Quotes from Robert Farrar Capon

Against all the propaganda for fancy eating and plain cooking, I hope to persuade you to cook fancy and just plain eat. It is better for your soul.

To make belief the touchstone of the kingdom's operation is simply to turn faith into just one more cold work. Of course we must believe; but only because there is nothing left for us to do but believe.

The gluing together of a clutch of human beings into some semblance of a city has never been more than remotely possible. We are all sinners, and it's the people closest to us that see us at our worst. The family gets the lion's share of life's provocations, aggravations, and enervations. Nowhere is there so much fur quite so ready to be rubbed the wrong way.

What God effects in the reconciliation does the work of forgetting without the danger of forgetting. He does better than forget: he remembers our evil in grace as the only read thing it ever could have been. He takes away the flaming sword between us and our self-knowledge, and brings us home to ourselves.

If, while we hold our times here in our own hands, all we have to do to be reconciled is believe he has them in his, how much less will we have to do there when we shall see they are in Christ's hand alone - that is, see them held for our eternal enjoyment as all right?

We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.

Any authentically Christian system is going to have to keep off the kick of human merit and demerit and stick resolutely to a universalism of grace that overrides the subject of human works.

The feet-on-the-stove stance of this book is a deliberate attempt to cure myself, and anyone else who will listen, of the nasty habit of worrying the world to pieces like a terrier with a rag. What we are up to here is not the hasty shaking loose of a culinary result, but a patient rumination on cooking itself. There are more important things to do than hurry.

At the very worst, all you can be is dead - and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.

Only when you are finally able, with the publican, to admit that you are dead will you be able to stop balking at grace.

What saves us is Jesus, and the way we lay hold of that salvation is by faith. And faith is something that, throughout this book, I shall resolutely refuse to let mean anything other than trusting Jesus. It is simply saying yes to him rather than no. It is, at its root, a mere "uh-huh" to him personally.

God's program is grace, not scorekeeping; free gift, not reward and punishment in this world.

adultery can indeed be pleasant, and tying one on can amuse. But betrayal, jealousy, love grown cold, and the gray dawn of the morning after are nobody's idea of a good time.

I myself, however, could never resist the temptation to read raisin paste for wine in the story of the Miracle of Cana. "When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made raisin paste ... he said unto the bridegroom, 'Every man doth at the beginning doth set forth good raisin paste, and when men have well drunk [eaten? the text is no doubt corrupt], then that which is worse, but thou hast kept the good raisin paste until now.

Does it not whet your appetite for the critical opera omnia of such an author, where he will freely have at the lenth and breath of Scripture? Can you not see his promised land flowing with peanut butter and jelly; his apocalypse, in which the great whore of Babylon is given the cup of ginger ale of the fierceness of the wrath of God?

On the other hand the usual flat whisk is awkward for tall, narrow pots, and it, too, is weak at scouring into corners. The spiral cream whip ... is a little better at reaching out of the way spots, but it defies firm handling. If anything ever sticks to the pot, you will feel as if you are working with a wet noodle.

However grand our sacramental downsittings and updressings may be, they remain only and precisely sacraments: real presences, under particular signs, of the happier order that faith can discover under any and all signs. They're a bit like the church. As long as we see them as an earnest of the kingdom, they're all right; when we put on airs and act as if they were the kingdom itself, they look just silly.

The secular, for all its goodness, does not defend itself very well against mindless and perpetual consumption. It cries out to be offered by abstinence as well as use; to be appreciated, not simply absorbed. Hunger remains the best sauce.

An eye for an eye" won't work because all it does is double the number of eyeless people.

Salvation is not a matter of getting a reward that will make up for a rotten deal; it is a matter of entering by faith into the happiness - the hilarity beyond all liking and happening - that has been pounding on our door all along.

The only reason that judgment comes into it at all is the sad fact that there will always be dummies who refuse to trust a good thing when it's handed to them on a platter.

We spend our lives invoking upon ourselves imagined necessities, creating God in the image of our own fears - and all the while, he is beating us over the head with the balloon of grace and the styrofoam baseball bat of a vindicating judgment. The history of salvation is slapstick all the way, right up to and including the end.

All salt and no finesse makes Jack a dull cook.

With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people's satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.