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Italian digital library

Liber Liber, a rich Italian digital library

Nesquik, preferably strawberry: Monday's food quotation

[Tracey Emin] memorably records that her mother worked at a club in Ramsgate called Gay Nights, and that at one time her diet consisted only of fish fingers and Nesquik ('preferably strawberry').

2005 Henry Hitchings, review of Tracey Emin's Strangeland in the Times Literary Supplement (23 December 2005) p. 9

Tropical fruit in 18th century England: Sunday's food quotation

December 10: Mr Taylor brought me a pine-apple, which was, for the season, large, & well-flavoured ... Eat a very delicate Cantaleupe: it had a bottle-nose, & grew close to the stem. Sav'd ye seed.

1792 Gilbert White, Diary (Gilbert White's year, 1982).

Especially prized were English pineapples, grown with absurd labours in a hothouse 'pinery', an accessory to a country estate which, says [Fran] Beauman, 'every self-respecting aristocrat' aspired to possess.

2005 Bee Wilson, Review of Fran Beauman, The Pineapple in the Times Literary Supplement (2 December 2005) p. 36.

The guga harvest: Saturday's food quotation

The occupants of Lewis rowed over to Sula Sgeir (sula is a Hebridean name for gannet and is also the generic name for many of the gannet's relatives) each autumn to take the fat young gugas, a right that they still maintain today, although the traditional guga harvests at other colonies have ceased.

2005 Christopher Perrins, review of Birds Britannica in the Times Literary Supplement (9 December 2005) p. 27.

In Europe, order from alapage.com

How did Southeast Asian food plants reach West Africa?

The theory that mariners from insular south east Asia rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached tropical west Africa by sea in early medieval times was argued by the ethnomusicologist A. M. Jones in the 1960s. It is now championed in Robert Dick-Read's new book The phantom voyagers: evidence of Indonesian settlement (Winchester: Thurlton, 2005) ...

As Roland Oliver points out in his review in the Times literary supplement (9 December 2005) the theory can explain how 'the coconut, the banana plantain, the taro and other Asian yams considered by botanists to have originated in South-East Asia' reached west Africa. It could also explain a fact that puzzled European mariners when they reached Benin in the early 16th century, as I mentioned in Dangerous Tastes -- the fact that they found pepper on sale there. The pepper is, however, now said to be a different species from any of those of southern Asia. As for the other food plants, it seems at least equally likely that these were brought to the east African coast by 'Indonesian' mariners (there can be no doubt that they crossed the Indian Ocean, since they settled Madagascar). If so, the plants might have gradually spread westwards from there in cultivation.

Market in colonial Malaya: Friday's food quotation

There was loud leisurely chaffering in the market over rambutans, aubergines, red and green peppers, Chinese oranges, white cabbages, dried fish-strips and red-raw buffalo-meat. The smells rose into the high blue coastal air.

1958 Anthony Burgess, The Enemy in the Blanket chapter 2

In Europe, order from alapage.com

Beer: an article from Food in the Ancient World from A to Z

Click here for the article on Beer in the ancient world and here for more about Food in the Ancient World from A to Z