I was brought up on English food. But not fish and chips, spotted dick, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pud, or other delicacies of British home cooking. These my mother scorned as somehow unhealthy; she may have grown up surrounded by non-Jews, but for just that reason she and her family kept to themselves and knew little of the domestic world of their neighbors, which they looked upon with fear and suspicion. In any case, she had no idea how to prepare English delicacies. Her occasional encounters, via my father's friends in the Socialist Party of Great Britain, with vegetarians and vegans had taught her the virtues of brown bread, brown rice, green beans, and other healthy staples of an Edwardian left-wing diet. But she could no more cook brown rice than she could have prepared chop suey. And so she did what every other cook in England in those days did: she boiled everything to death.
About This Quote
About Tony Judt
Tony Judt was a 20th-century English historian. Tony Robert Judt was an English historian, author, essayist and professor who specialised in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University and director of NYU's Remarque Institute. Read more on Wikipedia →