Capon Ponders the Universe

Looking into my saucepan as the stock thickens, I find a counterfoil to such astronomical terrorism. Creation is vast in every direction. It is as hugely small as it is large. The number of water-filled interstices in my three tablespoonfulls of flour runs the interstellar distances a fair second; the appeal to size is a self-canceling argument. Plying my whisk, I know that what goes on here is neither less mysterious nor less marvelous than what happens there. We may not have settled the question of whether I am mad to think I matter, but we have definitely eliminated the numbers game as a method of proof. I will listen to any man who wants to argue me down, but, saucepan in hand, I refuse to be snowed.

(Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, Modern Library Food, 101.)

Buy a Good Knife

At the root of many a woman’s failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives. After all, unless she has the tools and the talent with which to bone, skin, slice, and split, she must revert to the condition of her ancestors. The progress of the race, of course, enables her to serve prefried fish fillets and diced vegetables in butter sauce, but she herself regresses a million years. Her frozen vegetables are bludgeoned from the freezer with any club that comes to hand. (I have seen women use milk bottles, chair legs and even, ironically, the handle of a knife.)

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, Modern Library Food, 56.

In Which We Continue to Delight in Robert Farrar Capon

It was St. Thomas, again, who gave the most reasonable and relaxed of all the definitions of temperance. Wine, he said, could lawfully be drunk usque ad hilaritatem, to the point of cheerfulness. It is a happy example of the connection between sanctity and sanity.

(Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, Modern Library Food, 92.)

And because it is my Birthday…

… I hope you can suffer just a bit more, topical, Capon.

If I had only a single temporal blessing to wish you, I would not hesitate a moment: May you be spared long enough to know at least one long evening of old friends, dark bread, good wine, and strong cheese. If even exile be so full, what must not our fullness be?

(Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb)

The Supper of the Lamb

If you were discomfited by the fact that I was reading books on gardening, and if you are discomfited that I read theology (indeed, professionally I read very old theology), you may not be comforted that I have been reading a book on cooking– indeed, cooking and theology.

But how could I not?

Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful. Necessity is the mother only of clichés. It takes playfulness to make poetry.

You may have to put up with quite a bit of Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb in the coming weeks.

(Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, The Modern Library Food Series)

For My Husband, Who Also Married an Alice

…and who also loves food.

There we were in Italy, and Alice was devoting a good hour and a half right in the middle of the morning to inspecting a cathedral instead of helping me to comb the Michelin guide for the lunch spot most likely to stagger us with the perfection of its fettuccine. I tried to explain to her that marriage is sharing– not merely sharing one’s fettuccine with one’s husband if he is gazing at it adoringly and is obviously having second thoughts about having ordered the veal, but sharing the burden of finding  the fettucine restaurant in the first place.

-Calvin Trillin, Alice, Let’s Eat.

There was a pizza place in the neighborhood of the university where I went to undergrad that had this quote on the wall.

From the Cookbooks: Sunday Supper

(Sweet and sour pork and stir-fried broccoli from the Time-Life Foods of the World volume The Cooking of China.)