Sour Taste Quotes

The tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste out sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue.

They used to call the devil the father of lies. But for someone whose sin is meant to be pride, you'd think that lying would leave something of a sour taste. So my theory is that when the devil wants to get something out of you, he doesn't lie at all. He tells you the exact, literal truth. And he lets you find your own way to hell.

Beyond that, memories have a way of changing on us. Souring or sweetening over time—like a brew we drink, then recreate later by taste, only getting the ingredients mostly right. You can’t taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.

Regret was the worst. Regret was sour and bitter, and it tasted so close to the truth she had to fight sinking into it.

Eat bitter, taste sweet," Frank said. "I hate that proverb." "But it's true. What do they call it these days---no pain, no gain? Same concept. You do the easy thing, the appealing thing, the peaceful thing, mostly it turns out sour in the end. But if you take the hard path---ah, that's how you reap the sweet rewards. Duty. Sacrifice. They mean something.

Remember tonight...for it is the beginning of always," he whispered... - Shane That damn man just ruined all other men for me. Once you tasted that man, he made all others go sour in your mouth. Ah crap, I was in love with him. - Grace

I was born as sweet as that and if I am too sweet for your tastes then just clamp your mouth shut and spin on your heels. I can’t add sourness to my sap anymore just to fit onto a menu in a restaurant for wimps

The orange juice was sweet and sour, a sad and painful taste.

We tried it again and it didn't work out. Sour milk is always sour milk. When something goes bad it stays bad.You don't put sour milk in the refrigerator one day,and take it out the next and expect it to taste sweet.

She's an ugly little thing. No child should look like that. Pale and sour, like a glass of milk that's turned." "And so skinny!" the cook replied. "Never finishes her supper." Crouched beside the girl, the boy turned to her and whispered, "Why don't you eat?" "Because everything she cooks tastes like mud." "Tastes fine to me." "You'll eat anything." They bent their ears back to the crack in the cupboard doors. A moment later the boy whispered, "I don't think you're ugly." "Shhhh!" the girl hissed. But hidden by the deep shadows of the cupboard, she smiled.

Why do you like boys?” Grant asked sourly, but with slightly more boredom than judgment. “I don’t know, why do you like pizza?” “Because it tastes good in my mouth.” Patrick wasn’t about to go anywhere near that.

Of all the organs, ' said Nehemiah Trot, 'the tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste our sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue. Go to her! Talk to her!

They call me a monster and if it were untrue the weight of my crimes would pin me to the ground. I have maimed and I have murdered and if this mountain stood but a little higher I would cut the angels from their heaven. I care less for accusations than for the rain that soaks me, that runs down every limb. I spit both from my lips. Judgment has always left a sour taste.

Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.

The Kitchen           Half a papaya and a palmful of sesame oil; lately, your husband’s mind has been elsewhere.   Honeyed dates, goat’s milk; you want to quiet the bloating of salt.   Coconut and ghee butter; he kisses the back of your neck at the stove.   Cayenne and roasted pine nuts; you offer him the hollow of your throat.   Saffron and rosemary; you don’t ask him her name.   Vine leaves and olives; you let him lift you by the waist.   Cinnamon and tamarind; lay you down on the kitchen counter.   Almonds soaked in rose water; your husband is hungry.   Sweet mangoes and sugared lemon; he had forgotten the way you taste. Sour dough and cumin; but she cannot make him eat, like you.

The orange juice was sweet, yet sour. The taste of sorrow.

I’ll be back with the sandwiches,” she said. “But I had some leftover seven-layer dip.” “Yum.” Percy dug in with a tortilla chip. “She’s kinda famous for this, guys.” Sally ruffled his hair. “There’s guacamole, sour cream, refried beans, salsa—” “Seven layers?” I looked up in wonder. “You knew seven is my sacred number? You invented this for me?” Sally wiped her hands on her apron. “Well, actually, I can’t take credit—” “You are too modest!” I tried some of the dip. It tasted almost as good as ambrosia nachos. “You will have immortal fame for this, Sally Jackson!

Strangely, it was Athena who spoke up: 'The boy is correct. We have been unwise to ignore our children. It proved a strategic weakness in this war and almost caused our destruction. Percy Jackson - I have had my doubts about you, but perhaps -' she glanced at Annabeth, and then spoke as if the words had a sour taste - 'perhaps I was mistaken.

All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.

There's no clear water from a muddy well. All you can do is let the silt settle until the water clears otherwise it will taste sour. (paraphrased)

Men spend their lives in anticipations,—in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other—it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.

You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug.

With each passing day, I allowed myself to become a little more intoxicated by limitless possibilities which seemed sometimes to roll in with the fog, murmur suggestions that would have made me run yelling from them had I been anywhere [other than San Francisco], then leave me to cope with that special brand of terror bestowed by sweet and sour tastes of freedom.

Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.

There was no good without the bad, no joy without sorrow, no peace without war, and there definitely couldn’t be love without the sour taste of hate. You had to know what one felt like to fully experience and appreciate the other.

Rebecca del Rio offers a poem, “Prescription for the Disillusioned,” as an invitation to renewal and beginnings. Come new to this day. Remove the rigid overcoat of experience, the notion of knowing, the beliefs that cloud your vision. Leave behind the stories of your life. Spit out the sour taste of unmet expectation. Let the stale scent of what-ifs waft back into the swamp of your useless fears. Arrive curious, without the armor of certainty, the plans and planned results of the life you’ve imagined. Live the life that chooses you, new every breath, every blink of your astonished eyes.

The inside of my mouth fills with the sour, metallic taste I've come to know as humiliation.

Especially for Chu Wanning, it was as if an entire jar of vinegar had toppled over inside his chest, the sour taste of jealousy swelling without stop, getting under his skin. Sorry? How do you write sorry? Someone more apologetic, please teach him.

There’s such a thing as too much sweetness, Quincy, he told me. All the best bakers know this. There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more.

is a broken man an outlaw?" "More or less." Brienne answered. Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. "Then they get a taste of battle. "For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe. "They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. "If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chicken's, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world... "And the man breaks. "He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well

The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can’t. Can they make it so we don’t like sweet anymore? No, no they can’t.

If life feels bitter and sour, taste the sugar from the sweetness of flower

You can keep dividing and dividing and you’ll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no

Sour cream! He had tasted it once and liked to puke.

Kidding?” He asked; rolling the foreign word over in his mouth like he tasted something sour. “Yeah, you know. Joking. Ha ha ha.” I said.

A lot of the younger people think you're downright heroic." "Oh, good," I say, a sour taste in my mouth. "Heroism is what I was focused on. Not, you know, trying not to die.

The flavors are intense in her mouth, the sweet-almondy fruitiness of the pistachios beside the smoky sour taste of the sumac, delicate saffron, and herbal notes of olive.

He rolled his tongue around in his mouth and made a sour face. “Got any gum? Mints?” “No. You going to hark again?” He shook his head. “Mouth tastes like the bottom of my shoe.” I didn’t ask him how he knew that particular flavor.

I want to say something to him, but the words keep evaporating, vanishing off my tongue before I have the chance to say them. I can taste them, but I can't tell if they are sweet or sour.

And now I know what to do with lemons. When life gives you lemons, do experience the sour taste. Don't try to make a face or squint your eye and show your tongue. Instead, taste it with all your might so that one day you can throw the Lemon back to where it come from. Take that you Lemon!

It wasn’t perfect. It isn’t now. I still have days when I want to exit the system quicker then you can say, “don’t you dare give up now”, and you still have days where you can’t even taste the sweetness in raw honey and neither one of us believes in pills. Days when I so want to kiss you but your mouth is sour and my thoughts are bitter and I’m angry…just mad, just crazy with it all. But we are each others home sweet home, Love. The roof is screwed on too tight at times and the walls of our purple house can pinch a little but my God, they are always warm.

Taste, Chef said, is all about balance. The sour, the slaty, the sweet, the bitter. Now your tongue is coded. A certain connoisseurship of taste, a mark of how you deal with the world, is the ability to relish the bitter, to crave it even, the way you do the sweet.

Why do you like boys?” Grant asked sourly, but with slightly more boredom than judgment. “I don’t know, why do you like pizza?” “Because it tastes good in my mouth.” Patrick wasn’t about to go anywhere near that.

...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.

Life was nothing but endless torture. He no longer felt any pleasure watching the sun rise, his every waking moment was sour, ruining the taste of anything that could have brought him enjoyment. As he had never really felt that he was living, he was not afraid of death. He was even happy that, in death, he would find the sole proof that he had been alive.

There are not more than five cardinal tastes (sour, acrid, salt, sweet, bitter), yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted.

When the bells justle in the tower The hollow night amid, Then on my tongue the taste is sour Of all I ever did.

The kiss tasted of bitter sleep, the sourness of the wine. Something brought by each of them.

Most relationships come with expiration dates just like milk and bread. Some go sour before you can taste them,

Disloyalty had a taste. It was bitter. It was sour. It was even a little sweet.

The orange juice was sweet, yet sour. The taste of sorrow.

This must be the taste of Language— the tongue mapped by many colors, parsed by the vowels of memory, the roof of the mouth the dome of a world circumscribed by consonants, whose edges suggest the sour-sweetness of oranges, the bittermelon’s green rind, the river- scent of mangoes all the way to the grove.

Sour Milk You can't make it turn sweet again. Once it was an innocent color like the flowers of wild strawberries, and its texture was simple would pass through a clean cheesecloth, its taste was fresh. And now with nothing more guilty that the passage of time to chide it with, the same substance has turned sour and lumpy. The sour milk makes interesting & delicious doughs, can be carried to a further state of bacterial action to create new foods, can in its own right be considered complicated and more interesting in texture to one who studies it closely, like a map of the world. But to most of us: it is spoiled. Sour. We throw it out, down the drain-not in the backyard- careful not to spill any because the smell is strong. A good cook would be shocked with the waste. But we do not live in a world of good cooks. I am the milk. Time passes. You cannot make it turn sweet again. I sit guiltily on the refrigerator shelf trembling with hope for a cook who dreams of waffles, biscuits, dumplings and other delicious breads fearing the modern housewife who will lift me off the shelf and with one deft twist of a wrist... you know the rest. You are the milk. When it is your turn remember, there is nothing more than the passage of time we can chide you with.

That’s what the South was like for me. Sweet on the first taste, but something gone sour underneath. It’ll try to trick you, now—the sugarberries and the quiet and those lovely spread-out houses. But after that day with Auntie Rose, I could smell the rotten too.

Sattvic people enjoy food that is mild, tasty, substantial, agreeable, and nourishing, food that promotes health, strength, cheerfulness, and longevity. 9 Rajasic people like food that is salty or bitter, hot, sour, or spicy – food that promotes pain, discomfort, and disease. 10 Tamasic people like overcooked, stale, leftover, and impure food, food that has lost its taste and nutritional value.

The words tasted sour. I agreed with Patrick. In New Orleans, sometimes death did feel more like socializing. And he knew better than anyone else. He frequented postmortem parties daily, trolling for books.

There is nothing that is not beautiful about bread. The way it grows, from tiny grains, from bowls on the counter, from yeast blooming in a measuring cup like swampy islands. The way it fills a room, a house, a building, with its inimitable smells, submits to a firmly applied fist and contracts, swells again; the way it stretches and expands upon kneading, the warm, supple feel of it against skin. The sight of a warm roll on a table, the taste-sweet, sour, yeasty on the tongue.

The sky grew darker, and the light abandoned the daytime, so that we found ourselves always moving in a timeless murk, the only way to discern the hour the taste of sour burps, toothpaste in the morning, redolent in the afternoon of the jellied beef of school cafetetria meals

Of all the organs,” said Nehemiah Trot, “the tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste our sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue.

I missed the sad things about growing old, when women no longer look at you, when wine makes you weep instead of laugh and makes your mouth sour with the taste of weakness, and every day is one day nearer death.

But why, why all the hurt? Because, said Mr. Halloway. You need fuel, gas, someting to run a carnival on, don't you? Women live off gossip, and what's gossip but a swap of headaches, sour spit, arthritic bones, ruptured and mended flesh, indiscretions, storms of madness, calms after the storms? If some people didn't have something juicy to chew on, their choppers would prolapse, their souls with them. Multiply their pleasure at funerals, their chuckling through breakfast obituaries, add all the cat-fight marriages where folks spend careers ripping skin off each other and patching it back upside around, add quack doctors slicing persons to read their guts like tea leaves, then sewing them tight with fingerprinted thread, square the whole dynamite factory by ten quadrillion, and you got the black candlepower of this one carnival. All the meannesses we harbor, they borrow in redoubled spades. They're a billion times itchier for pain, sorrow, and sickness than the average man. We salt our lives with other people's sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival doesn't care if it stinks by moonlight instead of sun, so long as it gorges on fear and pain. That's the fuel, the vapor that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the scream from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way.

She cut a small piece of the gravalax and put it on a piece of black bread, daintily spooned a bit of dill sauce onto it, and ate it like it was the last piece of food in the world. I tried to imitate her, eating so slowly, tasting the raw pink fish and the coarse, sour bread, salt and sugar around the rind, flavors and scents like colors on a palette, like the tones in music.

Ead sat up as best she could, conscious of her sweat-soaked shift and the sour taste in her mouth. ”Ead," Sabran said, looking her over. A flush touched her cheeks. “I see you are at last awake. You have been absent from my lodgings for too long.” ”Forgive me, Your Majesty.” ”Your generosity has been missed.

There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more.

That blood only makes more blood. That settling one score only starts another. That war gives a bastard of a sour taste to any man that’s not half-mad, and it only gets worse with time.’ She didn’t disagree. ‘So you know why I’d rather be free of it. Make something grow. Something to be proud of, instead of just breaking. Be . . . a good man, I guess.

It’s like being offered lemonade after having something really sweet. The lemonade was wonderful before, but it just tastes sour after.

I woke up with an unfamiliar taste in my mouth, part sweet part sour, it took me days to realize this was simply hope.

She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate.

Disloyalty had a taste. It was bitter. It was sour. It was even a little sweet.

There weren't enough espresso in the world to wash the sour taste of betrayal out of my mouth.

Oh, good,” I say, a sour taste in my mouth. “Heroism is what I was focused on. Not, you know, trying not to die.

Have you ever tasted rose hips, in tea or jam? A tart sourness that cleans the teeth, refreshes, smells like a good morning. A mash of rose hips and mint keeps me steepling my fingers all day long, to keep those scents in my head. Sumac, too—I think you might like sumac.

Face Book is a tutti - frutti garden. There are all the kinds of fruits here, bitter or sweet, tasteless or sour taste, fresh or rotten fruits, all together mixed in....sweet harmony!

During breaks out in the field, when our grumbling stomachs sent a sour taste up into our mouths, our greatest entertainment was talking among ourselves about food. We, along with some of the other field hands, would trade descriptions of delicious foods we had eaten or heard about. It was truly food for the soul. The speakers would invariably have us all drooling.

She sipped the tonic. Her face puckered again. She gagged, covered her mouth and mumbled in disgust, "Oh my God!" "I said it tasted better, not great." Abby continued to force the sour tonic down in sips. She could taste a hint of vanilla but the potion left a bitter aftertaste that was similar to vinegar. Her stomach gurgled and burned. "Water," she coughed after her last sip of tonic. "No. You'll dilute it," Noel said firmly, relieving her of the glass. Smartly, she rebutted, "Isn't that what you're supposed to do after drinking poison? Or is it throw up?

Does it seem like things were better when you were younger?” Huck asked. “Did life really make more sense then?” “Yeah,” Tress whispered. “I remember…calm nights, watching the spores fall from the moon. Lukewarm cups of honey tea. The thrill of baking something new.” “I remember not being afraid,” Huck said. “I remember waking each day to familiar scents. I remember thinking I understood how my life would go. Same as my parents’. Simple. Maybe not wonderful, but also not terrifying.” “I don’t think things were really better though,” Tress said softly, still staring at the ceiling. “We just remember it that way because it’s comforting.” “And because we couldn’t see the troubles,” Huck agreed. “Maybe we didn’t want to see them. When you’re young, there’s always someone else to deal with the problems.” Tress nodded. Beyond that, memories have a way of changing on us. Souring or sweetening over time—like a brew we drink, then recreate later by taste, only getting the ingredients mostly right. You can’t taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.

A truth you did not want to know can rot & grow mold in the pit of your stomach, can sour every taste you've ever had, can cast a stench so bad your forget you've ever known a sweet thing. A truth you did not want can put a collar around your neck & lead you into the dark, the places where all your monsters live. -Camino

This is a story about the brothers Lynch. There were three of them, and if you didn't like one, try another, because the Lynch brother others found too sour or too sweet might be just to your taste. The Lynch brothers, the orphans Lynch. All of them had been made by dreams, one way or another. They were handsome devils, down to the last one.

Procrastination and excuses are sour spices that spoil the sweet taste of an effective work. They must hence, not be prompted under desire, partly because they are strictly time-stripping and also because they have no known essence.

We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce.

Sakyamuni, Confucius, and Laotse once stood before a jar of vinegar--the emblem of life--and each dipped in his finger to taste the brew. The matter-of-fact Confucius found it sour, the Buddha called it bitter, and Laotse pronounced it sweet.

Alessandro Volta, an Italian count and the inspiration for the eponym “volt,” demonstrated this back around 1800 with a clever experiment. Volta had a number of volunteers form a chain and each pinch the tongue of one neighbor. The two end people then put their fingers on battery leads. Instantly, up and down the line, people tasted each other’s fingers as sour.

We went into the lunchroom and then the monk read something for twenty minutes while we ate our lunch - sour apple cider and lentil soup which tasted like canned to me but when I said so everyone just looked at me like I'm crazy, but - I think I know my soup.

Last to check was her namesake: a rampion or bellflower, Campanula rapunculus-- little turnip. All by itself in a beautiful Spanish clay pot with a bright blue glaze. Its blooms were pinky-purple stars, tiny but perfect and delicate. Sometimes, if she was feeling down, Rapunzel would secretly break off a leaf and chew it, the sour/bitter taste comforting her through the worst of the drab winter months when nothing else grew.

Ead sat up as best she could, conscious of her sweat-soaked shift and the sour taste in her mouth. “Ead,” Sabran said, looking her over. A flush touched her cheeks. “I see you are at last awake. You have been absent from my lodgings for too long.” “Forgive me, Your Majesty.” “Your generosity has been missed.

He was completely detached from every thing except the story he was writing and he was living in it as he built it. The difficult parts he had dreaded he now faced one after another and as he did the people, the country, the days and the nights, and the weather were all there as he wrote. He went on working and he felt as tired as if he had spent the night crossing the broken volcanic desert and the sun had caught him and the others with the dry gray lakes still ahead. He could feel the weight of the heavy double-barreled rifle carried over his shoulder, his hand on the muzzle, and he tasted the pebble in his mouth. Across the shimmer of the dry lakes he could see the distant blue of the escarpment. Ahead of him there was no one, and behind was the long line of porters who knew that they had reached this point three hours too late. It was not him, of course, who had stood there that morning, nor had he even worn the patched corduroy jacket faded almost white now, the armpits rotted through by sweat, that he took off then and handed to his Kamba servant and brother who shared with him the guilt and knowledge of the delay, watching him smell the sour, vinegary smell and shake his head in disgust and then grin as he swung the jacket over his black shoulder holding it by the sleeves as they started off across the dry-baked gray, the gun muzzles in their right hands, the barrels balanced on their shoulders, the heavy stocks pointing back toward the line of porters. It was not him, but as he wrote it was and when someone read it, finally, it would be whoever read it and what they found when they should reach the escarpment, if they reached it, and he would make them reach its base by noon of that day; then whoever read it would find what there was there and have it always.

Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness - blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar - I'd loved since childhood, perhaps I'd find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized "the savour of the little madeleine": the apprehensiveness of death. "A mere taste," Proust writes, and "the word 'death' ... [has] ... no meaning for him." So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat, but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel's luck.

July" The figs we ate wrapped in bacon. The gelato we consumed greedily: coconut milk, clove, fresh pear. How we’d dump hot espresso on it just to watch it melt, licking our spoons clean. The potatoes fried in duck fat, the salt we’d suck off our fingers, the eggs we’d watch get beaten ’til they were a dizzying bright yellow, how their edges crisped in the pan. The pink salt blossom of prosciutto we pulled apart with our hands, melted on our eager tongues. The green herbs with goat cheese, the aged brie paired with a small pot of strawberry jam, the final sour cherry we kept politely pushing onto each other’s plate, saying, No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours. How I finally put an end to it, plucked it from the plate, and stuck it in my mouth. How good it tasted: so sweet and so tart. How good it felt: to want something and pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.

Clairey tasted the bile rising up in her throat, could smell the pathetic fear she was giving off, and they were as familiar to her as waking and sleep, as hunger and thirst. In her time of peace there with Ellis, she had nearly forgotten the taste and smell of it, how her joints became liquid and her mouth became sour. That was what violence did to her.

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.

Life is a miraculous fruit---sometimes it tastes sweet, sometimes it tastes sour & sometimes it tastes BITTER.

Taste, like smell, is a doorman for the digestive tract, a chemical scan for possibly dangerous (bitter, sour) elements and desirable (salty, sweet) nutrients.

Every swallow tastes sour, and the closer I get to school, the closer I come to collapsing.

He tastes like sour patch kids, and soda, and warmth, and goose bumps.

Bertie opened the vial and drank the traded words down, tasting sour cherry syrup over shaved ice, bitter lemon peel, and spices that recalled a nameless sorrow.

Savor the sweet taste before the sour one arrives

We may lay in a stock of pleasures as we would lay in a stock of wine, but if we defer tasting them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age.

An hour later, the task complete, the men retired, exhausted, with an odd taste of sour apples in their mouths.

They had found them growing on an old apple tree in a farmyard, green and small and sour, but they had both been deprived of fresh fruit for a long time, and they tasted ambrosial.

For me, food doesn’t just taste sweet, sour, spicy, what have you—it tastes of feelings, it invokes memories.

Shawn reaches across the counter with the spoon, and I taste the creamy potatoes, rich and delicious, with just the perfect amount of tartness from the sour cream. I roll my eyes in ecstasy.

As long as one strives to become a gourmet or a connoisseur of wines because it is the “in” thing to do, striving to master an externally imposed challenge, then taste may easily turn sour. But a cultivated palate provides many opportunities for flow if one approaches eating—and cooking—in a spirit of adventure and curiosity, exploring the potentials of food for the sake of the experience rather than as a showcase for one’s expertise.

Terror builds inside him. The reality that tonight will be his last leaves a sour taste in his mouth. The Tainted will eat him, or on a more terrifying note—if that’s even possible—maybe turn him into one of them. He’d rather die. But first, he’ll take as many of those bastards out as he can. He throws his pack into the throng and jerks the blade from his belt. With a thudding heart, he slices through them. Blood arcs over him, onto him.

love should taste like cotton candy−pink and sickeningly sweet. sticky on your teeth, a hunger that grows with each bite, it should make you feel full yet also so light. but when love tastes sour, does that mean i did not eat it right?

Are you persuaded of what you do or not? Do you need something to happen or not in order to do what you do? Do you need the correlations to coincide always, because the end is never in what you do, even if what you do is vast and distant but is always in your continuation? Do you say you are persuaded of what you do, no matter what? Yes? Then I tell you: tomorrow you will certainly be dead. It doesn't matter? Are you thinking about fame? About your family? But your memory dies with you,with you your family is dead. Are you thinking about your ideals? You want to make a will? You want a headstone? But tomorrow those too are dead, dead. All men die with you. Your death is an unwavering comet. Do you turn to god? There is no god, god dies with you. The kingdom of heaven crumbles with you, tomorrow you are dead, dead. Tomorrow everything is finished—your body, family, friends, country, what you’re doing now, what you might do in the future, the good, the bad, the true, the false, your ideas, your little part, god and his kingdom, paradise, hell, everything, everything, everything. Tomorrow everything is over—in twenty four hours is death. Well, then the god of today is no longer yesterday’s, no longer the country, the good, the bad, friends, or family. You want to eat? No, you cannot. The taste of food is no longer the same; honey is bitter, milk is sour, meat nauseating, and the odor, the odor sickens you: it reeks of the dead. You want a woman to comfort you in your last moments? No, worse: it is dead flesh. You want to enjoy the sun, air, light, sky? Enjoy?! The sun is a rotten orange, the light extinguished, the air suffocating. The sky is a low, oppressive arc. . . .No, everything is closed and dark now. But the sun shines, the air is pure, everything is like before, and yet you speak like a man buried alive, describing his tomb. And persuasion? You are not even persuaded of the sunlight; you cannot move a finger, cannot remain standing. The god who kept you standing,made your day clear and your food sweet, gave you family, country, paradise—he betrays you now and abandons you because the thread of your philopsychia is broken. The meaning of things, the taste of the world, is only for continuation’s sake. Being born is nothing but wanting to go on on: men live in order to live, in order not to die. Their persuasion is the fear of death. Being born is nothing but fearing death, so that, if death becomes certain in a certain future, they are already dead in the present. All that they do and say with fixed persuasion, a clear purpose, and evident reason is nothing but fear of death– ‘indeed, believing one is wise without being wise is nothing but fearing death.

This is actually the first time I've ever tried buttercream.' No doubt because it had been refrigerated until very recently, the cream retained a certain firmness. As it melted under the heat of her tongue, the sweet butter expanded lusciously, rousing all the cells across her body capable of apprehending its rich goodness. The dense sponge saturated with the rich, weighty aroma of milk made her think that she would never again be satisfied by fluffy shortcake with its sweet and sour tang.

The balls were dry as wood, you had to lick and suck at them before they tasted like sour cherries. If you chewed them well, the pit felt very smooth and hot on the tongue. Those night cherries were a happy thing, but they only sharpened our hunger.

Beyond that, memories have a way of changing on us. Souring or sweetening over time--like a brew we drink, then recreate later by taste, only getting the ingredients *mostly* right. You can't taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.

I don’t like wine,’ says Davíd. ‘It’s sour.’ ‘Wine is an acquired taste. When we are young we don’t like it, then when we are older we acquire a taste for it.’ ‘I am never going to acquire a taste for it.’ ‘That’s what you say. Let’s wait and see.’ Having

What a skeletal wreck of man this is. Translucent flesh and feeble bones, the kind of temple where the whores and villains try to tempt the holistic domes. Running rampid with free thought to free form, and the free and clear. When the matters at hand are shelled out like lint at a laundry mat to sift and focus on the bigger, better, now. We all have a little sin that needs venting, virtues for the rending and laws and systems and stems are ripped from the branches of office, do you know where your post entails? Do you serve a purpose, or purposely serve? When in doubt inside your atavistic allure, the value of a summer spent, and a winter earned. For the rest of us, there is always Sunday. The day of the week the reeks of rest, but all we do is catch our breath, so we can wade naked in the bloody pool, and place our hand on the big, black book. To watch the knives zigzag between our aching fingers. A vacation is a countdown, T minus your life and counting, time to drag your tongue across the sugar cube, and hope you get a taste. WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS FOR? WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON? SHUT UP! I can go on and on but lets move on, shall we? Say, your me, and I’m you, and they all watch the things we do, and like a smack of spite they threw me down the stairs, haven’t felt like this in years. The great magnet of malicious magnanimous refuse, let me go, and punch me into the dead spout again. That’s where you go when there’s no one else around, it’s just you, and there was never anyone to begin with, now was there? Sanctimonious pretentious dastardly bastards with their thumb on the pulse, and a finger on the trigger. CLASSIFIED MY ASS! THAT’S A FUCKING SECRET, AND YOU KNOW IT! Government is another way to say better…than…you. It’s like ice but no pick, a murder charge that won’t stick, it’s like a whole other world where you can smell the food, but you can’t touch the silverware. Huh, what luck. Fascism you can vote for. Humph, isn’t that sweet? And we’re all gonna die some day, because that’s the American way, and I’ve drunk too much, and said too little, when your gaffer taped in the middle, say a prayer, say a face, get your self together and see what’s happening. SHUT UP! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! I’m sorry, I could go on and on but their times to move on so, remember: you’re a wreck, an accident. Forget the freak, your just nature. Keep the gun oiled, and the temple cleaned shit snort, and blaspheme, let the heads cool, and the engine run. Because in the end, everything we do, is just everything we’ve done.

He's smiling at me. I want to say something to him, but the words keep evaporating, vanishing off my tongue before I have a chance to say them. I can taste them, but I can't tell if they are sweet or sour. Is he smiling at me, or is he sneering? I can't tell.

She told me that he has always been like this. That he says anger is like milk. It doesn't keep. It becomes sour, bringing sickness and death to anyone who tastes it when its time has passed. Grief, she said he likes to say, ages better than anger. It is eternal.

Mr. Morrison, our mailman, who had looked so perfect for the part. He was a tall, thin, lugubrious presence; a sourness radiated from him—dogs not only refrained from biting him, they slunk away from him; they must have known that the taste of him was as toxic as a toad’s.

He said, “Son, life’s like this marching band.” And I, who was expecting something more profound, inquired as to what in the seven hells he meant. “Look closely,” he said. “They’re going to start with numbers that they’re really good at. Things they’ve practiced; things they know they can’t screw up. Then they start getting ambitious; they might pull off a few good riffs here and there. And then the crowd cheers them on, and they get really ambitious, and they go straight into a number way beyond their competence. And you know what that leaves? A sour taste in the mouth.

BOWLS OF FOOD Moon and evening star do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe. The purpose of every gathering is discovered: to recognize beauty and love what’s beautiful. “Once it was like that, now it’s like this,” the saying goes around town, and serious consequences too. Men and women turn their faces to the wall in grief. They lose appetite. Then they start eating the fire of pleasure, as camels chew pungent grass for the sake of their souls. Winter blocks the road. Flowers are taken prisoner underground. Then green justice tenders a spear. Go outside to the orchard. These visitors came a long way, past all the houses of the zodiac, learning Something new at each stop. And they’re here for such a short time, sitting at these tables set on the prow of the wind. Bowls of food are brought out as answers, but still no one knows the answer. Food for the soul stays secret. Body food gets put out in the open like us. Those who work at a bakery don’t know the taste of bread like the hungry beggars do. Because the beloved wants to know, unseen things become manifest. Hiding is the hidden purpose of creation: bury your seed and wait. After you die, All the thoughts you had will throng around like children. The heart is the secret inside the secret. Call the secret language, and never be sure what you conceal. It’s unsure people who get the blessing. Climbing cypress, opening rose, Nightingale song, fruit, these are inside the chill November wind. They are its secret. We climb and fall so often. Plants have an inner Being, and separate ways of talking and feeling. An ear of corn bends in thought. Tulip, so embarrassed. Pink rose deciding to open a competing store. A bunch of grapes sits with its feet stuck out. Narcissus gossiping about iris. Willow, what do you learn from running water? Humility. Red apple, what has the Friend taught you? To be sour. Peach tree, why so low? To let you reach. Look at the poplar, tall but without fruit or flower. Yes, if I had those, I’d be self-absorbed like you. I gave up self to watch the enlightened ones. Pomegranate questions quince, Why so pale? For the pearl you hid inside me. How did you discover my secret? Your laugh. The core of the seen and unseen universes smiles, but remember, smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter. Dark earth receives that clear and grows a trunk. Melon and cucumber come dragging along on pilgrimage. You have to be to be blessed! Pumpkin begins climbing a rope! Where did he learn that? Grass, thorns, a hundred thousand ants and snakes, everything is looking for food. Don’t you hear the noise? Every herb cures some illness. Camels delight to eat thorns. We prefer the inside of a walnut, not the shell. The inside of an egg, the outside of a date. What about your inside and outside? The same way a branch draws water up many feet, God is pulling your soul along. Wind carries pollen from blossom to ground. Wings and Arabian stallions gallop toward the warmth of spring. They visit; they sing and tell what they think they know: so-and-so will travel to such-and-such. The hoopoe carries a letter to Solomon. The wise stork says lek-lek. Please translate. It’s time to go to the high plain, to leave the winter house. Be your own watchman as birds are. Let the remembering beads encircle you. I make promises to myself and break them. Words are coins: the vein of ore and the mine shaft, what they speak of. Now consider the sun. It’s neither oriental nor occidental. Only the soul knows what love is. This moment in time and space is an eggshell with an embryo crumpled inside, soaked in belief-yolk, under the wing of grace, until it breaks free of mind to become the song of an actual bird, and God.

Was it really wrong of me to remember the past fondly? It wasn't. Of course it wasn't. But the past was an easy meal after all. I could taste it again any time I wanted in memory and it would always be perfect and true. The here and now though had no recipe. It might be sour or bitter or raw.

I was thinking that it was regrettable that your tastes have grown canalized so young. There it was, raining soup-and you were caught without a spoon. Even three days of what you were offered-urged on you!-would have been something to treasure when you reach my age. And you, you young idiot, let jealousy chase you away! Believe me, at your age I would have gone Eskimo in a big way, thankful that I had been given a free pass instead of having to attend church and study Martian to qualify. I'm so vicariously vexed that my only consolation is the sour one that I know you will live to regret it. Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective . . . and the saddest perspective of all is to see far, far behind you, the temptations you've passed up. I have such regrets myself but all of them are as nothing to the whopper of a regret I am happily certain you will suffer.

The sorrow in his soul had begun to taste sour. Aged and dissolute, moments from crumbling. He did not know what would come in its wake. Resignation, as might find a fatally ill man in his last days? Or just an exultant eagerness to see it all end? At the moment, even despair seemed too much effort.

They worked on their knees, in a widening pond of gamma-emitting water. The two-fingered rubber mittens of their L-1 suits were clumsy and hot; they threw them off and used their bare hands. An hour later, the task complete, the men retired, exhausted, with an odd taste of sour apples in their mouths.

if I have spoken truth of Helen, she was qualified to give those who enjoyed the privilege of her converse a taste of far higher things. True, reader; and I knew and felt this: and though I am a defective being, with many faults and few redeeming points, yet I never tired of Helen Burns; nor ever ceased to cherish for her a sentiment of attachment, as strong, tender, and respectful as any that ever animated my heart. How could it be otherwise, when Helen, at all times and under all circumstances, evinced for me a quiet and faithful friendship, which ill-humour never soured, nor irritation never troubled?

She's right. They all are. I can feel it in my bones, that fear, like a sour taste on my tongue. I want nothing more than to stay here, to give in to their reason. I've seen the movies, too—I know what happens to the person who leaves safety to head out into the dark forest, the haunted psychiatric ward, the abandoned school. But what those movies don't show is the guilt surging like a current through my skin; how it feels to know someone you care about is already there, alone and vulnerable and terrified. What the moviegoers don't see is that the shame of staying can weigh heavier than the fear of going.

A truth you did not want to know can rot & grow mold in the pit of your stomach, can sour every taste you've ever had, can cast a stench so bad you forget you've ever known a sweet thing. A truth you did not want can put a collar around your neck & lead you into the dark places where all your monsters live.

Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it’s the latter. Humans perceive five tastes—sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)—and an almost infinite number of smells. Eighty to ninety percent of the sensory experience of eating is olfaction.

Fair warning: You might get stared at,” Zoe says as we walk through the security scanner. There are more people in the hallways up ahead now than there were earlier--it must be time for them to start work. “Your face is a familiar one here. People in the Bureau watch the screens often, and for the past few months, you’ve been involved in a lot of interesting things. A lot of the younger people think you’re downright heroic.” “Oh, good,” I say, a sour taste in my mouth. “Heroism is what I was focused on. Not, you know, trying not to die.” Zoe stops. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of what you’ve been through.

There were the subtle malts and brans of the crust and the pallid no-taste of good old Florentine bread. The snaking sour-sweet of the beef, like a slab of porphyry shot through with crystalline onion sugars, salt and soil-rolled toffee carrots; sparks of bitter thyme and mint oils; the velvet honeycomb of fat;

And there were hundreds of singular events experienced by individuals: creatures moving in the shadows, voices and screams from the sewer grates, milk souring, cats scratching owners, dogs howling, and a thousand people woke up to find that they no longer cared for the taste of chocolate. It was a fucked-up day.

My first taste of Filipino-style adobo lived up to its reputation. Garlicky and rich, the chicken and pork stew was at once salty, sour, and sweet. I couldn’t remember eating so much rice in one sitting, but it complemented the saucy meal perfectly. No wonder they matched a spoon to their fork instead of a knife.

Salt not only keeps food from spoiling, the fermentation that occurs during salting results in greater nutritional value and deeper flavour---what we Japanese call umami. This word, now used around the world, describes a fifth taste: savoury---after sweet, sour, salty and bitter. This is what makes Japanese pickles special.

I think about her serving this cake at Salt, the slice still warm, the aroma of corn filling the whole bakery like the branches of a tree stretching in all directions. It tasted buttery, and savory, and with just the right hint of sour, which I guess came from the cheese. It was perfectly salted and spicy, cinnamon's contribution to the cake.

I never liked North America, even first trip. It is not most crowded part of Terra, has a mere billion people. In Bombay they sprawl on pavements; in Great New York they pack them vertically--not sure anyone sleeps. Was glad to be in invalid's chair. Is mixed-up place another way; they care about skin color--by making point of how they don't care. First trip I was always too light or too dark, and somehow blamed either way, or was always being expected to take stand on things I have no opinions on. Bog knows I don't know what genes I have. One grandmother came from a part of Asia where invaders passed as regularly as locusts, raping as they went--why not ask her? Learned to handle it by my second makee-learnee but it left a sour taste. Think I prefer a place as openly racist as India, where if you aren't Hindu, you're nobody--except that Parsees look down on Hindus and vice versa. However I never really had to cope with North America's reverse-racism when being "Colonel O' Kelly Davis, Hero of Lunar Freedom.

What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.

There were many things Lore didn’t feel like doing today. Getting up early. Choking down breakfast. Her head felt like it was inhabited by a thousand tiny men with hammers, courtesy of the wine she’d downed before bed to make sure she didn’t dream. The combination of ache and dry, sour mouth made even the most delicate pastries taste like something from a refuse pile. Getting dressed also wasn’t high up on her list of things she wanted to do, and she’d let Juliette, her lady’s maid, stuff her into a pale-peach gown that really did nothing for her coloring because she didn’t have the energy to fight about it. That was typical for her, these days. Not having the energy to fight about things.

There’s no such a thing as too much sweetness, Quincy”, he told me. “All the best bakers know this. There needs to be a counterpoint. Something dark. Or bitter. Or sour. Unsweetened chocolate. Cardamom and cinnamon. Lemon and lime. They cut through all the sugar, taming it just enough so that when you do taste the sweetness, you appreciate it all the more.

I put a sour cherry pastille on my tongue, but the combination jarred. A meaty, protein taste was called for. With a cool skin, sticky sweet fragrance in the nostrils, the aleatory drip of timeless water echoing in your ears, a limbo beyond the muscle spindles... you become a spiced mummy in a cool chamber beneath the Nile. This salt-surfeited breeze tingling every corpuscle of my skin set me adrift on a cool back eddy near a basser sea... but the wave lap and sibilance of the palm leaves was like the rustle of a costly veil... in what exotic world did a vortex of primary colours drain into the eyes?... did it all make me a taffeted plankter drinking substance from the spectrum of a fractured sun?" -"Cancerous Kisses of Crocodiles

He had forgotten the sharp taste of stone dust that hung around the broken village houses, the dead skinny donkeys’ smell and the dead wretched goats’ smell, the broken terraces’ smell and smashed olive groves’ smell, the sour stench of high explosive, the heavy odour of spilled olive oil, all melding into a single smell he came to associate with human beings in trouble.

...kissing Locke never felt the way that kissing Cardan does, like taking a dare to run over knives, live an adrenaline strike of lightning, like the moment when you've swum too far out in the sea and there is no going back, only cold black water closing over your head. Cardan's cruel mouth is surprisingly soft, and for a long moment after our lips touch, he's still as a statue. His eyes close, lashes brushing my cheek. I shudder, as you're supposed to when someone walks over your grave. Then his hands come up, gentle as they glide over my arms. If I didn't know better, I'd say his touch was reverent, but I do know better. HIs hands are moving slowly because he is trying to stop himself. He doesn't want this. He doesn't want to want this. He tastes like sour wine. I can feel the moment he gives in and gives up, pulling me to him despite the threat of the knife. He kisses me hard, with a kind of devouring desperation, fingers digging in to my hair. Our mouths slide together, teeth over lips over tongues. Desire hits me like a kick to the stomach. It's like fighting, except what we're fighting for is to crawl inside each other's skin. That's the moment when terror seizes me. What kind of insane revenge is there in exulting in his revulsion? And worse, far worse, I like this. I like everything about kissing him- the familiar buzz of fear, the knowledge I am punishing him, the proof he wants me. The knife in my hand is useless. I throw it at the desk, barely registering as the point sinks in to the wood. He pulls back from me at the sound, startled. HIs mouth is pink, his eyes dark. He sees the knife and barks out a startled laugh. Which is enough to make me stagger back. I want to mock him, to show up his weakness without revealing mine, but I don't trust my face not to show too much. 'Is that what you imagined?' I ask, and am relieved to find that my voice sounds harsh. 'No,' he said tonelessly. 'Tell me,' I say. He shakes his head, somewhere chagrined. 'Unless you're really going to stab me, I think I won't. And I might not tell you even if you were going to stab me.' I get up on Dain's desk to put some distance between us. My skin feels too tight, and the room seems suddenly too small. He almost made me laugh there.

My stomach twists and my chest aches. This is exactly what I told him to do. He gave me a moment to tell him I wanted him too, and I told him I didn’t. I told him to play this game with someone else. I should be happy he listened for once. But I’m devastated. I’ve never been oblivious to Rhett’s reputation, but he’s never lived up to it in front of me. My tongue tastes sour at the sight.

The first time you make a decision like that, a decision which rubs against all your morals, is the hardest. The second time, though, is not so hard. And that makes you feel a fraction better about the first time. And so on. But you can keep dividing and dividing and you'll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no.

We drank a cup of tea and ate a little umeboshi cake. I still remember the nice taste of that little cake in the shape of the sour umeboshi plum. Nothing special happened—we just sat there, eating that cake—but I felt really comfortable. That memory is very clear for me. Spending the day with my mother, just being present with her. No disturbance, no brothers there, just my mother and I, just living.

It is an aromatic custard in a white dish. He saw the gooseberries earlier, tiny bubbles of green glass, sour as a friar on a fast day. For this dish you need fresh hens’ eggs and a pitcher of cream; you need to be a prince of the church to afford the sugar. His uncle stands over him. The custard quakes in waves of sweetness and spice. ‘Nutmeg,’ he says. ‘Mace. Cumin.’ ‘Now taste it.’ ‘And rosewater.

What Wendy felt was a spray of something that could only be described as golden. Light, effervescent, slightly dry. Fuzzy, like the horrible mineral waters Mother sometimes made Father take to aid his digestion. But not with the terrible metallic taste. For the brief moment she could taste anything at all, it was sweet- or no, maybe sour like lemons. No, not that, either- more like sparks from a fire.

Yesterday I just felt like eating my ass off so I did. I ate two Chef Boyardee pizzas, a Fifth Avenue candy bar, an entire package of fun size Snickers (that was fun!), several cherry sours (not the entire package, there are still a few left), an apple (apples don’t taste as good as they used to), several Slim Jims, a slice of burnt garlic toast, white cheddar popcorn and microwave popcorn. Today I will drink black coffee, eat a bowl of oatmeal (old school, boiled on the stove but no butter but lots of cinnamon and brown sugar) and dance to various YouTubes. I need to buy a pair of gloves, get my ass to the boxing gym and learn to love protein shakes. Also, I want to run a marathon. Then I want to get a backpack, stuff it with trail mix and the like and take to the road like the chick in that Wild book.

Or maybe,” Miriam seethes, “men swim in a septic pool of bad ideas about tough guys and big dicks, and they float there, soaking in it, gulping down mouthfuls of that shit, and it gets inside them, infects them, makes their blood go black and sour. Fathers take their sons and shove their heads down under the water, too, just to make sure they all get a taste. Maybe men are fucking broken. You ever think that?

In a plane again, Ashley thought sourly, her nose pressed to the window. Down below, glacier fought granite from horizon to horizon. This was the final leg of the two-day journey. Yesterday, they had flown the eight hundred miles from Buenos Aires to Esperanza, the Argentine army base on the tip on an Antarctic Peninsula. There, Ashley had her first taste of Antarctic air - like ice water poured into her lungs.

All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season. But we didn't. We shared this sour secret, a secret that began the spring Nadia Turner got knocked up by the pastor's son and went to the abortion clinic downtown to take care of it.

I was scared- with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I'd ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You're no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child ... That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out- or worse, you steal it from yourself ... By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you'd grow up to be. Looking back, I wish I'd relished those final instants of childish fear: that saccharine-sweet taste of terror curdling like sour milk in my mouth.

What’s your dad doing for his bachelor party?” I laugh. “Have you met my dad? He’s the last person who would ever have a bachelor party. He doesn’t even have any guy friends to have a party with!” I stop and consider this. “Well, I guess Josh is the closest thing he has. We haven’t seen much of him since he went to school, but he and my dad still e-mail every so often.” “I don’t get what your family sees in that guy,” Peter says sourly. “What’s so great about him?” It’s a touchy subject. Peter’s paranoid my dad likes Josh better than him, and I try to tell him it’s not a contest--which it definitely isn’t. Daddy’s known Josh since he was a kid. They trade comic books, for Pete’s sake. So, no contest. Obviously my dad likes Josh better. But only because he knows him better. And only because they’re more alike: Neither of them is cool. And Peter’s definitely cool. My dad is bewildered by cool. “Josh loves my dad’s cooking.” “So do I!” “They have the same taste in movies.” Peter throws in, “And Josh was never in a hot tub video with one of his daughters.” “Oh my God, let it go already! My dad’s forgotten about that.” “Forgotten” might be too strong of a word. Maybe more like he’s never brought it up again and he hopefully never will. “I find that hard to believe.” “Well, believe it. My dad is a very forgiving, very forgetful man.

It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes—cleaning fluids imbedded in fabric and blooming horribly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns—all the exudations of the human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind, …Light issuing from spotlights in the ceiling was sour and blinding like a sick breath. There was in that room an underlying confusion in the function of the senses. Smell became color, color became smell. Mute started at mute so intently they might have been listening with their eyes, and hearing grew preternaturally acute, yet waited only for the familiar syllables of surnames. Taste died, mouth opened in the negative drowsiness of waiting.

Sichuan pepper is the original Chinese pepper, used long before the more familiar black or white pepper stole in over the tortuous land routes of the old Silk Road. It is not hot to taste, like the chilli, but makes your lips cool and tingly. In Chinese they call it ma, this sensation; the same word is used for pins-and-needles and anaesthesia. The strange, fizzing effect of Sichuan pepper, paired with the heat of chillies, is one of the hallmarks of modern Sichuanese cookery. The

Were you a transfer too?” “I thought I would only have trouble with the Candor asking too many questions,” I say. “Now I’ve got Stiffs, too?” As it was with Christina before, my sharpness is intended to slam doors before they open too much. But Tris’s mouth twists like she tastes something sour, and she says, “It must be because you’re so approachable. You know. Like a bed of nails.” Her face flushes as I stare at her, but she doesn’t look away. Something about her seems familiar to me, though I swear I would remember if I had ever met such a sharp Abnegation girl, even for just a second. “Careful, Tris,” I say. Careful what you say to me, is what I mean, careful what you say to anyone, in this faction that values all the wrong things, that doesn’t understand that when you come from Abnegation, standing up for yourself, even in small moments, is the height of bravery. As I say her name, I realize how I know her. She’s Andrew Prior’s daughter. Beatrice. Tris.

The Netflix documentary Sour Grapes is a fascinating insight into this world. A crooked, though brilliant, Indonesian wine connoisseur called Rudy Kurniawan was able to replicate great burgundies by mixing cheaper wines together, before faking the corks and the labels. He was rumbled only when he attempted to fake wines from vintages that did not exist. I am told that it is possible to detect a forged Kurniawan wine by analysing the labels, but not by tasting the wine. I hate to say this, but Rudy was an alchemist. Several experts I have talked to in the high-end wine business regard their own field as essentially a placebo market; one of them admitted that he was relatively uninterested in the products he sold and would sneak off and fetch a beer at premium tastings of burgundies costing thousands of pounds a bottle. Another described himself as ‘the eunuch in the whorehouse’ – someone who was valuable because he was immune to the charms of the product he promoted.

Is it a coincidence that stories from the private life became more popular just as the grand hope for public redemption through revolution was beginning to sour? I witnessed a similar shift in taste in my own time. In the 1960s, while a hopeful vision of a just society arose again, countless poems and plays concerning politics and public life were written, read, and performed. But after the hope diminished and public life seemed less and less trustworthy, this subject was less in style.

Let us see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us. No man reverts with pleasure to any subject which he will not be able to reflect upon without pain. So too it cannot but be that the names of those whom we have loved and lost come back to us with a sort of sting; but there is a pleasure even in this sting. 5. For, as my friend Attalus used to say: “The remembrance of lost friends is pleasant in the same way that certain fruits have an agreeably acid taste, or as in extremely old wines it is their very bitterness that pleases us. Indeed, after a certain lapse of time, every thought that gave pain is quenched, and the pleasure comes to us unalloyed.” 6. If we take the word of Attalus for it, “to think of friends who are alive and well is like enjoying a meal of cakes and honey; the recollection of friends who have passed away gives a pleasure that is not without a touch of bitterness. Yet who will deny that even these things, which are bitter and contain an element of sourness, do serve to arouse the stomach?” 7. For my part, I do not agree with him. To me, the thought of my dead friends is sweet and appealing. For I have had them as if I should one day lose them; I have lost them as if I have them still. Therefore, Lucilius, act as befits your own serenity of mind, and cease to put a wrong interpretation on the gifts of Fortune. Fortune has taken away, but Fortune has given. 8. Let us greedily enjoy our friends, because we do not know how long this privilege will be ours.

He was too sick- he didn't think he could keep it down- but to please her, he drank a little. The crisp-sour taste made him recoil. "What is it?" "Mint tea."Win's angel-blue eyes stared into his without blinking, her beautiful face neutral. "You must drink all of this, and then perhaps another cup. It will make you better." He knew at once Win was lying. Nothing could make him better. And the bitter tang of morphine in the tea was impossible to conceal. But Merripen sensed an intent in her, a strange deliberateness, and the idea came to him that she was giving him an overdose on purpose. His exhausted mind weighted the possibility. It must be that Win wanted to spare him more suffering, knowing the hours and days to come were beyond his endurance. Killing him with morphine was the last act of kindness she could offer him. Dying in her arms... cradled against her... as he relinquished his scarred soul to the darkness... Win would be the last thing he would ever feel, see, hear. Had there been any tears in him, he would have wept in gratitude.

This dish... it's sweet-and-sour pork but with black vinegar. In fact, you could call it "Black Vinegar Pork." The glossy black of the vinegar was used to great effect in the plating, giving the dish a classy and luxuriant appearance. But the moment you put a bite in your mouth... fresh, vibrant green tea explodes in a sea of invigorating green. It is extravagantly delicious. Chef Kuga's Sweet-and-Sour sauce includes not just black vinegar but also balsamic vinegar as well as Chef Mimasaka's smoked soy sauce! It destroys the traditional boundaries of sweet-and-sour pork, creating a dish that's rich, tangy and savory while erasing the pork's thick greasiness to push the taste of the green tea to the forefront! He has completely succeeded in taking the green tea leaves and making them the centerpiece of his dish! But the point most worthy of attention... ... is that this sublime taste experience wasn't created using solely Chinese-cooking techniques. It shows an equally deft use of traditional French techniques!" "What the... French?! But isn't he supposed to be a purely Sichuan-Chinese chef?!" "Yes, yes. I'm gonna explain, so quiet down and listen up, 'kay? See, there's another secret y'all don't know. That sweet-and-sour sauce? I based it on Sauce au Vinaigre Balsamique. That's a balsamic vinegar sauce used in a whole lot of French recipes." "Aha! Now I see. So that's where it came from! French Vinaigre Balsamique sauce is a reduction of balsamic vinegar and Glacé de Viande! It has a light tanginess and thick richness, which must have boosted the deliciousness of the sweet-and-sour pork into the stratosphere!

There is a passage in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where the main character, Francie, talks about when her diet of stale bread and potatoes begins to feel flat, she takes her allowance and buys a pickle. She works on that pickle all day, and relishes its sourness. Then the bread and potatoes taste good again. This Thanksgiving is our pickle. It has shaken our frame for Thanksgiving, what it means, how to think about it, and how to celebrate it. We had to let go of some things we always do, and in doing so, the things we’ve kept felt all the more special.

Eating was a welcome distraction, not for us but for them. However the piles on the plates clashed (macaroni cheese sauce oozing orangely under the spinach salad), however sour the mixtures they made (runaway grapes rolling in the gravy!), our guests chewed to prove that their existence hadn't been diverted. For the price of a quick casserole, they bribed us into agreeing that this was God's plan, life was going on. Their cliches were breath mints: they wanted us to suck away to sweeten the bad taste our misfortune left in their mouths. And so we did.

All of this could fall flat, feel too much like a caricature of a Sicilian trattoria, if the food itself weren't so damn good: arancini, saffron-scented rice fried into crunchy, greaseless golf balls; polpette di pesce spada, swordfish meatballs with a taste so deep and savory they might as well be made of dry-aged beef; and a superlative version of caponata di melanzane, that ubiquitous Sicilian starter of eggplant, capers, and various other vegetation, stewed into a sweet and savory jam that you will want to smear on everything. Everything around you screams Italy, but those flavors on the end of the fork? The sweet-and-sour tandem, the stain of saffron, the grains of rice: pure Africa. The pasta: even better. Chewy noodles tinted jet black with squid ink and tossed with sautéed rings and crispy legs of calamari- a sort of nose-to-tail homage to the island's cherished cephalopod. And Palermo's most famous dish, pasta con le sarde, a bulge of thick spaghetti strewn with wild fennel, capers, raisins, and, most critically, a half dozen plump sardines slow cooked until they melt into a briny ocean ragù. Sweet, salty, fatty, funky- Palermo in a single bite.

2 cups shredded mild cheddar cheese ½ cup butter, melted Salt and black pepper, to taste Directions Preheat the oven to 350°F (177°C). Grease a 9x13-inch baking dish with butter or cooking spray. Peel the potatoes and shred them with a grater or with a food processor. Set aside. In a large bowl, mix the onion, soup, can of water, and sour cream. Add the shredded potatoes. Mix to coat well. Transfer the potato mixture into the baking pan and spread it in an even layer with a spatula. Bake in the preheated oven for 45-55 minutes or until the top is golden brown and the casserole is bubbly. Serve warm.

As she walked through the throngs of people, it was the first time at a charity event that she didn’t stop to meet and greet handfuls of people as she walked by. At any event, really. After all, that was their purpose.Well, networking was her purpose for attending.But now that she had a bit of space, she was just replaying the last half hour in her head, and it all left her with such a sour taste in the back of her mouth.Rather than the smile she typically fixed on, even in a bad mood, she was scowling by the time she reached Dean.“You look like you’re in a delightful mood.” He took a sip of the drink in his hand, pausing for a moment before he wondered aloud, “Here I thought you were on some sort of urgent covert mission, yet instead I find you slinking back in here looking all flushed with Sutton Spencer.”She didn’t need to see him to know that he was winking; his tone said it all.She shoved his shoulder. Harder than she’d originally intended, but she couldn’t control the frustration that was still bottled up. “Like I would do that here.” She didn’t say anything about whether or not she would do it with Sutton, because Dean might have been gay, but he was her friend; he knew her, and he had eyes.

I'm no expert when it comes to confectionery, but I understand that unsalted butter is used as standard in baking. By contrast, the West buttercream uses salted butter. That salinity really brings out the overall sweetness of the cake, adding depth to its richness. The sponge has a satisfying density to it, declaring itself roughly on the tongue, scented like eggs and flour. The Christmas cakes I've eaten up until now have all been shortcakes, and it's always seemed to me that the delicate, fluffy whipped cream and the sweet sourness of the strawberries obliterate the aroma and the texture of the sponge.

Her six-year-old brain had lost her father at sweet and was still stuck trying to decipher lemonade. "But lemon is pretty, Dad. It's yellow. Like sun." Her father nodded, his lips curved up at the corners. "Sun is pretty and it has a smiley face. Sun is not bad." "No, I guess it's not." Her father chuckled. "I love sun." "Of course you do, sweetie-pie." "So lemon is nice, too." "I believe so, but some people don't like the taste. It's too sour, they say." She looked back at her father and said with a tone that suggested what other people thought about lemon was crazy. "Then add sugar. No need to blame the lemon.

Grace had turned to Leeza, Ken, her boyfriend, Brian, and baking. She started by baking the family recipes from her childhood. Cinnamon buns, gingersnaps, saffron bread, and lingonberry pancakes. Grace knew she didn't have her mother's talent, but she tried her best and hoped it might also bring her mother back to earth. Maybe even bring the two of them closer. One afternoon, Grace made a German chocolate cake. She decided to try something different, and added fresh local Door County sour cherries to the batter. When Ken tasted it, he'd fallen on the floor, exclaiming, "I'm dead, but at least I went to heaven: Death by chocolate!

Jeff and Amy were part of this, though never in the sense that the natives were. They were not indigenous: they were outlanders, ‘foreigners,’ distinguished by a sort of upcountry cosmopolitan glaze which permitted them to mingle but not merge. Even their drinking habits set them apart. Deltans drank only corn and Coca-Cola; gin was perfume, scotch had a burnt-stick taste. They would watch with wry expressions while Amy blended her weird concoctions, pink ladies and Collinses and whiskey sours, and those who tried one, finally persuaded, would sip and shudder and set the glass aside: “Thanks”—mildly outraged, smirking—“I’ll stick to burrbon.

Engaging in the fight for civil rights and social justice is not for the faint of heart. It is as difficult as it is important, and the wins may never taste as sweet as the losses taste sour. But count yourself as part of the lineage of those who refused to relent. And when we’re feeling frustrated and discouraged by the obstacles in front of us, let’s channel the words of Constance Baker Motley, one of my inspirations as the first black American woman appointed to the federal judiciary. “Lack of encouragement never deterred me,” she wrote. “In fact, I think the effect was just the opposite. I was the kind of person who would not be put down.

And we’re going out. Kill me. ‘Got everything?’ Mom asks, her voice all sing-songy. We’re acting normal. A short-lived facade when I open my bag and Operation Check Contents begins. 1. Phone to call for help if we have a car crash/get mugged/drive into the path of a tornado 2. Headphones to drown out the sound of people if we get caught in a crowd 3. Bottle of water for if we break down and get stranded in the middle of nowhere 4. Another bottle of water in case that other bottle leaks or evaporates 5. Tissues for nosebleeds, sneezing, crying, and/or drooling 6. Sanitizer to kill the germs you can catch from touching anything 7. Paper bag to breathe into or throw up in 8. Band-Aids and alcohol wipes in case open wounds should occur 9. Inhaler (I grew out of asthma when I was twelve, but you can’t be too careful when it comes to breathing) 10. A piece of string that serves no purpose but it’s been here since for ever and I’m afraid the world will implode if I don’t have it 11. A pair of nail scissors for any one of a trillion reasons, most of which conclude with me being kidnapped 12. And, finally, chewing gum to take away the sour taste I always get when the panic hits Normal takes a nosedive into my bag, sinks beneath the copious amount of clutter, and dies a slow, painful death.

There was a day when one could honestly and innocently enjoy the sheer pleasure of a good sticky toffee pudding; when ice cream was nice cream and Bakewell tart really was baked well. Tastes change, though, and the world of the sweet has often been sour, having to go through some dramatic overhaulage in order to keep pace. Whilst a straightforward sausage and a common kedgeree maintain their hold on the nation’s culinary choices, the pudding has to stay on its toes to tantalise our taste buds. From low fat through to no fat, from sugar free through to taste free; what the next stage is we can only wait and see…’ CILLA BUBB. Don’t Desert Your Desserts

Aperitif--- Spectral Sour (Library of Spirits, Fall 2016) Amuse-bouche--- Sautéed Liver and Onions (Saveur Fare, Winter 2016) Potage--- Buffalo Chicken & Baked Potato Chowder (Hell's Kitchen, Winter 2017) Entrée--- Fried Sardines with Preserved Lemon on Toast (Hell's Kitchen, Winter 2017) Special Seatings--- Chef's Tastings (Limited) Once he realized what it was, Kostya had to take a minute. They were all aftertastes, dishes rooted in the Dead that he, Konstantin, had shepherded back to life. Frankie had seen the possibilities; he'd believed in him. Always. So much, apparently, that he'd imagined what a restaurant serving Kostya's food would look like. How he could structure his courses.

They set aside the quills and inspected the roasted pear, which was filled with mascarpone and scattered with pistachios. Leo considered. "The mascarpone's a good idea," he said. "It's not sweet. There's some cardamom in there too." Britt nodded. The tuiles that accompanied the pear were caramelized and sparkling with coarse dark sugar. He took a bite of pear and mascarpone and a bite of tuile and chewed, still nodding. Leo took one more bite. "That's actually really good. I hate a mushy pear, but this is just right." They moved on to the sour cherry cake, which was moist and fragrant with almond and some herbal note that quieted both of them. They sat, tasting and thinking, for several seconds, until Leo said, "Hyssop.

When I lived in New York and went to Chinatown, I learned that these flavors and their meanings were actually a foundation of ancient Chinese medicine. Salty translated to fear and the frantic energy that tries to compensate for or hide it. Sweet was the first flavor we recognized from our mother's milk, and to which we turned when we were worried and unsure or depressed. Sour usually meant anger and frustration. Bitter signified matters of the heart, from simply feeling unloved to the almost overwhelming loss of a great love. Most spices, along with coffee and chocolate, had some bitterness in their flavor profile. Even sugar, when it cooked too long, turned bitter. But to me, spice was for grief, because it lingered longest.

YOU’RE NO ANGEL, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it’s been a gray day sogged by a slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom, and since you’re fresh to West Table, Mo., and a new hand at the dog-food factory, your choices for company are narrow but you find some finally in a trailer court on East Main, and the coed circle of bums gathered there spot you a beer, then a jug of tequila starts to rotate and the rain keeps comin’ down with a miserable bluesy beat and there’s two girls millin’ about that probably can be had but they seem to like certain things and crank is one of those certain things, and a fistful of party straws tumble from a woven handbag somebody brung, the crank gets cut into lines, and the next time you notice the time it’s three or four Sunday mornin’ and you ain’t slept since Thursday night and one of the girl voices, the one you want most and ain’t had yet though her teeth are the size of shoe-peg corn and look like maybe they’d taste sort of sour, suggests something to do, ’cause with crank you want something, anything, to do, and this cajoling voice suggests we all rob this certain house on this certain street in that rich area where folks can afford to wallow in their vices and likely have a bunch of recreational dope stashed around the mansion and goin’ to waste since an article in The Scroll said the rich people whisked off to France or some such on a noteworthy vacation. That’s how it happens. Can’t none of this be new to you.

NORMAN’S EGG SALAD 4 cups peeled and chopped hard-boiled eggs.*** (That’s about a dozen extra large eggs—measure after chopping) 1/2 cup crumbled cooked bacon (make your own or use real crumbled bacon from a can—I used Hormel Premium Real Crumbled Bacon) 1 Tablespoon chopped parsley (it’s better if it’s fresh, but you can use dried parsley flakes if you don’t have fresh on hand) 1/4 cup grated carrots (for color and a bit of sweetness) 4 ounces cream cheese 1/4 cup sour cream 1/2 cup mayonnaise (I used Best Foods, which is Hellmann’s in some states) 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder (or 1/2 teaspoon freshly minced garlic) 1/2 teaspoon onion powder (or 1 teaspoon freshly minced onion) salt to taste freshly ground black pepper to taste   Peel and chop the hard-boiled eggs. Add the crumbled bacon, the parsley, and the grated carrots. Mix well.   Put the cream cheese in a small bowl and microwave for 30 seconds on HIGH to soften it. If it can be easily stirred with a fork, add the sour cream and mayonnaise, and mix well. If the cream cheese is still too solid, give it another 10 seconds or so before you add the other ingredients.   Stir in the garlic powder and onion powder.   Add the cream cheese mixture to the bowl with the eggs and stir it all up. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste, and chill until ready to serve.   Serve by itself on a lettuce leaf, as filling in a sandwich, or stuffed in Hannah’s Very Best Cream Puffs for a fancy luncheon.   Yield: Makes approximately a dozen superb egg salad sandwiches.

The pan dulce was perfect, and it gave Anna an idea. Talking to Lila about her favorite memories of her mother had shaken loose parts of the past she had either forgotten or overlooked. Like the songs her mother would sing as she cooked the one and only thing she ever cooked; like that time they visited the family coffee estate and Mum shot a rampaging wild boar and then they cooked and ate it later that night; like the smell of rain in the forest; like the fat, sour gooseberries they would pick off the trees; like fresh peppercorns straight off the vine; like countless other jumbled memories and smells and tastes and sounds that had been tucked away in some corner of her mind gathering dust for so long. Mum's favorite dish, the one and only thing she ever cooked. I'm going to make it. Anna had never learned how to make it, because she had always arrogantly assumed her mother would be around forever, but she had eaten it so many times that she was sure she could recreate it by memory and taste alone. This is it. Her favorite food. She would have to thank Lila for the inspiration later. This was the connection she had been afraid she would never find. It was a way to hold on to everything she had lost. "Can I borrow your wallet, Dad?" Excited for the first time in what felt like months, Anna rushed out to the neighborhood grocery store and picked out the ingredients she hoped would work. Curry leaves, bay leaves, whole black peppercorns, turmeric, ginger, garlic, green chilies, red chilies, limes, honey, and, finally, a fresh shoulder of pork.

I realized that it was not Ko-san, now safely ditched for ever, but Ko-san's mother who stood in need of pity and consideration. She must still live on in this hard unpitying world, but he, once he had jumped [in battle], had jumped beyond such things. The case could well have been different, had he never jumped; but he did jump; and that, as they say, is that. Whether this world's weather turns out fine or cloudy no more worries him; but it matters to his mother. It rains, so she sits alone indoors thinking about Ko-san. And now it's fine, so she potters out and meets a friend of Ko-san's. She hangs out the national flag to welcome the returned soliders, but her joy is made querulous with wishing that Ko-san were alive. At the public bath-house, some young girl of marriageable age helps her to carry a bucket of hot water: but her pleasure from that kindness is soured as she thinks if only I had a daughter-in-law like this girl. To live under such conditions is to live in agonies. Had she lost one out of many children, there would be consolation and comfort in the mere fact of the survivors. But when loss halves a family of just one parent and one child, the damage is as irreparable as when a gourd is broken clean across its middle. There's nothing left to hang on to. Like the sergeant's mother, she too had waited for her son's return, counting on shriveled fingers the passing of the days and nights before that special day when she would be able once more to hang on him. But Ko-san with the flag jumped resolutely down into the ditch and still has not climbed back.

Heart Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart. It was either that or the soul. The hard part is getting the damn thing out. A kind of twisting motion, like shucking an oyster, your spine a wrist, and then, hup! it's in your mouth. You turn yourself partially inside out like a sea anemone coughing a pebble. There's a broken plop, the racket of fish guts into a pail, and there it is, a huge glistening deep-red clot of the still-alive past, whole on the plate. It gets passed around. It's slithery. It gets dropped, but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty. Too sour, says another making a face. Each on is an instant gourmet, and you stand listening to all this in the corner, like a newly hired waiter, your diffident, skillful hand on the wound hidden deep in your shirt and chest, shyly, heartless.

I grabbed a handful of tarragon and closed my eyes, inhaling its sweet fragrance. I could almost feel my grandmother next to me, smell the aromas embedded into her poppy-print apron, taste her creamy veloutés. Thanks to her, my skills in the kitchen started developing from the age of seven. I'd learned how to chop, slice, and dice without cutting my fingers, to sauté, fry, and grill, pairing flavors and taming them into submission. Just as I'd experienced with my grandmother's meals, when people ate my creations, I wanted them to think "now this is love"- while engaging all of the five senses. For me, cooking was the way I expressed myself, each dish a balance of flavors and ingredients representing my emotions- sweet, sour, salty, smoky, spicy-hot, and even bitter. My inspiration as a chef was to give people sensorial experiences, to bring them back to times of happiness, to let them relive their youth, or to awaken their minds.

Now, listen. What’s come before will come back around again. Republic was the way of the world before, and it’ll be the way again. And for a time everyone will cheer them on, and everything will be cozy-dosie, but there will come a time when things go sour and someone decides they got a better way of doing things. And the New Republic or the New-New Republic or the Republic We Got This Week will clamp down hard and then those people with the so-called better way will become the brave rebel alliance and the Republic will become the enemy and the wheel will turn once more.” He rubs his eyes. “I’m old enough to remember when the Republic shot itself right in the knee. It wasn’t taken over by the Empire. It became the Empire slowly, surely, not overnight but over years and decades. Fruit always tastes nice when it’s ripe. But it can’t stay like that. Every nice piece of fruit will rot on the branch if it hangs there long enough. You remember that.

he snuffed the remaining powder into his other nostril and threw the scrap of thin plastic to the floor. There was no sensation, nothing at all, the world was the same and Billy knew that he had been cheated. Two D’s shot, gone for nothing. He leaned out of the glassless, frameless window and tears mixed with the perspiration on his face. He cried and thought about that for a while and thought how glad he was it was dark and no one could see him crying, not him, eighteen years old. Under his fingers the rough metal of the window opening had the feel of miniature mountain peaks and valleys. Jagged, smooth, soft, hard. He leaned close and stroked with his fingertips and the pleasure of the touch sent shivers of love running the length of his spine. Why had he never noticed this before? Bending, he put out his tongue and the sweet-sour-iron-dirt taste was so wonderful, and when he let the sharp front edges of his teeth touch the metal it felt as though he had bitten off a piece of steel half as big as the bridge.

When they got to the table, it was easy to recognize some of the dishes just from their pictures in the book. Skillet Broken Lasagna, which smelled of garlic and bright tomato; Fluffy Popovers with Melted Brie and Blackberry Jam (she started eating that the minute she picked it up and could have cried at the sweet, creamy-cheesy contrast to the crisp browned dough). There were also the two versions of the coconut rice, of course, and Trista had placed them next to the platter of gorgeously browned crispy baked chicken with a glass bowl of hot honey, specked with red pepper flakes, next to it, and in front of the beautifully grilled shrimp with serrano brown sugar sauce. Every dish was worthy of an Instagram picture. Which made sense, since Trista had, as Aja had pointed out, done quite a lot of food porn postings. There was also Cool Ranch Taco Salad on the table, which Margo had been tempted to make but, as with the shrimp dish, given that she had been ready to bail on the idea of coming right up to the last second, had thought better of, lest she have taco salad for ten that needed to be eaten in two days. Not that she couldn't have finished all the Doritos that went on top that quickly. But there hadn't been a Dorito in her house since college, and she kind of thought it ought to be a cause for celebration when she finally brought them back over the threshold of Calvin's ex-house. The Deviled Eggs were there too, thank goodness, and tons of them. They were creamy and crunchy and savory, sweet and- thanks to an unexpected pocket of jalapeño- hot, all at the same time. Classic party food. Classic church potluck food too. Whoever made those knew that deviled eggs were almost as compulsively delicious as potato chips with French onion dip. And, arguably, more healthful. Depending on which poison you were okay with and which you were trying to avoid. There was a gorgeous galaxy-colored ceramic plate of balsamic-glazed brussels sprouts, with, from what Margo remembered of the recipe, crispy bacon crumbles, sour cranberries, walnuts, and blue cheese, which was- Margo tasted it with hope and was not disappointed- creamy Gorgonzola Dolce.

I doubt; Therefore, I think Therefore, I am. I see; I take in the colours around me. The patterns, the lights, the rainbows. I see the night and the stars that glow. I dream; Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. I smell; The perfumes, the roses. The stench, the rotten and the putrid. The aromas and delicacies; Cooking. I inhale; The green, the forest, the trees. Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. I hear; The noises. The people, the cheer. The wails, the screams, the tears. The rejoicing. The laughter, and happiness. I listen; Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. I taste; The sweetness, the fire. The treats, and savoury delights. The burnt, the spoilt and the tasteless. The sourness and the bitterness. I eat; Therefore, I think. Therefore, I am. I speak; Short messages. Long speeches. Quiet whispers. Bellowing noises. I scream; Therefore, I think, Therefore, I am. I feel; The despair. The anguish, the fear. The pricks, the cuts, the injuries. The joy. The pride. The seething. The envy, greed, and jealousy. The cold, the heat and the shivering. The pain, the sickness, the ageing. I die; Therefore, I lived. Therefore, I was.

Oh, I was but a wounded Beast Oh, I was but a wounded Beast Teeth gnashing from a brutal feast Wolfing down with others; consuming every bite Eating every poison laid before my sight I dined upon Iniquity’s endless shelf Blindly feeding, greedily…on myself Oh, I was but a wounded Beast Expiring with every taste of yeast Belly puffed and sour with death A haunting shutter with every breath Full of nothing but vanity Dipped in pleasure and tragedy Oh, I was but a wounded Beast As the West is far from the East I charted the lust of mine own eyes Thus, in my folly…I was sure to die My soul knew nothing of sacrifice Instead I danced with every vice Oh, I was but a wounded Beast You found me broken and utterly fleeced Naked, abandoned and truly alone You nurtured the wounds to which you sewn You gave me bread, You sang me a song And touched my wounds with a loving balm Oh, I was but a wounded Beast Yet, You taught me wisdom’s leash So I walk with you…dawn through night Quenched by your fount of love and light No darkness, no hate not a selfish bone Can feed this fiend that You’ve atoned Oh, I was, but a wounded Beast! ~Jason Neville Versey

You know the problem with this place?' I tug my arm back again, but he holds fast. 'Besides you touching things that don't belong to you?' My eyes narrow on him. 'I'm sure you're going to tell me.' My stomach flutters as his thumb brushes my pulse and he releases my wrist. I answer before I can think better of it. 'Hope.' 'Hope?' He tips his head closer to mine as if he wasn't sure he heard me right. 'Hope.' I nod. 'Someone like you would never get it, but I knew coming here was a death sentence. It didn't matter that I've been trained my entire life to enter the Scribe Quadrant; when General Sorrengail gives an order, you can't exactly ignore it.' Gods, why am I running off at the mouth to this man? What's the worst he'll do? Kill you? 'Sure you can.' He shrugs. 'You just might not like the consequences.' I roll my eyes and to my utter embarrassment, instead of pulling away now that I'm free, I lean in just a little, like I can siphon off some of his strength. He certainly has enough to spare. 'I knew what the odds were, and I came anyway, concentrating on that tiny percentage of chance that I would live. And then I make it almost two months and I get...' I shake my head, clenching my jaw. 'Hopeful.' The word tastes sour.

Jyo offered Isae a fried feathergrass stalk with a big smile, but Akos snatched it before she could take it. “You don’t want to eat that,” he said. “Unless you want to spend the next six hours hallucinating.” “Last time Jyo slipped someone one of those, they wandered around this house talking about giant dancing babies,” Jorek said. “Yeah, yeah,” Teka said. “Laugh all you want, but you would be scared too if you hallucinated giant babies.” “It was worth it, whether I will ever be forgiven or not,” Jyo said, winking. He had a soft, slippery way of talking. “Do they work on you?” Cisi asked Akos, nodding to the stalk in his hand. In answer, Akos bit into the stalk, which tasted like earth and salt and sour. “Your gift is odd,” Cisi said. “I’m sure Mom would have some kind of vague, wise thing to say about that.” “Ooh. What was he like as a child?” Jorek said, folding his hands and learning close to Akos’s sister. “Was he actually a child, or did he just sort of appear one day as a fully grown adult, full of angst?” Akos glared at him. “He was short and chubby,” Cisi said. “Irritable. Very particular about his socks.” “My socks?” Akos said. “Yeah!” she said. “Eijeh told me you always arranged them in order of preference from left to right. Your favorite ones were yellow.

Starting with the chocolate version, I swap out some of the cocoa powder with melted bittersweet chocolate and add some sour cream for balance and moistness, as well as some instant espresso powder, my secret ingredient for anything chocolate, which doesn't so much make something taste like coffee, but rather just makes chocolate taste more chocolaty. While the chocolate cupcakes are baking, I turn my attention to the vanilla recipe, adding some vanilla bean paste to amp up the vanilla flavor and show off those awesome little black-speck vanilla seeds, and mixing some buttermilk into the batter to prevent it from being overly sweet and unbalanced. The banana version uses very ripe bananas that I've been stashing in the freezer, as well as a single slice of fresh banana that has been coated in caramel and is pushed halfway into each cup of batter for a surprise in the middle of the cupcakes. Herman's frostings are close to the frostings of my youth, simple faux buttercreams made with softened butter and confectioners' sugar. Nothing fancy. In my newer versions, the chocolate gets melted chocolate and chocolate milk mixed in, the vanilla gets more vanilla bean paste and a tiny hit of lemon zest, and the peanut butter gets a blend of butter and cream cheese for some tang.

We ended the day and hobbled back inside, greeted by the scent of the stew Laadan had cooked up. I went upstairs to wash the day’s worth of grime off, and Aiden followed. Once inside the room, I tossed him a coy look over my shoulder. At least, I thought it was coy, but I probably looked like I had something in my eye. Aiden grinned nonetheless. “Are you following me?” I asked, kicking off my boots. He prowled forward, moving like one of those caged panthers we’d seen at the zoo. “I’m just being here for you, and I think you really need me right now.” “Ha. Ha.” Out of my shoes, Aiden towered over me, I felt like a hobbit standing in front of him. Aiden’s grin spread and a dimple in his left cheek appeared. He tucked a strand of my hair back, then his hands dropped and he tugged the shirt out of my cargos. “I think you called it ‘manning up’.” This wasn’t the kind of manning up I’d been talking about the night before, because even with my limited knowledge of such things, he excelled in that department. But I said nothing as I stared up at him. Lowering his head, his lips brushed over mine. I was sure I tasted of dirt and sour apple, courtesy of the Blow Pop I’d been nursing earlier, but he made this sound against my mouth, part growl and part something deeper. As the kiss deepened, like he could just devour the taste and feel, I melted against him. “I really like your idea of manning up,

crispy baked wontons Brianna Shade | BEAVERTON, OREGON These quick, versatile wontons are great for a crunchy afternoon snack or paired with a bowl of soothing soup on a cold day. I usually make a large batch, freeze half on a floured cookie sheet, then store them in an air-tight container for a fast bite. 1/2 pound ground pork 1/2 pound extra-lean ground turkey 1 small onion, chopped 1 can (8 ounces) sliced water chestnuts, drained and chopped 1/3 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce 1/4 cup egg substitute 1-1/2 teaspoons ground ginger 1 package (12 ounces) wonton wrappers Cooking spray Sweet-and-sour sauce, optional In a large skillet, cook the pork, turkey and onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink; drain. Transfer to a large bowl. Stir in the water chestnuts, soy sauce, egg substitute and ginger. Position a wonton wrapper with one point toward you. (Keep remaining wrappers covered with a damp paper towel until ready to use.) Place 2 heaping teaspoons of filling in the center of wrapper. Fold bottom corner over filling; fold sides toward center over filling. Roll toward the remaining point. Moisten top corner with water; press to seal. Repeat with remaining wrappers and filling. Place on baking sheets coated with cooking spray; lightly coat wontons with additional cooking spray. Bake at 400° for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown, turning once. Serve warm with sweet-and-sour sauce if desired.

In the section with edible flowers I stopped short, a bright yellow-and-purple pansy in my hands, hearing my mother's voice from long ago. Pansies are the showgirls of the flower world, but they taste a little grassy, she'd confided to me once as we pulled the weeds in her herb and flower garden. I put a dozen pansies in my cart and moved on to carnations. Carnations are the candy of the flower world, but only the petals. The white base is bitter, she'd instructed, handing me one to try. In my young mind carnations had been in the same category as jelly beans and gumdrops. Treats to enjoy. "Impatiens." I browsed the aisles of Swansons, reading signs aloud. "Marigolds." Marigolds taste a little like citrus, and you can substitute them for saffron. My mother's face swam before my eyes, imparting her kitchen wisdom to little Lolly. It's a poor woman's saffron. Also insects hate them; they're a natural bug deterrent. I placed a dozen yellow-and-orange marigolds into my cart along with a couple different varieties of lavender and some particularly gorgeous begonias I couldn't resist. I had a sudden flash of memory: my mother's hand in her floral gardening glove plucking a tuberous begonia blossom and popping it in her mouth before offering me one. I was four or five years old. It tasted crunchy and sour, a little like a lemon Sour Patch Kid. I liked the flavor and sneaked a begonia flower every time I was in the garden for the rest of the summer.

You've had hot coffee before, and in the hands of a skilled maker, coffee can be amazing. But the fact is that coffee is one of the hardest things to get right in the world. Even with great beans and a great roast and great equipment, a little too much heat, the wrong grind, or letting things go on too long will produce a cup of bitterness. Coffee's full of different acids, and depending on the grind, temperature, roast, and method, you can "overextract" the acids from the beans, or overheat them and oxidize them, producing that awful taste you get at donut shops and Starbucks. But there is Another Way. If you make coffee in cold water, you only extract the sweetest acids, the highly volatile flavors that hint at chocolate and caramel, the ones that boil away or turn to sourness under imperfect circumstances. Brewing coffee in cold water sounds weird, but in fact, it's just about the easiest way to make a cup (or a jar) of coffee. Just grind coffee -- keep it coarse, with grains about the size of sea salt -- and combine it with twice as much water in an airtight jar. Give it a hard shake and stick it somewhere cool overnight (I used a cooler bag loaded with ice from ice camp and wrapped the whole thing in bubble wrap for insulation). In the morning, strain it through a colander and a paper coffee filter. What you've got now is coffee concentrate, which you can dilute with cold water to taste -- I go about half and half. If you're feeling fancy, serve it over ice.

This Compost" Something startles me where I thought I was safest, I withdraw from the still woods I loved, I will not go now on the pastures to walk, I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea, I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me. O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive you growths of spring? How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you? Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd, I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath, I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. 2 Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs, The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards, The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean forever and forever, That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

It’s not that I want us to understand one another, be friends, talk, or be together. I don’t need them to understand me. I know they won’t, and I don’t wish them to. What I’m looking for is something harsher and more severe. I want to know. I want to understand. I want to know so I can feel relief. I want peace of mind, because ignorance is absolutely terrifying. Complete understanding is such a self-righteous, selfish, and arrogant thing to wish for. It’s despicable and repulsive, really. I’m beyond disgusted with myself for wanting it. But if—if we could feel the same way… If we could impose that ugly self-satisfaction on one another, if there’s some sort of relationship that could permit that arrogance… I know something like that is absolutely impossible. I bet I’ll never attain something like that. I’m sure the grapes out of my reach are sour. But I don’t need fruit sweet like lies. I don’t need false understanding or phony relationships. What I want is those sour grapes. Even if it’s sour, even if it’s bitter, even if it tastes bad, even if it’s pure poison, even if it doesn’t exist, even if I can’t acquire it, even if what I want cannot be allowed… “Still…” The word came out of me unbidden, and even I could hear it trembling. “Still, I…” I fought down the sob that nearly escaped and tried to swallow the sound along with the rest of the sentence, but they both came out in fragments. My teeth rattled, and my throat was tight as the words left my mouth anyway. “I want…something real.

…It usually starts innocently enough, a friend remarking to you that the co-op has a nice new crop of grapefruit. “Hmm, I don’t really care for grapefruit myself,” you say, entirely without malice. She seems startled, “Really?” she says. If you had a tendency to be sarcastic, you might say, “No, I deliberately misrepresent my taste in citrus to gain the upper hand in conversation.” But you are not sarcastic, so you restate your dislike, a little more timidly now. “Yeah, I just don’t care for grapefruit. It tastes bitter to me.” “Bitter! How can you think grapefruit tastes bitter?” she demands. “I find that difficult to answer — ” you say. “Grapefruit is the single least bitter thing in the world! Sugar is more bitter than grapefruit!” she continues. “Sugar is deliberately bitter,” you say, trying to calm her. “Sugar is pure white hate.” “You want bitter? Radicchio is bitter. Dandelion greens — they’re bitter!” “I hate them. They’re mean,” you say as the situation death-rolls out of control. “I’m going to get you some of that grapefruit right now and show you that it’s not bitter,” she says, marching to the refrigerator. You have apparently run afoul of a committed grapefruit apologist. Soon you are eating extremely bitter chunks of fruit you loathe. “Tell me, is that bitter? Is it?” she asks, leaving you no wiggle room. “Unbelievably not-bitter. Sweet, sure. Sour, you bet. Salty, powerfully so — but bitter? No and again, no. All bitterness has vanished from existence. Even the concept of bitterness has been conquered and bows down before this grapefruit,” you say, nearly gagging from the bitterness.

She remembered those fancy receipt books written by Lady Nonesuch, or Countess Thingumabob, and laughed out loud. They boasted how damnable high bred the lady was, and how the reader might herself be reckoned à la mode, if she could only cook such stuff herself. No, her book would hold a dark mirror to such conceits. Since Mother Eve's day, women had whispered of herblore and crafty potions, the wise woman's weapons against the injustices of life; a life of ill treatment, the life of a dog. If women were to be kicked into the kitchen they might play it to their advantage, for what was a kitchen but a witch's brewhouse? Men had no notion of what women whispered to each other, hugger-mugger by the chimney corner; of treaclish syrups and bitter pods, of fat black berries and bulbous roots. Such remedies were rarely scribbled on paper; they were carried in noses, fingertips and stealthy tongues. Methods were shared in secret, of how to make a body hot with lust or shiver with fever, or to doze for a stretch or to sleep for eternity. Like a chorus the hungry ghosts started up around her: voices that croaked and cackled and damned their captors headlong into hell. Her ghosts were the women who had sailed out beside her to Botany Bay, nearly five years back on the convict ship Experiment. She made a start with that most innocent of dishes: Brinny's best receipt for Apple Pie. For there was magic in even that- the taking of uneatables: sour apples, claggy fat, dusty flour- and their abradabrification into a crisp-lidded, syrupy miracle. Mother Eve's Secrets, she titled her book, a collection of best receipts and treacherous remedies.

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.

CAKE whole black peppercorns whole cloves whole cardamom 1 cinnamon stick 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon salt 3 large eggs 1 large egg yolk 1 cup sour cream 1½ sticks (6 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature 1 cup sugar 2 large pieces fresh ginger root (¼ cup, tightly packed, when finely grated) zest from 2 to 3 oranges (1½ teaspoons finely grated) Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter and flour a 6-cup Bundt pan. Grind your peppercorns, cloves, and cardamom and measure out ¼ teaspoon of each. (You can use pre-ground spices, but the cake won’t taste as good.) Grind your cinnamon stick and measure out 1 teaspoon. (Again, you can use ground cinnamon if you must.) Whisk the flour with the baking powder, baking soda, spices, and salt in a small bowl. In another small bowl, whisk the eggs and egg yolk into the sour cream. Set aside. Cream the butter and sugar in a stand mixer until the mixture is light, fluffy, and almost white. This should take about 3 minutes. Grate the ginger root—this is a lot of ginger—and the orange zest. Add them to the butter/sugar mixture. Beat the flour mixture and the egg mixture, alternating between the two, into the butter until each addition is incorporated. The batter should be as luxurious as mousse. Spoon batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 40 minutes, until cake is golden and a wooden skewer comes out clean. Remove to a rack and cool in the pan for 10 minutes. SOAK ½ cup bourbon 1½ tablespoons sugar While the cake cools in its pan, simmer the bourbon and the sugar in a small pot for about 4 minutes. It should reduce to about ⅓ cup. While the cake is still in the pan, brush half the bourbon mixture onto its exposed surface (the bottom of the cake) with a pastry brush. Let the syrup soak in for a few minutes, then turn the cake out onto a rack. Gently brush the remaining mixture all over the cake.

We see three men standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has dipped his finger into the vinegar and has tasted it. The expression on each man's face shows his individual reaction. Since the painting is allegorical, we are to understand that these are no ordinary vinegar tasters, but are instead representatives of the "Three Teachings" of China, and that the vinegar they are sampling represents the Essence of Life. The three masters are K'ung Fu-tse (Confucius), Buddha, and Lao-tse, author of the oldest existing book of Taoism. The first has a sour look on his face, the second wears a bitter expression, but the third man is smiling. To Kung Fu-tse (kung FOOdsuh), life seemed rather sour. He believed that the present was out step with the past, and that the government of man on earth was out of harmony with the Way of Heaven, the government of, the universe. Therefore, he emphasized reverence for the Ancestors, as well as for the ancient rituals and ceremonies in which the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, acted as intermediary between limitless heaven and limited earth. Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time. A saying was recorded about K'ung Fu-tse: "If the mat was not straight, the Master would not sit." This ought to give an indication of the extent to which things were carried out under Confucianism. To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. The world was seen as a setter of traps, a generator of illusions, a revolving wheel of pain for all creatures. In order to find peace, the Buddhist considered it necessary to transcend "the world of dust" and reach Nirvana, literally a state of "no wind." Although the essentially optimistic attitude of the Chinese altered Buddhism considerably after it was brought in from its native India, the devout Buddhist often saw the way to Nirvana interrupted all the same by the bitter wind of everyday existence. To Lao-tse (LAOdsuh), the harmony that naturally existed between heaven and earth from the very beginning could be found by anyone at any time, but not by following the rules of the Confucianists. As he stated in his Tao To Ching (DAO DEH JEENG), the "Tao Virtue Book," earth was in essence a reflection of heaven, run by the same laws - not by the laws of men. These laws affected not only the spinning of distant planets, but the activities of the birds in the forest and the fish in the sea. According to Lao-tse, the more man interfered with the natural balance produced and governed by the universal laws, the further away the harmony retreated into the distance. The more forcing, the more trouble. Whether heavy or fight, wet or dry, fast or slow, everything had its own nature already within it, which could not be violated without causing difficulties. When abstract and arbitrary rules were imposed from the outside, struggle was inevitable. Only then did life become sour. To Lao-tse, the world was not a setter of traps but a teacher of valuable lessons. Its lessons needed to be learned, just as its laws needed to be followed; then all would go well. Rather than turn away from "the world of dust," Lao-tse advised others to "join the dust of the world." What he saw operating behind everything in heaven and earth he called Tao (DAO), "the Way." A basic principle of Lao-tse's teaching was that this Way of the Universe could not be adequately described in words, and that it would be insulting both to its unlimited power and to the intelligent human mind to attempt to do so. Still, its nature could be understood, and those who cared the most about it, and the life from which it was inseparable, understood it best.

Sam dragged her over to a small plot. Unlike the historic ones, this seemed like an ordinary grave. The headstone read Paul Danvers 1950-1997. “And this guy,” Sam said through clenched teeth. “Got so drunk one night, he accidentally set his house on fire, killing himself and his seventeen-year-old son.” Margot pulled back. This date had turned as sour as the feeling in her gut. “Murdered his own son.” Sam’s voice was tight and full of emotion. “He was going to college in the fall. Got a full ride and everything.” “That’s awful,” said Margot. “Where’s the son buried?” “So glad you asked.” Sam smiled so mournfully that Margot regretted asking at all. He pointed to the headstone next to Paul’s. In the darkness, it was nearly impossible to make out the young man’s name. Margot knelt on the soft grass and leaned forward, using the light from her cellphone to see the engraving. She gasped and nearly dropped the phone. “Sam Danvers,” she said, barely getting out the words. “That’s not funny.” Margot’s hands shook. “Is your name really Sam?” He no longer smiled, just nodded. “It is.” Sam came in close and said her name in such a soft whisper, Margot ached to touch him. He reached up to her face and tucked a strand of wavy hair behind her ear. “If things were different at all…” She put her hands on his. His skin felt dry and cold while hers felt clammy. “What does that mean? If what was different?” Sam leaned in, his face encased in shadows, and kissed Margot. She gasped before being taken in by the kiss. His breath tasted oddly of licorice and she was suddenly aware of the scent of fresh-cut grass. His lips were soft, but his kiss was urgent. He gripped the belt loops of Margot’s jean shorts and pulled her in tight against his chest. Her head swam and her heart pounded. She pulled away from him and attempted to catch her breath. She looked at him, her eyes bright with fury. “That wasn’t an answer.” He ran his hands through his hair. A typical guy stall tactic, thought Margot. But Sam wasn’t stalling. He was struggling. “Margot, I’m Sam Danvers,” he said. Margot shook her head — “No. No. No.” — and marched away from him.

The crispy crunch of the savory parmesan wings. The thick and smooth Ankake sauce. And under those lies the tender and springy chicken meat that floods the mouth with its umami-laden juices with each bite! Even the delicate aftertaste unique to the Satsuma Jidori has been vividly enhanced! You would think by adding powerfully flavored ingredients like cheese and pork jowl that the overall taste would become heavy and cloying, but that isn't the case at all! The answer to that is in the Ankake sauce. I seasoned that Jidori stock with one special secret ingredient. "Yukihira, quit stalling! What the heck is that ingredient? Tell me! Now!" "It's ketchup. I used good ol' tomato ketchup to make that Ankake sauce... ... into a special house-blend sweet n' sour sauce!" "Ketchup?!" Sweet n' sour sauce is used in a lot of dishes, from obvious ones like sweet n' sour pork, to regional varieties ofTenshinhan crab omelet over rice, and even seafood dishes like deep-fried cod! It's especially handy for Chinese cooking, which commonly makes use of a variety of oils. It's perfect for alleviating the thick oiliness of some dishes, giving them a fresh and tangy flavor. So by adding the tart acidity of tomato-based ketchup to make my Ankake sauce... ... it wipes out the cloying greasiness of both the Parmesan cheese and the pork jowl, leaving only their rich flavors behind. Not only that, it also brings out the Satsuma Jidori's renowned delicate aftertaste!" "The base broth of the sauce is from a stock I made from the Jidori's carcass, so of course it will pair well with the wing meat. And to top it all off, Parmesan cheese and tomatoes are a great match for each other!" "Oh... oh, now I see! That's how you managed to keep from smothering the Jidori's unique flavor! Tomatoes are one big lump of the umami component glutamic acid! Add the inosinic acid from the Jidori and the Guanylic acid from the shiitake mushrooms, and you have three umami compounds all magnifying each other! The techniques for emphasizing the unique and delicious flavors of a Jidori... the three-way umami-component magnification effect... the synergy between ketchup and cheese... the texture contrast between the crispy cheese wings and the smooth Ankake sauce... all of those rest squarely on the foundation of the tomato's tart acidity!

Now imagine that an anthropologist specializing in primitive cultures beams herself down to the natives in Silicon Valley, whose way of life has not advanced a kilobyte beyond the Google age and whose tools have remained just as primitive as they were in the twenty-first century. She brings along with her a tray of taste samples called the Munsell Taste System. On it are representative samples of the whole taste space, 1,024 little fruit cubes that automatically reconstitute themselves on the tray the moment one picks them up. She asks the natives to try each of these and tell her the name of the taste in their language, and she is astonished at the abject poverty of their fructiferous vocabulary. She cannot comprehend why they are struggling to describe the taste samples, why their only abstract taste concepts are limited to the crudest oppositions such as “sweet” and “sour,” and why the only other descriptions they manage to come up with are “it’s a bit like an X,” where X is the name of a certain legacy fruit. She begins to suspect that their taste buds have not yet fully evolved. But when she tests the natives, she establishes that they are fully capable of telling the difference between any two cubes in her sample. There is obviously nothing wrong with their tongue, but why then is their langue so defective? Let’s try to help her. Suppose you are one of those natives and she has just given you a cube that tastes like nothing you’ve ever tried before. Still, it vaguely reminds you of something. For a while you struggle to remember, then it dawns on you that this taste is slightly similar to those wild strawberries you had in a Parisian restaurant once, only this taste seems ten times more pronounced and is blended with a few other things that you can’t identify. So finally you say, very hesitantly, that “it’s a bit like wild strawberries.” Since you look like a particularly intelligent and articulate native, the anthropologist cannot resist posing a meta-question: doesn’t it feel odd and limiting, she asks, not to have precise vocabulary to describe tastes in the region of wild strawberries? You tell her that the only things “in the region of wild strawberry” that you’ve ever tasted before were wild strawberries, and that it has never crossed your mind that the taste of wild strawberries should need any more general or abstract description than “the taste of wild strawberries.” She smiles with baffled incomprehension.

Drat. Daisy pulled back with a frown. She felt guilty that she had enjoyed the kiss so little. And it made her feel even worse when it appeared Llandrindon had enjoyed it quite a lot. “My dear Miss Bowman,” Llandrindon murmured flirtatiously. “You didn’t tell me you tasted so sweet.” He reached for her again, and Daisy danced backward with a little yelp. “My lord, control yourself!” “I cannot.” He pursued her slowly around the fountain until they resembled a pair of circling cats. Suddenly he made a dash for her, catching at the sleeve of her gown. Daisy pushed hard at him and twisted away, feeling the soft white muslin rip an inch or two at the shoulder seam. There was a loud splash and a splatter of water drops. Daisy stood blinking at the empty spot where Llandrindon had been, and then covered her eyes with her hands as if that would somehow make the entire situation go away. “My lord?” she asked gingerly. “Did you… did you just fall into the fountain?” “No,” came his sour reply. “You pushed me into the fountain.” “It was entirely unintentional, I assure you.” Daisy forced herself to look at him. Llandrindon rose to his feet, water streaming from his hair and clothes, his coat pockets filled to the brim. It appeared the dip in the fountain had cooled his passions considerably. He glowered at her in affronted silence. Suddenly his eyes widened, and he reached into one of his water-laden coat pockets. A tiny frog leaped from the pocket and returned to the fountain with a quiet plunk. Daisy tried to choke back her amusement, but the harder she tried the worse it became, until she finally burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, clapping her hands over her mouth, while irrepressible giggles slipped out. “I’m so— oh dear—” And she bent over laughing until tears came to her eyes. The tension between them disappeared as Llandrin don began to smile reluctantly. He stepped from the fountain, dripping from every surface. “I believe when you kiss the toad,” he said dryly, “he is supposed to turn into a prince. Unfortunately in my case it doesn’t seem to have worked.” Daisy felt a rush of sympathy and kindness, even as she snorted with a few last giggles. Approaching him carefully, she placed her small hands on either side of his wet face and pressed a friendly, fleeting kiss on his lips. His eyes widened at the gesture. “You are someone’s handsome prince,” Daisy said, smiling at him apologetically. “Just not mine. But when the right woman finds you… how lucky she’ll be.

Game of Thrones - Feast for Crows. “Ser? My lady?" said Podrick. "Is a broken man an outlaw?" "More or less," Brienne answered. Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. "Then they get a taste of battle. "For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe. "They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. "If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world . . . "And the man breaks. "He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them . . . but he should pity them as well.