A Cook for All Seasons

Give us this day our daily taste.

Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in,

And sauces which are never the same twice.

Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with,

And casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity.

Take away our fear of fat,

And make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron's beard.

Give us pasta with a hundred fillings,

And rice in a thousand variations.

Above all, give us grace to live as true men.

The author of this hedonistic, gormandizing prayer is a Christian clergyman of serene faith. For 20 years, Robert Farrar Capon, 43, has been an Episcopal priest in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an old Long Island shipbuilding town on the edge of the Manhattan commuter belt. He lives with his wife Peg, their six children, two cats (named Anthony and Bartholomew) and a nondescript dog in a century-old house adjoining his small white clapboard church. At dinner time, the sweet cooking aromas wafting out of the old rectory hint at the true nature of a man who is no ordinary country vicar.

Capon (who pronounces his name like that of the fowl) is not only a witty and urbane minister but a highly accomplished chef; his latest book, The Supper of the Lamb (Doubleday; $5.95), is currently one of the country's bestselling new volumes on cookery. It is, however, something more than a skillful dissertation on kitchen arts. As the religiously symbolic title indicates, Capon also offers the reader a gentle taste of theology--quite painless, and spiced with high humor and style.

Lip-Smacking Enthusiasm. The Lamb of the title is, of course, the paschal lamb--not only the animal eaten on the occasion of Passover but the Lamb of God, meaning Christ. Capon's lamb recipes are quite earthy and practical; they offer budget-saving ways of serving eight people (four times) with a single leg of lamb. But something more important is bubbling in Capon's pot. In the practical process of relating a simple recipe he is also reflecting on a profound idea: that ordinary materials used in everyday life can be in a very deep sense signs of the Christian mysteries.

Capon moves with ease from the mundane to the divine, and back again. He can write about food with lip-smacking enthusiasm; at the same time, he soars far above standard cookbook prosody. His loving description of how to peel and cut an onion, for example, is a poetically existential commentary on being and creation: "Reflect how little smell there is to a whole onion--how it is the humors and sauces of being that give the world flavor, how all life came from the sea, and how, without water, nothing can hold a soul."

Spiritual though his purpose is, Capon relishes the secular. He regards any meal as incomplete without a good wine. Would St. Paul, Calvin or Luther, he asks, have opened "bottles of Welch's Grape Juice in the sacristy before a service?" He dismisses synthetic foods as almost blasphemous and his gorge rises on the subject of dieting: "When you fast, fast; when you feast, feast." Neither prim nor prudish, he considers women, like pastries, a special delight: "A woman is like an aging strudel--not always crisp on the outside, but always good on the inside."

Gentleman's Gentleman. Born in New York City, Capon intended to become a naval architect--and still likes to make ship models--but decided on the church after a dose of college humanities at Columbia University. At Illinois' Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, he immersed himself in dogmatic theology, a subject that he still teaches part-time at Long Island's George Mercer Jr. Memorial School of Theology. His interest in cooking traces back to his childhood; his grandmother was a professional cook and his grandfather was a "gentleman's gentleman who could whip up a snack without making even a smudge on his butler's suit." Capon began cooking seriously 15 years ago because, he says, it is the preacher's ideal hobby: "Not as expensive as boating or golf, and very adjustable to the time you have to work at it."

The kitchen is not his only literary setting. His first book, Bed and Board (1965), was a droll excursion into the problems of love and marriage: "There are days--lots of days," he writes of his children, "when, if I could, I would mail them back to Dr. Spock." An Offering of Uncles (1967) dealt in a similarly down-to-earth but expressive way with such philosophical problems as freedom, fate and myth.

Fundamentally, Father Capon is a conservative; he believes that religious ideas, like good wine, improve with age. As it happens, one of his Port Jefferson parishioners is Death-of-God Theologian Thomas Altizer, but Capon is convinced that such "gloom and doom" prophets are not really speaking relevantly to the contemporary world. It is not at all surprising that his next book will defend one of the most basic of Christian beliefs: the Trinity. Like The Supper of the Lamb, it will have two levels: on one, it will be a book about wine; on the other, it will attempt to explore a subtle and difficult dogma. How will he combine the two? "I don't know yet," he says, "but I feel it will work."

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