The Miracle of Chopping Onions
A theological cookbook connects good recipes with human experience; the simple tasks of cooking with the miracle of our own transformation.
Review by Ali Holcomb
I can’t be the only one who, when looking through a recipe and seeing the instructions “chop the onion,” feels a sense of existential dread. Chopping an onion involves all the fussiness I detest about cooking. The wrappings and paper of the onion are messy, and my entire counter is covered with that filmy casing as I work my way inside the layers. And then at last the golden onion is reached, and so begins the arduous chopping. And chopping and chopping. At some point my eyes well with tears, making the chopping more dangerous as my vision blurs—but I’m determined to finish the job. Unfortunately, though my eyes are streaming and the kitchen counter is a mess, I’m still merely on step one of the recipe, which will also require me to get the onion to that perfect golden sweetness sizzling in a pan before it can be of any use in the rest of the dish.
So, no I do not find anything lovely about chopping an onion. There is no delicious snacking amidst the chopping. No quick taste test of the brownie batter, no sneaking a bite. It’s simply a long obedience to the recipe instructions.
But then enters Robert Farrar Capon, an Episcopal priest and a chef—though he’s just an amateur, as he reminds readers. But he transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, acknowledging that the beingness of a thing can reveal the love of God as he gives step by step instructions for how to chop an onion. He reveals a beauty to the process I’ve never really considered, writing: “We mistake the earthly husks of place for the heart of its mattering.” Because chopping an onion is not just the lengthy task at the beginning of a recipe; it’s a gathering of things—counter, knife, board, onion, oneself. “We live in an age which is too little impressed by the small and too easily intimidated by the great.” Chopping an onion is no quick feat, and Capon tells us to pull up a chair and sit as we chop so we may enjoy the process and the gathering of this little society as the preparing of the meal begins.
And so opens the theological cookbook, containing tidbits of advice for parenting, dealing with picky eaters, hosting sit-down dinners, and marriage, as well recommendations for kitchen utensils, and of course, plenty of recipes, all with theology woven throughout. But I suppose the chopping of the onion is really chapter 2, as the book starts with Capon’s explaining how, though he is but a humble amateur chef, it is an amateur status that makes us a lover of things, because we must do them for the sheer desire and love of them. And it is this love that transforms the object of our affection. As Capon describes here, “Nothing is more likely to become garbage than orange rind, but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap. That, you know, is why the world exists at all… it is the orange peel hung on God’s chandelier. He likes it; therefore, it stays.”
We cannot live on feast days alone; there must be ordinary days as well.
Perhaps I am the onion here: earthy, infinitely complicated, also a bit messy and tiresome to transform into something delightful. But in the hands of a creator, I am viewed as valuable. Sitting with me for the transformative process is a delight, a joyful meeting for him. So maybe now I can see the miracle in chopping onions—a metamorphosis far beyond what I imagined when I first saw one on a cutting board.
Reading Capon feels like sitting in his kitchen, watching him bustle about making the famed “Lamb for eight persons” as he offers advice and observations. His tone is conversational, friendly, wisened, and fatherly, with the odd food pun worked in. But the richness of the writing made me move through it slowly and methodically. Each chapter to be consumed like a fine meal. One chapter was almost too much for one sitting, and every chapter is now filled with my underlining and marginalia, running out of space to take in all the beautiful truth he writes. But even Capon speaks to moderation, though he has little tolerance for diets or restriction: a “body may or may not lose weight; his soul, however, is sure to wither.” Though he, too, was tempted into dieting, it was in the goodness and richness of Spaetzle that Capon came to his senses to take up fasting instead. “Separate the secular from the sacred, and the world becomes an idol shrouded in interpretations.” In fasting there is meaning, and there is an end to the fast, usually with a tremendous feast. But a diet has no end, or we are forced into a Sisyphean cycle of restriction and consumption, without ever being able to fully taste.
Capon’s discussion of ferial vs festal soothed my longing for the liturgies of my old Anglican church. We cannot live on feast days alone; there must be ordinary days as well. Ferial cooking is not inferior but a triumph over scarcity—a transformation in its simplicity, where “the grand ordinariness must never go unsavored.” Reading Capon’s recipes, I felt that I had made my own cooking at once too complicated and too easy. In my focus to cook the fanciful, extraordinary meals of a newlywed, I had forgotten the simplicity of stews and stocks, shredded chicken that has been delightfully seasoned, simple sustenance that could also taste good.
But to focus entirely on the good and skip that, on occasion, we endure the malady of heartburn after a meal would be disingenuous, for food can cause discomfort as well. While our bodies were designed to address such circumstances, our hearts nevertheless burn with a desire not satisfied on earth. The best metaphor God could give us to understand our need of Him, our desire for something beyond this world, was to speak of truths in terms of taste. We are told “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Christ tells us, distributing communion at the Last Supper “this is my flesh broken for you, take and eat.” Adam and Eve in the garden are told that the fruit of the tree is theirs to eat. The Israelites are fed manna, given a literal daily bread. Revelation tells of a final feast of the lamb, a passage that was read at my wedding, to remind us all of the great feast to come—one that will never be fulfilled on earth.
I cannot say it better than Capon: “Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers, why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry, or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half of earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become…We were given appetites not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.”
Ali Holcomb lives in Virginia Beach on the water with her husband where she’s learning to be a military spouse and an ocean girl, after growing up in the landlocked west.
The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection was first published in 1969. You can find it at many used bookstores, or in its current edition from Modern Library, published July 2, 2002.
