Category Archives: quotes

RFC makes one of nature’s marvels.

books, food and cooking, quotes, Robert Farrar Capon

In the chapter titled “Living Water” in The Supper of the Lamb, in which we learn how to make Brown Stock and White Stock, Robert Farrar Capon continues, “…you are now ready for the really astonishing part of the exercise.” It’s the lead-in to another of the recipes that are scattered throughout the first two-thirds of The Supper of the Lamb, with more of them concentrated in the recipe section at the back.

Many of the recipes seem a little outdated now, but I doubt I’d have taken to the foods featured in Supper even in 1969 when it was first published, because I was just learning to live on my own and to eat rice and vegetables. Our ferial eating in those days was sparser of meat and wine than RFC could have imagined, and Diet for a Small Planet was the go-to cookbook. It would be another ten or fifteen years before I bought my first leg of lamb.

Nowadays I am well supplied with recipes for most everything I could possibly want to cook, but Capon’s next suggestion sounds so strange and appealing that I think I will have to try it eventually. If I had to choose between meat and butter, two foods at the top of my list of culinary loves, I guess I’m just sensible enough to choose meat, and when RFC tells me I can capture its “heart and soul” in my kitchen, I can’t resist his encouragement to create something of which he also claims, “…you will find yourself whittling off little pieces to dissolve on your tongue at odd times of the day.”

I’ll just give you the whole recipe here, because though we no doubt can find a version online, I naturally like the style of this one. It will be my last “meaty” post on this book, because in my church we are beginning our Lenten fast from meat very soon, and it’s time for me to turn the page.

HOMEMADE MEAT GLAZE
(Meat Extract)

Take the strainerful of bones and scraps [from which you have made the stock] and put them back into the stockpot. Add any scraps of meat you have around: poultry, pork, veal — even leftover hamburger — just stay away from lamb and ham. Meat extract can, of course, be made from the used bones alone, but anything that brings more natural gelatin to the pot is welcome. Cover everything deeply with cold water, adding no salt at all, and boil for two or three hours more.

That done, strain once again, this time into a large saucepan. Discard the bones. (They have been worked to death. Even the dog will look down his nose at them now.)

Boil the contents of the pan hard, skimming the froth from the top now and then, until the liquid is drastically reduced. When it is down to about a pint, transfer it to a smaller pan and boil on, over slightly reduced heat. Continue boiling until it reaches the consistency of a thick, blackish-brown syrup (half a cup, give or take a little). Pour this into a heatproof jar, cool, and refrigerate.

You now have, perhaps for the first time in your life, real meat extract — one of nature’s marvels. It is, of course, highly concentrated gelatin, but it has been imbued with the heart and soul of meat. Its taste is beautiful. Moreover, in spite of the fact that no speck of salt went into all those quarts of water the second time around, it is salted to perfection. Its consistency is, admittedly, a little forbidding; It is not unlike a young and tender shoe heel. Refrigerated, it will keep in this state for weeks; but, obligingly enough, it melts at the temperature of the mouth. If you are any lover of food at all, you will find yourself whittling off little pieces to dissolve on your tongue at odd times of the day.

Use it ad lib. Its general effect is to give a sauce soul and substance without overpowering the proper flavor of the dish. Experiment. It improves almost anything. A tablespoonful melted in warm Hollandaise imparts a certain roundness and resonance to what is sometimes an excessively light and lemony sauce. A piece dropped on top of a hot fried egg (plus a dash of Tabasco, if you are up to it) is delightful. And in the form of Colbert Butter, it is the perfect accompaniment to steaks, chops, fish, or poultry — not to mention a piece of matzoh at three in the afternoon.

RFC considers blood and sacrifice.

books, church, food and cooking, nature, poetry, quotes,

I owe you something more, however — something darker — on the subject of meat: The minor leads inexorably to the monumental. Lamb has set our feet in a large room indeed. Man not only dines: he also kills and sacrifices. The room in which he relishes the animal orders lies between slaughterhouse and temple. There are death’s heads at each end of the table of the world.

In The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection Robert Farrar Capon introduces what is perhaps the most poetic chapter with this paragraph. He explores our human proclivity to hunting and butchering and the Jewish temple sacrifices in a long poem that I mostly didn’t have the patience for, though I liked its division into sections named for the categories of the car game:

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral;
Testing the textures of creation,
savoring the styles of its coinherence.

After describing the neat and clean Mineral parts of our world, he moves on to the Vegetable, “the kingdom of seed, birth, life….And for the first time,/ the reek of death.” But

Onions die quietly,
Cabbages shed no blood;
All plants forgive:
By the waters that comprise them
They wash man’s hands
And let him walk away.

Eating vegetables is so innocent. But Capon doesn’t want to ignore the reality of our place as carnivores, so he unapologetically moves on to the Animal kingdom

each man owning the honest interchange by which he steals his livelihood; each woman’s hand intimate with the crack of wrung neck and severed spine….

It is not possible or even desirable to distill the writer’s poem into a fully satisfying theology, but I wanted my readers to know that he does satisfy himself with the mysteries of God’s plan of salvation, of which the temple sacrifices were a foreshadowing of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.

The world awaits
The unimaginable union
By which the Lion lifts Himself Lamb slain
And, Priest and Victim,
Brings
The City
Home.

Other posts in this series are:
RFC is the man we need.
RFC begins with the meat.

RFC begins with the meat.

books, food and cooking, quotes,

The book into which I am dipping to give you several tastes is Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon. The title refers on one level to the four meals he will show us how to make, for eight people at each sitting, out of one leg of lamb. As I said in my first post, it’s not these recipes that most interested me about the book, but they form the loose structure around which the author gathers all his personality and wisdom.

He tells us that “Lamb for Eight Persons Four Times is not simply a recipe. It is a way of life.” A way that has us deliberately creating leftovers so that for most suppers we can use little bits of our meat and make it go a long way. I have a lot of experience with this kind of cooking, and I appreciate Capon’s undergirding philosophy, that there are times to feast, and they are not every day.

He has a term for the everyday: ferial eating. I found in the dictionary that it’s a church term for a weekday on which no feast is celebrated. Capon’s first principle for this ordinary type of eating is: Never serve anybody a whole anything. Because “appetite rises to meet food supply,” and we just don’t need to eat large amounts every day.

Every dish in the ferial cuisine, however, provides a double or treble delight: Not only is the body nourished and the palate pleased, the mind is intrigued by the triumph of ingenuity over scarcity — by the making of slight materials into a considerable matter.

I have to admit that in the days when our feasts were rare, it was easier for us all to stay slim and healthy. For several years now, cooking for only two people, I’ve probably been serving way too many whole items, and I also have so many leftovers from which to create more yummy meals that I hardly have enough cold storage for them. The type of lifestyle where the cook shops nearly every day and prepares what is fresh in the shops in that season seems to be what I should aim for.

Still, I very much appreciate that Capon introduces us early on to his idea of the creative and resourceful cook, who knows how to season and sauce her humble food so that it’s often more interesting and delectable than the festal roast.

Just tonight my man and I enjoyed for the second time (as I’d ended up with a big potful) a soup that was made according to these methods, using the leftover lamb roast from Christmas as well as the leftover liquid it was cooked in, which included a good amount of wine, with rosemary and garlic. Not too much meat was left, but I added some lentils and vegetables, and Mr. Glad could not help feeling it quite unfair that he should be eating such amazing food when so many people never get stuff like this. (The stew in the photo is from a previous and different ferial meal.)

Our author chef carves his (large) leg of lamb into parts to make first a stew, and then three other ferial meals, including a casserole with spinach, a stir-fry, and a soup. His recipe for stew includes an injunction against flouring the meat before browning it:

…it is the point at which nine tenths of the stews in the world go wrong. The trouble is that few cooks realize how long it takes to brown meat thoroughly….People who flour their meat and brown it in butter are entitled to their religion….I think it fair to note, however, that such people have never gotten around to browning meat. All they have done is darkened some butter and scorched a little flour. The meat inside remains untouched. Accordingly, their stews never know the savor of the true burnt offering; in their haste they settle for the dubious pleasure of eating charred wheat.

Unfortunately my mother taught me to flour my meat and it was only a few years ago that I learned better. RFC also gives advice about liquid:

A word about the liquid itself. Unless you are physically prevented from doing so, always use stock or wine, especially in a ferial stew. We are working here with an admitted minimum of meat. To add water to it is to strain it, to demand of it a cruel exertion, to have it arrive at the table worn out with overwork. This is no festal dish with enough meat in it to make meals for a week. This is a poor dish, whose meat is to be pitied and spared. Accordingly, any liquid that goes into it should be of a charitable and kindly sort…which knows how much more blessed it is to give than to receive. Stock then; not water. And, no matter what else, wine. A gallon of good California red in the kitchen closet will do more for your cooking than all the books in the world.

Capon has more opinions about wine, and the philosophy of meat-eating, “little invisible spooks” (Can you guess what those might be??), and the “higher session” of The Supper of the Lamb, and that is why I need a few more posts to share my gleanings. Coming soon!

The first post in this series is RFC is the man you need.