Sweetly and subtly perfumed...so soft it is best eaten with a spoon, a tenderness more appealing to gourmets than to those who have to pick, ship, handle and store it in constant fear of ruinous spoilage.
Waverley RootThe hard-drinking newspaperman is, or used to be, a stock character of fiction. Now he is being phased out of literature just as he is being phased out of life.
Waverley RootIn medieval times the habit arose of expressing a man's wealth, no longer in terms of the amount of land in his estate, but of the amount of pepper in his pantry. One way of saying that a man was poor was to say that he lacked pepper. The wealthy lacked pepper. The wealthy kept large stores of pepper in their houses, and let it be known that it was there: it was a guarantee of solvency.
Waverley RootNature was indeed at her artistic best when she created the nutmeg, a delight to the eye in all its avatars, from the completely garbed to nudity.
Waverley RootThe oat is the Horatio Alger of cereals, which progressed, if not from rags to riches, at least from weed to health food.
Waverley RootThe turnip is a capricious vegetable, which seems reluctant to show itself at its best.
Waverley RootEvery country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want. I used to think that the notoriously bad cooking of the English was an example to the contrary, and that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it.
Waverley Root