Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Share a couple or more sentences from the book you’re currently reading. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

This week I’ve been reading The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery. It’s a slim book, packed with richness – sumptuous, and full to over-flowing with words and images. It is verbose, florid and sensational – meaning that is celebrates all the sensations experienced relating to food.

Here is a description of one of my favourite foods:

… crimson in its taut silken finery, undulating with the occasional more tender hollow, with a cheerfulness about it like a plumpish woman in her party dress hoping to compensate for the inconvenience of her extra pounds by means of a disarming chubbiness that evokes an irresistible desire to bite into her flesh.

… my teeth tore into the flesh to splatter the tongue with the rich, warm and bountiful juice, whose essential generosity is masked by the chill of a refrigerator, or the affront of vinegar, or the false nobility of oil.

The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one’s mouth that brings with it every pleasure. The resistance of the skin – slightly taut, just enough; the luscious yield of the tissues, their seed-filled liqueur oozing to the corners of one’s lips, and that one wipes away without any fear of staining one’s fingers, this plump little globe, unleashing a flood of nature inside us: a tomato, an adventure. (from pages 44-5)