Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 exptools 1/6/84; site ihuxq.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!floyd!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!ihuxq!amigo2 From: amigo2@ihuxq.UUCP (John Hobson) Newsgroups: net.cooks Subject: Recommended cookbook Message-ID: <574@ihuxq.UUCP> Date: Wed, 1-Feb-84 11:08:07 EST Article-I.D.: ihuxq.574 Posted: Wed Feb 1 11:08:07 1984 Date-Received: Fri, 3-Feb-84 02:49:36 EST Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL Lines: 79 One of my favorite cookbooks is something of an oddity. It is called The Supper of the Lamb, by Robert Farrar Capon. Capon is an Episcopal priest (this is important in understanding the book), and TSotL reminds me of Brillat-Savarin in that it is not so much a collection of recipes as an extended essay on the art of cooking. He starts off with by giving the ingredients for a recipe called "lamb for eight persons four times" and finally finishes it sixteen chapters later. Capon is opinionated and given to going off on tangents, but he is a good writer, is consistantly entertaining, and his opinions are worth listening to. He talks about such things as making puff pastry, explaining why you do everything, how to make a gravy, how to thicken a stew. He is not so interested in the hows as the whys of everything. A typical example, talking about people who object to wine in cookery: Consider first the teetotalers. They began, no doubt, by observing that some men use wine to exxcess--to the point at which, though the wine remains true to itself, the drinker does not. That much, I give them: Drunks are a nuisance. But they went too far. Only the ungrateful or the purblind can see that sugar in the grape and yeast on the skins is a divine idea, not a human one. Man's part in the process consists of honest and prudent management of the work that God has begun. Something underhanded has to be done to grape juice to keep it from running its appointed course. Witness the teetotaling communion service. Most Protestants, I suppose, imagine that it is part of the true Reformed religion. But have they considered that, for noneteen centuries after the institution of the Eucharist, wine was the only element available for the sacrament? Do they serious envision St. Paul or Calvin or Luther opening bottles of Welch's Grape Juice in the sacristy before the service? Luther, at least, would turn over in his grave. The WCTU version of the Lord's Supper is a bare 100 years old. Grape juice was no commercially available until the discovery of pasteurization; and, unless I am mistaken, it was Mr. Welch himself (an ardent total abstainer) who persuaded American Protestantism to abandon what the Lord obviously thought rather kindly of. That much damage done, however, the itch for consistency took over with a vengance. Even the Lord's own delight was explained away. One of the most fanciful pieces of exegesis I ever read began by maintaining that the Greek word for wine, as used in the Gospels, meant many other things than wine. The commentator cited, as I recall, *grape juice* for one meaning, and *raisin paste* for another. He inclined, ultimately, toward the latter. I suppose that such people are blessed with reverent minds which prevent them from drawing irreverent conclusions. I myself, however, could never resist the temptation to read raisin paste for wine in the story of the Miracle of Cana. "When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made raisin paste...he said unto the bridegroom, `Every man at the beginning doth set forth good raisin paste, and when men have well drunk [*eaten?*--the text is no doubt corrupt], then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good raisin paste until now.'" Does it not whet your apetite for the critical *omnia opera* of such an author, where he will freely have at the entire length and breadth of Scripture? Can you not see his promised land flowing with peanut butter and jelly; his apocalypse, in which the great whore Babylon is given the cup of the ginger ale of the feirceness of the wrath of God? Capon has also written two other cookbooks in much the same vein, Food For Thought and Party Spirit (in which he asks the question What makes a successful party?). John Hobson AT&T Bell Labs Naperville, IL (312) 979-7293 ihnp4!ihuxq!amigo2