Blog the Fortieth: "The Glories of the Pea"

In Transcendental Array

It’s spring intermittently down here just south of the Mason Dixon line, which means tis the season for N.P.R.’s donor marathon. I never donate to N.P.R., even though for decades it has been my primary and often sole news source as I cook supper. I’m attached to it on uncle Niccolo’s advice to keep your enemies closer than your friends, as well as for the antidote it provides to my own bias in the daily exercise of having to decipher the news under its. In any case, I will to my dying day be grateful to N.P.R. for this quotation from the diary of a Lady-in-waiting to Catherine de Medici during her reign over the cuisine of the court of Henri II: “Nothing else has been spoken of at Court this week but the glories of the pea newly arrived from Italy.”

Ah! Can you imagine a world in which peas are glorious?

So, I am abashed to offer you this post on what my people do with peas, because I feel as though my people’s recipes are not glorious enough for that quotation. The recipes are really, really good, but only in the usual way that our food is really, really good, and glorious should be even better than that, I figure. Anyways, I have one pasta recipe for you, a soup, a vegetable side, a chicken-braise, and a most unexpected calamari braise, in case there be an apologetical glory of sorts to be got from crossing kinds in transcendental array.

Blog the Eighth: Asparagus 'n Eggs

A Match Made in Heaven for Meatless Fridays

Asparagus is perfect for Lent, coming in season just in time as it does, and loving eggs as much as it does.  Asparagus and eggs are a match made in heaven, so I say, Let no man divide what God has joined in a union as loving as it is holy.  Of course, leave it to the French.  The sophists flatter aversion to vegetables by pulverizing the poor thing and giving it over to be swallowed up by a bowl of cream surfeited with a dollop of butter, with only floating fragments surviving, as bits of limb did in the Cyclops’s bowl of milk after he washed down the companions of Odysseus whom he had chewed up.  The French are ready to do this to any vegetable you don’t like, and it always satisfies, because it’s the same taste satisfaction over and over again, namely hot buttered cream.  If not for the nutritive value of the vegetable doomed for the day, they might just as well hand out bowls of heated cream, a spoon, and the salt and pepper shakers.

My people so venerate asparagus that I won’t even call what they make of it a soup.  Soup implies a liquified mélange.  We, rather, cook the asparagus in a minimum of water so that it makes its own broth for itself, and then we drop eggs beaten with a little grated cheese into its broth, to add buttressing substance and complementary savoriness.  This soup is for the sake of the asparagus, not the asparagus for the soup, so in Italian one would call it in brodo, its own broth, in fact.