How Pineapples Became the Gucci Purse of 1700s Europe

Ernest signaled the waiter to replenish the daiquiris. Looking at my littered plate, he gave me a puzzled look. “Why’d you leave the shrimp heads? That’s the best part.” He picked one up and crunched it happily. I crunched one but not happily.

Grasse was busy, crowded, and workmanlike. It fell into the perfume business through a combination of luck, sheep, buffalo, and Catherine de Médici. In the Middle Ages, Grasse was a tanning town, treating sheepskins from Provence and buffalo hides from Italy. Part of the process required the use of aromatic herbs (and if you’ve ever smelt a tannery

Like girls, champagne bottles are put to work in the service of showing off clients’ expenditures. Champagne has been associated with exclusive celebrations for at least a century and associated with elites since court society monopolized its consumption in prerevolutionary Europe.

Fashion was rampant, L.A. fashion at its peak of tomorrowness. Everyone looked healthy and lithe and contemptuous of trends and popular obsessions. Just about all of them wore clothes from thrift shops, shops they’d sacked from Marin County to Redondo Beach.

When Jacaranda realized that these people were the ones meant by the words “jet set,” she was sure there must be a mistake. Why travel if it’s always going to be fillet of sole every night? If it hadn’t been for Max, the “dear friends” would have been stuck with each other in French restaurants forever. But then, most people like

Columbus may have brought one back successfully to Spain, although pineapples tended to rot on the long return voyages across the Atlantic. He called it piña de Indes (“little pine of the Indians”) for its resemblance to the pinecone and declared it “the most delicious fruit in the world.” For the Spanish-Italian historian Pietro Martire d’Anghiera