Farmhopper is a full-time working professional and passionate home cook. In 1999, she relocated from Manhattan to Southampton, NY, to ditch the rat race, join her husband, who also works locally, and be closer to her favorite farms and foods. They have a five-year-old son.
Dear Ms. Hopper:
For vicarious drinking and eating, with a lot of laughs and history thrown in, I recommend you dip occasionally into The Diary of Samuel Pepys (preferably the complete and unabridged Latham and Matthews volumes) where you will find descriptions of “a sort of French wine called Ho-Bryan [Pepysian for Haut-Brion] which hath a good and most particular taste which I never before encountered,” eating a barrel of oysters with William Penn, drinking his first “cupp of tee (a China drink),”—coffee was more popular in the London of his day—or buying a bundle of “sparrow grass” which I doubt could have rivaled Sang Lee’s purple stalks.
With your tidy and scatological review of “To Have and Have Not” (you referred to it as “crap”) I entirely agree, and so did no less a critic than Sinclair Lewis: “This thin screaming little book” about “boresome and cowardly degenerates”. . . “continues logically the combination of puerile slaughter with senile weariness”. . .”and “makes it clear that no real man ever thinks of anything save adultery, alcohol, and fighting.”
Speak up, man! Be bravely heard
Bawling the four-letter word,
And wear your mind décolleté
Like Mr. Ernest Hemingway.
RRC
Thanks, Robert! An education, as always. For you, I will open up the Pepys.