Boards and a Book

In The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection, Robert Farrar Capon writes

Let me go further, therefore, and suggest that your cutting boards be numerous: a chopping block, if you can manage it, then a bread board, a fish board, and an onion board. Except for the chopping block, these can succeed each other in a kind of hierarchy. A new board is always a bread board; a retired bread board becomes a fish board (for filleting and skinning); and a retired fish board becomes and onion board. the principle is simple: At any given period in its life, a board will come into contact with nothing stronger than that for which it is named. A retired onion board, accordingly, becomes firewood.

I remembered the passage this morning while I was chopping onions on the board we use for all foods, and have for years. No doubt the rectory kitchens of Long Island, some of them anyway, had more room than our kitchen does. And certainly Capon had a more sensitive nose than I do--nearly everyone does, and he writes about his ability to smell peanut butter on the breath at ten paces or tobacco at twice that.

The Supper of the Lamb reminds me in some ways of Laurie Colwin's columns on cooking. I would be hard put to find a recipe that I followed or technique that I learned from it, yet the tone of common sense and the explanations of why one does this or that are encouraging. One reads, and may decide to try something new.

Capon was a priest of the Episcopal Church, and taught in one of its seminaries as well:

You have arrived at the point where you will have to trust me. I am a teacher. Every time I start a class in elementary Greek, I tell the members that I can teach Greek to anyone, provided he will do exactly what I tell him and nothing else. The ones who believe me go fast; the others give themselves a hard time. I say the same thing to you about pastry.

 Elsewhere he mentions teaching dogmatic theology. His professions and convictions inform the book. In the introduction to the 1989 second edition, accounting for the book's success, he writes

Which brings me to the major reason I think this improbably combination has proved successful. There is a habit that plagues may so-called spiritual minds: they imagine that matter and spirit are somehow at odds with each other and that the right course for human life is to escape from the world of matter into some finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller) realm. To me that is a crashing mistake--and it is, above all, a theological mistake. Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; Gog who, at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding "Good!" over his own concoctions. And it is God's unrelenting love of the stuff of this world that keeps it in being at every moment. So if we are fascinated, even intoxicated, by matter, it is no surprise: we are made in the image of the Ultimate Materialist.

It is tempting to go on quoting, but the book remains in print. It is not expensive, and you can see for yourself.

Capon died in 2013, and you can find an obituary from the New York Times, a brief biography in Wikipedia, and various other notices on line.