Days 6/7

There’s a delightful clip from the Vicar of Dibley series when Alice goes on, rather more than a bit, about I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (http://tinyurl.com/krjcyo). It seems she’s found a similar product and, in a rather confused explifactionation, determines that, because she can’t believe I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter isn’t, in fact, butter, and she can’t believe the other product isn’t I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, they must both be butter (and, perforce, there is obviously a whole lot more butter around than anyone thinks!). Were it only so!

It makes me laugh each time I see it, but it also makes me wonder, now, if I’ve made a terrible mistake. Imagine what would have happened if Julie had initiated her year-long quest to prepare food created by the Queen of Cholesterol, Julia Child, at a time when there was so little demand for butter that the local grocer and chains across the country had simply stopped stocking butter. Would she have managed by making believe that oleo margarine or Crisco would soufflé, flambé and velouté as well as the real thing?

I fear I’ve come to the table at a time when the Episcopal Grocer has decided that a lack of demand for bread means, in most places, it need only be proffered once a week, if then. I wonder, though, if the resurgence in interest in Mastering the Art of French Cooking occasioned after the success of the Julie-Julia Project isn’t really a reflection of pent-up demand for real food, slow food style? If so, is it not equally possible that decades of low-fat Jesus have created a population that doesn’t know how good the full-flesh version tastes?

MMM...something to consider this week as I return, hungrily, to the land of the daily Eucharist…welcome back, my friends, to the table of the King of Heaven and the feast that never ends. Bring it on – and Bon Appetit!