Good Taste Quotes

“She looked out of the kitchen window at gray skies, at clouds heavy with rain slanting down on the horizon now (she imagined making the mark with a wet brush in watercolor), and the winter colors of the fields. She would paint this day in umber, sap green and Payne's gray.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“We're quite happy to shrug and swap raisins for currants, if that's what we happen to have in our cupboard, an orange for a lemon, a chicken for a rabbit, a saucepan for a frying pan, and I suppose that attitude stimulates inventiveness. (But rule-breaking and multifariousness aren't good for a writer who is striving to discern patterns and draw tidy conclusions.)
One of the privileges of researching a book of this kind is the opportunity to travel, and I have seen different versions of England over the past year--- the England of new red-brick bungalows and modern white-tiled factories and the coal-blackened terraces of Industrial Revolution England. I've visited timeless cathedral-city England, the landscapes of Wordsworth and Jane Austen, recognizable still, and the England of village greens and fleeces and orchards full of shiny apples. I've seen silenced shipyards, rusting cranes and queues outside Labour Exchanges, and the England of lidos, motor cafés and nightclubs, all presently coexisting, and I've been struck by what a land of contrasts and contradictions this is. As much as I have asked myself "What is English food?," I have pondered, "Where---and what--- is England?" A land of contrasts (and it always has been, I suspect) creates a food of contrasts. English food is elaborate and simple, conservative and adventurous, regionalized and international.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“The manuscript seemed to shout less now; it was less stridently flag-wavingly English. As Stella had reinstated the Spanish oranges, the Dutch salad gardens and the Jewish fried fish, the accent of the text had changed. Instead of a clipped BBC English, it now spoke with a hotchpotch voice. Stella felt it more authentic for that, though, and her confidence in it began to return. It might no longer have a lion's roar, but this was a story of a trading and a hospitable nation, turned outward, not inward.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“It had been a dove-colored morning when Stella had left home, a soft gray sky touched with pink at the horizon. It had brightened after the rain, though, and everything was edged with gold this afternoon, like the pages of a precious book. Mist clung on in hollows, and water was running at the side of the road, but the hedgerows glittered now, wood pigeons lifting from wheat fields, and the hills were burnished bronze. Stella breathed in a scent of fallen leaves and wood fires, and vaguely wished for a less complicated life in which she might simply sit and evaluate the light with a box of watercolors on her lap.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Pan haggerty wasn't dissimilar to a gratin dauphinoise (she could almost hear Freddie crowing that the English had got there first), but was fried in a pan in hot dripping. Singing hinnies were griddle cakes, it transpired, enriched with lard, flavored with currants and eaten spread with butter.
"They sizzle and sing on the girdle," Mrs. Birtley explained and smiled.
There was much use of potatoes in these recipes, Stella noticed, as she turned the pages, lots of dumplings, leeks, dried peas and oats, and a wholesome sense of economy. These recipes suggested that the region had always been thrifty, but Stella heard pride, not complaint, in Mrs. Birtley's voice, a care and a particularity.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Talk of saffron and Phoenician trading routes had left her thinking about bouillabaisse and dipping bread into ochre-colored aioli. She saw herself standing over dishes of pork cooked with prunes, chicken flecked green with tarragon, and jewel-like pears poached in red wine.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Stella stood at the queue outside the butcher's shop and tried to pin a name to all the shades of red. Carmine, cadmium, Venetian red, she thought, vermillion, rose madder, magenta.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“We also like our sauces to be spicy. As Chaucer said, "Woe to the cook whose sauces had no sting!" Incidentally, I can't help wondering if there is an ancestral link between our Worcestershire Sauce and the garum sauce so beloved of the Roman legionaries. Could this be another legacy of Caesar's invasion?
REVD. WALTER ALFORD, Chester”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“My grandmother used to say that mint could heat up a man's blood. She told me that it was used in love potions in the olden times and soldiers weren't allowed to eat it lest they run amuck with lust. I remember her expounding on this subject over the Sunday roast and the cautionary look that she gave my grandfather as he reached for another spoonful of mint sauce.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“I am pleased to enclose my mother's recipe for Maids-of-Honor. She made beautiful pastry, such a light touch, and this was a great treat in my childhood. She liked to tell us that this cake dates back to Henry VIII's time (he was fond of his maids, wasn't he?) and that the original recipe is padlocked inside an iron box in Richmond Palace. Could that be true?
CHARLES WEST, Surrey”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“English cheeses are the finest in the world, don't you think? I don't know why anyone eats foreign cheese. Why on earth would you want a flaccid Camembert when you can have a fine, flinty farmhouse Cheddar? Most foreign cheese isn't fit to bait a mousetrap. Much of it is adulterated, you know."
Stella was partial to a well-aged Camembert, a Comté and a Cantal. The fact that one could buy Continental cheeses had been one of the pleasures of living in London, and while she'd been in Paris she'd practically lived on the stuff.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“I'll permit you to comfort me with soothing words and caresses later.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“I'm sure you are aware of the history of the Crusaders bringing spices and dried fruits back to England. While these would have been luxuries at first, with the establishment of regular trade routes, spiced cakes would eventually become affordable treats for the common people, and were often associated with the festivals of the religious calendar. Spiced buns, marked with a cross, were being eaten on Good Friday in the fourteenth century, the origin of our Hot Cross Buns, and there are also many local peculiarities linking spices, currants and the church. Banbury cakes, baked for the town's St. Luke's Day fair, are made in an oval shape to signify the cradle of the baby Jesus...
REV. SAMUEL WAVERLEY, Banbury”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“She opened the window and breathed in the morning air. It had rained a little overnight and everything had been washed clean. Ivy leaves looked lacquered, bee wings hummed in hawthorn blossoms, strings of birdsong seemed to garland the garden, and all was sweet, fresh and bright. Stella could smell newly mown grass, honeysuckle, breaking buds of lilac--- and, yes, frying bacon.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“What brings you to Gloucestershire?"
"I was halfway between Banbury cakes and Bath buns," she said.
He raised an eyebrow in response, which made her feel like she'd let a double entendre slip out. "I say! You're going to have to elucidate.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“She looked out of the kitchen window at gray skies, at clouds heavy with rain slanting down on the horizon now (she imagined making the mark with a wet brush in watercolor), and the winter colors of the fields. She would paint this day in umber, sap green and Payne's gray.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Stella looked out at the passing countryside now. It was like England as it is depicted on exported biscuit tins, a country of little valleys and beech copses, of gilded fields and mellow, misted hollows. Green hills rolled evenly, as if they'd been landscaped by Capability Brown, and oak-framed vistas presented themselves for her approval. Even the sheep here appeared to have been shampooed and set. Stella thought that if she'd grown up in Gloucestershire, she might be painting watercolor landscapes and infinitely contemplating variations of green.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“She'd had a useful morning studying turnip cultivation; however, in an indulgent moment she'd drifted into a daydream in which she was motoring around the Mediterranean with Michael, writing about salty hams and sweet Charentais melons, slicing into glistening apricot tarts, and cracking crab claws by glittering harbors.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Forsythia and cherry blossom were out in a garden, flickering in the light, and there were pots of golden crocuses by doorsteps. Stella saw sticky-looking buds on a horse chestnut and climbing roses were sending out fresh pink shoots. Everything seemed to be resurgent. Burgeoning. Fecund.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Stella leaned her head back and saw the sun flashing between rooftops, pale pearly clouds and then the corner of Peter Jones', the windows full of hats and dresses in the spring colors, all geranium reds, hyacinth blues and Parma violets.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“She passed under the ivy-grown lych-gate and walked between the yew trees. The graves were clustered together in groups, as if they had secrets to share and were turning over-the-shoulder eyes on incomers. The newly mown grass was cadmium green oil paint squeezed straight from the tube.
Stella leaned on the railings as she read the inscriptions on William and Dorothy's graves. The light made the lettering crisp and brought out the purples and golds of the lichens. Shadows bowed the head of the lamb on Dora Quillinan's gravestone; the trees beyond were full of the trilling of blackbirds, and lines of Wordsworth's "Lucy" poem came into Stella's mind.
"No motion has she now, no force, she neither hears nor sees," she whispered. "Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees."”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Muffins, teacakes, tea rolls, morning rolls, batch rolls, stottie cakes, wigs, birdies, huffkins, oven-bottom muffins, baps and cobs... It says something about us as a race, doesn't it? (But, frankly, I'm not sure what.)
HORACE DAVIDSON, Ripon”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Her imagination arranged the oatcakes, rissoles and dumplings into a still life, and even with complimentary lighting, it was a rather cheerless composition. She found herself wanting to add a single satsuma to the canvas to give it a splash of color and a contrast of texture, a pomegranate, an aubergine, or even a humble tomato. But that wasn't English cooking, was it? She looked at the pile of letters. "We are not a country that cooks in primary colors," she said aloud, experimentally, testing the words as her mouth formed them. How pleasurable it would be to write about a ratatouille made from sweet end-of-summer tomatoes, apricot-colored chanterelles fried in butter with flecks of bright green parsley, or red mullet grilled over vine prunings and served with spoonfuls of golden aioli”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“I mean, who even are the English? The descendants of the Germanic tribes? We're a great hotchpotch really, aren't we? A mishmash of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans, et cetera, et cetera, to a complicatedly hybrid ancestry, barely united for centuries, and our borders always shifting. We're not a pure, homogenous race sprung from English soil, are we? When people talk about Englishness, I often get a whiff of frowsty Victorian velvet," she mused, articulating more expansively with her hands as she warmed to her theme. "It makes me think of paintings of King Alfred, Ivanhoe and Tennyson, people putting on dressing-up clothes to do archery, and William Morris tapestries. Perhaps Englishness is less about geography and historical dates and more about symbols and emotions? There are lots of tripwires and misty hollows between the lions and unicorns, aren't there? When you begin to think about what Englishness means--- and, by extension, English food--- it all starts to become rather precarious and complicated, doesn't it?”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“It's a big subject the history of English food," Dilys said, but then frowned and looked like she was reevaluating her words. "Or perhaps it isn't--- most things are imported, aren't they? If you wind it back, I guess there's not much that truly is native. I suppose, when it comes down to it, our only indigenous foods are fungi, worts and seaweeds.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Should she be savoring an Aveyronnais sharp cheese, though? Was this a disloyal choice of lunch? In the interests of focus and professionalism, Stella resolved that she should write an admiring paragraph about Wensleydale cheese this afternoon--- and perhaps not mention it first having been made by Cistercian monks from Roquefort.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“"I MISS"
(From the notebook of Elizabeth Douglas, 1923)

I miss my mother's pastry.
I miss Aunt Lucy's boiled beef and dumplings.
I miss watching my grandfather eating pickled walnuts.
I miss Annie's sticky ginger cake.
I miss my grandmother's potato scones.
I miss my grandfather making rum punch at Christmas.
I miss helping my mother to make a trifle and both running our fingers around the mixing bowls.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Stella turned through the pages and saw the pikelets, pea-and-ham soup and the boiled mutton and capers of her childhood. Here was her mother's wimberry pie, her damson jam and her gooseberry fool. Where recipes came from relatives and friends, her mother's handwriting noted the case: the method for hot-water pastry had been handed down from her grandmother; the parsley in her suet dumplings came from her cousin; the parkin was her great-aunt's recipe. Stella remembered how she and her mother would always share the first slice of roast lamb at the stove and the secret glass of sherry they'd drink as they made a trifle.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“The pair of them had taken pleasure in discovering the London markets together, stretching their fingers out to touch the pineapples and pomegranates, sketching the stalls piled high with herrings and cockleshells, and holding clementines to their noses at Christmas, each fruit crackling in its wrapping of foreign lettering.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste

“Stella daydreamed about Continental delicatessen stores and the scent of ripe tomatoes. She and Michael had liked to go to Covent Garden and Billingsgate together, to Fortnum & Mason, and to the little foreign grocers' shops around Golders Green, Soho and Camden Town. She'd loved to see the sacks of pistachio nuts and the jars of crystallized ginger, the bottles of orange-flower water and distillations of rose petals, suggestive of the flavors of dishes from The Arabian Nights, the barrels of pickled herrings and the sides of salt beef. Together they enjoyed talking about what they might do with the star anise and the brined green peppercorns, the tarragon vinegar and the bottled bilberries. People had sometimes given Stella questioning looks when she took her sketchpad to the markets, but there was a pleasure in trying to capture the textures of the piled oranges and peaches and the glimmer of mackerel scales.”
― Caroline Scott, Good Taste