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Showing posts with the label Describing Food

In Praise of Pig

I recently spent a very entertaining few hours discussing Chinese tea and planning a perfect dinner, a key part of which would be pork in all forms but especially  barbecued pork (cha siu) and suckling pig. I was reminded of Charles Lamb's extremely elegant "Dissertation Upon Roast Pig" from his Essays of Elia which contains the following memorable description. "There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, cracking, as tis well called - the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure of this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance - with the adhesive oleaginous - O call it not fat -  but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it - the tender blossoming of fat - fat cropped in the bud- taken in the shoot- in the first innocence - the cream and quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food - the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna, or, rather fat and lean (if it must be so)