, which perplexed reformers, was in most cases an American-acquired habit. In much of central, eastern, and southern Europe coffee was a high status drink which the poor, especially the peasants, could hardly afford. Slavic immigrants seem to have manifested a particular weakness for coffee. In their homes it was customary to have a pot of coffee on the stove all day long, with members of the family helping themselves at will. Asked if she had changed her diet upon coming to America, a Polish woman replied, 'Naturally, at home everyone had soup for breakfast, and here everyone has coffee and bread.' A Czech immigrant who arrived in 1914 perhaps exemplified the most common attitude toward the presence of all of these old-country luxuries on the table when he recalled that his family thought that in America 'we ate like kings, compared to what we had over there. Oh, it was really heaven.

Mr. Fish told my mother that he would make a “gift” of Sagamore’s body—to my grandmother’s roses. He implied that a dead dog was highly prized, among serious gardeners; my grandmother wished to be brought into the discussion, and it was quickly agreed which rosebushes would be temporarily uprooted, and replanted, and Mr. Fish began with the spade. The digging was much softer in the rose bed than it would have been in Mr. Fish’s yard, and the young couple and their baby from down the street were sufficiently moved to attend the burial, along with a scattering of Front Street’s other children; even my grandmother asked to be called when the hole was ready, and my mother—although the day had turned much colder—wouldn’t even go inside for a coat. She wore dark-gray flannel slacks and a black, V-necked sweater, and stood hugging herself, standing first on one foot, then on the other, while Owen gathered strange items to accompany Sagamore to the underworld. Owen was restrained from putting the football in the burlap sack, because Mr. Fish—while digging the grave—maintained that football was still a game that would give us some pleasure, when we were “a little older.” Owen found a few well-chewed tennis balls, and Sagamore’s food dish, and his dog blanket for trips in the car; these he included in the burlap sack, together with a scattering of the brightest maple leaves—and a leftover lamb chop that Lydia had been saving for Sagamore (from last night’s supper).

Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she'd roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she'd spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She'd stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father's absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths. "After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do..." She tried to explain it- how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same step that her mother's mother's mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven's heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

As far as he was concerned, Testaccio, not the Via del Corso or the Piazza del Campidoglio, was the real heart of Rome. For centuries animals had been brought here to be butchered, with the good cuts going to the noblemen in their palazzos and the cardinals in the Vatican. The ordinary people had to make do with what little was left---the so-called quinto quarto, the "fifth quarter" of the animal: the organs, head, feet, and tail. Little osterie had sprung up that specialized in cooking these rejects, and such was the culinary inventiveness of the Romans that soon even cardinals and noblemen were clamoring for dishes like coda all vaccinara, oxtail braised in tomato sauce, or caratella d' abbachio, a newborn lamb's heart, lungs, and spleen skewered on a stick of rosemary and simmered with onions in white wine. Every part of the body had its traditional method of preparation. Zampetti all' aggro were calf's feet, served with a green sauce made from anchovies, capers, sweet onions, pickled gherkins, and garlic, finely chopped, then bound with potato and thinned with oil and vinegar. Brains were cooked with butter and lemon---cervello al limone---or poached with vegetables, allowed to cool, then thinly sliced and fried in an egg batter. Liver was wrapped in a caul, the soft membrane that envelops a pig's intestines, which naturally bastes the meat as it melts slowly in the frying pan. There was one recipe for the thymus, another for the ear, another for the intestines, and another for the tongue---each dish refined over centuries and enjoyed by everyone, from the infant in his high chair to the nonnina, the little grandmother who would have been served exactly the same meal, prepared in the same way, when she herself was a child.

The store smells of roasted chicken and freshly ground coffee, raw meat and ripening stone fruit, the lemon detergent they use to scrub the old sheet-linoleum floors. I inhale and feel the smile form on my face. It's been so long since I've been inside any market other than Fred Meyer, which smells of plastic and the thousands of people who pass through every day. By instinct, I head for the produce section. There, the close quarters of slim Ichiban eggplant, baby bok choy, brilliant red chard, chartreuse-and-purple asparagus, sends me into paroxysms of delight. I'm glad the store is nearly empty; I'm oohing and aahing with produce lust at the colors, the smooth, shiny textures set against frilly leaves. I fondle the palm-size plums, the soft fuzz of the peaches. And the berries! It's berry season, and seven varieties spill from green cardboard containers: the ubiquitous Oregon marionberry, red raspberry, and blackberry, of course, but next to them are blueberries, loganberries, and gorgeous golden raspberries. I pluck one from a container, fat and slightly past firm, and pop it into my mouth. The sweet explosion of flavor so familiar, but like something too long forgotten. I load two pints into my basket. The asparagus has me intrigued. Maybe I could roast it with olive oil and fresh herbs, like the sprigs of rosemary and oregano poking out of the salad display, and some good sea salt. And salad. Baby greens tossed with lemon-infused olive oil and a sprinkle of vinegar. Why haven't I eaten a salad in so long? I'll choose a soft, mild French cheese from the deli case, have it for an hors d'oeuvre with a beautiful glass of sparkling Prosecco, say, then roast a tiny chunk of spring lamb that I'm sure the nice sister will cut for me, and complement it with a crusty baguette and roasted asparagus, followed by the salad. Followed by more cheese and berries for dessert. And a fruity Willamette Valley Pinot Noir to wash it all down. My idea of eating heaven, a French-influenced feast that reminds me of the way I always thought my life would be.

A Mediterranean flatbread, the pita is baked at a high temperature so that puffy pockets form in the middle, which can then be stuffed with meat or beans. He did the same thing that Secretary Girl did with her turtle burger bun... ... picking something that would keep the meat juices from dripping out the bottom! Hmm. You used a handmade Tzatziki sauce to ameliorate the smelliness of the kebab meat and to create a mild base to make the spices stand out. And the burger patty... ... is kofta! A Middle Eastern meatloaf of ground beef and lamb mixed with onions and plentiful spices, its highly fragrant aroma hits the nose hard! Its scent and umami flavor are powerful enough to bring tears to the eyes!" W-what is going on here?! How could they eat all that greasy, heavy meat so quickly and easily?! "Here. Let me give you a lesson. Four things are required for a good burger. A bun, a patty, some kind of sauce and... ...pickles. The sharp smell and tart flavor of pickles is what highlights the meaty umami of the patty. Pickles are a hidden but key component of the best burgers! From what I could tell, you used ginger sticks as your pickle analogue... ... but that was a weak choice." "What?! Then what did you choose that's so much better?!" "The pickle type that I picked for my burger... ...is achaar." "Achaar?" "What kind of pickle is that?" ACHAAR South Asian in origin, achaar consists of fruits or vegetables pickled in mustard oil or brine, and then mixed with a variety of spices. Sometimes called Indian pickles, achaar is strongly tart and spicy. This is achaar I made with onions. The spicy scent of the mustard oil makes the meaty umami of the kofta patty really stands out. For the tartness, I used amchoor- also known as mango powder- a citrusy powder made from dried unripe mangoes. But that's just the base. I added lemon juice to bolster the citrusy flavor of the amchoor... ... and then some garlic, ginger and chili peppers to give it an aroma that tickles the nose. Cloves. Cumin seeds. Black pepper. Paprika. I even added a dab of honey to give it a hint of sweetness.

For a start, most books like this, rich in such expensive pigments, had been made for palaces or cathedrals. But a haggadah is used only at home. The word is from the Hebrew root ngd, “to tell,” and it comes from the biblical command that instructs parents to tell their children the story of the Exodus. This “telling” varies widely, and over the centuries each Jewish community has developed its own variations on this home-based celebration. But no one knew why this haggadah was illustrated with numerous miniature paintings, at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments. It was unlikely that a Jew would have been in a position to learn the skilled painting techniques evinced here. The style was not unlike the work of Christian illuminators. And yet, most of the miniatures illustrated biblical scenes as interpreted in the Midrash, or Jewish biblical exegesis. I turned the parchment and suddenly found myself gazing at the illustration that had provoked more scholarly speculation than all the others. It was a domestic scene. A family of Jews—Spanish, by their dress—sits at a Passover meal. We see the ritual foods, the matzoh to commemorate the unleavened bread that the Hebrews baked in haste on the night before they fled Egypt, a shank bone to remember the lamb’s blood on the doorposts that had caused the angel of death to “pass over” Jewish homes. The father, reclining as per custom, to show that he is a free man and not a slave, sips wine from a golden goblet as his small son, beside him, raises a cup. The mother sits serenely in the fine gown and jeweled headdress of the day. Probably the scene is a portrait of the family who commissioned this particular haggadah. But there is another woman at the table, ebony-skinned and saffron-robed, holding a piece of matzoh. Too finely dressed to be a servant, and fully participating in the Jewish rite, the identity of that African woman in saffron has perplexed the book’s scholars for a century. Slowly, deliberately, I examined and made notes on the condition of each page. Each time I turned a parchment, I checked and adjusted the position of the supporting forms. Never stress the book—the conservator’s chief commandment. But the people who had owned this book had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war.

What can he tell them? He, who knows nothing. Ibn al Mohammed has not planned atrocities nor committed them. He has never been in the presence of terrorists. Yet Satan’s agents suspect him. He is dark-complected. His hair and beard are black. His name is Muslim. Body tall and slender, hands large, their fingers long and tapered. Dark eyes sunken in a narrow face. Irises like obsidian. He prays on hands and knees, forehead touching the floor. Thoughtlessly aligned, his cage obliges him to face a white plastic wall to bow toward Mecca. No matter; Ibn al Mohammed requires no sight of ocean or sky to know his place in the universe. He knows himself as one chosen, beloved of God. A man whose devotion will allow him to be saved. Standing at the bars, he stares at the plastic wall. Modesty panel, they call it. The detainee wills nothing, attempts nothing, merely stares at blankness as his mind opens toward such signs as might appear. Something, nothing. However little, however great, whatever God vouchsafes is sufficient. The least sign is enough. A crease in the plastic. A shadow cast against its insensate skin, then fleeing, gone. A raindrop: trickling through the roof, one small drop might touch the wall, leave a transparent streak, a tear without sorrow to confirm his understanding of what is and must be. Recognition. Acceptance. By such a sign he will know he is not forsaken. That God notices and prepares a place. He will not serve in the harvest. He will eat the food, drink the water, ride the bus. He will not pick the berries so prized by his captors. Droids will cajole and threaten; perhaps they will beat him. If so, they incriminate themselves. He relishes their degradation together with God’s tasking, this new test of will and faith. To suffer in silence, as meek as a lamb. Ibn al Mohammed will remove himself from himself. Self fading into background, his presence will diminish. His body will persist; corporeally, he must endure. But his self will become absent. Mind and its thought, heart and all emotion will disperse smoke-like into nothingness and in its vanishing forestall injury, indignity, all pain. Does God approve? Does God see? A mere token will assure Ibn al Mohammed for a lifetime. Standing at the bars, he watches. Minutes pass. How long must he wait? God speaks at His leisure to those with patience to attend. What does it mean, to have enough patience to attend to God? It is a discipline to expect nothing because you deserve nothing and merit only death. Ibn al Mohammed has waited all his life. What has he seen? His father taken away. His mother and sisters scrounging in a desert. He himself is confined in-cage. Squats on a stool, shits in a pail. Rain rattles across sheet tin, pock-pock-pock-pock. Food is delivered on a tray. A damp bed beneath his body, a white wall before his eyes. What does Ibn al Mohammed see? He sees nothing. [pp. 203-204]

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past — Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens — inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: “I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I’ll drink the victim’s sufferings until I’m drunk with them!” Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago. There was a rumor going the rounds between 1918 and 1920 that the Petrograd Cheka, headed by Uritsky, and the Odessa Cheka, headed by Deich, did not shoot all those condemned to death but fed some of them alive to the animals in the city zoos. I do not know whether this is truth or calumny, or, if there were any such cases, how many there were. But I wouldn’t set out to look for proof, either. Following the practice of the bluecaps, I would propose that they prove to us that this was impossible. How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years? Take it away from the working class? Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn’t their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn’t it expedient? That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.

Lamb & Flag 33 Rose St, Covent Garden, WC2E 9EB Lamb & Flag is an old London pub with a long history dating back to 1623. It was frequented by Charles Dickens, a loyal client, as well as other personalities of his times. Not only is the food delicious, but the portions are also surprisingly large for a pub menu. Plenty of fresh ales can be found here, and if you prefer whisky, you can order from a long list with all kinds of whiskies. Lamb & Flag is a historic pub with a warm ambiance and prompt service – all at competitive prices.

Fred Sparham had provided the money to start the project, and many times when Dad needed parts, supplies, or equipment, Fred was the one who would get the money together and send the goods. Sometimes he sent cash from his own pocket to tide the family over with food and fuel expenses. He told his son Eddie, “We can’t have Bob and his family going hungry out there. It’s twenty bucks for us, and twenty bucks for Bob.

When hay is removed and new growth appearsand the grain from the hills is gathered in,26 lambs will provide your clothing,and goats, the price of a field;27 there will be enough goat's milk for your food —food for your householdand nourishment for your female servants. b

Try the gougères," Lumière interrupted, popping one into her mouth before she could continue. It was warmed by his flame and melted on her tongue- nothing at all like the perfectly good but usually rock-hard ones she and her father baked. "Ohhh..." she couldn't help saying. "It's been so long since we had a guest!" Mrs. Potts danced around on the table happily, somehow managing to fold a napkin with her spout-nose. She tossed it into Belle's lap: a swan shape that gracefully unfolded as it fell, almost like it was flying. Belle shrank back, worried it was actually going to fly. "I can't imagine why," she muttered. And then she was distracted by the food. Piles of it. More than a feast- a banquet. There was a whole leg of lamb, multiple terrines and soufflés, three soup courses, a delicate fish in white wine broth, an orange ice in between to clear the palate... There was a water glass, a golden glass for red wine, a crystal one for white, and a saucer for consommé. There were seven forks of descending size and different numbers of tines, the last three whose use she couldn't even begin to work out.

I'm intrigued by Jake's mention of the Castelli Farms pork. And anything made with wild boar. Perhaps a wild boar ragout with braised carrots and fennel. Sausages are a must, lamb and spicy pork, served with black pepper flecked polenta. Mussels steamed in sweet vermouth, a salad of chicory and fresh anchovies with a warm caper vinaigrette.

In preparation for a feast to welcome the newlyweds, crates of melons, eggplants, tomatoes, basil, apricots, and figs were stacked in the shade. Naneh Goli sat at a table set outside the kitchen, stringing green beans to cook with minced beef in a bright tomato sauce for lubia polo- a favorite dish of Zod's boyhood. Forty game hens already lay in their saffron yogurt marinade, and tomorrow they would roast them over an open fire to serve with mounds of jeweled rice. All morning Yanik shaped lamb koofteh (meatballs) mixed with allspice and thyme, browning them in small batches and infringing on Nina's burners, which she needed to simmer mulberry preserves for parfait.

They camped at night among evergreens, and George showed her how to make use of her herbs for a lentil stew for breakfast. She already was thinking longingly of the food back in the Palace- though, she was ravenous enough to have eaten almost anything. But their fare was plain in the extreme and even though there was quite enough to keep her from feeling hungry, still, images of roast fowl, lamb, bowls of ripe fruit and yogurt, fresh bread and honeycomb, and sweet wine kept intruding between her and her plain flatbread and crumbled goat cheese and olives.

Broccoli branches, mashed potatoes, spools of gravy, sliced pillowy white bread. It slides on to Sirine's plate, glossy with butter. The meat loaf is oniony and dense under its charred crust, dressed in sweet puddles of ketchup. On the counter there's a food-stained copy of The Joy of Cooking and a red-plaid Betty Crocker cookbook, both from the library. She's impressed. No one ever wants to cook for her; the rare home-dinners at friends' houses are served with anxiety and apologies. But Han just seems excited- his skin slightly damp and pink from the kitchen heat- and intrigued by the new kind of cooking, a shift of ingredients like a move from native tongue into a foreign language: butter instead of olive oil; potatoes instead of rice; beef instead of lamb. He seats her on a pillow on the blue cloth and then sets the dishes before her on the cloth. He sits across from her, one knee skimming hers. They touch and she makes herself lean forward to reach the bowl of potatoes. Their knees graze again. Han tastes each dish while looking at Sirine, so the meal seems like a question. She nods and praises him lavishly. "Mm, the rich texture of this meat loaf- the egg and breadcrumbs- and these bits of onion are so good, and there's a little chili powder and dry mustard, isn't there? It's lovely. And there's something in the sauce... something..." "You mean ketchup?" Han asks. "Oh yes, I suppose that's it." She smiles. "That's remarkable." Sirine smiles vaguely, tips her head, not sure of what he means. "What?" "The way you taste things...." He gestures over the food, picks up a bite of meat loaf in his fingers as if it were an olive. "You know what everything here is- I mean exactly." "Oh no." She laughs. "It's so basic, anyone can do that. It's like you just taste the starting places- where it all came from. Unless of course it's ketchup." He gazes at her, then carefully takes her hand and kisses her fingers. "Then I think you must be of this place." Sirine laughs again, disconcerted by his intensity. "Well, I don't know about that, but I think food should taste like where it came from. I mean good food especially. You can sort of trace it back. You know, so the best butter tastes a little like pastures and flowers, that sort of stuff. Things show their origins

Controversy remains about what kind of ceremony is carried out in Ge 15:9–21. What/whom do the pieces represent (possibilities: sacrifice for oath, God if he reneges, nations already as good as dead, Israelites in slavery)? Whom do the birds of prey represent (nations seeking to seize available land, e.g., Ge 14, or to plunder Israel)? Whom do the implements represent (God and/or Abram)? These issues cannot currently be resolved, but a few observations can help identify some of the possible connections with the ancient world. Before we look at the options, a word is in order about what this is not. 1. It is not a sacrifice. There is no altar, no offering of the animals to deity and no ritual with the carcasses, the meat or the blood. 2. It is not divination. The entrails are not examined and no meal is offered to deity. 3. It is not an incantation. No words are spoken to accompany the ritual and no efficacy is sought—Abram is asleep. The remaining options are based on where animals are ritually slaughtered in the ancient world when it is not for the purposes of sacrifice, divination or incantation. Option 1: A covenant ceremony or, more specifically, a royal land grant ceremony. In this case the animals typically are understood as substituting for the participants or proclaiming a self-curse if the stipulations are violated. Examples of the slaughter of animals in such ceremonies but not for sacrificial purposes are numerous. In tablets from Alalakh, the throat of a lamb is slit in connection to a deed executed between Abba-El and Yarimlim. In a Mari text, the head of a donkey is cut off when sealing a formal agreement. In an Aramaic treaty of Sefire, a calf is cut in two with the explicit statement that such will be the fate of the one who breaks the treaty. In Neo-Assyrian literature, the head of a spring lamb is cut off in a treaty between Ashurnirari V and Mati’ilu, not for sacrifice but explicitly as an example of punishment. The strength of these examples lies in the contextual connection to covenant. The weakness is that only one animal is killed in these examples, and there is no passing through the pieces and no torch and firepot. Furthermore, there are significant limitations regarding the efficacy of a divine self-curse. Option 2: Purification. The “torch” (Ge 15:17) is a portable, handheld object for bringing light. The “smoking firepot” (15:17) can refer to a number of different vessels used to heat things (e.g., an oven for food, a kiln for pottery). Here the two items are generally assumed to be associated with God, but need not be symbolic representations of him. These implements are occasionally used symbolically to represent deities in ancient Near Eastern literature, but usually sun-gods (e.g., Shamash) or fire-gods (e.g., Girru/Gibil). Gibil and Kusu are often invoked together as divine torch and censer in a wide range of cultic ceremonies for purification. Abram would have probably been familiar with the role of Gibil and Kusu in purification rituals, so that function would be plausibly communicated to him by the presence of these implements. Yet in a purification role, neither the torch nor the censer ever pass between the pieces of cut-up animals in the literature available to us. Further weakness is in the fact that Yahweh doesn’t need purification and Abram is a spectator, not a participant, so neither does he. In the Mesopotamian Hymn to Gibil (the torch), the god purifies the objects used in the ritual, but the only objects in the ritual in Ge 15 are the dead animals, and it is difficult to understand why they would need to be purified.

Waiters began to appear with tureens of soup, platters of fish and meat, and bowls of vegetables. Another with a huge gold tasting spoon hanging like a necklace at his chest showed the Count a bottle of wine, which he approved, and when opened, sniffed the cork, and then nodded so that a glass could be poured for me. He ordered the waiters to put everything on the table and retreat to the rear of the room. "I will serve her," he said. "Tell me what you would like, Mina." I opened my mouth to speak, but he put a finger to my lips. "Not that way. Tell me with your thoughts." Without looking at the food, I directed my attention by scent to the tureen of turtle soup, whose aroma I recognized from my first dinner at the asylum. "Yes, good," the Count said, ladling out a small bowlful for me. "What else?" I relished the aromas of the white fish with wine and capers, the lamb with mint sauce, and the carrots, but rejected the turnips, which I had eaten for so many years at Miss Hadley's that I had come to abhor them. My repulsion made him laugh, and he signaled for a waiter to take the bowl away.

Twenty-eight courses?" Dylan mused. "Get comfortable," Grace said with anticipation. They came on little spoons, tiny plates, in small glasses, atop mini-pedestals even speared and hung, suspended on custom-made wire serving devices like little edible works of art, which was entirely the point: mint-scented lamb lollypops, osetra and oysters on frothed tapioca, beet gazpacho and savory mustard shooters, foie gras porridge with a sweet ginger spritz in an atomizer, ankimo sashimi on house-made pop-rocks, plums in powdered yogurt, goat cheese marshmallows, venison maple syrup mastic, warm black truffle gumdrops with chilled sauternes centers. Foamed and freeze-dried, often accompanied by little spray bottles of fragrance and tiny scent-filled pillows, the food crackled and smoked and hissed and sizzled, appealing to all the senses. Thin slices of blast-frozen Kobe carpaccio were hung on little wire stands to thaw between courses at the table. All sorts of textures and presentations were set forth. Many were entirely novel and unexpected renderings of traditional dishes. Intrigued and delighted by the sensory spectacle, Dylan and Grace enjoyed the experience immensely, oohing and aahing, and mostly laughing. For as strange as each course might be, as curious as the decorative objects that presented them, each one was an adventure of sorts, and without exception, each one was delicious, some to the point of profound. And each one came with an expertly matched extraordinary wine, in the precisely correct Riedel glass.

Philadelphia was the smell of the summer sun, of burnt asphalt, of sizzling meat from food carts tucked into street corners, foreign brown men and women hunched inside. Ifemelu would come to like the gyros from those carts, flatbread and lamb and dripping sauces, as she would come to love Philadelphia itself. It did not raise the spectre of intimidation as Manhattan did; it was intimate but not provincial, a city that might yet be kind to you. Ifemelu

I started in our neighborhood, buying a pastrami burrito at Oki Dog and a deluxe gardenburger at Astro Burger and matzoh-ball soup at Greenblatt's and some greasy egg rolls at the Formosa. In part funny, and rigid, and sleepy, and angry. People. Then I made concentric circles outward, reaching first to Canter's and Pink's, then rippling farther, tofu at Yabu and mole at Alegria and sugok at Marouch; the sweet-corn salad at Casbah in Silver Lake and Rae's charbroiled burgers on Pico and the garlicky hummus at Carousel in Glendale. I ate an enormous range of food, and mood. Many favorites showed up- families who had traveled far and whose dishes were steeped with the trials of passageways. An Iranian cafe near Ohio and Westwood had such a rich grief in the lamb shank that I could eat it all without doing any of my tricks- side of the mouth, ingredient tracking, fast-chew and swallow. Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held. I asked the waiter if I could thank the chef, and he led me to the back, where a very ordinary-looking woman with gray hair in a practical layered cut tossed translucent onions in a fry pan and shook my hand. Her face was steady, faintly sweaty from the warmth of the kitchen. Glad you liked it, she said, as she added a pinch of saffron to the pan. Old family recipe, she said. No trembling in her voice, no tears streaking down her face.

Liver,” says Moeller. “Mixed with some other viscera. The first part that a wild animal usually eats in its kill is the liver and stomach, the GI tract.” Organs in general are among the most nutritionally giving foods on Earth. A serving of lamb spleen has almost as much vitamin C as a tangerine. Beef lung has 50 percent more. Stomachs are especially valuable because of what’s inside them. The predator benefits from the nutrients of the plants and grains in the guts of its prey. “Animals have evolved to survive,” Rawson says. They like what’s best for them. People blanch to see “fish meal” or “meat meal” on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal—which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones—most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild. Muscle meat is a grand source of protein, but comparatively little else. Animals

The definition for the “Poop Deck” as found in nautical books would lead you to believe that the name was derived from the French word for the stern of the ship, la poupe which in turn was derived from the Latin puppis. On sailing ships this deck was higher than the main deck, making it ideal to navigate from. It also was where the binnacle and ship’s wheel were located for the helmsman. The deck of the poop deck formed the roof or overhead of the Captain’s cabin making it convenient for the Captain to reach. His after cabin was frequently irreverently referred to as the “poop cabin!” As wooden ships with iron men were replace with wooden men on iron ships, the navigational functions, with the exception of setting the sails, were moved to the bridge. According to my father who was a ship’s cook in the early 1920’s, the term poop deck remained, but took on a totally different meaning. During the turn of the last century, with coal fired reciprocating steam engines replacing wind and sails, this rear deck was where animals were kept to be butchered for food. Salted meat packed in barrels and the lack of fresh vegetables was the frequent cause of constipation and even worse scurvy. Many ships of that era, and before, didn’t yet have refrigeration and this was the way they continued to have fresh meat. A cabin boy tended to the chickens, pigs, lambs and goats and it was up to the butcher or cooks to slaughter and quarter them. Of course the deck nearest the stern was ideal for this, leaving the ensuing smell behind in the wake of the ship. Seldom is the term “Poop Deck” used now since with the advent of cruise ships nautical terms are fading. Bunks have become beds, cabins became staterooms and the head is now the restroom. Oh, what has become of the days of yore?

NOURISHING TRADITIONAL FOODS Proteins: Fresh, pasture-raised meat including beef, lamb, game, chicken, turkey, duck and other fowl; organ meats from pastured animals; seafood of all types from deep sea waters; fresh shellfish in season; fish eggs; fresh eggs from pastured poultry; organic fermented soy products in small amounts. Fats: Fresh butter and cream from pasture-fed cows, preferably raw and cultured; lard and beef, lamb, goose and duck fat from pastured animals; extra virgin olive oil; unrefined flax seed oil in small amounts; coconut oil and palm oil. Dairy: Raw, whole milk and cultured dairy products, such as yoghurt, piima milk, kefir and raw cheese, from traditional breeds of pasture-fed cows and goats. Carbohydrates: Organic whole grain products properly treated for the removal of phytates, such as sourdough and sprouted grain bread and soaked or sprouted cereal grains; soaked and fermented legumes including lentils, beans, and chickpeas; sprouted or soaked seeds and nuts; fresh fruits and vegetables, both raw and cooked; fermented vegetables. Beverages: Filtered, high-mineral water; lacto-fermented drinks made from grain or fruit; meat stocks and vegetable broths. Condiments: Unrefined sea salt; raw vinegar; spices in moderation; fresh herbs; naturally fermented soy sauce and fish sauce.

I’m hungry. Last night I dreamed of food. Ordinarily I dream of you, but last night I’m sorry to say that you were eclipsed by lamb with mint sauce.

We live on a cursed earth in a cursed universe. Both are under the baleful influence of Satan, who is both “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4), and “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). The devastating effects of the curse and satanic influence will reach a terrifying climax in the events of the Tribulation. Some of the various bowl, trumpet, and seal judgments are demonic, others represent natural phenomena gone wild as God lets loose His wrath. At the culmination of that time of destruction and chaos, Christ returns and sets up His kingdom. During His millennial reign, the effects of the curse will begin to be reversed. The Bible gives us a glimpse of what the restored creation will be like. There will be dramatic changes in the animal world. In Isaiah we learn that The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze; their young will lie down together; and the lion will eat straw like the ox. And the nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den. They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain. (Isa. 11:6-9) “The wolf and the lamb shall graze together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain,” says the Lord. (Isa. 65:25) The changes in the animal world will be paralleled by changes in the earth and the solar system: Then the moon will be abashed and the sun ashamed, for the Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, and His glory will be before His elders. (Isa. 24:23) The light of the moon will be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven days, on the day the Lord binds up the fracture of His people and heals the bruise He has inflicted. (Isa. 30:26) No longer will you have the sun for light by day, nor for brightness will the moon give you light; but you will have the Lord for an everlasting light, and your God for your glory. Your sun will set no more, neither will your moon wane; for you will have the Lord for an everlasting light. (Isa. 60:19-20)

The commingling of the Sacred Body and Blood symbolically expresses that in reality on the alter the Body and Blood are not separate, but under each species the whole Christ is present as one sacrificial gift and one sacrificial food. It tells us also of the Resurrection, in which His Body and Blood were again united and vivified; the Lamb that was slain now lives eternally.

The end of the world culminates not in clouds and harps, but in a FEAST. At the wedding supper of the Lamb, the divine presence is restored to us over a table of food. (p. 59)

I pop into Barrett's, ducking beneath the bright-red awning into the tiny shop, which is packed with fresh cuts of everything, from delicate lamb chops to meaty pork roasts covered in thick layers of fat. Mountains of fat sausages beckon from within the glass case, in more varieties than I could ever imagine---wild boar and apple, venison, chicken and sage, beef and garlic. A musty funk fills the store, giving the place an air of rustic authenticity. I order three Cornish hens (or, as the British call them, poussin) and then head back toward Pomona, the small food shop I visited this morning, remembering the fresh, crusty loaves of bread on their shelves. I grab a loaf of challah, its braided crust shiny and golden brown, along with some celery, an onion, some mushrooms, and a few spices. Before I pay, I also throw a bunch of speckled bananas, a pot of Greek yogurt, and some flour and sugar into my basket. The ingredients are slightly different here than they are back home---"self-raising flour," "caster sugar"---but I'm sure I can re-create the banana bread I developed for a famous morning-show host back in Chicago. It's one of my most popular recipes to date, and I'm sure it would taste great with a cup of tea.

Alternatively, hunters may have caught and ‘adopted’ a lamb, fattening it during the months of plenty and slaughtering it in the leaner season. At some stage they began keeping a greater number of such lambs. Some of these reached puberty and began to procreate. The most aggressive and unruly lambs were first to the slaughter. The most submissive, most appealing lambs were allowed to live longer and procreate. The result was a herd of domesticated and submissive sheep. Such domesticated animals – sheep, chickens, donkeys and others – supplied food (meat, milk, eggs), raw materials (skins, wool), and muscle power. Transportation, ploughing, grinding and other tasks, hitherto performed by human sinew, were increasingly carried out by animals. In most farming societies people focused on plant cultivation; raising animals was a secondary activity. But a new kind of society also appeared in some places, based primarily on the exploitation of animals: tribes of pastoralist herders.