Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible
Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around
An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.” Ashbery, “Mixed Feelings,” cf Auden
Poetry & Pictures: Down and Out in Paris and London
“You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A sniveling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food.”
Turkey with necklace of sausages and gaping interior
When no untoward circumstance prevents, however, turkey is the traditional Christmas dish. Some people like him roasted, and some people like him boiled, some demand that he shall have a necklace of sausages, and some that he shall be stuffed with oysters, while others yet prefer chestnuts. Whatever the stuffing may be made of, let it be savory with pot-herbs for then when it is thrust into the turkey’s gaping interior, and he is thrust into the oven, that luscious odor arises which brings the cat out from under the stove to snuff and mew, and which, in little houses, penetrates into the room where the family are gathered, and makes them sniff and smile and tell old jokes.
A roast of beef is a necessary presence at an English Christmas dinner, but Americans, I think, are well content with a ham, or in some localities, a chicken pie; a luscious deep chicken pie, with thick gravy bubbling up through the little bias openings in the crust, and, on top, bits of pastry cut out and pinched into the shape of holly leaves. Oysters also make a delicious filling for such a pie. In that case it becomes a “toad in the hole,” for a cup has to be put in to hold up the crust.
The ham should wear a frilled paper collar like the ham Alice saw in the Looking-Glass Country. He should also be decorated with spots of pepper and cloves stuck into the fat in a pattern. His paper ruff gives him such a personality that the housewife just naturally calls him “he” as soon as she gets him into his collar.
Country Life in America, 1904
“with pink meat showing in slightly burst seams”
There was a cafeteria with a mob at the counter and then nothing more until, at the far end of the platform, a man with a steaming metal pushcart. He was bald; he held a small paper bag in one hand, and with the other he flipped open the several tabernacles of his pushcart and stabbed at white buns and red, dripping sausages the size of bananas, with pink meat showing in slightly burst seams. There were three customers ahead of us. He served them, taking his time, urging buns and sausages into the bags with his busy fork. When my turn came I showed him two fingers, changed my mind, three fingers. He bagged three of each.
“eesh, bangers and mash writ large!”
Eating In
When the city melts like butter
and the sky sizzles like bacon
we’ll be safe and snug
deep in our bomb shelter.
You’ll read my palm
running your finger along
the long life line.
We’ll smile
and cuddle together
like potatoes in their jackets
roll together
like sausages in the oven.
—
