Gastronomy – Of Glass & Paper

#DailyPrompt: Pick your Potion #Armagnac

It is like diving into Rabelais’ s writing, following the Gargantua, or perhaps meditating on Monsieur Montaigne.

What is there to say, about Armagnac?

The grapes, the sand, les jeunes filles en fleur, during the harvest…

Yes, it’s Monsieur Proust in a bottle!

Image: Ernest Hébert (1817-1908), Ophélie – 1876

#FiveSentenceFiction: Feast

In their millions they invade the huge organism, and they die in their millions, slain by the fierce defenders.

Yet their legions keep their assault, step by step gaining territory despite the enemy’s resistance, blind to their losses.

So small in proportion they are, a fraction of a millionth of the size of their target: invisible to the living.

Waves after waves they are pushed back, but already they feast on the corpses of the vanquished.

As I succumb to them I wonder if they are our ancestors: the most deadly fiend of all living creatures.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121122152928.htm

There soon! Can’t wait!

#FiveSentenceFiction: Composure

Sitting at the small table, in this corner of the enchanted city, you are the quintessential woman, from a country where smoking a Gauloise is, for a pretty woman – but you all are – never a sign of ostentation.

I love the little scarf, and the beret, matching the red schoolgirl shoes, the striped sailor’s cotton shirt, and all that cheese on the table: I smile at you but you are far away.

Were you to notice me I would be the one to lose it: the irrepressible urge to be part of your picture, but, alas, as you can see, I am escaping, crawling on the white table cloth, pretending not to be there…

Under my little shell, I blink at the red wine, promise of slow cooking, and of garlic, yes, that powerful and pungent aphrodisiac.

But, as a self-contained, if not sex-less, mollusc, I shall keep my composure, and, soiling the white cloth, keep dreaming of you.

#Geometries: Essen, or gastronomy as an erotic art

One of our early shared erotic experiences was that of cooking together: the kitchen as a wonderful space for titillating the buds and other parts of our complex mammal’s nervous systems. In truth, we enjoyed cooking together before we determined the geometry of our other encounters. I have described our enjoyment of a simple Indian dish earlier. The diversity of choices, what precedes, what follows, what to drink in-between, and when to meet more intimately, is of course boundless.

As a Franco-German household, with spatters of English, Spanish, Italian, Welsh, Irish, and now Japanese, influences, the world is our oyster… We perfection the art, test new ideas with friends (up to a point), and first of all ourselves: what works, what makes us high, what sends us dreaming. As we travel we gather new recipes, try and compare, this giving us new opportunities to mix pleasures, sometimes with delightful results. There are also failures: things that don’t work, occasionally with comical results – and guess who’s mostly to blame for those?

So what is our ranking? Well, we place Italian cooking on top, particularly the mix of Milanese, Piedmont, Venetian and Tyrollean traditions that prevails in Northern Italy. But this is not exclusive, no more than the geometries of Lieben which may be the subject of my next post…