“We are not simply the users of creation;
– Robert Capon
we are, all of us, called to be its offerers.”
This is the essence of Robert Farrar Capon’s book, The Supper of the Lamb. Part cooking, part philosophy, part theology, it is a book like none other. It is a serendipitous fusion of poetry, humor, social commentary, history, recipes, and stories, and it envelops the senses like the flavorful sauces he so loves.
This review was difficult for me to write. Every chapter held so many treasures, and so much wisdom and humor that to try to give a simple overview was difficult, much less making the choice of which of the many well-loved quotes to share.
Perhaps it’s better to start with what it is not.
This book is not a guilt-inducing solicitation to follow any certain health fad, to raise more of your own food, or to sprout your own grain for flour.
It is not an admonition to make every meal preparation a beautiful zen moment. Sometimes dinner has to be made, and made quickly, and it’s not pretty, and there is no sparkling glass of wine on the counter and Frank Sinatra softly playing in the background.
It is not a beautiful hardcover cookbook with gorgeous displays of food and flowers and sparkling glasses on artsy wooden tables and boho blankets draped over chipped wooden chairs. And frankly, in an increasingly image-obsessed culture, it was refreshing to read simple black and white paragraphs that made me look at life through the lens of someone else’s mind instead of the lens of their camera.
And though written by an Episcopalian priest, it is not a self-righteous, religious book admonishing us to think less of our physical bread and more on the bread of the soul. As Capon himself says, “this is not a book in which cooking is press-ganged into providing pious little analogies to higher truths, nor is it one that allows the long arm of theology to meddle in any way with the proper, earthy pleasures of cooking and eating.”
What I eventually realized was that this book is about a way of life. This book is about Selah – a word I love.
This book, The Supper of the Lamb, is about embracing the full spectrum of what it means to engage in the necessary and constant act of feeding the human body – in seasons of beauty and in seasons of plainness; in seasons of calm and rest when cooking is a delight, and in seasons of chaos and busyness when getting food on the table is not delightful; in seasons of plenty and in seasons of scarcity.
It’s a book about paying attention.
Take an onion, for example. I don’t think I’ll ever cut an onion in the same mindless manner again after reading his chapter on the theology of an onion. Yes, an entire chapter is devoted to the slicing of an onion. But what a pleasure to read. Capon insists that inattention to the world around us costs us dearly, and that viewing things only in light of what they do for us is what divorces us from reality. And what is this reality? The earthly, physical, wonderful reality of a complex, layered, and very physical world.
Capon has this to say: “There is a habit that plagues many so-called spiritual minds: they imagine that matter and spirit are somehow at odds with each other and that the right course for human life is to escape from the world of matter into some finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller) realm. To me, that is a crashing mistake – and it is, above all, a theological mistake. Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions, and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; God, who at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding “Good!” over his own concoctions.”
It is about the delight of simply being, and the delight our Creator takes in our being-ness.
But back to the onion. It now lies in pieces on our cutting board, its sweet and biting juice infusing the skin on our fingers. And what this fascinating priest/chef/artist has done, with the contemplation of this one onion, is given us an awareness of the mysteries hidden within all life forms. Capon writes:
“Beneath this gorgeous paradigm of unnecessary being lies the Act by which it exists. You have just now reduced it to its parts, shivered it into echoes, and pressed it to a memory…. Hopefully you will never again argue that the solidities of the world are mere matters of accident, creatures of air and darkness, temporary and meaningless shapes out of nothing. …. [God] likes onions, therefore, they are. The fit, the colors, the smell, the tensions, the tastes, the textures, the lines, the shapes are a response, not to some forgotten decree that there may as well be onions as turnips, but to His present delight – His intimate and immediate joy in all you have seen, and in the the thousand other wonders you do not even suspect.”
Mary Oliver would approve.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
– Mary Oliver
Before you picture a kitchen where the cook sits in a continual zen contemplation, staring at vegetables and fauna, never fear. Capon does not advocate this level of in-depth contemplation for every cooking act, for that would be exhausting and impossible. I’m reminded of something Byron wrote: “There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?” So there can be no such thing as a life of continual contemplation. Capon would agree, I have no doubt. For now, having been taught by one onion, he feels no need to wax poetic about the remaining onions. He instructs us to forthwith dispatch the rest of the onions into the cooking pot, and his recipe for ‘Lamb for eight persons, four times’, continues.
This recipe – Lamb for eight persons four times – is the foundation of the book, and while it is rather unorthodox, he uses it to show the rhythms of cooking, which mirror the rhythms of our lives. Rhythms that he calls festal and ferial.
What is festal and ferial cooking?
Festal – convivial; festive; gala. Festal cooking is the extraordinary, the special-occasion, the celebratory dinner or spectacular weekend brunch.
Ferial – everyday; weekday. Its root, feria, means ‘any day other than Sunday.’ It is what is referred to in liturgical language as ordinary time. Ferial does not mean tasteless, however. It may not be a gala dinner, but neither is it a crust-of-bread fast. Think steak dinner (festal) vs Beef Bourguignon (ferial). It consists of dishes which “take a little, cut it up small, and make it go a long way,” says Capon.
This is a lifestyle of simple, nourishing, daily meals followed by the occasional throw-all-caution-to-the-wind celebrations, interspersed with times of fasting.
Wait, fasting? you say. Yes. Capon shuns what he calls “the devilish cult of dieting.” Instead of religiously sticking to a daily diet, where deviations are viewed with guilt, his is a holistic approach to food that nurtures body, mind, and soul. It is this very rhythm – ferial and festal and fasting – that shows the most respect for our earth, our bodies, and our human relationships.
Take noodles for example. “The devilish cult of dieting,” says Capon, has demonized noodles. “No longer can we see such a thing as noodles as unique and delightful beings; they have become an abstract subject called highly caloric food.” Enter a dinner party scene, where the hostess is offering her lovingly-prepared homemade noodles:
The hostess beams and asks:
“What can we give you, Harry?
Large helping or small?”“If it’s all the same to you, Martha,
just a little of the Chicken Paprikash.
No noodles.
I’m counting calories.”
Living and eating with respect
He views this behavior as disrespectful – not only disrespectful to the hostess, but to the earth which produced the goodness that became this glorious dish, to the One who made it all and called it good, and also to a world that needs our joy. Yes, this world lacks much. It is incomplete, full of pain, injustice, discord, and pollution. And that is the reason we celebrate all that is excellent and delightful in it.
Capon says, “Let us fast, then – whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat. Festally, first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored. But both ways let us eat with a glad good will, and with a conscience formed by considerations of excellence, not by fear of Ghosts.”
While God gives me meat in due season
– Robert Capon
and the sensibilities with which to relish the gift,
I refuse to sit down to eat and rise up
only to have picked and fussed my way
through the goodness of the earth.
It is about savoring the ordinary, and reveling in the festal, with equal gladness of heart. For it is only the person who knows how to embrace the gifts of this world with joy and gratitude that will be able to embrace the gifts of the world beyond. “If will be precisely because we loved this Old Jerusalem of a world enough to bear it in our bones that its textures will ascend when we rise; it will be because our eyes have relished the earth that the colors of its countries will compel our hearts forever,” Capon writes.
He has a point. The earth offers mere glimpses of a beauty and glorious perfection beyond our comprehension. But if we cannot enjoy those glimpses here, how will we be able to enjoy the Presence of the One who first dreamed them into being?
We make idols of our concepts, but wisdom is born of wonder.
St. Gregory the Great
As you can see, this is no ordinary cookbook. Capon writes, “as you have no doubt gathered, the culinary philosophy of this book is heretical.” And at the half-way point, he says, “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 book is a piece of art.
Capon is an artist. He’s an artist with his words and with his kitchen and with his knives and with his sauces and his breads. He is the Andrea Bocceli of the kitchen. He taught me to see more, to see better, to appreciate, savor, and protect, as Linda Durham wrote in her memoir:
“Ravens taught me to pay attention.
– Linda Durham, Still Moving: a Memoir
The desert taught me to see.
Art and artists taught me to see more…
and better…
and to appreciate, savor, and protect.”
Capon writes this book from a place of respect for the limited supplies of the earth, respect for our hard-earned resources, and respect for the sacredness and brevity of life. It is about rhythm – life lived within the ebb and flow of the seasons. Words followed by silence. The glorious psalm and the Selah.
And oh, the sauces. It is worth reading the book for his sauces alone. “Hollandaise,” he writes, “is not one bit less a marvel than the Gothic arch, the computer chip, or a Bach fugue.”
This book reminded me of the lifestyles of my grandmothers, and their mothers and grandmothers. It used to be so natural and normal no one ever thought to write it down – these age-old kitchen habits of ritual stock-making and whole-food cooking; of enjoying everything in moderation instead of demonizing entire food groups. In a world where our recipes and meal planning have become increasingly dominated by social media influencers, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with all the beautiful women flaunting their beautiful and latest-health-fad options for breakfasts, lunches, snacks, dinners, and complicated sweets-substitutes concoctions. I tried it, for a while, but what ended up happening was that I felt like I spent most of my day in the kitchen, soaking, sprouting, fermenting, straining, drying, blending, and all the other things this lifestyle asked. I began to notice that food dominated my thinking to the extent that I was beginning to hate it.
If this is not you, and you genuinely love fiddling in the kitchen, or have figured out a good balance, my hat’s off to you. In my season of life, it didn’t work. I simply didn’t have the energy or inclination for it any longer.
Capon did something very different from the social media influencers. Instead of guilting me into cooking certain ways, he let me borrow his eyesight, and extended a hand with an offer to sink into the rhythms of a lifestyle we have forgotten. To dine with nourishing simplicity and whole-food cooking, to fast in season, and when the occasion calls for it to savor festival cooking with delight and a clear conscience.
There is so much more I could say, for he touches on so many things, but no words of mine can truly capture the delightful warmth of this book. Twenty minutes reading a chapter with a cup of tea in hand nourished my mind and heart better than twenty minutes of social media scrolling, and I re-entered the kitchen in a better frame of mind. I sincerely hope you get to read it sometime.
And now for a finishing touch, as a pat of butter finishes a sauce, here are a few of my favorite quotes from The Supper of the Lamb:
On paying attention:
“Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing. …. think how much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the insides of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses, and the juice of pine trees to realize he could turn them all into the first fiddle. No doubt his wife urged him to get up and do something useful.”
On knives:
“A woman with cleaver in mid-swing is no mere woman. She breaks upon the eye of the beholder as an epiphany of power, as mistress of a house in which only trifles may be trifled with – and in which she defines the trifles. A man who has seen women only as gentle arrangers of flowers has not seen all that women have to offer. Unsuspected majesties await him.”
On wine:
“One might have hoped that, with so gracious a creature as wine, even the most ardent religionists and secularists would have made an exception to their universal custom of missing the point of things. But alas, between teetotalism on the one hand and classifying it as an alcoholic beverage on the other, they have both lost the thread of delight… [It holds] sovereign power to turn evenings into occasions, to lift eating beyond nourishment to conviviality, and to bring the race, for a few hours at least, to that happy state where men are wise and women beautiful, and even one’s children begin to look promising.”
And my favorite:
“Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things. Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart’s astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder. Even more, they sit us down evening after evening, and in the company that forms around our dinner tables, they actually create our humanity.”
Another book I would enjoy borrowing from your library 😏