The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen Page A

a fresh layer of coarse salt. You can add onions and olives if you like it that way. Spread it on flatbread for Ligurian peasant pizza.
    I tried to make it once. Sometimes I like to eat something for the idea, the romance of it. But this putrescence…
    Was unforgivably distracted then by Dennis, who came a-knocking on my sanctuary door.
    My leg pain would be alleviated if I quit smoking, but I'm uninterested in considering this because it's not a choice for me. To live without smoking is no life.
    In another notebook, I recently tried to write down how I made some of the dishes I've cooked over the years. Recipes, all right, that's what they are. But the effort it took to reconstruct those meals I made and enjoyed a long time ago put me in a foul mood, this nostalgic Loki garum mood. Why do people write recipes?
    A recipe is a cruel joke.
    I'm conceiving a brutal, half-hateful crush on the late, great, much-lamented food-memoir author M.F.K. Fisher, that uppity little slyboots of a voluptuary autodidact, that fresh-faced Irish smartypants. I ask myself—as I set down measurements of this and that, tell my unknown galley slave to wait until the butter is foaming before adding minced shallots, conjure the giving, fleshy plumpness of dried cherries in stout sauce for holiday ham—where Mary Frances got the idea that her foodie musings would interest anyone. She wrote book after book about herown thoughts, experiences, and ideas concerning food. I lack that idea fundamentally. I can't expect anyone to look to me for any kitchenary authority. But… again, the futile urge to impart my deepest secrets before I go.
    Montaigne, even in his original hard-to-follow old French, pleases me as much as Fisher these days. They were doing the same thing, really, hedging their bets against death, shoring the fragments of their ruins with words. That crazy old François Villon as well, who wrote, “Qui meurt, a ses lois de tout dire.” The dying man has the right to say anything. And I suppose in my own way that's what I'm doing.
    How to make holiday sauce for ham (not recommended for hermits, for obvious reasons): Whisk a couple of tablespoons of cornstarch into a cup of chicken stock or broth. Melt a wad of butter in a skillet till it foams, then sauté three minced shallots in it for a few minutes. Add a pinch of allspice; stir for half a minute. Add four cups of dark stout, a cup of tart dried cherries. Simmer this for ten minutes, until it thickens a little. Rewhisk the chicken broth and cornstarch to mix it again, and then stir it gradually into the stout mixture. Cook this until it thickens, remove from heat, add one and a half tablespoons balsamic vinegar, then salt and pepper to taste. Serve this smoky, fruity, blackish, bitter-at-the-end sauce with hot sliced hickory-smoked ham, in a pitcher on the side with a ladle.
    I've left out an ingredient, the one that's supposed to go in with the stout and cherries. So whoever follows this recipe is guaranteed to fail, insofar as his or her sauce is guaranteed not to be the same as mine, the gold standard only because it's my recipe. I can't remember now what it was, but if I made it now in the kitchen, it would come to my hand at the right instant. It's not a malicious omission…. Maybe it's a drop of garum.
    There is no better combination than that of velvety butter and fumey alcohol, and, later, fatty tender meat.
    There is nothing less interesting to me than the idea of aholiday meal with eight or ten or twenty people related to one another by blood or marriage; the thought of such a meal and its proscriptions and protocols causes me to fall instantly asleep. I'm boring myself so much I can hardly hold the pen.
    After he barged into my chambers, Dennis parked his flat, entitled rear end on the seat of my favorite chair, the armchair facing the windows that look out over the river, and proceeded to explain the end of his marriage to me while I sat on my bed in my pajamas, squinting at