Butterfly Effect
Men were like butterflies to Margaret Fountaine: They were apt to flit away without warning or leave-taking....
All I needed was a sandwich to make me believe in miracles …
“You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country?..."
Reindeer Game
In the harsh arctic region Laplanders inhabit, joy, like summer, is fleeting.
Night Moves
There was a time when late-night wakefulness wasn't something to be dreaded but welcomed. Centuries ago, sleepers woke with pleasure, even eagerness. Between "first" and "second" sleep, so called, men, women and children stirred to enjoy activities domestic and romantic, spiritual and intellectual.
As if she lived a mad, gay life …
“What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York...."
Boor and Peace: The Russian Occupation of Paris and the Birth of the Bistro
The cosmopolitan leisure that the Parisian café has come to symbolize belies its humbler origin. The story of its emergence is written in blood and fire, namely, that which was spilled and ignited during the Napoleonic Wars.
Seeing these men live it up makes my mouth water….
"People have even made eating into something else: necessity on the one hand, excess on the other...."
Some Assembly Required: Parlor Games and Their Uses
If all that's solid melted into air under conditions of capitalism, parlor games and similar practices acted as so many bladders to capture this sublimated social stuff that was formerly so reliably substantial.
The luncheon was not altogether a success….
"She ate noisily, greedily, a little like a wild beast in a menagerie...."
Plié … Relevé … Heel!
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely critters--at least as far as Mrs. Midnight's Animal Comedians were concerned.
Starting out in the Evening
A newly revised Starting Out is in order. But what would such a thing look like? Under my editorship it would be present- rather than future-oriented, and it would exult an ethic of making do. Entire chapters would be devoted to advice on living, if not stylishly, then passably while servicing debt. It would be
Reader’s Digest
A Review of Balzac’s Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac So strange and hectic a phantasmagoria were the…
The Art of Cuisine: Fragrant Vapors of Goulash
In her absence, her father, a meager pensioner with a passion for heraldry, blazonry, archivology, and sigillography, absconds with his wife for the King of Hungary, a local restaurant, to determine whether what their daughter, a champion of simple, economical home-cooked meals, says of eating places was in fact true: that they serve nothing but
The Art of Cuisine: “Such Lawless Cake”
Photo: The Moonshiner’s Daughter, N. Brock, 1900 “I was usually left with her while both families went to church on Sabbath mornings and well remember being…
The Art of Cuisine: Mediterranean
A review of A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David New York Review Books Classics, 203 pp., $14.95 In 1939 Elizabeth David, a lord’s…
The Art of Cuisine (8): Cakes and Tarts
When the delight of frolicking with his pets wears thin, the count feasts on large fruit tarts, which he inundates with jugs of cream.