The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

PREFACE

Once upon a time, there was a musician who complained that half the notes he wanted to play were not on the piano. They lay, he claimed, between the keys where he could never get at them. Accordingly, he took up fiddling, which has no such limitations, and lived happily ever after.

This is a book on cooking; but like the musician, it concentrates more on the cracks and interstices of the culinary keyboard than on the conventional notes themselves. It, too, involves considerable fiddling around—some of it rather low, but some of it very high indeed. Nevertheless, I commend it to you in all seriousness. From it, you may learn things you never knew, or be confirmed in prejudices you have always held—or even come away with a recipe or two to add to your collection. In any case, you will find it a leisurely and unhurried book: The outlandish recipe with which it begins lasts the whole work through and provides, not so much an outline, as a fixed star under which the length and breadth of cooking is explored.

As I look it over in its finished form, two matters seem to require a word of explanation. For the first, only those recipes which fit logically within the framework of the book occur in the text itself. All the others have been assembled in the appendix in the usual order, together with page references to the ones previously given. No recipes, however, have been included for mere completeness’ stuffy sake: I have given you only what I know and like. It is, after all, my book.

The second matter is the fact that I seem never to have settled in my mind the question of the sex of the reader. Some of my comments are obviously only for women’s ears; others will make little sense except to men. I thought for a while about going through the book and straightening this out, but decided against it. It is just such narrow-mindedness about sex that has nearly deprived us of the heights and depths of the sexuality which is our glory. I offer it to you, therefore, as the first androgynous cookbook and spare myself the labor of revision. We are all true men—or women—here. Vive la difference, and let it lie where it falls.

Port Jefferson, New York

August 1968

ONE

Ingredients

Let me begin without ceremony.

LAMB FOR EIGHT PERSONS FOUR TIMES

In addition to one iron pot, two sharp knives, and four heads of lettuce, you will need the following:

FOR THE WHOLE

1 leg of lamb (The largest the market will provide. If you are no good with a kitchen saw, have the chops and the shank cut through. Do not, however, let the butcher cut it up. If he does, you will lose eight servings and half the fun.)

FOR THE PARTS

I (A)

Olive oil (olive oil)

Garlic (fresh)

Onions, carrots, mushrooms, and parsley

Salt, pepper (freshly ground), bay leaf, marjoram

Stock (any kind but ham; water only in desperation)

Wine (dry red—domestic or imported—as decent as possible)

Broad noodles (or spaetzle, potatoes, rice, or toast)

I (B)

Olive oil (again)

Garlic

Onions

Salt, pepper (keep the mill handy), and thyme (judiciously).

Oregano is also possible, but it is a little too emphatic when

you get to III.

Wine (dry white—even French Vermouth—but not Sherry. Save

that. Or drink it while you cook.)

II

Spinach (a lot)

Cheese (grated: Parmesan or Cheddar; or perhaps Feta—any-

thing with a little sharpness and snap)

Mayonnaise (not dietetic and not sweet)

Sherry (only a drop, but Spanish)

Bread (homemade; two loaves) and butter (or margarine, if

you must)

III

Oil (peanut oil, if you have any; otherwise olive)

3 eggs

Onions

Shredded cabbage (bean sprouts, if you have money to burn)

Sherry (if you have any left)

Stock (as before, but only a little)

Rice (cooked, but not precooked)

Soy sauce (domestic only in desperation)

IV

Onions, carrots, celery, turnip

Oil, fat, or butter

Barley (or chick-peas or dried beans—or all three)

Water

Salt, pepper, and parsley (rosemary?)

(Macaroni and shredded cabbage are also possible. A couple

of tomatoes give a nice color.)

If prepared correctly, it is all delicious.

Permit me now to wipe my hands and introduce myself. I am an author who has always intended to write about cooking, but who has never gotten started in a way that didn’t carry him out of the field in two paragraphs or less. This time, as you can see, I have outwitted the muse. My beginning, if confusing, is the most auspicious thus far.

Next, my qualifications.

First, I am an amateur. If that strikes you as disappointing, consider how much in error you are, and how the error is entirely of your own devising. At its root lies an objection to cookbooks written by non-professionals (an objection, by the way, which I consider perfectly valid, and congratulate you upon). It does not, however, apply here. Amateur and nonprofessional are not synonyms. The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers— amateurs—it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral—it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness.

In such a situation, the amateur—the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy—is just the man you need. More than that, whether you think you need him or not, he is a man who is bound, by his love, to speak. If he loves Wisdom or the Arts, so much the better for him and for all of us. But if he loves only the way meat browns or onions peel, if he delights simply in the curds of his cheese or the color of his wine, he is, by every one of those enthusiasms, commanded to speak. A silent lover is one who doesn’t know his job.

Therefore, the man who said beauty is in the eye of the beholder was on the right track, even if he seemed a bit weak on the objectivity of beauty. He may well have been a solipsist who doubted the reality of everything outside himself, or one of those skeptics who thinks that no valid judgments are possible—that no knife can in reality be pronounced sharp, nor any custard done to perfection. It doesn’t matter. Like Caiaphas, he spoke better than he knew. The real world which he doubts is indeed the mother of loveliness, the womb and matrix in which it is conceived and nurtured; but the loving eye which he celebrates is the father of it. The graces of the world are the looks of a woman in love; without the woman they could not be there at all; but without her lover, they would not quicken into loveliness.

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits—witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little, and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling.

Or, conclusively, peel an orange. Do it lovingly—in perfect quarters like little boats, or in staggered exfoliations like a flat map of the round world, or in one long spiral, as my grandfather used to do. Nothing is more likely to become garbage than orange rind; but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.

That, you know, is why the world exists at all. It remains outside the cosmic garbage can of nothingness, not because it is such a solemn necessity that nobody can get rid of it, but because it is the orange peel hung on God’s chandelier, the wishbone in His kitchen closet. He likes it; therefore, it stays. The whole marvelous collection of stones, skins, feathers, and string exists because at least one lover has never quite taken His eye off it, because the Dominus vivificans has his delight with the sons of men.

But enough. The amateur is vindicated; let me proceed with my other qualifications.

For the second one, put down that I like food. As a child, I disliked fish, eggs, and oatmeal, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. My tastes are now catholic, if not omnivorous. My children call me the walking garbage pail. (On my own terms, of course, I refuse the epithet: All that I take is stored lovingly in an ample home—it becomes not waste, but waist. On their meaning, however, I let it stand: I am willing to try anything more than once.)

Admittedly, there are some delicacies that give me pause— prairie oysters, for example, or the eye of the calf in a tête de veau. But since I have never tasted them, my apprehension may be only the disenchantment wrought by distance. Even the surf is frightening when you lie in bed and think about it. In any case, it is part of my creed that there are almost no foods which, given the right cook, cannot be found delectable. Just so long as they are not corrupt—no, that is too sweeping: It will cost me pheasant and venison—just so long as they are not gracelessly corrupt, there is, somewhere in the world, an eye that can conceive them in loveliness, and a recipe that can deliver the goods. I am convinced that even shoe tongues, if cooked provençale or à la mode de Caen, would be more than sufferable.

Third qualification: I like drink. Without any exceptions of time, place, or circumstance, man and boy, I have never tasted wine or spirit for which I could not find a kind word or at least an hour’s culinary employment. (I have tasted some pretty mean stuff; but with enough garlic in the recipe, a show of decency is usually possible—anything is better than water in a stew.) To the best of my recollection, I have never thrown away a bottle of anything. If wine is too bad, it can be used to cut vinegar for salads; and there is no spirit so poor but that a stronger one cannot be used to cover it. In extremis, bitters will absolve anything.

Admittedly, there are spirits so pronounced that they are unrepentant. Chief among them is marc, or grappa-brandy distilled from the leavings of the vintage. As it happens, though, I have no desire to cover it with anything. I find it delectable—full of nostalgia and the remembrance of the first afternoon on which I drank it. It is redolent of earth and stems and the resurrected soul of the grape, all combined with an overpowering suggestion of freshly painted radiators in a shoe store—which, you will concede, must be the very essence of unforgettability.

Every rule has its exception, however. While I have never thrown any liquor away, there is one bottle in my house which, after ten years, is still half full. It contains a synthetic Kirsch manufactured by an insecticide company (sic). (Precisely.) It was given to me, seven-eighths full, by a chemist friend who was employed by the firm at the time. He drank just enough to discharge his obligation to his superiors and then with a straight face bestowed the rest on me. It was purely and simply terrible, and ten years have not altered that judgment. Every now and then, however, I take another sip, partly to remind myself of what a paragon of awfulness it is, but partly to prove that for all its faults, it is still not undrinkable. In a real world, nothing is infinitely bad. My bottle of bogus Kirsch bears witness that there is no bottomless pit in any earthly subject—that to be good or bad is not as much of an achievement as to be at all. Even the devil, insofar as he exists, is good. What he does wrong with his existence is all small compared with what God does right about him. The Kirsch in my closet is a little hell; by an imitation of the divine courtesy, its being is precious to me, even when its manners are not.

My remaining qualifications—peculiarities, if you prefer—follow more briefly.

On cookbooks. I have Henri-Paul Pellaprat on my shelf, but Fannie Farmer in my heart. You may locate my culinary politics slightly to the right of the latter, but well to the left of the former. In my own terms, I describe myself as an Anglican, or moderately high-church, cook.

On equipment. I dislike gadgets. The thought of an electric knife short-circuits all the connections in my brain. I do not collect corkscrews, but I have a mania for sharp knives (though not for knife sharpeners) and for large pots. I own enough ironware to anchor a twenty-eight-foot cruiser in a twentyknot wind. To the best of my knowledge, nothing in my house is coated with Teflon.

On the act of cooking. I despise recipes that promise results without work, or success without technique. I have eaten too many short-cut piecrusts to trust anyone who tells women that pastry made with oil is just as good as the hard kind. Mere facility, of course, is no more a guarantee of good taste in cooking than it is in music; but without it, nothing good is possible at all. Technique must be acquired, and, with technique, a love of the very processes of cooking. No artist can work simply for results; he must also like the work of getting them. Not that there isn’t a lot of drudgery in any art—and more in cooking than in most—but that if a man has never been pleasantly surprised at the way custard sets or flour thickens, there is not much hope of making a cook of him. Pastry and confectionery will remain forever beyond him, and he will probably never even be able to get gravy to come out the same twice. Interest in results never conquers boredom with process.

For all that, however, boredom is not unconquerable. Delight in the act of cooking is one of the oldest and nearest things in the world. We have not made mud pies for nothing. If a cook is willing simply to look at what he is doing, there is hope. And if he should ever be fascinated by the fact that cornstarch and flour do the same thing differently, there is more than hope. There is a slight but distinct foretaste of victory. Chaudfroid of boned squab, fong wong gai, and paklava are just over the next line of hills.

Finally, my prejudices. I avoid, when possible, mild hams, New York State wines, thin bacon, vodka, and all diets. I think turkey is, if not overrated, at least overserved. I enjoy cocktails (other than cute ones) but I dislike them before dinner, and think them gauche after. (Some of them, like the martini, are marvelous inventions, but man has yet to find a civilized use for them.) I am also against margarine, prepared foods, broiled grapefruit, marshmallow sweet potatoes, and whipped cream in pressurized cans.

On the other hand, I am wild about peanut butter and canned fruit cocktail (even the kind that tastes like the can). I will eat as much process cheese as I am handed, and I have been known to put mayonnaise on cooked pears. I am also a notorious stealer of Franco-American spaghetti from the plates of unsuspecting children, and (probably) the foremost canned ravioli maven on the east coast.

Having thus insulted not only my home state, but also the standard menu of American Christendom, and the drinking habits of an entire nation—having, in short, alienated all possible readers (those who do not find me a snob will call me a boor)—I think we are ready to begin. Continue at your own risk; you have been more than adequately warned. I am an excuse for a cook, writing a book that is an excuse for … .But why should I warn you about everything?

TWO

The First Session

Let me concede a point to the reader. You no doubt feel that, whatever else may be forthcoming in this book, I owe you at least an attempt to make good on the obviously pretentious and apparently ordinary recipe with which I began. You are right; I intend to address myself to it immediately. I must ask, however, that you permit me to do it at my own rate. These things take time.

For the moment, therefore, set aside the leg of lamb. If you are a hardy soul, and do not mind getting cold fingers cutting up meat, return it to the refrigerator; alternatively, if comfort is a consideration with you, let it warm up a bit on the kitchen counter. In any case, we do not need it yet. I must teach you first how to deal with onions.

Select three or four medium-size onions—I have in mind the common, or yellow, onion normally available in the supermarket. The first movement (IA) of my recipe is simply a stew; small white onions, while more delicate as a vegetable in their own right, are a nuisance to cut up for inclusion in something else. The labor of peeling is enlarged beyond reason, and the attempt to slice up the small slippery balls you are left with can be painful.

Next take one of the onions (preferably the best-looking), a paring knife, and a cutting board and sit down at the kitchen table. Do not attempt to stand at a counter through these opening measures. In fact, to do it justice, you should arrange to have sixty minutes or so free for this part of the exercise. Admittedly, spending an hour in the society of an onion may be something you have never done before. You feel, perhaps, a certain resistance to the project. Please don’t. As I shall show later, a number of highly profitable members of the race have undertaken it before you. Onions are excellent company.

Once you are seated, the first order of business is to address yourself to the onion at hand. (You must firmly resist the temptation to feel silly. If necessary, close the doors so no one will see you; but do not give up out of embarrassment.) You will note, to begin with, that the onion is a thing, a being, just as you are. Savor that for a moment. The two of you sit here in mutual confrontation. Together with knife, board, table, and chair, you are the constituents of a place in the highest sense of the word. This is a Session, a meeting, a society of things.

You have, you see, already discovered something: The uniqueness, the placiness, of places derives not from abstractions like location, but from confrontations like man-onion. Erring theologians have strayed to their graves without learning what you have come upon. They have insisted, for example, that heaven is no place because it could not be defined in terms of spatial co-ordinates. They have written off man’s eternal habitation as a state of mind. But look what your onion has done for you: It has given you back the possibility of heaven as a place without encumbering you with the irrelevancy of location.

This meeting between the two of you could be moved to a thousand different latitudes and longitudes and still remain the session it started out to be. Indeed, by the motions of the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe (if that can be defined), every place—every meeting of matter —becomes a kind of cosmic floating crap game: Location is accidental to its deepest meaning. What really matters is not where we are, but who-what real beings—are with us. In that sense, heaven, where we see God face to face through the risen flesh of Jesus, may well be the placiest of all places, as it is the most gloriously material of all meetings. Here, perhaps, we do indeed see only through a glass darkly; we mistake one of the earthly husks of place for the heart of its mattering.

But back to the onion itself. As nearly as possible now, try to look at it as if you had never seen an onion before. Try, in other words, to meet it on its own terms, not to dictate yours to it. You are convinced, of course, that you know what an onion is. You think perhaps that it is a brownish yellow vegetable, basically spherical in shape, composed of fundamentally similar layers. All such prejudices should be abandoned. It is what it is, and your work here is to find it out.

For a start, therefore, notice that your onion has two ends: a lower, now marked only by the blackish gray spot from which the root filaments descended into the earth; and an upper, which terminates (unless your onions are over the hill, or have begun to sprout because you store them under a leaky sink trap) in a withered peak of onion paper. Note once again what you have discovered: an onion is not a sphere in repose. It is a linear thing, a bloom of vectors thrusting upward from base to tip. Stand your onion, therefore, root end down upon the board and see it as the paradigm of life that it is—as one member of the vast living, gravity-defying troop that, across the face of the earth, moves light-and airward as long as the world