Hors d'oeuvre

“ The hors-d’œuvrier should be able to produce something sightly and good out of very little, and the beauty and attractiveness of a hors-d’œuvre should depend to a much greater degree upon his work and the judicious treatment of his material than upon the nature of the latter. ”

“ Cut each halved anchovy, which should have been previously marinaded in oil, into two or three little fillets. Place them across each other in a hors-d’œuvre dish, after the manner of a lattice; garnish with chopped parsley and the chopped white and yolk of a hard-boiled egg, alternating the colours. Put a few capers on the fillets, and besprinkle moderately with oil. Anchovy fillets may also be served on a salad of ciseled lettuce, for the sake of variety. ”

“ The Editor, stroking his pointed beard with satisfaction, was reading through the menu, the gracious lady and the handsome niece were noting, one by one, the celebrities dining at the other tables, and the head waiter was standing watching the Editor with the calm but deferential confidence an artist shows when an important patron is inspecting his work. A minor servitor, a thin tape of gold on the collar of his livery coat and wearing white gloves, was also in attendance, and the overture in the way of hors-d'œuvre à la Russe was before us. ”

“ Salad of Eggs.—With alternate rows of sliced eggs and either tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, or beetroot, and a salad-seasoning composed of oil and vinegar or cream, a dozen different salads may be prepared, each of which constitutes an excellent hors-d’œuvre. ”

“ In the back room Brett and Bill were sitting on barrels surrounded by the dancers. Everybody had his arms on everybody else's shoulders, and they were all singing. Mike was sitting at a table with several men in their shirt-sleeves, eating from a bowl of tuna fish, chopped onions and vinegar. They were all drinking wine and mopping up the oil and vinegar with pieces of bread.
"Hello, Jake. Hello!" Mike called. "Come here. I want you to meet my friends. We're all having an hors-d'œuvre." ”

“ All the great missionaries of good cookery have gone forth from it, and its cuisine was, is, and ever will be the supreme expression of one of the greatest arts in the world. Most of the good cooks come from the south of France, most of the good food comes from the north. They meet at Paris, and thus the Paris cuisine, which is that of the nation and that of the civilised world, is created.
When the Channel has been crossed you are in the country of good soups, of good fowl, of good vegetables, of good sweets, of good wine. The hors-d'œuvre are a Russian innovation ”

“ Tragedy, dramas, history, romance, comedy, travel, you cast all of them in the furnace and the mould of your brain, and you peopled the world of fiction with new creations. The newspaper, the book, the theatre, burst asunder, too narrow for your puissant shoulders; you fed France, Europe, America, with your works; you made the wealth of publishers, translators, plagiarists; printers and copyists toiled after you in vain. In the fever of production you did not always try to prove the metal you employed, and sometimes you tossed into the furnace whatever came to your hand. ”

“ When Anna Akimovna took his arm and led him to the dining-room, he tossed off a glass of vodka and put a piece of salmon in his mouth; he positively purred with pleasure. He munched loudly, disgustingly, emitting sounds from his nose, while his eyes grew oily and rapacious.
The hors d’oeuvres were superb; among other things, there were fresh white mushrooms stewed in cream, and sauce provençale made of fried oysters and crayfish, strongly flavoured with some bitter pickles. The dinner, consisting of elaborate holiday dishes, was excellent, and so were the wines. ”

“ The mangled car beneath the tree,
The dead man, and the tortured wife
Doomed to a cripple's chair for life—
His chief concern was getting by
The stern inspector's eager eye.
Perhaps he whistles on his way
Into the factory to-day
And doesn't know the ruin wrought
By just one minute's careless thought.
Yet human life is held at stake
By nearly all that toilers make. ”

“ We knew well that a journey through, round, or over this glass would take us into an unnatural world where we should be negative instead of positive, passive instead of active, useless scrap-iron instead of working parts of a well-constructed machine. Yet we never considered the possibility of being obliged, in that unreal world, to live a life of impotence. ”

“ How would the great realities of life flash upon the reader’s mind, and how insensibly would he amalgamate fact with fiction! And, lastly, think, reflect, what new catastrophe would open upon an author’s vision; for while, to the gentler novelist, like Mrs. Gore, an eternal separation might ensue from starting with the wrong train, the bloody-minded school would revel in explosions and concussions, rent boilers, insane luggage-trains, flattening the old gentlemen like buffers. ”

“ And when we get back to the dreary grind, and the bald-headed boss's call, Don't you think that the dingy window-blind, and the dingier office wall, Will suddenly melt to a vision of space, of violent, flame-scarred night? ”

“ Thus, in talking of the present or the past world, I know I am only dangling about the theatre-lobbies, coffee-houses, ridottos, pleasure-haunts, fair-booths, and feasting- and fiddling-rooms of life; that, meanwhile, the great serious past or present world is plodding in its chambers, toiling at its humdrum looms, or jogging on its accustomed labours, and we are only seeing our characters away from their work. ”

“ Desperately straining every effort in an endeavor to build up something, to create something, he merely fell sprawling into the dust, and his work collapsed and disintegrated, rewarding him with a mock and a sneer. ”

“ One is free at last—and lilting in a slow flight of the elements, winging outwards. Oh God, to be free of all the hemmed-in life—the horror of human tension, the absolute insanity of machine persistence. ”

“ How many labour to destroy the monuments of the dead, and summon up the great from their graves to answer for trifles before them? How many, by misrepresentations, both hinder the world from favouring men of genius, and discourage them in themselves ”

“ The loss was many companies, but they never lacked the one hundred to do the work, always by night, always silently; crawling through the night, pick and shovel in hand, came that antlike hundred, the individuals constantly varying, as figures in a kaleidoscope where death is at the handle, but never quitting its terrible task. ”

“ I believe we understand both scenes and machinery. But there is another kind of public opinion that rises like the wind, incomprehensible, unmanageable, and terrible as the wind when it rouses itself to a storm. ”

“ Probably, from what I have told you before, you will have a guess at the remedy for such a disaster; remembering always that many of the things which used to be produced—slave-wares for the poor and mere wealth-wasting wares for the rich—ceased to be made. That remedy was, in short, the production of what used to be called art, but which has no name amongst us now, because it has become a necessary part of the labour of every man who produces. ”

“ A Work, which, popular and admired as it confessedly is, has never met with the thousandth part of the attention which it deserves. It appears to me that we are now at a crisis in the state of our country, and of the world, which renders the reasonings and exhortations of that eloquent production applicable and urgent beyond all power of mine to express. ”

“ The knowledge of the loss lies like lead at the heart and fills one with a keen regret, a poignant sense of the cruelty of the industrial system and your own weakness with it; yet one must live. But there is real tragedy in working the night shift at the forge. ”

“ However, this minor annoyance was blocked out, and the masterpiece was exhibited in the leading galleries of the civilized world, until, like the machine's other productions, it crumbled and fell into dust. ”

“ Never can we forget the hopeless look of mingled misery and disgust that was painted on the mind-illuminated faces of our colleagues when the thrilling act became patent—that our literary labors were received by the public with cold and damning indifference! ”

“ Frightful machinery for crushing and flattening; most cruel press for shattering the soul! One turn of the screw follows another, until, all breathless, and with a loud crack, it has burst forth from the machine and fallen into the unknown world. ”

“ It is a grim story of the unpicturesque and horribly anxious lives of working-folk, specifically of the house-painter and his mates working on a job, elated and satisfied at the beginning, depressed and despondent as the work nears completion with the uncertainty as to how long it will be before another job comes along. ”

“ Test each bit of the action to see that it can be done with your facilities; don’t attempt an elaborate story and then be forced to rewrite it after the work of production has started. That means time lost—for which you are paying salaries—and a weakened production. Construct a story, as has been said above, that uses exterior scenes almost entirely. See that the locations are convenient; it does not require many journeys from one end of the town to the other to eat up valuable time. ”

“ The "moving drama" is the other side of the industrial picture. Life for the masses means dirt and disease, ugly factories, sordid homes, mean streets. The moving drama takes the masses away from grim reality; they see beautifully gowned women in drawing-rooms ”

“ If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. ”

“ The faults of a performance are overlooked, and its merits over-rated. To suppress any work, in the present state of society, I am convinced is utterly impossible; and any attempt to do so, only encreases what mischief there may be.—A work openly sold, is open to reply ”

“ As people live in a house, or work, day after day, in a store or factory or public building, they become used to inconveniences, bad arrangement, and lack of proper facilities. They complain for a time, perhaps, and then forget. ”

“ It is a chaos before the creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which habitable worlds are evolved. ”

“ All these vast cities have given way and gone, even as my native Potteries and the Black Country have gone, and the lives that were caught, crippled, starved, and maimed amidst their labyrinths, their forgotten and neglected maladjustments, and their vast, inhuman, ill-conceived industrial machinery have escaped—to life. ”

“ The clash of souls is lost sight of in the orchestral crash of falling buildings; the climax in the struggle of a heroic spirit is hidden behind locomotives coming head-on and smashing themselves into junk; the pathetic twilight closing over some wonderful character depiction is lost in the glare of a bona-fide fire advertised to cost thousands of dollars. These are melodramatic sensations, not drama. ”

“ that life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality: and for the words "good" and "wicked," used of men, you may almost substitute the words "Makers" and "Destroyers." ”

“ Let us overrun the companies of Artificers & craftsmen, which continually labour from night to night, and yet hardly able to find them necessaries to live, by bewailing their bare estate, & filling their nightwatchings with sorrow and tears. ”

“ For this unproductive commercialism, this "unreal reality" projected by the malignant power which resists creation, is not only an obscene outrage to the aesthetic sense; it is actually an assassination of life. ”

“ Under this influence not only is the subdivision of labour which places each successive operation in separate hands accepted as a matter of course, but into each operation itself this separation imports a spirit of lassitude and dulness and compliance with false conditions and limited aims which would seem almost incredible in those practising what should be an inspiring art. To men so trained, so employed, all counsels of perfection are foolishness; all idea of tentative work, experiment, modification while in progress, is looked upon as mere delusion. ”

“ Current fiction, current jokes, current experience, and all the background of history and literature, show us this strong and vicious tendency at work; and ugly is the work it does. No personal necessities, no family necessities, call for the expenses lavished on entertainment. ”

“ The clatter of tools died out in the space of two seconds, and the men, swinging themselves into their coats, straggled out into the road, slouching, rolling, hitching, and apparently untouched by the desire of the ordinary human heart to keep step. ”

“ But the growth of technical dexterity was a poor compensation for the narrowing of interests; the individual was sacrificed to make the artist; and art, too, suffered by the divorce from practical affairs. ”

“ To avoid the old-fashioned method of giving ten or twelve for every season in the year, I have made the whole contents of my book one regular bill of fare, which will enable the most inexperienced cook, or young lady just commencing housekeeping, to compose a recherché or economical bill of fare at will, being so distributed, that after a short series of sauces the bill of fare commences, being first the soups, then the fish, then the hors-d’œuvres, or flying dishes, to be handed round the table during the time the removes and entrées are placing upon it ”