Some books are ostensibly about one thing -- and open out to more. Others are little books with big ideas. Two of them are sitting by my desk, one a gift and one a recent purchase. Each is filled with little bits that add up to lots more. Each is literally small -- fits well into your hand and carries nicely. And, each is that ideal sort of book for dipping into now and then for a brief respite. A pause. I think pauses are very important in our oh too busy lives. I have too much on my list. And, the list never seems to get shorter. I think this all too often. And, I feel it. Books like these help me pause, if just for a moment.
While my favorite little book is not about food (it is Thomas Merton's Zen and the Birds of Appetite from Shambhala Pocket Classics ), these two are. They're not explicitly meant for meditative stops in your day or week. They involve neither daily affirmations nor the humorous play on them of Andrew Boyd's Daily Afflictions. In fact, they are not daily at all. But they're, as I say, great little vacations once in a while (what Herbert Marcuse called "repressive desublimation.")
The Cooking Companion is filled with little snippets of fact and fancy, trivia challenges and statistics, all oriented around -- you guessed it -- food. In fact, each pages number has a little fact that uses that number; page 49 (year last century in which Elizabeth David wrote her first cookery feature), page 101 (average daily consumption in calories of animal products per person in Ethiopia), page 136 (amount, in milligrammes, of vitamin E found in 15g of wheatgerm oil. And yes, that is how they spell milligrammes.) Snippets of verse. Meanings of words. Films for foodies. Do you need to know all these things? Will you remember them all? No. But worth a pause.
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Poems about Food and Drink -- a choice that reveals, perhaps, my closet love for poetry. (Basho is my favorite these days and often is.) One of those lovely everyman's library volumes that fits in your hand and has a red ribbon bookmark. Poems on vegetables and fruit, milk and breakfast. feating and fasting. Kipling on bananas, Marianne Moore on rosemary, Sylvia Plath on mushrooms, and yes, Cole Porter on milk.
Little books. Little pauses. Momentary sabbaticals. Refresher courses.
