The following story about an opinionated chef-priest and his loving, long-suffering wife comes from Chapter 3 of Robert Farrar Capon’s More Theology & Less Heavy Cream. Capon is a fixture around here, and in addition to being a master theologian of grace, he was none too shabby as a New York Times food columnist. For those interested in food, grace, or how to make amends after critiquing your spouse’s vegetable prep, look no further.
Pietro was making Danish pastry on his day off. Even if he said so himself, he had terrific moves. Rolling up the cinnamon-scented, raisin-studded sheet of dough, he sealed the edge smartly with tap water, sliced the roll into uniform schnecken with rapid-fire strokes of the knife and had them panned and rising in nothing flat.
He turned to the companion of his bed and board. “There,” he said triumphantly. “It’ll be gorgeous. Guaranteed.” Madeleine was cutting up celery for tunafish salad—as usual, she was preoccupied.
Why, he wondered, did she have to work so slowly? When she peeled potatoes, she sat down at the table and laboriously deposited each paring into the center of a paper towel. When he did vegetables, he stood at the sink, flipped the peels all over the place and got the job done in one third the time. He would lighten her darkness.
“Hey, Love, why are you dicing that celery one stalk at a time? And with that dinky knife? If you used my chef’s knife and cut them all lengthwise first, you could cut them crosswise all at once. Efficiency, Kid. That’s the name of the game.”
Madeleine threw the paring knife down on the board. “Look. If I wanted somebody to do time and motion studies on me, I’d have taken up with a choreographer, not a pastry-pushing advice-peddler. At least he’d be interested in my moves someplace besides the kitchen. And don’t call me ‘Kid’. I’m old enough to dice celery anyway I like. Why don’t you grow up and learn that when you’re not doing something you shouldn’t bother people who are? Finish the salad yourself!”
Pietro followed her down the hallway only to have the bedroom door slammed in his face. By the time he fetched a wooden skewer to pop the lock, she was sobbing into her second tear-soaked pillow. “Look, Maddie, all I meant was…” That tore it.
Somebody once defined an expert as an ordinary man a long way from home.
Nobody, Pietro thought to himself as she lit into him with a week’s worth of grievances, was much of a marriage counselor in his own bedroom. Still, there was nothing for it now but to take the full treatment. Ten minutes of tirade were followed by seven of silence and thirty-five of dredging the channels of communication. At the end, he formulated—to her but for himself—yet another of Pietro’s Pet Principles: If You’re Not Doing It, Don’t. He swore on the stack of rumpled bedclothes that he would keep his nose out of her celery-dicing forever.
The bedclothes became still more rumpled after that and, twenty minutes later, while she freshened up, a renewed man returned to the kitchen to tackle the tunafish. All went well until it came time for the mayonnaise. The jar was empty. For an instant, he was tempted to shout the bad news down the hall.
It occurred to him just in time, that there was a corollary to his recently hatched Principle which was just as important: If You Are Doing It, Do It All. He got out an egg, a lemon, salt, and olive oil, and whipped up a batch of homemade mayonnaise in the blender right on the spot. Tasting it, he was moved to take back some of the cynical things he had depressed himself with recently.
He had worked all week long with an unlikeable couple whose contempt for each other was as deserved as it was implacable. He had given them extra hours for nothing. The counseling had helped, but it had also backfired: they had come divided by mutual hatred; they left united in anger at him. At a cocktail party last night he learned they were bad-mouthing him all over town. No good deed, Pietro reflected bitterly, goes unpunished.
But now—Pollyanna be praised—his virtuous resolve not to shout a complaint had paid off in honest-to-God mayonnaise, the first in months. Virtue was, indeed, its own reward.
Pietro put the finished salad into a container and turned to the task of transferring the rest of the mayonnaise from the blender to a jar. The job had always annoyed him—all those air pockets getting trapped in the jar, necessitating patient and repeated pounding on the counter till they rose to the surface. Gentle pounding though, on a potholder or a thick towel. He had more than once ended up with a counterful of mayonnaise and broken glass.
Was there a lesson here too? Pietro felt for a moment that his starchier colleagues might take a dim view of the culinary approaches to counseling that were coming so thick and fast this morning. But intellectual respectability be damned: anything can be an illustration, just as long as it sheds light.
This bout he had just had with Madeleine: What was that, if it wasn’t the settling of the mayonnaise of their marriage to get rid of the pockets of silence and the air-holes of distance they had accumulated during seven days of not dealing with each other? Their exertion in the bedroom worked in the same way as this lesser operation in the kitchen. And it operated under the same necessities: it had to be done; it could not be done halfheartedly; and it was dangerous if not done gently.
But it resulted in a product with a longer shelf life. Let his colleagues call that corn if they liked. It wasn’t bad for a day off.
He checked his danish. The schnecken were coming along nicely, but another half hour or so wouldn’t hurt. Was there a lesson somewhere that could be drawn from dough? Warmth as the key to rising? He noted that Madeleine had not yet emerged from the bedroom. Perhaps he might wander down the hall again and work out a corollary or two with her.
Pietro whistled as he went.
