Food with the Hemingways

When this posts, I’ll be on my way to Dulles (aka the Hell of airports) to board a twelve hour flight to Dubai. As I’ve gotten father away from my college years and my time studying abroad, I crave almost anything related to travel. That includes reading. Books about wine take me to vineyards, my Afar magazines give me glimpses into different countries with every issue, and for this blog post, The Paris Wife brought me into the lost generation of the 20s. So, I’m going to try and capture some of the Hemingway spirit Paula McLain creates in The Paris Wife and share with you some of the words that bring together food and travel. In the interest of the truth, this isn’t some highbrow book that relays every truth about Paris in the 20s, but it is a fun read to pass the time at an airport or two.

“But now that it was high summer, I didn’t want to be in the kitchen at all and was happy to eat fruit or nothing until Ernest was finished with his work. Then we’d go to a cafe for an aperitif when it was dark and much cooler and felt right again to eat and be hungry.”

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“Duff Twysden was one of the wilder girls of the cafe scene. She drank like a man and told a good, filthy joke and could talk to absolutely anyone.”

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“We drank several bottles of chilled wine and then three-star Hennessy, and everything was beautiful- the valleys and bridges, the charming house and its flowering trees.”

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“One afternoon I was lying back on the grass watching Ernest and Chink fish. Ernest reached into the duffel bag on the bank next to him and pulled out a bottle of cold white wine that he uncorked with his teeth.”

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“Absinthe was illegal in France and had been for years. So was opium, but you could find both everywhere in Paris if you knew where to look. I loved the delicate licorace taste and the way the ritual of the cube and specially perforated spoon made raindrops, sugar drops.”

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“There were camellias floating in glass bowls and mounds of oysters and fresh corn dotted with sprigs of basil. It seemed possible that the Murphys had specially ordered the deep purple Meditteranean sky…”

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Now, I’m off to read some words written by Hemingway while imagining I’m in Paris in the 20’s. While this book and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris have established that it wasn’t the necessarily the fairy tale I may have imagined, it’s still kind of nice to pretend sometimes.

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