Word: capon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...author of this hedonistic, gormandizing prayer is a Christian clergyman of serene faith. For 20 years, Robert Farrar Capon, 43, has been an Episcopal priest in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an old Long Island shipbuilding town on the edge of the Manhattan commuter belt. He lives with his wife Peg, their six children, two cats (named Anthony and Bartholomew) and a nondescript dog in a century-old house adjoining his small white clapboard church. At dinner time, the sweet cooking aromas wafting out of the old rectory hint at the true nature of a man who is no ordinary country vicar...
...Capon (who pronounces his name like that of the fowl) is not only a witty and urbane minister but a highly accomplished chef; his latest book, The Supper of the Lamb (Doubleday; $5.95), is currently one of the country's bestselling new volumes on cookery. It is, however, something more than a skillful dissertation on kitchen arts. As the religiously symbolic title indicates, Capon also offers the reader a gentle taste of theology-quite painless, and spiced with high humor and style...
...Smacking Enthusiasm. The Lamb of the title is, of course, the paschal lamb-not only the animal eaten on the occasion of Passover but the Lamb of God, meaning Christ. Capon's lamb recipes are quite earthy and practical; they offer budget-saving ways of serving eight people (four times) with a single leg of lamb. But something more important is bubbling in Capon's pot. In the practical process of relating a simple recipe he is also reflecting on a profound idea: that ordinary materials used in everyday life can be in a very deep sense signs...
...Capon moves with ease from the mundane to the divine, and back again. He can write about food with lip-smacking enthusiasm; at the same time, he soars far above standard cookbook prosody. His loving description of how to peel and cut an onion, for example, is a poetically existential commentary on being and creation: "Reflect how little smell there is to a whole onion-how it is the humors and sauces of being that give the world flavor, how all life came from the sea, and how, without water, nothing can hold a soul...
Spiritual though his purpose is, Capon relishes the secular. He regards any meal as incomplete without a good wine. Would St. Paul, Calvin or Luther, he asks, have opened "bottles of Welch's Grape Juice in the sacristy before a service?" He dismisses synthetic foods as almost blasphemous and his gorge rises on the subject of dieting: "When you fast, fast; when you feast, feast." Neither prim nor prudish, he considers women, like pastries, a special delight: "A woman is like an aging strudel-not always crisp on the outside, but always good on the inside...