The Supper of the Lamb

An Episcopal priest sits down to write a cookbook and produces a book about attention instead. Capon spends a whole chapter cutting one onion — turning it, smelling it, looking at the wet rings of it — and by the end of those pages the argument has been made without ever being stated: the world is not a set of raw materials, it is a set of particular things, and the only honest response to a particular thing is to notice it.

Around that sits a real recipe. Lamb for eight, four times, stretched down to a supper for four and then to soup — the household economics of a priest with a large family and no money, written without a shred of apology. The technical instruction is genuine and still works. It is also, page for page, some of the funniest writing about food anyone has done.

Capon's word for the failure he is arguing against is inattention, and his cure is not restraint but appetite. He is against the diet-and-guilt reading of pleasure, against food as fuel, and against the idea that the spiritual life happens somewhere other than the kitchen. The last chapter is a benediction over a table. It is not a metaphor.