I used to think that the preface of a book was just perfunctory, perhaps a tradition of some bygone era, ever lingering to force the reader to flip through more pages before arriving at the important stuff. When I became a man, I put away childish things. Now the preface is the threshold from this world to the fresh, exciting world of “Chapter 1.” It’s the handshake, where the author tells the reader, “Howdy,” and the reader responds, “Pleased to meetcha.” It’s the aroma that always reaches your nose before you can ever take the first bite. Speaking of food, here’s the first part of the preface from the first edition of Robert Farrar Capon’s, The Supper of the Lamb:
“Once upon a time, there was a musician who always 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’ve 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 last 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.”
Now Robert Capon has said, “Hello,” and from what I’ve gathered, he really means it.
Register over on the sidebar to win a copy of this phenomenal literary cookbook.
<>
