Gushing over gumbo and celebrating celery: two literary quotes.

[full_metal_ox]

I encountered these quotes in Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons (Little, Brown and Company, 1996), by Nava Atlas; the problem is that I haven’t the book ready to hand, and it’s no longer in any of my local library systems.

The first quote came from a nineteenth-century (French? British? I want to say De Tocqueville or Brillat-Savarin) author who’d visited the U.S. and found an epiphany in gumbo: they proceeded to eulogize it as the perfect food, combining vibrant flavors and being soup and vegetable and entree in one.

The second was by a Victorian or Edwardian British author, extolling celery, in its cold clear no-nonsense crispness, as the gustatory expression of autumn. (These quotes embellished recipes for a gumbo and a celery soup, respectively; Atlas’ cookbook had something of a literary and reflective tone.)

ETA: wolfinthewood has identified the celery quote, from the essay “A Word for Autumn” in Not that it matters (1919) by A.A. Milne; kineticatrue has tracked the gumbo quote to Will H. Coleman’s Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans and Environs (1885), p 91.

Comments

[calzephyr]

That's awesome that you were able to find answers!

[full_metal_ox]

Yeah; I’ve vastly enjoyed being a book querent and book detective on this comm and its Livejournal predecessor (which has, unfortunately, been deleted; I can’t have been the only one using it as an off-script book rec and reference source, and I wish they’d at least left the old posts intact as originally planned.)

[calzephyr]

It's such a shame that whatwasthatbook was deleted as you never know what tiny clue Google will zero in on :\

[kattslavenkoko.wordpress.com]

It was moved over to Dreamwidth entirely, so still possible to find the posts :-) It's very quiet, though: https://whatwasthatbook.dreamwidth.org/

[full_metal_ox]

Unfortunately, it’s not a matter of the Livejournal content having been ported into Dreamwidth; the Dreamwidth version of whatwasthatbook was created back in 2009 as a backup Just In Case; the first query dates from 2011, and the second and third from right after Perevorot ‘17 (the latter two were mine, in part as an attempt to jump-start the comm.) In short: the Dreamwidth comm contains only its own handful of posts and comments, and over a decade of LJ correspondence is gone.

[kattslavenkoko.wordpress.com]

Oh, I see. Well, that's a pity then.