my tubby torso

During my Summer-2005 stay in Reading, I went in a Saturday noon to have lunch in Whitley, a Wiltshire village, in a place called the Pear Tree Inn. Being a Beckettian-heavy-boozer-turned-a-Shavian-teetotaller, I ordered a bottle of Barbican alcohol-free beer, christening its name, Islamic beer, to the bar-maid who served with a smile. There are certain things which seldom fail to send a shiver of excitement rippling thru my tubby torso, and that bar-maid's smile is one of them and entering a restaurant is another

THE OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD, Alan Davidson says that the Italians claim that their culinary secrets were packed up and transported over the Alps by Caterina de'Medici when, in 1533, she married the man who became Henry the Second of France. Antonio Latini's LO SCALCO ALLA MODERNA, published in late seventeenth century, contains the--correct me if I am wrong--first account of roasting ortolan in the days when eating songbirds was not yet banned in Europe