On Beauty, and the miracle of food

I love food.

I love beautiful things. And there is something about beautiful things that makes me want to make it a part of me. With music I want to dance or sing or move. With almost everything I want to touch…

And food is one of those ways that I literally get to experience a beautiful thing in a style that makes it a part of me. I get to take it in.

(although, now that I think about it, that was what I loved about being pregnant too. I tripped the whole time with the awe of having a living thing growing inside of me. So crazy!)

But I love good food. I’ve become ever more discerning as time passes. I can pass on cheap yucky chocolate and hold out for the good. I don’t buy plastic cheese. I buy awesome cheese. My kids know good cheese. Even at my poorest my budgetary weakness was always groceries. I combine the freshest vegetables and fruits in new and exciting ways. I love good sashimi.

I’ve never enjoyed margarine. Give me fresh unsalted butter please. Sometimes when I’m in a mood- I make my own butter from buttermilk. I make it a family project with the kids. SO GOOD. I’m so happy to know a place where I can find good baguettes and croissants and Sourdough.

I love a good wine, especially when swirled and sniffed and savored. I love fresh peas. I love tomatoes that taste like tomatoes. I love a good yogurt.

I love a good sauce Béchamel. Or sauce bourgogne. I love smoked salmon and grilled lamb and baked duck and poached halibut. I love raw oysters eaten fresh from the ocean, that I’ve pulled from the water less than 10 minutes earlier.

I miss Mamie’s Cous-Cous (that she learned to cook when living in Morocco) and her blanquette de veux. I miss Papy’s soupe aux crab with those weird poisonous crabs he catches out at the island, MY GOD! I miss my dad’s everything, especially his fish. I love my mom’s way of preparing sausage. I miss the smoked teal that my step-dad used to go kill for me and smoke in his smoker every year for my birthday. Every year I long for that teal. I miss the beef I was served in France that had grazed on pastures salted from ocean breezes and who’d been sliced by my uncle who owned the pasture and the boucherie.

On beauty, C.S. Lewis wrote:

We want so much more- something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

To bathe in it, to become a part of it… YEAH.