'Between soup and love,

the first is better.' -Spanish proverb

I couldn't disagree more, but then, other than a couple bisques and chilled consommé with fresh mint and lemon, I tend to find soup a rather terrifying proposition. However, whether we agree or disagree with old Spanish chestnut-writers, or old Spanish-chestnut writers (and I do make exception to my soup exception for a good chestnut bisque, I assure you), the degrees of separation between soup and love are not as numerous as may appear. They involve:


- Belle-Epoque Grandes Horizontales
- guilds
- lesbian thespians
- cured meats
- Jacobins
- gastronomic proto-Taylorism

----and Dominicans.

You think I can't pull these together; you suspect it could be done by no one. And it is a disparate list. But I can and I will, and it will further buttress my argument that just when you let down your guard and imagine it can't possibly happen here, you meet Dominicans in the strangest of places...

The august Auguste Escoffier is the name that unites this strange list. I was reading Kenneth James' absorbing biography of the chef (from which any names or numbers herein are taken), which briefly gives a summation of the state of restaurants and cuisine in France and England before Ritz and Escoffier launched the Savoy in London. There was very much in France (though by no means paralleled in England) by this time a tradition of haute cuisine; Escoffier's revolution on the Continent was the efficiency and systematization brought by his brigade system, and a substantial reduction thereby, in the name of modernization and productivity, of the number and severity of beatings of cooks delivered by chefs. Corporal punishment in a kitchen slows everything down, and Escoffier believed quality and speed could coexist.

Despite there being by Escoffier's time a short history of fine restaurants in France, this development could not have happened without the short history of the guillotine, a more severe form of corporal punishment than that used by successful chefs in their private reigns of terror in tiny, sweaty fiefdoms. The Jacobins had, amongst other things, succeeded in producing a class of ronin chefs, as prior to the Revolution the best cooks had always worked for the best families. Gourmandise took place on estates and in castles; eating out was, as it had been since the time of the ancient Romans, the province of travelers, who had no choice of entrée at the hostelry they stopped at, but rather partook of the same potluck pot au feu as the rest of the overnight guests.

An enterprising Parisian by the name of Boulanger twenty-some years before the Revolution conceived of offering a sit-down meal with a choice of options from a menu to city-dwellers wanting a meal but no room to go with it. The climax of his meal was always a soup, which he called a 'restorative,' or 'restaurant,' getting him in trouble with the guilds, who had continued to operate since the Middle Ages in various formulations and groupings as the sole source of takeaway items such as cured meats, cooked meats, bread, pastry, sausages and sauces. Specifically, the traiteurs (from traditor, one who delivers; from tradere, deliver; surrender; from trans + dare, to give; nothing at all to do with selling state secrets, as these fellows were masters of sealed lips and secret handshakes), or caterers, argued that his 'restorative' was in fact a ragoût, which they alone were licensed to sell. The traiteurs lost, M. Boulanger won, and by 1789 there were about 50 such establishments in Paris (p.26). The Revolution temporarily interrupted the revolution, but within ten years after the bloodletting stopped there were hundreds of the new restaurants in Paris.

Enter Escoffier, England, and César Ritz. The world of dining in Britain changed for the better with the opening of the Savoy: there was fine food, organization, modern menus, ambiance, and personalized service for the guests. All that remained was to coax well-to-do Victorians, with their armies of servants and cooks, out of the house on occasion for epicurean entertainment. While Victorian gentlemen were accustomed to dining out, they did so in the company of other men or with women other than their wives; it was considered unseemly for ladies to be seen eating in public. Thus one prong in Ritz' and Escoffier's campaign was to create an atmosphere that would welcome and enchant, rather than discomfit, wives and other ladies of virtue. To succeed in this would require banishing the other sorts of ladies, such as actresses, singers, and those more skilled in the companionship arts than the domestic. An evening dress-code stipulation eliminated some; barring single female diners left well-heeled-but-dateless demimondaines dining elsewhere.

One celebrity courtesan who lacked neither escorts nor evening dress and thus continued to patronize the Savoy was one-time Folies Bergère dancer Mlle. Liane de Pougy, born Anne Marie Chassaigne and later crowned Princess Anne-Marie Ghika of Romania, who despite two marriages and a Sapphic amour she described as the love of her life, renounced her past life of scandal and splendor and finished her days serving disabled orphans at the Asylum of St. Anne as a Dominican tertiary.

In (there's no way it wouldn't be, is there?) Savoy...

And you thought I couldn't do it.

The Best Laid Plans...

Firstly, today was a long, long day. It was the first day the meal program I volunteer at on Wednesdays was having Tent City on the church premises, in theory adding an additional hundred or so people. That many people, it turned out, were not added, since although most of Tent City came, many regulars stayed away, some perhaps fearing we were not up to the task, and others possibly fearing they would be pressed into duty as dishwashers. As we were prepping and cooking, however, we didn't know what number would arrive, so we had to continue with the largest estimate. And we had a very generous donation of salmon. Very generous. And I cooked it all.

Without belaboring the point, one of our cooks had to leave early, we prepped the full amount but served our normal number, I scrubbed three hot flattops within an inch of their lives, accidentally poured vinegar instead of oil on a scalding hot one, and left with hair, skin, and clothes trailing a rank sillage of garlic cream sauce, fish and vinegar.

I felt inestimably cleaner after a long bath, but I was still exhausted. I lay in bed reading, but my eyes kept closing, which I took to mean I needed to go to sleep. Despite my best intentions and concerted effort, that plan fell through, so I went back out to the living room and did some work.

In time the neighbor's cat climbed in through the screen (which I neatly sliced months ago to allow him to escape bad weather) and brought with him a mouse. At first I couldn't tell if he was alive or dead, but it turned out he was living. I ushered the cat into the bedroom and the mouse into a flexible binder-thing for bills and receipts. In my altered state that was Phase One of a dimly-conceived plan which included an ill-thought-out Phase Two involving asking the mouse to go into a cardboard box from there, and a satisfying Phase Three of him doing so. It should, by contrast, have involved picking up the folder, putting it in a cardboard box, walking down the stairs, going out somewhere, and putting down the folder near an attractive stand of trees.

That was a couple of hours ago. I am still awake, now researching 'humane mousetraps' on the Web. All things considered, the one involving a two litre bottle of Diet Coke should seem the most reasonable, if not providentially revealed, choice. Plan B, that of depositing the neighbor's cat in action poses in various spots likely to contain curious mice and a good scent trail, and then nabbing the rodent once thus detected, resulted in little other than odd sounds, blank looks, and all manner of languourous poses from the uninterested hunter.

Now the cat has left, and I have a wild mouse, about whose state of health or recent conjugal activity I know nothing, in my house! I don't want the cat to find him when I am not able immediately to retrieve him, but I also don't want to wake up and find him in my bed. Or on my head, in my bed! I also very much do not want him to die of whatever injuries he might have, and be unreachable yet foul-smelling in some unfindable crevice post-mortem.

Had I only been able to sleep, the cat would have killed him, I would not have known and tried to prevent it, and although it is distinctly, horrifically unpleasant to awaken to a dead animal or bird on the floor, it is, unlike this, a readily, easily, eminently soluble problem...

4 out of 5 French Existentialists Agree:

'if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.' --Nietzsche

If you are sick of feeling like a self-absorbed abyss, and you live near Seattle, there may be a great opportunity to change that. The self-absorbed abyss part; I offer no suggestions nor assistance as to relocation. Tent City is going to be up at Prince of Peace Lutheran in Shoreline for the next three months. With collaboration through the Shoreline YMCA and a grant from ELCA, there is a meal program there Wednesday nights for about 150-190 people.

With Tent City there, there will be an additional 100 or so people. Most of the volunteers start somewhere between 3:30-5, and the meal will now run from 5-7-ish, to allow for a second seating. Volunteers are needed for set-up, service, bussing tables, doing dishes, and cleanup. If you want to volunteer, please call the Shoreline YMCA at 206-364-1700.

If you need more convincing that doing nice things is a nice thing to do, here are what some famous religious figures have to say on the matter:


'Feed the hungry and visit the sick, and free the captive, if he be unjustly confined. Assist any person oppressed, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.' -- Muhammad

'Compassion and love are not mere luxuries.
As the source both of inner and external peace,
they are fundamental to the continued survival of our species.' -- XIV Dalai Lama

'But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?' --John the Baptist

'Even offering three hundred bowls of food three times a day does not match the spiritual merit gained in one moment of love.' --Nagarjuna

'Love of all creatures is also love of God, for whoever loves the One loves all the works that He has made. When one loves God, it is impossible not to love His creatures. The opposite is also true. If one hates the creatures, it is impossible to love God who created them.' MaHaRal/ Yehudah ben Bezalel Levai

"Open my heart that compassion may
be my companion;
Where I meet pride, humble me;
Where I meet anger, calm my fears;
Where I meet injustice, cause me
to act in love's way.
May I be as gentle as the doe,
as fearless as the lion,
as faithful as the dog." --King David

'Live with compassion, Work with compassion, Die with compassion, Meditate with compassion, Enjoy with compassion. When problems come, Experience them with compassion.' --Lama Zopa Rinpoche

'I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.' -- Francis of Asissi

Whether you call it tzedekah, chesed, rahmah, ihsan, metta, boddhicitta, mercy, compassion, or good works, everyone from Zoroaster to Abraham thinks you should be cultivating it. And if in their saffron robes and pilgrims' sandals all the foregoing are unconvincing, remember that the great existentialist unbelievers Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir all risked their lives to save those of others in the French Resistance. Surely not everyone needs recourse to a metaphysics or baleful eschatology just to wash a few darned dishes???

'Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.'

So said the epicure Brillat-Savarin, and while an ontological argument based on that aphorism would be hard to sustain in many quarters (or so I pray, at any rate: the idea of my body decomposing into lardons of cured pork and boxes of Good-n-Plenty while the walls of my veins leaked Barolo and Amarone into the velvet walls of my coffin strikes far more terror in me than the normal image which -disturbingly, perhaps - doesn't disturb me in the least), and the more transcendent aspects of his musings on gastronomy and gourmandise are equally unsuited to the realities of our present world, the above quote, read entirely wrongly, of course, and viewed through an ethical rather than aesthetic lens, is what I want to get to here today.

(Update 06.12.08: That was really all one sentence. Someone, save me from myself.)

People like to think of globalism as a brand-new phenomenon. And I will admit that with the population of the world so much greater than ever before, every nation or region has a greater impact on others: I have more people producing more waste over here in country X, so there is a greater chance of some of it reaching you in country Y, for example. But the Chinese have been a global power for millennia, over land and by sea. The silver in Chinese coffers plundered by the British opium trade and subsequent wars and concessions was largely from South American mines, while the tea that the British came to love was, as we all know, an ancient part of Chinese gastronomic culture. Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy, and the cotton plantations of the southern United States arose to fill the growing gap between India's long history of production and current need, while the US is now poised in coming years to become the leader in 'hauling coals to Newcastle' quite literally -- not to mention the huge markets of China, India, Russia, as well as many smaller countries in the developing world.

So.

It may have been the case before, but now that the stakes are manifestly higher we admit it more readily: we are all in this together. Even George W. Bush has come to acknowledge that, at least as far as the ozone layer is concerned, human beings can have some kind of corporate and individual impact on the world as a whole. And I believe that food, our use of it, our approach to it, our taking it for granted or choosing to be deliberate in our choices, can be a significant aspect of living up to our values.

Every left-leaning, bunny-hugging simpleton will recite the evils of McDonalds anytime there is a perceptible lapse in conversation. And, in the Northwest at least, anyone desirous of impressing upon his audience the virtuousness of his life and lower intestine will not fail to (re-) state (the obvious:) his unswerving allegiance to the aisles of Whole Foods for all his home cooking and (natural) grooming products needs.

But in the same way that my sending a check every once in a while to Mercy Corps or the Red Cross does not confer something akin to proactive moral immunity, a lifetime's absolution, or mean I thus have carte blanche to perform human sacrifices or set the neighbor's house on fire because I did good elsewhere, trusting a preacher, or a friend, or - for heaven's sake! - a retailer, as gatekeeper for all our individual, specific ethical choices sells our own conscience and powers of rational contemplation short. There simply is no one guidebook containing every possible moral conundrum an individual can face in the moment. And I think that before we can get to 'we are what we eat' in its moral sense, we have first to accept that we are what we do, overall. We are the choices we make, the mistakes we regret, the issues we feel compelled to stand for, and the hand we do or do not offer a suffering soul.

How this all ties in to food, not to mention my enduring and recurrently proven faith in the human voice coming through miles of wires and anonymity and preconceptions, and not forgetting, as well, my own well-deserved humility and willingness to put crow in cream sauce on my own dinner menu when appropriate, will have to wait until next time, as this preamble to what I intended to say is already too long without even having a body yet!