One of my many odd callings has been to be a food writer who also happens to do most of the shopping, prepping, cooking, and garbage-hauling in my own home… As a household cook, for example, I’m an apostate from the religions of food and diet that now plague this once-great nation. (I’m not talking about fast food: I happen to think Big Macs and Egg McMuffins are fine.) What bothers me is the late-twentieth-century’s penchant for doctrinaire pronouncements on the subject of cooking and eating. For example: It’s gotten so bad that when people are watching me at the stove—when I’ve turned off the heat and start to stir four tablespoons of cold butter (yes, I said butter!) into my Bolognese sauce to round out the flavor and take up the floating grease (yes, that works!)— I have to chase the true believers out of the kitchen lest their pious consciences be offended. Such people don’t cook or dine; they sniff around for heresies—and have fits when they find them. Does that sound like the trouble religion gives preachers in their congregations, or what?
-Robert Farrar Capon, The Foolishness of Preaching, 57.
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