French Onion Soup

Onions are a thing of beauty, aren't they? No? You think they are too mundane to be beautiful? They have such a humble exterior, hiding away those lovely, thin layers.

In a passage I found so memorable in the book The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon writes about how to meditate on an onion. "Take one of the onion (preferably the best looking),... and sit down at the kitchen table.... 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.... Onions are excellent company."

parsley dumplings

I am reading a hilarious (and useful) book right now: The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. It was published in 1967 and has recently been reprinted in the Modern Library Food series, chosen by Ruth Reichl. It is both funny* and very thought-provoking. The author, Robert Farrar Capon, is a chef who is also an Anglican priest. The book "speaks not only about cooking, but... what cooking is about." And the last hundred pages are all recipes. He gives instructions about "ferial cooking", the ordinary day-to-day, economical cooking we do, as opposed to "festal cooking". It all fits in nicely with what I have been thinking about lately regarding meat: that it is to be treasured and used wisely.