“…but what most enraptured me were the asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and pink which shaded off from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their white feet–still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed–with an iridescence that was not of this world.
I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form 
and who, through the disguise of their firm comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume.”
(From Remembrance of Things Past, Swann’s Way, Combray, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)
Jenny McPhee 