This book of simple nursery rhymes takes readers through the months of the year, each one attached to a verse about the pleasures of eating chicken soup with rice in locales across the globe (“far-off Spain,” “old Bombay”) and ever more extreme conditions (the bottom of the ocean, a literal robin’s nest). Picking Pierre as a favorite meal in literature-as you may recall, Pierre, the boy who doesn’t care, is eaten by a lion-would probably be more Sendakian, but to me, nothing can surpass Chicken Soup With Rice. Each book is a banquet of mischief and reverie.
When I was very small, I treated my beloved copy-which remains in arm’s reach on my desk now-with something like religious fascination. Please tell me that you know of Sendak’s Nutshell Library, a tiny four-volume set, each roughly the size of a deck of cards, first published in 1962 and made in every way for the eager hands of early childhood. In one scene, he describes a couple sharing a meal in an orange grove in Tepotzotlán, Mexico: “We had eaten a tamal de elote-a fine semolina of sweet corn, that is, with ground pork and very hot pepper, all steamed in a bit of corn-husk-and then chiles en nogada, which were reddish brown, somewhat wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were downed in a creamy, sweetish surrender.” With mesmerizing style, Calvino captures the way a perfectly prepared dish can, for an instant, become the very center of the universe, the way a meal between two people can hang suspended in an everlasting present.Ĭhicken Soup With Rice: A Book of Months, by Maurice Sendak (Anyone who has tried to interpret her Italian grandmother’s handwritten recipes will see the humor and the profundity in this kind of bequeathed knowledge.) Calvino writes, too, of food’s unique ability to capture a moment in time. In Under the Jaguar Sun, a collection of three short stories that engage the senses, he describes the act of cooking as “the handing down of an intricate, precise lore.” Each dish can be a kind of story that reflects the person who eats it-one that attaches a meal to the ancestral. Calvino’s particular skill is his dreamer’s eye, his ability to make stories of incredible lightness out of a too-complicated world.
0 kommentar(er)
