Let the Feast Begin!
Playwright and author of light prose, ROBEHT FONTAINE lives in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Late at night when my wife and I are in bed, relaxed, my wife devotes a great deal of time to thumbing through magazines, punctuating her perusing with cries of delight and smackings of her pretty lips.
Meals at our house are adequate but generally made of something hastily thought and quickly cooked, licit in nourishment but lacking in imagination.
It is now, about midnight, when my wife unselfishly shares with me her culinary dreams. She smiles, sighs, clucks, chuckles happily, and quotes aloud the appetizing ingredients.
She hands me a page with a colored photograph. “It even looks heavenly,” she cries, enchanted. ”I must make it for you.” Notice her lack of ego. She must make it, yes, but for me. How satisfying, how soothing, how touching!
She rips the recipe from the magazine, her eyes gleaming with hope and determination, as if the quick, competent gesture with which she removed the recipe would be carried over the next day into action.
On a good night she may do this four or five times. She reads, she halts, she remarks, she glows, and she rips. Scandinavian pastry, Oriental curries, French meats in Burgundy. For me she chooses the best of every land, the choicest of every time, the most complex and wonderful of each sort.
All these shining recipes, complete with photographs, she files in a drawer she can reach from the bedside. Now and then she empties the drawer and puts the cuttings in another drawer somewhat removed from the first one. then once more she begins to stuff the iirst one.
Her collection mounts and grows. It is probably the finest collection of cooking items ever assembled in several drawers. It plays no favorites. It sides with no nationality. It includes everything from borsch to baklava. It is as complete and varied as any form of happiness can be, enough to make one joyous and yet leave one unsatisfied.
Unsatisfied, because I know my wife will, the following evening, find still more delicious formulas to read to me and remove from her magazine. I do not mean unsatisfied in the sense that she, being so busy collecting and stuffing into drawers, will never find the time actually to cook any of her discoveries.
Yet I am not without hope, for every now and then she feels that she is not doing quite enough by quoting and tearing. She says plaintively and promisingly, “I’m really going to cook some of these someday. Honest, I am!”
Meanwhile I am married with a certain degree of happiness to the world’s most exotic and versatile noncooking cook; a certain degree of hopefulness, too, I might add, for just today she has begun to paste her items in an enormous book. Who knows?