Food in Time
Rooting food in temporality.
This is not a manual of cookery but a book about enjoying food. Few of the recipes in it will contribute much to the repertoire of those who like to produced dinner for six in thirty minutes flat. I think food, its quality, its origins, its preparation, is something to be thought about in the same way as any other aspect of human existence.Jane Grigson, introduction to Good Things
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When one thinks of the civilization implied in the development of peaches from the wild fruit or of apricots, grapes, pears, plums, when one thinks of those millions of gardeners from ancient China right across Asia and the Middle East to Rome, then across the Alps north to France, Holland and England of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how can we so crassly, so brutishly, reduce the exquisite results of their labour to cans full of syrup and cardboard-wrapped blocks of ice?
Cooking something delicious is really much more satisfactory than painting pictures or making pottery. At least for most of us. Food has the tact to disappear, leaving room and opportunity for masterpieces to come. The mistakes don't hang on the walls or stand on the shelves to reproach you forever.
And so for day 2250
09.02.2013
