The Spirit of Food

Thirty-four essays on food and faith, with the writers' own recipes printed among them. Lauren Winner's essay is called "Fitting Food," Luci Shaw's "Soul Food," and Jeanne Murray Walker writes on the communion of saints. Chef Gary LeBlanc's, "Go Feed People," comes out of cooking for people in the aftermath of a disaster. Leslie Leyland Fields, who put the book together and fishes commercially in Alaska, closes it with how to make the perfect loaf of bread.

A good part of the collection is about going without: an essay on a self-imposed food-stamp fast, one called "Fasting toward Home," one on the joy of the fast, one titled simply "Famine." The rest is feasting, and the span of contributor is wide. Alexander Schmemann and Andre Dubus, both dead well before the book was made, sit alongside little-known writers. Robert Farrar Capon's onion is in here, and so is a new essay on what Capon's Supper of the Lamb taught its author to cook. Wendell Berry's "The Pleasures of Eating" is reprinted here too.

It works for a reader who wants the theology of eating handled by people who actually cook, and it is a natural companion to Capon. The reservation is the standard anthology problem, and this one has it badly: across thirty-four pieces the quality swings hard, the reprinted classics outclass much of the new work around them, and the recipes range from genuinely useful to decorative. The theological span is narrower than the subject, and leans American Protestant.