WHAT'S COOKING

Puritan pies and decadent dinners (Julian Barnes, The Guardian, 6/14/2003)

In 1923, Joseph Conrad's wife Jessie published A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House. Her husband's preface begins like this:

"Of all the books produced since the remote ages by human talents and industry those only that treat of cooking are, from a moral point of view, above suspicion. The intention of every other piece of prose may be discussed and even mistrusted, but the purpose of a cookery book is one and unmistakable. Its object can conceivably be no other than to increase the happiness of mankind....

"Good cooking is a moral agent.... The Noble Red Man was a mighty hunter, but his wives had not mastered the art of conscientious cookery - and the consequences were deplorable. The Seven Nations around the Great Lakes and the Horse tribes of the plains were but one vast prey to raging dyspepsia... [and] the domestic life of their wigwams was clouded by the morose irritability which follows the consumption of ill-cooked food."...

Philip Larkin believed "Poetry is an affair of sanity" ... Cooking too is an affair of sanity - even literally so. Stella Bowen once knew a poet in Montparnasse who had suffered a nervous breakdown and been incarcerated in a clinic. After his release, he lived in a room overlooking the street, opposite a boulangerie. The poet dated his recovery from the moment when, gazing out of his window, he saw a woman going in to buy bread. He felt, he told Bowen, "unutterably envious of the interest she was taking in the choosing of a loaf"....

"The intimate influence of conscientious cookery," [Conrad] wrote, "promotes the serenity of mind, the graciousness of thought, and that indulgent view of our neighbour's failings which is the only genuine form of optimism. Those are its titles to our reverence."

There's nothing more conservative than a home-cooked dinner. There's nothing more libertarian than a microwave oven. It is these gustatory predilections, perhaps, that are most responsible for divisions within the Republican Party. Like the Noble Red Man, doesn't it seem that the good folks at LewRockwell.com are dyspeptic? Posted by Paul Jaminet at June 18, 2003 8:37 AM