Jane Stannus

Wise men say only fools rush in. But in this particular instance, I really couldn’t help falling in love on the spot. Like a zillion others, the story starts on a night out. When my party, dripping with rain, arrived at the restaurant, our table wasn’t ready, and they ushered us to wait at the bar The bar was a happening kind of place. Instead of looking up at shelves of bottles and bartenders mixing drinks, it looked down onto the kitchen area, which was built around a giant wood fire over which five or six cooks labored frenetically. The flames blazed openly, fed from the picturesque log stack that lined the back wall of the dining area.

‘Life,’ Carl Sandburg says, ‘is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.’ Carl, being a poet, was the sensitive type. You’d better believe that when Chuck Norris peels an onion, the only crying comes from the onion. But Chuck’s iron-jawed impassivity isn’t a trait I personally seek to emulate (though one is naturally curious about the type; did you know that when Chuck goes to a feminist rally, he leaves with a freshly ironed shirt and a sandwich?) I freely admit that both life and onions have occasionally brought me to tears. Especially onions. Julia Child thought it hard to imagine a civilization without them, but as a seven-year-old I vigorously disagreed.

What will Easter 2021 be like? Nothing like 2020, if I have my way. This year, I dream, Easter will be preceded by a Holy Week as solemn as if COVID had never been. Purple-veiled statues will stand solemnly about the church overlooking the Holy Thursday foot washing, a jug of water the only cleansing agent in sight, while a large choir sings the Ubi caritas. The Mass will be jammed with people, as it is every normal year, lovely, unknown people who spontaneously show up, unregistered and untraceable, squeezing in wherever there’s space. Afterwards an altar boy swinging a golden censer will lead the procession through volutes of blue smoke to an altar of repose, swathed in white silk.

The decline and fall of the New York Times, like that of the Roman Empire, did not happen overnight. Believe it or not, by 1970 the rot had already set in at the Times and rank error was being peddled as fact to a trusting public. I have proof. In August of that year, the paper ran a review of a Canadian theatrical production just arrived in New York called ‘Love and Maple Syrup’ (a reference to a Gordon Lightfoot song). The show was panned — so far, so par for the course — but the review ended on a shockingly error-riddled and un-factchecked note: ‘Love, incidentally, is great, but have you actually tasted maple syrup? Ugh! Only a nation with built-in insecurities and a dire need for blood sugar could have chosen it as its national drink.

It’s hard to keep up with the French. First they invent a perfectly good culinary term, hors d’oeuvre, which as everyone knows refers to the bite-sized appetizers served at cocktail hour. We Anglos, in keeping with our ancestral custom, duly pirate the word and put it to work in kitchens on three continents. But barely have we wrestled the silent h into submission and gotten the vowels in oeuvre sorted out (is that ue or eu?), when the French — who had permitted their attention to wander for a brief space — deign to take note of our efforts, lifting a single languid eyebrow: ‘What? Hors d’oeuvres? Oh, you mean amuse-bouches?’ Stop the presses, everyone; cancel the cookbooks; send the menus back to the printshop. It’s an amuse bouche now...

Christmas is a truly season of birds. Ornamental peacocks and gilded wrens perch upon the Christmas tree, cardinals and chickadees make themselves at home at feeders and on wrapping paper, and irrepressible robins are ubiquitous. According to a medieval legend recounted in Hamlet, during the season ‘wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated’, the ‘bird of dawning’ (the rooster) ‘singeth all night long...so hallowed and so gracious is the time’. One presumes the medievals had acquired the skill of sleeping through crowing roosters, or perhaps hallowed and gracious would not have been the chosen terms.