Imported Quotes

“I might have gone a little overboard today buying some new spices- I swear I can spend all day at the supermarket. I especially love the one in our neighborhood that brings in ingredients straight from the island. I get to walk the aisles and pick up herbs and peppers from all over the world, thinking of all the ways to remix my favorite dishes.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High

“So, your cobbler traveled from the South of the US to the south of the Iberian Peninsula! I let the peaches sit in the juice of some sour oranges and added apricots, and the patrons at the restaurant I'm working at gobbled it up before the lunch rush was over!”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, With the Fire on High

“Ordering online was all about ticking boxes. Species. Color. Size. Number. Grade of quality. Degree of openness. But there was something miraculous about seeing the flowers she'd imagined brought to life. Roses from Columbia. Chrysanthemums from Ecuador. Orchids from Thailand. Anemones and agapanthus from Spain. Stargazers and parrot tulips from the vast Dutch flower fields.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“... the exotic spices arriving daily from the East Indies and the Americas, the crates of sweet oranges and bitter lemons from Sicily, the apricots from Mesopotamia, the olive oil from Naples, the almonds from the Jordan valley... I have seen and smelled these delicacies at market. But does any English person know how to cook with such foods?
I think back to my time in France and Italy, of all the delicacies that passed across my tongue. And then to the gardens I've seen in Tonbridge with their raised beds of sorrel, lettuce, cucumbers, marrows, pumpkins. Already the banks are starred bright with blackberries and rose hips, with damsons and sour sloes, the bloom still upon them. Trees are weighted down with green apples and yellow mottled pears and crab apples flushed pink and gold. Soon there will be fresh cobnuts in their husks, and ripe walnuts, and field mushrooms, and giant puffballs.”
― Annabel Abbs, Miss Eliza's English Kitchen

“None of this Mad Mario showmanship- orange clogs and Bermuda shorts fit for Babar, sweetbreads garnished with squash blossoms stuffed with cheese from the milk of Angora goats who live in the Pyrenees. Litchi sorbet veined with coconut milk and honey from Crete.”
― Julia Glass, The Whole World Over

“The first time Avis knelt on a chair and stirred eggs into flour to make a vanilla cake, she had an inkling of how higher orders of meaning encircle the chaos of life. Where philosophy, she already intuited, created only thought- no beds made, no children fed- in other rooms there were good things like measuring spoons, thermometers, and recipes, with their lovely, interwoven systems and codes. Avis labored over her pastries: her ingredient base grew, combining worlds: preserved lemons from Morocco in a Provencal tart; Syrian olive oil in Neapolitan cantuccini; salt combed from English marshes and filaments of Kashmiri saffron secreted within a Swedish cream. By the time Avis was in college, her baking had evolved to a level of exquisite accomplishment: each pastry as unique as a snowflake, just as fleeting on the tongue: pellucid jams colored cobalt and lavender, biscuits light as eiderdown.”
― Diana Abu-Jaber, Birds of Paradise

“One platter held two fillets of salmon, each thinly sliced and surrounded by appropriate garnishes and small rounds of dark bread. The other platter had a lush assortment of appetizers.
"Why, that's perfectly lovely," said Sally, who immediately had a brioche round swathed with foie gras on the way to her mouth. I attacked the salmon. Between chews, Sally managed to say, "Please thank him for us. I'm sure it's a sweatshop in the kitchen, but when there's time, I'd love to meet him."
"I'll be sure to tell him. Right now he's a bit like a chicken without its noggin."
"This salmon is delicious. Do you smoke it yourself?"I always like to compliment freebies from the kitchen. It usually keeps them coming. This time I was being totally honest; the salmon was incredible.
"Aye, we do. And the other salmon fillet on the plate is cured in tequila and lime juice. We do that here as well. And we bake the brown bread that's with it. All of our salmon comes from Ireland, as well as the dark flour for the bread.”
― Nancy Verde Barr, Last Bite

“Some people smoked when they were upset, some did yoga, or drank, or paced, or picked fights, or counted to one hundred. Georgia cooked.
As a small girl growing up in Massachusetts, she'd spent most of her time in her grandmother's kitchen, watching wide-eyed as Grammy kneaded the dough for her famous pumpernickel bread, sliced up parsnips and turnips for her world-class pot roast, or, if she was feeling exotic, butterflied shrimp for her delicious Thai basil seafood. A big-boned woman of solid peasant stock, as she herself used to say, Grammy moved around the cramped kitchen with grace and efficiency, her curly gray hair twisted into a low bun. Humming pop songs from the forties, her cheeks a pleasing pink, she turned out dish after fabulous dish from the cranky Tappan stove she refused to replace. Those times with Grammy were the happiest Georgia could remember. It had been almost a year since she died, and not a day passed that Georgia didn't miss her.
She pulled out half a dozen eggs, sliced supermarket Swiss and some bacon from the double-width Sub-Zero. A quick scan of the spice rack yielded a lifetime supply of Old Bay seasoning, three different kinds of peppercorns, and 'sel de mer' from France's Brittany coast. People's pantries were as perplexing as their lives.”
― Jenny Nelson, Georgia's Kitchen

“We're very excited about our new line of products." John squeezed his wife's hand. "We produce churned butter with sea salt imported from France. And we just started a line of yogurt with cream on top that sold very well at the farmers market."
"Try the milk. It's from Ollie, my favorite cow," Jenny interrupted, placing a tray and two glasses on the coffee table.
"Did you milk her yourself?" James took a cookie and dipped it in the glass of milk.
"My dad says I'm not old enough. Ollie is my best friend. Would you like to meet her?"
"I'd love to meet Ollie." James stood up and brushed cookie crumbs from his slacks. "Some of my best friends growing up were cows."
James followed Jenny to the barn and Cassie pored over brochures and marketing plans with John and Selma. She liked the design of their butter containers: ceramic pots with black-and-white labels and a cow's hoofprint on the bottom.
"And I love the idea of selling your milk in reusable glass bottles." Cassie put down her pen. "We'll have a whole fridge of milk in colored bottles. And we'll put a display of the butter pots next to the bread oven. Customers can sample fresh baked bread with churned butter.”
― Anita Hughes, Market Street

“I sent messengers across Italy: to our farms for wood pigeons, dormice, capons, and heaping baskets of grapes, apples, and beets; to the fields beyond Rome for fresh pears; to Nomentanum for amphorae of wine, some more than forty years old; to Praeneste for hazelnuts; and to the plains between Ostia and Lavinium for wild boar and deer. I sent men to Ostia for fresh, salty mackerel and mussels and to Mount Hymettus for the finest honey to dilute the Falernian wine we had on stock at home for the princeps and all the senators. I purchased ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and other spices from India and Taprobane, not only to flavor the food but to present as gifts. I even sent a man to Sicilia for green and black olives and for the olive relish that was a specialty of the region. I reveled in the planning of such a massive banquet.”
― Crystal King, Feast of Sorrow

“As he bit into the oily green flesh, Fairchild couldn't have known he was holding in his hands the future crop of the American Southwest. But he had a hunch. It was a black-skinned fruit, a variety of alligator pear, or as the Aztecs called it, "avocado," a derivative of their word for testicle. It grew in pairs, and had an oblong, bulbous shape. The fruit had the consistency of butter and was a little stringy. But unlike the other avocados he had tasted farther north, in Jamaica and Venezuela, this one had remarkable consistency. Every fruit on the tree was the same size and ripened at the same pace, rare qualities for anything that grew in the consistent warmth of the subtropics.
In Santiago, where a boat had deposited Fairchild and Lathrop, the avocado had an even greater quality. Fairchild listened intently as someone explained that the fruit could withstand a mild frost as low as twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Such a climatic range suggested a perfect crop for America. From central Mexico, the worldwide home of the first avocados, centuries of settlers had carried the fruit south to Chile. David Fairchild mused about taking it the other way, back north. "A valuable find for California," he wrote. "This is a black-fruited, hardy variety."
Lathrop tagged along on the daytime expedition when Fairchild tasted that avocado. He agreed that a fruit so hardy, so versatile, would perfectly answer farmers' pleas for novel but undemanding crops, ones that almost grew themselves, provided the right conditions. Fairchild didn't know the chemical properties of the avocado's fatty flesh, or that a hundred years in the future it would, like quinoa, find esteem, owing to its combination of fat and vitamins. But he could tell that such a curious fruit, unlike any other, must have an equally curious evolutionary history. No earthly mammal could digest a seed as big as the avocado's, and certainly not anything that roamed wild through South America.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“From Shanghai, Meyer had sent seeds and cuttings of oats, millet, a thin-skinned watermelon, and new types of cotton. The staff of Fairchild's office watched with anticipation each time one of Meyer's shipments were unpacked. There were seeds of wild pears, new persimmons, and leaves of so-called Manchurian spinach that America's top spinach specialist would declare was the best America had ever seen. Meyer had delivered the first samples of asparagus ever to officially enter the United States. In 1908, few people had seen a soybean, a green legume common in central China. Even fewer people could have imagined that within one hundred years, the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history, as feed for livestock, food for humans (notably vegetarians), and even a renewable fuel called biodiesel.
Meyer also hadn't come empty-handed. He had physically brought home a bounty, having taken from China a steamer of the Standard Oil Company that, unlike a passenger ship, allowed him limitless cargo and better onboard conditions for plant material. He arrived with twenty tons, including red blackberries, wild apricots, two large zelkova trees (similar to elms), Chinese holly shrub, twenty-two white-barked pines, eighteen forms of lilac, four viburnum bushes that produced edible red berries, two spirea bushes with little white flowers, a rhododendron bush with pink and purple flowers, an evergreen shrub called a daphne, thirty kinds of bamboo (some of them edible), four types of lilies, and a new strain of grassy lawn sedge.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“Several weeks before he left Peking, Meyer visited a small village and noticed, in a house's doorway, a small bush with fruit as yellow as a fresh egg yolk. Meyer ignored a man who told him the plant was ornamental, its fruit not typically eaten but prized for its year-round production. The fruit looked like a mix between a mandarin and a citron (which later genetic testing would confirm). It was a lemon, but smaller and rounder---its flavor surprised him as both sweeter than a citron and tarter than an orange. And its price, twenty cents per fruit or ten dollars per tree, suggested that people with an abundance of other citrus valued it greatly.
Meyer had little room in his baggage, but he used his double-edged bowie knife to take a cutting where the branches formed a V, the choice spot to secure its genetic material.
That cutting made the voyage to Washington, and then the trip to an experiment station in Chico, California, where it propped up a new lemon industry grateful to receive a sweeter variety. The lemon became known as the Meyer lemon, and from it came lemon tarts, lemon pies, and millions of glasses of lemonade.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“When I was nine, Sunrise Market relocated to a larger store. My mom pored giddily over the new imports that came with the expansion: pollack roe frozen in little wooden boxes; packages of Chapagetti instant black-bean noodles; bungeo-ppang, fish-shaped pastry filled with ice cream and sweet red-bean paste, each new item reviving bygone memories of her childhood, conjuring new recipes to capture old tastes.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Across the street from the bed-and-breakfast, I open a small café where residents can sip cocoa lattes, eat raspberry tarts baked in Valentine's Town, and savor orange whipped toffees that Helgamine and Zeldaborn complain get stuck in their few remaining teeth--yet they keep coming back for more. Wolfman and Behemoth sit together every afternoon sharing a pot of black rose tea, delicately holding their cups between clawed and too-large fingertips, nibbling on coconut macaroons. I even sell my sleeping tonic at the café--in a much milder dose than what I brew for the Sandman, who still stops by for a refill now and then--in scents of lavender and chamomile, herbs harvested from Dream Town.”
― Shea Ernshaw, Long Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas