"Cinnamon and Gunpowder"

[fiefoe]

Eli Brown delivers exactly what the title promises: a culinary novel set among pirates. This is a good read for the moderately sick.

• Tall women confuse the eye. / to appreciate the nobility of a quiet room
• "Quite! A surprise and a delight like a whistling donkey."
• He had a proper accent, sounds that evoked the first curls of cream in strong tea.
• To overcome this impasse, I have decided to nurture my sponge as a wet nurse.
• the faded cravat that needed starching and made him look as if his head had been served on a bed of wilted escarole.
• the bare trees turned the sky into a crackle glaze. / The stubborn peach of his ruined monocle unnerved me.
• Mr. Apples was intimate with each of the guns and cajoled and patted them as if tending to a field of dairy cows.
• Between the opaque striations, wisps of fat clung to the crisp potato breading and resolved upon the tongue like the echo of a choir surrendering to silence. The saffron warmed all together as sunlight through stained glass blesses a congregation, while the shrimp sauce waved its harlot's kerchief from the periphery.
• (The rabbit) seemed to have the ability to dash in and out of darkness as one uses a door.
• I finally saw sunset for the blood warning it had always been.
• Whenever a character expired, this rag was fluttered about the wound to indicate spurts of blood. It was then seized and reused by the next victim. This single cloth embellished and stitched these murders into a grim yet somehow lovely choreography.
• That is the feeling that the tea smoke imparts, not the actual arrival but the comforting nearness of home.
• The temple is open on both ends. On one side is the known world, lit by the sun and in the order nature and man have designed. Ont he other end is darkness and transformation. Between these poles of birth and death, serenity and insanity, lies taste.
• Some have survived lead in the ear for a time... Maybe it's one solid fist, or maybe it's got jagged petals. So the flesh becomes a purse for the blade. They go made from the pain, or the lead poisons them slowly.
• I didn't know a ship could be so thoroughly ventilated and yet float.
• With pandemonium severing the stays of creation around me
• If I am to return to a familiar light, it seems I must first plumb the darkest tents of this carnival world.
• These are the racquets that have been batting my shuttlecock mind about.
• We built (the curry) pinch by pinch and took turns sniffing at the pile, debating whether to sharpen it with a touch more mustard or anchor it with cumin. When we lost the cinnamon's hum, we knew we had gone too far.
• In a world turned by the forks of avarice / "Lonely as moonlight on a spoon, that one."
• the eyebrows that were thunder's cousin
• For all of my kitchen philosophies were nothing compared to the truth that now opened me to the bone: that I was, myself, food.
• I may say, though, that I am happy. Once baked, the bread cannot return to flour.