still illustrating tweets on occasion. this one’s by scribblymouse
something is eating away at me
with splendid teeth
Gwendolyn MacEwen, from “Memoirs of a Mad Cook,” The Armies of the Moon (Macmillan, 1972)
When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn’t that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows.
But it also devours.
Carver, Raymond. Late Fragment. (via coldspaces)
Her evil schemes found expression in cooking. She was a really excellent cook, for she had the primary gifts in the culinary art: diligence and imagination; but when she put her hand to it, no one ever knew what surprise might appear at the table. Once she made some paté toast, really exquisite, of rats’ livers; this she never told us until we had eaten them and pronounced them good; and some grasshoppers’ claws, crisp and sectioned, laid on an open tart in a mosaic; and pigs’ tails baked as if they were little cakes; and once she cooked a complete porcupine with all its quills — who knows why, probably just to give us all a shock at the raising of the dish cover, for even she, who usually ate everything, however odd, that she had prepared herself, refused to taste it, though it was a baby porcupine, rosy and certainly tender.
In fact, most of these horrible dishes of hers were thought out just for effect, rather than for any pleasure in making us eat disgusting food with her. These dishes of Battista’s were works of the most delicate animal or vegetable jewellery; cauliflower heads with hares’ ears set on a collar of fur; or a pig’s head from whose mouth stuck a scarlet lobster as if putting out its tongue, and the lobster was holding the pig’s tongue in its pincers as if they had torn it out. And finally the snails; she had managed to behead I don’t know how many snails, and the heads, those soft little equine heads, she had inserted, I think with a toothpick, each in a wire-mesh; they looked, as they came on the table, like a flight of tiny swans.
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it’s much the same.
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood (via lipstickmata)
here is a conversation i had with my father:
me: dad try the leftovers in the fridge they’re so good it’s stuffed heart
dad: AHHHHHH WHAT
dad: BRIDGETTE I ALMOST ATE THAT
me: good eat it it’s really good
dad: THAT IS ONE STEP BELOW CANNIBALISM
me: IT IS NOT THERE ARE NOT STEPS IT IS BINARY
me: AND THAT IS A PIG’S HEART AND YOU ARE LITERALLY EATING SAUSAGE KOLACHE
dad: the heart is what the pig used in order to love
dad: and there are steps
dad: it is not binary
me: how many steps
dad: seven
me: whatever more food for me
and then this morning him and the girls handed me this:
he is a 50 year old attorney this is how he spent his morning was making this
note he put himself in the first safe zone
In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims (via aryarstark)
From the journal of René Redzepi, Danish foraging chef
He did a small dish of cooked, juicy vegetable stalks and salted mackerel, with a light, sweet, intense emerald broth made by juicing the first tender peas of the season. It was almost like being bitch-slapped by summer.
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I went foraging, sinking into the forest, tasting things, hoping to clear my thoughts and take that deep, relaxing breath that allows me to shrug off the bustle of the kitchen. I took a second and rested on my haunches, absentmindedly picking things up around me. A snail slowly wandered through the moss. I followed as it inched along, unaware that it was selecting its own garnish.
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One thing is certain: I just bought five extra dehydrators on the Internet.
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His eyes were tender, as if he was clutching a bunch of puppies. ‘What do you think — aren’t they beautiful? I fucking love them.’ I couldn’t help tugging at one of the roots. ‘Me too, this celeriac is beautiful. What do you want to do with it?’ I asked, as if talking to a new father.
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‘Blood for next week,’ I said, as we wrapped up for the night. ‘Ha ha, very funny,’ Sam retorted, a bit miffed thinking I was laughing at their fatigue. ‘I’m not joking, chef. And casings, and skins of carrots, pigs, chickens — think about it.’ What have we ever done with blood besides make sausages? ‘Chef,’ Lars said, looking serious, ‘it’s the same as it was with the brains — maybe some things just aren’t meant to be fucked with.’ The last thing I did before we went home was order more brains.
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Selected excerpts from A Work In Progress
