27
" She returned to the kitchen, where she'd been making sugared flowers. Mint leaves, tiny violets and old-fashioned rose petals, heavy with perfume, lay on the counter. Very gently she dipped each one into the stiff egg whites, then in confectioners' sugar, and then placed them on the baking sheet, which she put in the warm oven, the door ajar. It gave the room the scent of a garden, heady and sweet.
Sabine had planned to store the sweets in canning jars- there were still a few gaskets and lids left- and save them for cake. When she was a child, her grand-mère had once made her a Saint-Honoré for her birthday. It was the most wondrous cake in the world. Not a cake at all but a composition of tiny puffs of choux pastry filled with vanilla cream, very much like profiteroles, but molded together with caramel and covered with whipped chantilly cream fresh from the dairy. Her grand-mère decorated it with candied flowers and mint leaves.
Sabine never had anything like it before or since and suddenly wanted to make that cake again. "
― N.M. Kelby , White Truffles in Winter
29
" Chicken legs, beef ribs- they ate the food with their fingers, dipping into the horseradish sauce, feeding each other greedily. Laughing. They rolled leaves of cabbages and chewed on them like monkeys. They ate the golden potatoes as if they were apples. By the time they returned to the making of stock, and took the roasted veal bones from the stove and put them into the pot and filled it with enough cold water so that it could slowly simmer, their own legs no longer ached, their feet felt as if they could stand the weight of their bones for yet another day and they tasted of garlic and wine.
"Thank you, chef," he said.
"Thank you, chef."
She opened the cheese larder and took out a wedge of runny Camembert, which she covered with a handful of white raspberries that he had draining in a colander by the sink. He opened a bottle of port.
The dishes could wait. They sat on the back stairs of the tall thin house and looked over the lights of the steep city of Monte Carlo and out into the endless sea. The air was cool, the cheese and raspberries were rich and tart; the port was unfathomably complex with wave and wave of spiced cherries, burnt caramel and wild honey. "
― N.M. Kelby , White Truffles in Winter
