Over the past few weeks I have been slowly savoring Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa in rotation with two or three other books. I can't dedicate myself solely to this one work simply because I do not want it to end. It just so happens that my cousin in Oklahoma is reading the same book at the same time and is convinced that it must be the most beautiful book she's ever read. I do agree.
Dinesen, the pen name under which the Danish author Karen Blixen worked, stuns me with her ability to capture something almost unnameable into elegant prose - the wild sorcery of a cook. Living on her coffee plantation in Kenya in the early 1900s, Blixen introduces us to Kamante, her faithful African tribesboy servant, and his place in the kitchen. She writes,
"Now when I find Kamante at hand, as a familiar spirit to cook with, this devotion again took hold of me. There was to me a great perspective in our working together. Nothing, I thought, could be more mysterious than this natural instinct in a Savage for our culinary art. It made me take another view of our civilization; after all it might be in some way divine and predestinated.
Kamante, in all cooking matters , had a surprising manual adroitness. The great tricks and tours-de-force of the kitchen were child's play to his dark crooked hands; they knew on their own everything about omelettes, vol-au-vents, sauces, and mayonnaises. He had a special gift for making things light, as in the legend the infant Christ forms birds out of clay and tells them to fly. He scorned all complicated tools, as if impatient of too much independence in them, and when I gave him a machine for beating eggs set it aside to rust, and beat whites of egg with a weeding knife that I had had to weed the lawn with, and his whites of egg towered up like light clouds. As a Cook he had a penetrating, inspired eye, and would pick out the fattest chicken out of a whole poultry yard, and he gravely weighed an egg in hand, and knew when it had been laid.
He had a great memory for recipes. He could not read, and he knew no English so that cookery-books were of no use to him, but he must have held all that he was ever taught stored up in his ungraceful head, according to some systematization of his own, which I should never know. He had named the dishes after some event which had taken place on the day they had been shown to him, and he spoke of the sauce of the lightning that struck the tree, and of the sauce of the grey horse that died.
He did at times taste the food that he cooked, but then with a distrustful face, like a witch who takes a sip out of her cauldron. He stuck to the maizecobs of his fathers" (p. 38-9).
It was only today that I discovered Blixen also authored Babette's Feast, the iconic French culinary fable that later became a film in the 80s - one of my favorites.
