On this gray winter’s afternoon I finished a wonderfully irreverent culinary reflection titled The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farras Capon. I learned some interesting things about cooking: how to make a broth, why pastry is so amazingly good, but more I loved his wit, his playfulness, and his delight in cooking, fasting, and eating.
Capon’s love for the particulars of cooking is something I’ve been slowly learning and mulling since my time at L’Abri seven years ago when I first began to appreciate eating. Since then, around Bill &Val’s and Steve & Jeannie’s tables, I’ve come to see dining as something wonderful and extravagant, full of spices and varieties beyond what nutrition requires. To my mind the ability to experience wonderful and extravagant food from time to time says something amazing about a God who created all those varieties of grapes, animals, and vegetables simply for the unnecessary pleasure of man.
There are lots of divine things about eating (like the love my mother put into every meal she cooked me or the beauty of hospitality to lonely) and to that list I’ll add that there is something deeply divine about the delight of eating and fasting. So the The Supper of the Lamb is one part how-to cookbook filled with dismissals (electric knives and margarine), loves (wine, cheddar cheese, and butter), and prayers and one part glorification of the magnificent particulars of cooking, of creating and Creation. (For a longer (and excellent) essay on this aspect see Andy Crouch’s review.)
Capon (a priest) loves his table and sees how it reflects his God. He’s wrathfully dismissive of all those who seek to assault the table: nutritionists, dieters, and children. Capon speculates that the devil might have evaluated his strategy to corrupt humans and said “In concentrating on offenses against God and neighbor, it (our strategy) had failed to corrupt his relationship to things. Things by their provision of unique delight and individual admonishments, constituted a continuous refreshment of the very capacities Hell was at pains to abolish . . . the door of delight must remain firmly closed.” Capon, I think, is intent on ripping the door open and offering us again the delights of the table.
I’ll finish this post with one of the many sections that made me laugh. As a teenager I was declared the world’s slowest hiker, not for my fitness, but for my inability to pass by even the smallest of interesting things without stopping. In Capon I found a kindred spirit.
“Having finished thus the main part of the first half of the initial section of my . . . recipe,* I suggest that we now relax in earnest . . . If you are still with me at this point, it can only be because you are a serious drinker of being: a man who will walk back ten paces to smell privet in bloom; a woman who loves to rap sound turnips with her knuckles. Let us congratulate one another: The party has taken a distinct turn for the better. The busybodies with late meetings to attend have long since departed. The fidgeters who yawned their way through the evening have flaunted their early rising and vanished mercifully into outer darkness. Rejoice, dear heart; the ribbon clerks are finally out of the game. At last we may speak freely of the things that matter. Put away the cooking Sherry, Margaret; only the real ones are left. The good stuff is in the right hand end of the sideboard.
Our progress to noodles must not be hasty.”
*This “initial section” being page 109 of The Supper of the Lamb!
On Tuesday Charity and I drove over to UNC hospitals to met Marjorie, the first child of our friends, Bret and Rachel. Marjorie was asleep for most of our brief visit. She was small, wrinkly, and lovely.
Posted by furthermusings 
Posted by furthermusings 
Posted by furthermusings 