## Metadata * Author: [[A Liebling]] * ASIN: B01L7BD980 * ISBN: 086547236X * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L7BD980 ## Highlights He also knew the melancholy of having recognition come late. — location: [44](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=44) ^ref-36159 --- Cavafy’s Alexandria, William Kennedy’s Albany, or Bellow’s Chicago— — location: [64](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=64) ^ref-20658 --- Americans who had known only the Puritanism of their own country, its materialism, indifference to art, and ignorance of history. — location: [89](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=89) ^ref-24585 --- was often alone, but seldom lonely.” — location: [95](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=95) ^ref-47839 --- it retains a star in the Michelin, a book Liebling held in disdain, not for any inaccuracy or lack of standards but because it is a symbol of the age of the automobile and the decline, in his view, of provincial restaurants in France. This may seem to be a contradiction but the speed and ease of car travel has meant that restaurants which once depended on a steady, discriminating clientele of business travelers now need only cater to customers who come once and are unlikely to return, at least for some time. As a result the restaurants rarely change their menus and are not pressed to satisfy unfailingly, cook seasonal specialties, or try new dishes. — location: [115](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=115) ^ref-36618 --- A kind of anonymous patronage, such as one might find in a shoeshine parlor, leads to a lower level of art. — location: [119](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=119) ^ref-12397 --- The Food of France, by Waverley Root, — location: [165](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=165) ^ref-51552 --- In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. — location: [168](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=168) ^ref-3152 --- Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.” M. — location: [203](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=203) ^ref-58906 --- Alsatian wine—a Lacrimae Sanctae Odiliae, — location: [227](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=227) ^ref-11784 --- Square Louvois, — location: [247](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=247) ^ref-4083 --- There is at present a great to-do among wine merchants in France and the United States about young wines, and an accompanying tendency to cry down the “legend” of the old. For that matter, hardware clerks, when you ask for a can opener with a wooden handle that is thick enough to give a grip and long enough for leverage, try to sell you complicated mechanical folderols. The motivation in both cases is the same—simple greed. — location: [420](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=420) ^ref-14681 --- To deal in wines of varied ages requires judgment, the sum of experience and flair. It involves the risk of money, because every lot of wine, like every human being, has a life span, and it is this that the good vintner must estimate. His object should be to sell his wine at its moment of maximum value—to the drinker as well as the merchant. — location: [423](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=423) ^ref-4750 --- The vintner who handles only young wines is like an insurance company that will write policies only on children; the unqualified dealer wants to risk nothing and at the same time to avoid tying up his money. — location: [425](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=425) ^ref-34235 --- To deal wisely in wines and merely to sell them are things as different as being an expert in ancient coins and selling Indian-head pennies over a souvenir counter. — location: [428](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=428) ^ref-21313 --- He falls into a critical error more common among writers less intelligent: he attacks it for not being something else. — location: [435](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=435) ^ref-41663 --- Because its excellences are not those of Burgundy or Bordeaux, he underrates the peculiar qualities it does not share with them, as one who would chide Dickens for not being Stendhal, or Marciano for not being Benny Leonard.) The — location: [436](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=436) ^ref-17915 --- The wine still had a discreet cordon—the ring of bubbles that forms inside the glass — location: [439](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=439) ^ref-13484 --- it had developed the color known as “partridge eye.” — location: [440](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=440) ^ref-19305 --- the man who accepts say-so in youth will wind up in bad and overtouted restaurants in middle age, ordering what the maître d’hôtel suggests. He will have been guided to them by food-snob publications, and he will fall into the habit of drinking too much before dinner to kill the taste of what he has been told he should like but doesn’t. — location: [763](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=763) ^ref-1551 --- When one considers the millions of permutations of foods and wines to test, it is easy to see that life is too short for the formulation of dogma. — location: [797](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=797) ^ref-42384 --- A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost. — location: [802](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=802) ^ref-45656 --- Any normally white wine can be converted into a rosé simply by adding a dosage of red wine* or cochineal. — location: [961](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=961) ^ref-30981 --- Côte Rôtie—the hillside roasted in the sun—is the friendliest of the three, as is the wine, which has a cleaner taste than Châteauneuf and a warmer one than Hermitage. — location: [991](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=991) ^ref-33586 --- Mens sana in corpore sano — location: [1035](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1035) ^ref-47969 --- When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted. I, — location: [1037](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1037) ^ref-38828 --- “Calves’ hocks have I yesterday at lunch to home eaten, with potato dumplings, and to dinner spring chicken with another time dumplings.” — location: [1059](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1059) ^ref-12205 --- vermouths cassis, — location: [1150](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1150) ^ref-37573 --- I liked the sensation of immersion in a foreign element, as if floating in a summer sea, only my face out of water, and a pleasant buzzing in my ears. — location: [1152](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1152) ^ref-7079 --- The truly great restaurateur is the one who can please essentially the same clientele week after week without boring or disappointing — location: [1433](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1433) ^ref-56936 --- La cuisine française is not one cuisine but a score, regional in origin, shading off into one another at their borders and all pulled together at Paris. — location: [1434](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1434) ^ref-61045 --- Burgundy has the advantage—to which a young palate is particularly sensitive—of a clear, direct appeal, immediately pleasing and easy to comprehend on a primary level. — location: [1514](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1514) ^ref-34678 --- This is a quality compatible with greatness. — location: [1516](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1516) ^ref-60580 --- (If the Beaujolais region were to produce all the wines, bottled and en carafe, that are sold in its name, it would have to be larger than Alaska. One reason the French held on to Algeria so stubbornly was that with its loss three-quarters of “the Beaujolais” would disappear.) — location: [1526](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1526) ^ref-34459 --- He was a patriotic man at home, but he was convinced that in Paris the presence of Americans was a sign of a bunco joint. — location: [1630](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1630) ^ref-13622 --- Innocent of preoccupation with the future, they had no trace of a desire to build up an income for old age. — location: [1681](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1681) ^ref-23969 --- And, finally, there was the legend of the Perpetual Boom. America, it appeared, was the country that had discovered an infallible system for beating the races. This made Americans, in the abstract, as unpopular as we eventually became in the forties, but it also spurred imitative identification. — location: [1711](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1711) ^ref-10821 --- new doctrines had the same effect on temples of gastronomy that the Reformation had on the demand for style-flamboyant cathedrals. — location: [1735](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1735) ^ref-27276 --- At first, the disappearance of the expensive restaurants was not felt at the lower levels where Root and I reveled, but it slowly became evident, as the disappearance of the great opera houses would become evident in the standards of professional singing; with no Metropolitan to aspire to, the child soprano of Boulder, Colorado, would have no incentive to work on her scales. — location: [1736](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1736) ^ref-32773 --- Child-labor laws and compulsory education were additional obstacles in the way of the early apprenticeship that forms great cooks. — location: [1740](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1740) ^ref-13299 --- One of the last of the Fratellini family of clowns, an old man, made a television address in Paris a few years ago in which he blamed the same conjunction of circumstances for the dearth of good young circus clowns. “When I was a child, my father, bless him, broke my legs, so that I would walk comically, as a clown should,” the old man said. (I approximate his remarks from memory.) “Now there are people who would take a poor view of that sort of thing.” — location: [1741](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1741) ^ref-46623 --- During the twenties and thirties, the proportion of French restaurants that called themselves auberges and relais increased, keeping pace with the motorization of the French gullet. They depended for their subsistence on Sunday and holiday drivers, who might never come over the road again, and the Guide Michelin, the organ of a manufacturer of automobile tires, ominously began to be the arbiter of where to dine—a depressing example of the subordination of art to business. — location: [1748](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1748) ^ref-45364 --- marc de Bourgogne — location: [1788](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1788) ^ref-33402 --- Good Calvados is never sold legally. The tax leaves a taste that the Norman finds intolerable, — location: [1847](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1847) ^ref-10396 --- Bread is a good medium for carrying gravy as far as the face, — location: [1917](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1917) ^ref-20390 --- “I used to think … that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it.”) — location: [1956](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=1956) ^ref-32996 --- The rise and fall of an art takes time. The full arc is seldom manifest to a single generation. — location: [2009](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=2009) ^ref-38409 --- We sounded like the traditional New Yorkers who inhabit the same apartment house but meet for the first time in Majorca. — location: [2148](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01L7BD980&location=2148) ^ref-53391 ---