Usque ad Hilaritatem (part 1)

This is Foie Gras Poutine. If there ever were a dish to compete for 'most unnecessary', surely Foie Gras Poutine is it.

Exegegis:

Poutine is a traditional Canadian lower-class dish. (I say it with respect, remember always no matter what else I say, that I delight in hot dogs more than a grown man reasonably should). Now Poutine for us Southerners need only be explained thusly: it's french fries with gravy on top; a traditional rib-sticking feature of the Canadian everyman's after work meal. Already at this humble point we have crossed the border into what the modern world would call the dietetically perverse, as so many ordinary meals do these days. But a certain Chef by the name of Martin Picard took it several dozen steps further.

Martin Picard is the head Chef and founder of a Montreal-based restaurant I (desperately) would like to patronize one day. It's called Au Pied de Cochon, which is French for 'the foot of the pig'. Martin Picard has stuck with a die-hard extremism to the classical forms of good French cooking, that is to say, butter, fat, salt, meat, wine, pig's feet, cream, pâte, bread, pastry, duck, love, happiness...

... and in that sense, by returning to a time when nobody cared about the calorific content of their food but rather its taste, he has become a revolutionary in the most literal sense: innovation by coming full circle. With his typical disregard of health-conscious, bean-sprout-devouring, omega-47Q-fatty-acid-Z-obsessed modern culture, Martin Picard invented the Foie Gras Poutine.

Foie Gras is the liver of duck or goose which have been bred and fed for the specific purpose of possessing extraordinarily tasty livers. It is very fatty. It is very rich. It is excellent with Sauternes (by the way)...

Foie Gras Poutine's gravy is made by blending a good bit of goose liver into the gravy, and then, for good measure, slapping a solid chunk of pan-seared Foie Gras onto the whole mess at the end. It is the only $23 dollar French Fries you'll find anywhere, and it probably takes a year off of your life-expectancy every time you eat it.

Martin Picard, in fact, was criticized by the culinary elite for his introduction of this dish into the menu of a purportedly also 'elite' restaurant. And to be fair, it was originally created as a sort of joke, something entirely unexpected to surprise a favorite regular, who ended up loving it so much the dish made it to the big leagues and has since become one of the more successfull dishes Au Pied de Cochon offers. But what bothered critics, besides how low-brow even ordinary Poutine is, was the engorging excess, the unabashed richness, the artery-clogging, no, the artery-destroying health-heedlessness.

Foie Gras Poutine is unnecessary. It doesn't do any more to fulfill the purpose of food than astronaut, freeze-dried protein and vitamin chips might, in fact, if the purpose of food is indeed simply nutrition, Foie Gras Poutine does it rather worse. It's all fat and starch. It's bad for you. It's useless.

Homily:

And this is its glory. I agree with Asher. And both of us, for that matter, agree with Robert Farrar Capon. The world was never meant to be used; it was meant to be enjoyed. The world, the whole deliriously spinning universe, was made to be enjoyed.

It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries. and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have.

So let me repeat: Foie Gras Poutine is unnecessary, but let's take that as a compliment. Everything good is unnecessary but the original Good. He didn't need any of all this when he made it. He made it out of love, because he thought it was good, tov. As Capon puts it, He likes it.

The Supper of the Lamb has many deeply worthwhile things to say, but it was this point I felt was driving all the different thoughts of the book. The world is Good. Life is good. To be is good. To eat, and especially to eat together, is good. And not to say that a man who doesn't feel this way about things isn't Christian, or can't be a Christian, but that he isn't thinking like one. He's making a mistake, and I think a more costly one than he realizes.

What do you suspect we'll be doing for all eternity? Singing hymns and nothing else? I will confess to you I felt a good deal of dread as a child thinking I would have to stand around bellowing the same hymnal mediocrities I even then recognized as substandard for the rest of an infinite time. Dreadful. That's not to say there won't be singing. There will be, and (praise God!) much better than we're used to. But I suggest to there will be more, that the Marriage Supper of the Lamb will be, in a sense, only a taste of what's to come after, the wine an Apéritif, the food Hors d' Oeuvres.

This life eternal that is given to us is a life of peace, and peace is good. Christ is the Prince of Peace, after all. And although I readily agree that our lives now cracked, broken, at war, that there are things that need doing, that our self is sinful and thus more often than not needs denying, restricting, yet there are people who have taken the struggle of this present darkness and fetishized it, made an idol of it in fact. They paint the struggle as the whole of Christianity. They are the workaholic pastors, the obsessive penitents. They are the self-aggrandizing pedants of the Law, the Pharisees.

I don't mean to be judgmental. All of us are these people to some degree. Every religious man is also a religious hypocrite. This time is one of struggle, but we take this struggle upon ourselves wanting to be rid of it. It is a weariness, and glory to the day when it's done!

For myself I have come to believe that precisely to the extent that you value your own self in terms of your religious powers (your honesty, your earnestness, your chastity, your generosity), it is to that extent that you will find Heaven a disappointment. You have not developed the sensibilities of Heaven, because honesty, earnestness, chastity, generosity, all the virtues, are not the point of existence in eternity, they are the pre-requisites, and they are long since accomplished for you by Someone Else. The point, what we are to be doing all that long, long time, is loving things, loving each other, above all and through all, loving God.

What is the chief end of man?

Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Loving things now, loving wine and beer and cheese and company (the crown of good food), and loving dancing and loving art and loving sport and the world generally, it is all training for Heaven. In this race we will all stumble in of course, because that's who we are, but whatever shape I'm in by the time I get there (rather rounder than not, I suspect), I'll be ready for a drink.

Doxology:

May God bless you and keep you,

May God make his face to shine upon you,

And give you peace.