The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Kitchen arts & letters)

PREFACE

Once upon a time, there was a musician who complained that half the notes he wanted to play were not on the piano. They lay, he claimed, between the keys where he could never get at them. Accordingly, he took up fiddling, which has no such limitations, and lived happily ever after.

This is a book on cooking; but like the musician, it concentrates more on the cracks and interstices of the culinary keyboard than on the conventional notes themselves. It, too, involves considerable fiddling around--some of it rather low, but some of it very high indeed. Nevertheless, I commend it to you in all seriousness. From it, you may learn things you never knew, or be confirmed in prejudices you have always held--or even come away with a recipe or two to add to your collection. In any case, you will find it a leisurely and unhurried book: The outlandish recipe with which it begins lasts the whole work through and provides, not so much an outline, as a fixed star under which the length and breadth of cooking is explored.

As I look it over in its finished form, two matters seem to require a word of explanation. For the first, only those recipes which fit logically within the framework of the book occur in the text itself. All the others have been assembled in the appendix in the usual order, together with page references to the ones previously given. No recipes, however, have been included for mere completeness' stuffy sake: I have given you only what I know and like. It is, after all, my book.

The second matter is the fact that I seem never to have settled in my mind the question of the sex of the reader. Some of my comments are obviously only for women's ears; others will make little sense except to men. I thought for a while about going through the book and straightening this out, but decided against it. It is just such narrow-mindedness about sex that has nearly deprived us of the heights and depths of the sexuality which is our glory. I offer it to you, therefore, as the first androgynous cookbook and spare myself the labor of revision. We are all true men--or women--here. Vive la difference, and let it lie where it falls.

Port Jefferson, New York August 1968