The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection,
by Robert Farrar Capon
(Modern Library, US$20.00 / €17.50)
This has been a bad summer not just in Europe but also in North America. The lack of rain and the bleaching out of the vegetation has threatened food shortages for the coming winter. Such a summer underlines that in general we are so concerned about weight loss, calories and additives to processed food, that we all too often lose sight of the fact that we are lucky to have any food at all.
Or perhaps I should really say we are blessed, after all our ignorant misuse of the world around us, to have any food at all. The latest universal craze for açai bowls is evidence of this: these luscious berries which urbanites are everywhere gobbling up, harvested in Amazonia, where a crucial climatic region of the world is being relentlessly destroyed to make someone rich. A ghastly example of the poor of the world feeding the rich.
Insightful
The author of this interesting, entertaining and spiritually insightful book was an American Episcopalian priest and chef who died in 2013. He worked forty years in a parish in Port Jefferson, New York, as a full-time pastor.
He published his first book, Bed and Board, with his thoughts on Christian marriage today; yet sadly he left his ministry in 1977 as a result of his own divorce. This book stands out among the many religious and spiritual books he later wrote, was first published in 1969 to great success and was reprinted, yet it has taken more than two decades to come back into print.
Taste
A stray sentence from it will give potential readers a taste of what it contains: “We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great. That is the unconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God.”
Though some may have some disquiet about the title, recalling as it does a very popular book by a very different kind of writer, this is a serious yet amusing book about creation and how a Christian ought to approach it and enjoy it rather than corrupt it.
But these culinary reflections also reveal recipes that seem to be very eatable – this reviewer and his wife have not had time yet to try them all. But it is the thoughts of this clerical chef as he goes to work that are revealing, as in his description of cutting up an onion, an everyday task to which few other cooks ever give a thought. But an onion is an excellent example of the economy of providence. As a cook he was truly grateful for the daily bounty of bread because he made it. Those who cook partake in a special way in the creativity of man and nature that keep the world going around.
So take a break from Nigella and Jamie and all those others whose books about “good food” from Ballymaloe to Padstow crowd our kitchen shelves. Certainly the Lord will provide, but what we do with what He provides is just as important. Robert Farrar Capon puts the “good” back in “good food”.
