Our Contributors — The Lamb & Quill

Sir Lushington, in his customary attitude of repose, attending to matters of the cellar.

Sir Lushington

Editor & Keeper of the Cellar

Sir Lushington is the founding editor and presiding spirit of The Lamb & Quill, a periodical he established upon the principle that the three pillars of a civilized life — good books, honest food, and well-chosen drink — deserve more serious and more joyful attention than they commonly receive. He is a man of firm opinions, generous appetites, and a cellar that has been described by those who have visited it as "alarming in its depth and reassuring in its quality."

His department, From the Cellar, concerns itself with wine, whisky, and spirits of all descriptions, reviewed not with the clinical detachment of the professional scorer but with the warmth of a man who believes that drinking well is a moral act. He also presides over The Commonplace Book, in which he records those stray observations, literary connections, and philosophical musings that arise naturally when one has been reading with a glass in hand. He is, by his own admission, better company after nine o'clock in the evening.

Correspondence may be directed to sir.lushington@thelambandquill.com

The Professor, discovered in his natural habitat among the volumes.

Professor Quarto

Librarian & Correspondent on Matters Literary

Professor Quarto is a scholar of wide reading and idiosyncratic enthusiasms who has never met a footnote he did not wish to pursue to its source. His formal training is a matter of some dispute — he has been variously described as a retired professor of English literature, a former antiquarian bookseller, and a man who simply never left the library — but his knowledge of books, particularly those written before the present century, is formidable and freely shared with anyone who will listen, and a fair number who would rather not.

His department, From the Library, treats of old books and new thoughts about them, with particular attention to the ways in which reading and eating have always been intertwined. He has a weakness for eighteenth-century prose, marginalia of all periods, and any volume that smells properly of its age. He maintains that a book unread is a tragedy, but a book unfinished is merely a promise deferred, and that the best preparation for any meal is half an hour with a good author.

Correspondence may be directed to professor.quarto@thelambandquill.com

The Trencherman, attending to matters of the table with his customary vigour.

The Trencherman

Cook & Critic of All Things Edible

The Trencherman is a man who takes his food seriously but never solemnly — a distinction he considers essential and which he will explain at length to anyone who confuses the two. He is a home cook of considerable skill and an eater of legendary capacity, equally at home dismantling a whole roasted lamb as he is debating the correct ratio of fat to lean in a sausage. He has opinions about butter that border on the theological, and a conviction that the decline of Western civilization can be traced, with reasonable accuracy, to the moment people stopped making their own stock.

His department, From the Kitchen, is devoted to recipes, techniques, and impassioned defences of ingredients the world has unjustly forgotten. He writes about food the way some men write about love — with urgency, with attention, and with the understanding that the subject deserves one's very best prose. He does not believe in "quick weeknight meals" as a genre, holding that even a Tuesday supper deserves respect, and that a man who will not take twenty minutes to make a proper vinaigrette has lost his way in life.

Correspondence may be directed to trencherman@thelambandquill.com