"Be there a picnic for the devil, an orgy for the satyr, and a wedding for the bride." ― Roman Payne, The Basement Trains
"As a kid, I was taught that if you opened the Bible in the middle you'd probably land on the book of Psalms. And near the middle is everyone's favorite, the 23rd, there is this line: "You prepare a table before in the presence of my enemies." I don't know how many times I've read or recited this Psalm without pondering what that line actually means, but here is my take on it. When things are a bit tense, when life is not going at its best, when the potential for disaster is just around the corner, when your enemies are all around you - and even staring you down! - that's when God lays out the red-checkered picnic cloth and says, "Oooo, this is a nice place. Let's hang out here together for a while...just you and me." ― David Brazzeal, Pray Like a Gourmet: Creative Ways to Feed Your Soul
"I simply cannot see why one would wish to picnic in the nude. There would be ants in dreadful places." ― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Gold
"I bring the leftovers to rehearsal, and Ms. Albright lets us have a cake picnic on the stage. And by cake picnic, I mean drama kids hunched over the box like vultures shoveling cake by the fistful." ― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
"I'd eat a picnic in Hades with him." ― Kristen Ashley, The Will
"Terence's idea of roughing it consisted of pork pie, veal pie, cold roast beef, a ham, pickles, pickled eggs, pickled beets, cheese, bread and butter, ginger beer and a bottle of port. It was possibly the best meal I had ever had in my life." ― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog
"The indoor picnic had been laid out in an octagonal-shaped sunroom featuring an atrium set in the center of the stone floor. Here a "white garden" planted with white roses, snowy lilies, and silver magnolias gave off a delicious scent that drifted across the table laden with linen, crystal, and silver. The white linen cloth had been scattered with pink rose petals that matched the flowered Sevres china." ― Lisa Kleypas, Suddenly You
"She leaned over the basket again, taking in the mouthwatering aromas wafting out of it. "Fried chicken? Oh, I'm thinking buttermilk fried chicken?" Dylan was once again amused. "How do you do that?" "I like food." "You don't say." "And I love Southern fried chicken." She tried to open the basket, and he tapped her hand jokingly. "Sit," he said. And she did, crossing her legs and plopping down on the blanket. Opening the basket and playing waiter, Dylan began removing flatware and plates and red-checkered napkins, and then wrapped food. "For lunch today in Chez Orchard de Pomme, we have some lovely cheese, made from the milk of my buddy Mike's goat Shelia." He removed the plastic wrap, which covered a small log of fresh white cheese on a small plate, and handed it to her. Grace put her nose to the cheese. It was heavenly. "Oh, Shelia is my new best friend." "It's good stuff. And we have some fresh chili corn bread. The corn, I think, is from Peter Lindsey's new crop, just cut out from the maze, which is right down this hill." He motioned with his head toward the field, and then he handed her a big loaf of the fresh corn bread wrapped loosely in wax paper. "It's still warm!" Delighted, she held it to her cheek. Then he pulled out a large oval Tupperware container. "And, yes, we have Dolly's buttermilk fried chicken." Grace peeled open the top and smelled. "Fabulous." "It is!" He also pulled out a mason jar of sourwood honey, a sack of pecans, and a couple of very cold bottles of a local mountain-brewed beer." ― Jeffrey Stepakoff, The Orchard
"The year 1694 witnessed the first recorded use of the word 'picnic', in the form of the French phrase repas à picnïque. Initially a repas à picnïque was a meal (not necessarily outdoors) at which each diner contributed a share of the food, or paid for their own share. The word may derive from Middle French piquer, 'steal, pilfer', and nique, which denoted a small copper coin, hence figuratively, 'nothing at all'. The word 'picnic' is first recorded in English in 1748, apparently in the context of a meal eaten at the card table. Only later, it seems, did picnics move out of doors." ― Ian Crafton
"Signor Renzo's lodge stood on a grassy knoll near the crest of the hill. It was a modest place, just a low stone hut, before which stretched a woven ceiling of vines. My dinner was cooked on an open fire by the table. This was no banquet, but what the cook called a pique-nique, a meal for hunters to take outdoors. After Renzo had chosen two fat ducklings from his larder, he spitted them over the fire. Then he made a dish of buttery rice crowned with speckled discs of truffle that tasted powerfully of God's own earth. 'Come sit with me,' I begged, for I did not like him to wait on me. So together we sat beneath the vines as I savored each morsel and guessed at the subtle flavorings. 'Wild garlic?' I asked, and he lifted his brows in surprise as he ate. 'And a herb,' I added, 'sage?' 'For a woman, you have excellent taste.' For a woman, indeed! I made a play of stabbing him with my knife. It was most pleasant to eat our pique-nique and drink the red wine, which they make so strong in that region that they call it black or nero. I asked him to speak of himself, and between a trial of little dishes of wild leaves, chestnut fritters, and raisin cake, Signor Renzo told me he was born in the city and had worked at a pastry's cook shop as a boy, where he soon discovered that good foods mixed with ingenious hands made people happy and free with their purses." ― Martine Bailey, An Appetite for Violets
"Eleanor unpacked the picnic basket and spread Mrs. Stevenson's goodies across it. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the four of them ate ham sandwiches and Cox's Orange Pippins and far too much cake, washing it all down with fresh ginger beer. Edwina watched the proceedings imploringly, snaffling up each small tidbit as it came her way. But really, the heat for October was uncanny! Eleanor undid the small pearl buttons at her wrist, rolling her sleeves back once, and then twice, so they sat in neat pleats. A somnolence had come over her after lunch, and she lay back on the blanket. Closing her eyes, she could hear the girls bickering lazily over the last slice of cake, but her attention drifted, sailing beyond them to pick out the 'plink' of water as gleaming trout leapt in the stream, the thrum of hidden crickets on the rim of the woods, the warm rustling of leaves in the nearby orchard. Each sound was an exaggeration, as if a bewitching spell had been cast over this small patch of land, like something from a fairy tale, one of Mr. Llewellyn's stories from her childhood." ― Kate Morton, The Lake House
"Cosima and Tommy sit on Midsummer Common, under a tree on the patch of grass where they first met. As is their tradition, Cosima has baked a plethora of goodies: sour cherry and chocolate cupcakes, goat's cheese and pesto pizzas, orange oil cannoli, and- Tommy's personal favorite- lemon and lavender cake." ― Menna van Praag, The Witches of Cambridge
"After Sims and the footmen had departed, Ethan sat with his back against the tree trunk and watched as Garrett unearthed a feast from the hampers. There were boiled eggs, plump olives, stalks of crisp green celery, jars of pickled carrots and cucumbers, sandwiches wrapped in paraffin paper, cold fried oyster-patties and wafer crackers, jars of finely chopped salads, a weighty round of white cheese, muslin-lined baskets filled with finger cakes and pastry biscuits, a steamed cabinet pudding left in its fluted stoneware mold, and a wide-mouthed glass bottle filled with stewed fruit." ― Lisa Kleypas, Hello Stranger
"Plus, Mama packed a good picnic. That night she brought us plenty of ham sandwiches and Lay's potato chips, plus orange slices and Oatmeal Caramelitas, a salty, buttery layer of oats topped with chocolate chips, walnuts, and melted Kraft caramels." ― Susan Rebecca White, A Place at the Table
"She serves us, pouring the iced tea into red plastic cups, piling chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and a couple of biscuits each onto our plates. It's an almost entirely brown meal. Mama would say it needs a colorful vegetable to complete it, but brown or not, it tastes good. Salty and hot, except for the tea of course, which is cold and sweet." ― Susan Rebecca White, A Place at the Table
"I told her one of the few stories that she'd told me of myself as a child. We'd gone to a park by a lake. I was no older than two. Me, my father, and my mother. There was an enormous tree with branches so long and droopy that my father moved the picnic table from underneath it. He was always afraid of me getting crushed. My mother believed that kids had stronger bones than grownups. "There's more calcium in her forearm than in an entire dairy farm," she liked to say. That day, my mother had made roasted tomato and goat cheese sandwiches with salmon she'd smoked herself, and I ate, she said, double my weight of it. She was complimenting me when she said that. I always wondered if eating so much was my best way of complimenting her. The story went that all through lunch I kept pointing at a gaping hole in the tree, reaching for it, waving at it. My parents thought it was just that: a hole, one that had been filled with fall leaves, stiff and brown, by some kind of ferrety animal. But I wasn't satisfied with that explanation. I wouldn't give up. "What?" my father kept asking me. "What do you see?" I ate my sandwiches, drank my sparkling hibiscus drink, and refused to take my eyes off the hole. "It was as if you were flirting with it," my mother said, "the way you smiled and all." Finally, I squealed, "Butter fire!" Some honey upside-down cake went flying from my mouth. "Butter fire?" they asked me. "Butter fire?" "Butter fire!" I yelled, pointing, reaching, waving. They couldn't understand. There was nothing interesting about the leaves in the tree. They wondered if I'd seen a squirrel. "Chipmunk?" they asked. "Owl?" I shook my head fiercely. No. No. No. "Butter fire!" I screamed so loudly that I sent hundreds of the tightly packed monarchs that my parents had mistaken for leaves exploding in the air in an eruption of lava-colored flames. They went soaring wildly, first in a vibrating clump and then as tiny careening postage stamps, floating through the sky. They were proud of me that day, my parents. My father for my recognition of an animal so delicate and precious, and my mother because I'd used a food word, regardless of what I'd actually meant." ― Jessica Soffer, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots
"They sat under a walnut tree on wooden benches draped with kilims and soon the table was covered with small dishes of yogurt, olives cured with angelica, eggplant and whey cooked to a silky paste, piles of basil, cilantro, and tarragon, and a pitcher of doogh, the tangy yogurt drink spiked with mint" ― Donia Bijan, The Last Days of Café Leila
"We have fresh mozz, heirloom tomatoes, basil, and a sprinkling of goat cheese on your panini. It was warm at one point this evening, but the flavors only get better as you let them moosh." "Moosh?" My stomach rumbled as I unwrapped the sandwich. "Sounds technical." I stopped talking because my first bite demanded a respectful silence. The crunch of crispy exterior gave way to an extroverted, summery flavor: notes of salt and a splash of bright tomato, still-warm mozzarella... I heard a sigh escape my lips and saw Kai thoroughly enjoying my enjoyment. "This," I said, mouth still full, "is perfect." His eyes widened around his own bite of panini. Blotting his chin with a napkin, he said, "Good. That's what I was aiming for." He pointed to a collection of plastic containers. "After you've regained your composure, we also have my grandmother's famous new potato salad with bacon and cider vinaigrette, sliced mango and strawberries, and a triple-layer chocolate cake for dessert." ― Kimberly Stuart, Sugar
"A picnic basket in Paris is like a treasure chest- untold riches in a limited space. The first apricots had appeared at the market, their skins fading from speckled red to glowing orange to burnished gold, like the sun-bleached walls of an Italian villa. There were tiny cucumbers, as thick as my thumb and curled like a ribbon. I'd become obsessed with a new fruit called a pêche plat, a flat peach. Imagine a perfectly ripe white peach that someone has sat on. Gwendal picked up a tomato and bit into it like an apple. I did the same. At the bottom of the basket was a carefully folded square of waxed paper. Inside was a small mound of rillettes, shredded pork cooked in its own fat until meltingly smooth." ― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes
"I said a picnic,' said Quin sternly. 'In Britain a picnic means sitting on the ground and being uncomfortable, preferably in the rain." ― Eva Ibbotson, The Morning Gift
"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three" ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
"We made a fire and cooked the clams, adding some wild onions and sea asparagus for flavor, and ate out of bowls made of abalone shells, with mussel shells for spoons and berries for dessert." ― Erica Bauermeister, The Scent Keeper
"Life is neither a picnic nor a pain" ― Lailah Gifty Akita
"In a doubting democracy the picnic is often gatecrashed by the government." ― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless
"There was loads of food set up on a large picnic table just outside the kitchen door. Potato salad with green beans. Sautéed squash with onions and garlic. Tomatoes on their own, or stuffed with cream cheese, or with rice and peppers. Bowls of salad, dressed and undressed. Fresh bread. Berry pie, berry cobbler, berries and cream. Pretty much everything had been grown by the class, and it was enormously satisfying to eat it all." ― Abbi Waxman, The Garden of Small Beginnings
"You might expect such a grand hamper to be filled with smoked salmon, a cocktail of olives---ciabatta bread, perhaps. But no. Marcus knows that my taste in food runs to the far side of the Philistine. Instead, the hamper is packed with pork pies, hot pizza wrapped in foil, Walkers crisps, Pringles, my very favorite muffins from Chocolate Heaven and, in its own little cooler, a tub of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream." ― Carole Matthews, The Chocolate Lovers' Club
"Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing, and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden's voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both holden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming." ― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
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