Archives for the 'william f. buckley' tag
William F. Buckley Dies
William F. Buckley, the National Review founder, died last night.
What’s that got to do with food? Plenty. First, he was discovered at his desk by his cook.
Second, one of my favorite Buckley stories includes what I consider to be the greatest, most evocative food sentence of all time, by Tom Reiss in a 2005 New Yorker profile of Buckley:
Buckley’s housekeeper, a stout Slovak woman, served us hamburgers, on fine china, with ramekins for ketchup and mustard on each plate, and I asked Buckley how he felt about conservatism’s current course.
That, my friends, is writing.
The NY Times obit notes Buckley’s own food writing, from Cruising Speed: A Documentary:
For example, in “Cruising Speed: A Documentary,” published in 1971, he discussed the kind of meals he liked to eat.
“Rawle could give us anything, beginning with lobster Newburgh and ending with Baked Alaska,” he wrote. “We settle on a fish chowder, of which he is surely the supreme practitioner, and cheese and bacon sandwiches, grilled, with a most prickly Riesling picked up at St. Barts for peanuts,” he wrote.
Obit here.
Update: NBC anchor Brian Williams remembers Buckley as a kind and affable man with a love of good peanut butter.
