The Book of Heaven: A Novel (15 page)

The Invisibles who completed their kitchen apprenticeships won their initiation as master cooks by gradually mastering the Twelve Dinners and their variant patterns. The children intended merely for household service were not taught the Twelve.

These Twelve were the culinary incarnation of the great cycle of events, seasons, and emotions in human life, the very taste of Providence itself, in food that Heaven and earth, the natural and the sublime. Gate taught her that the effect of the Twelve should be like music, the acme of entwined flavors. As with music, the guests should intuit what had been expressed, even if no one could describe it.

Each master cook was educated with a secret, separate Twelve, designed for her individual skills and temperament alone, known only to herself and her teacher. There was a drama in each of these Twelve, and the great Invisible cooks produced them as messages, exquisite and triumphant resolutions, or as dazzling gambles taken at a moment of great risk, a dinner dealt as if from a fortune-teller's deck of tarot cards.

You will have heard, even if you are unfamiliar with the Twelve, the stories of one of these dinners that changed the course of a human life, or of a country's history, thus altering—or still to alter—your life, and mine. For example, we all know the familiar story of the False Host, the tale of a great landowner who invited a young couple to a great feast in his magnificent garden, but when they sat down with him at table, would not let them share the splendid dishes he himself was served on golden plate.

Instead, they were served cooked grain on earthenware dishes. When the husband, according to the hospitality he valued and understood, attempted to serve himself and his wife from the golden platters, the landowner had them stripped naked by his attendants, and driven from the table.

The couple took no revenge, but instead vowed to feed anyone who sat at their table with overflowing generosity and intuition, as a way of loving all impersonally. In this way, they did indeed come to love many strangers, even some they did not like, and many came to love them, too. But they established the great principle of impersonal love through their feasts where all were welcome at the table and none refused any dish that had been prepared. They became the angels we know as Providence and Plenty, present at all feasts.

As for the landowner, his garden fell into ruin, as no one would accept his invitations, and even his servers deserted him as he took to capriciously denying them the wine and particular dishes they loved and had earned in serving him.

There is also the tale of the Miracle of the Bread. This happened to a hermit, who belonged to a sect that shunned and abhorred women as animals, temptations to men, who had brought every kind of evil into the world, slaves to their own flesh, fallen nature incarnate. The hermit had a tender heart, despite his harsh doctrines, and to be candid, his ignorance, since he never had any but the most restricted contact with women. It was his habit to feed animals, and the travelers who passed by his hut, half hidden in the spring and summer by straggling grasses.

He lived on cheeses donated by merchants on his twice-yearly visits to town, but bread was a luxury beyond him; he never had any to offer. “Eat, poor fish,” he said, crumbling bits of cheese and tossing them into the lake. “But I have no bread for you.” “Eat, poor insects,” he said, dropping crumbs of cheese for the ants. “But I have no bread for you.” “Eat, poor vipers,” he said, leaving bowls of cheese curd out at night. “You, at least, will not want bread.” One afternoon a woman stopped at his hut, to ask for food and water. He brought out a share of cheese, and said to her, “Eat, poor animal. But I have no bread.”

She thanked him for the cheese, but paused before she ate, and said, “May I ask why you call me ‘poor animal'? ‘Dear woman' would be more welcoming.” The monk answered, “It is what we call women in our prayers for them.”

“And,” she asked, “why do you say you have no bread? Your hut is surrounded by wheat.” The monk had never realized that the overgrown grasses in the fields near his hut were wheat. “But it is not ripe,” the monk said, with finality.

“But I can ripen it for you,” the woman said, and the fields turned to gold.

“But it is not threshed,” the monk said.

“I can thresh it for you, and mill it, too,” the woman said, as the finest powder of flour snowed into the monk's empty barrel.

“But I have no yeast,” the monk said.

“I can make bread rise,” the woman said, and on the table next to the cheese two perfect loaves appeared, emanating the sweet fragrance of a summer afternoon.

The monk, until then, had been resisting the miracle. When he touched the bread, he accepted the miracle, and asked in wonder, “Who are you?”

The woman said, “You should recognize me.”

The monk shook his head, marveling, and said, “I did not think it was possible for God to incarnate in the body of a woman.”

“You also did not see the wheat hidden in the grasses, and the bread alive in the wheat,” she said.

The hermit never had the courage to admit the vision he had seen, but God, being a woman, forgave him for that. The bread made from the wheat harvested around his hut, though, became famous for its exquisite flavor and healing properties, and the hut became a place of pilgrimage, where no one went unfed.

Savour stood that late afternoon at Gate's side, as he accepted the roast bird of one apprentice, turned another aside for a mismanaged fire that prematurely cracked the clay, as he tasted and corrected.

She began to describe the Angel. There was an unspoken but powerful prohibition against the presumption of forming impressions of authorities; such impressions were viewed as undermining, in the way that iconoclasts viewed images of gods as challenges to singular divine power. Contaminating a leader or a god with partial human perceptions was to impose a limitation and to hint at the unmentionable existence of change.

Still, in hearing her own description, she discovered that she had made a number of observations of this man, and had concealed them, as if in a mental pantry. She told Gate of his charm, courtesy, dazzling handsomeness, his insistence on the supremacy of his God.

Gate set a group of apprentices to shred the flesh of the birds he judged failures, to be used in other dishes, and said, “Think of his soul as a dish. What is its predominant flavor? If you have tasted precisely, you will know the secret of his appetite. And where should you look first to glimpse this appetite? At the face—a man's habitual expression manifests what he tastes like to himself.”

“I believe,” said Savour, “that what is sweet to this man is strength. And power, his power. When you see his face, you notice that his expression in repose is one of pleasure, and yet frustration, as if he is tasting something delicious he cannot get enough of. I think he is tasting himself.”

She shivered with excitement. Gate knew she was seeing a vision of her great exhibition dinner. “Yes, I know him now, this is what I must do, it should be the Dinner of Grandeur.”

Her excitement mounted, and she spoke with the unconscious authority that possessed her in the practice of her craft. “A dinner for a ruler, dramatic and extravagant. There will be twelve different roasts of game and herd animals, fish and birds. I shall slaughter a pair, male and female, of each, and have them borne in lying side by side on enormous platters of gold and silver and tortoiseshell, lying on beds of pilaf. These will be carried by twelve children each, six on each side. They will kneel in front of him, to present the meats. This will hint that they kneel not only from reverence, but also from gratitude, that they themselves have not been sacrificed. I must learn quickly some of the names of his God. Then I shall make pastries rich with cheese and butter, latticed with the thousand names—”

“Savour,” Gate interrupted. “Are you sure of your judgment?”

“Yes,” she said decidedly.

“I am not,” he replied. “Listen to yourself. The last skill of the arts of the kitchen is the power to judge the work you have done.

“This is done through two tastings. First, the tasting by mouth, the judgment of food by the tongue. Then the tasting by mind; that is, the judgment of the palate itself. This is a far more subtle discipline, but it can be approached by describing your work in words. Then you must listen carefully, as if you were someone else, to what you have described.

“You, Savour, have described your own feats. The dinner you have described is a display of your own power and your desire to impress. It is your own power that enchants you. You should be thinking of this man's. It is you who wants to be the conqueror. If I were this man, I would want you to celebrate my power more than your own. Above all, as you seem to have forgotten, he is not a ruler, but the servant of one.

“However, if a Dinner of Grandeur were appropriate, yours would not be a bad conception. This dinner may yet be a useful one in your repertoire. Still, I think you have forgotten to ask a cook's second important question in devising an entertainment.”

“What is that?” She looked up at him.

“You must search your own appetite. And remember the first of all the principles of the kitchen, embedded in all the skills of knife, every calibration of temperature, each fine conception of a dish. Cooking is description, Savour. It is a description of the world, of the cook, and of the guest, all at once. And it is also an imagination of paradise. The great cook is working to reconcile that description, the facts of this world, with that vision, the dream of the gifts of Heaven.

“You are excused from kitchen work until noon tomorrow. Think deeply and quickly. Your work tonight is to create your future.”

Savour did as her teacher directed, and took advantage of her rare evening of freedom from the kitchens to walk along the estuary; the tide was still out, and the lambs old enough to graze were feeding on the salty grasses that gave their flesh its unique tenderness, and its faint aroma of lavender and sea breeze when roasted. Fine palates loved these delicate animals because they were the only creatures slaughtered and roasted whose bones tasted of flowers when they were brought to the table, as if they had never died.

Part of her work, like the work of all cooks, was to enter into a strange waking dream, to invite the world inside her. This work never feels as if it is done in ordinary time, because action and imagination fuse in the doing of it. The discipline of training and the freedom of passionate abandonment merge within it. Those who are dying and those who are making love know the hallucinatory nature of this work, those at the task of ending a life, those at the task of beginning one.

Savour entered that dream as she walked, and sometime during her sleep that night, she became convinced of which of her Twelve she must present to the Angelical. She sat up in bed as alert as an athlete leaping for a ball. She went to the window and prayed to her patron deities. There was, in answer, a full moon. She took polish, her whetstone, her silver presentation dishes, and her knives outside into the kitchen garden. It was common knowledge that silver polished by moonlight would take on a supernatural radiance, and that moon-honed knives cut more keenly, and impart the flavor of Heaven to whatever they cut, if a skilled hand wields them.

When Savour approached Gate that day as he patiently corrected the faults in the shapes of the clay urns his students offered him, he saw that she was inspired. This could mean that she had a true inspiration, or was seized by a headlong impulse that would cost him great effort to discipline. He hoped it was the former.

She beckoned him aside, and he left the supervision to another apprentice, one he was training as an instructor, a destiny that would have been impossible for Savour.

“I know which of my Twelve it has to be,” she said, with an absolute conviction that made him apprehensive. However, she was still his apprentice, and he must still make her understand the faults of her work when it was bad, the finesse of her work when it was good. He said, “Which have you chosen? And explain to me what made you choose it?”

“I am right about the man's appetite, but wrong about how to satisfy it. The Dinner of Grandeur can only be for someone who has won power beyond striving. It would not make this Priest feel content, but remind him all the more of his hunger. My first dinner for my master would have given him the sensation of starving.”

“Good,” said Gate. “You are thinking more keenly about the nature of this guest. Now, what is a cook to a man seeking power? Who are you to him? Reason, Savour.”

“I am his theater. I show his power as hospitality, sustaining, if he chooses, his companions. Or my plates set out hints of reproach, or a warning of a guest's falling worth, a message sent subtly through a thumb's flick of salt, of tears to come.

“If I serve apples with duck, I show his orchards and his lakes. I show his power as glory.

“But I have to be more to him than this. Because any banquet cook can serve him in this way. Judging from what you have taught me, the chief feature of power is the ease with which it can jettison and replace. But I am a cook, servant of the irreplaceable. So here is how I will serve him.

“I will give him back with this food what he cannot replace in himself: innocence. I will make him feel the luxury of safety, since men of power are always in danger. I will remind him by nourishing him that I can also poison. He will remember that during the hours he dines, his cook is responsible for his fate. He will sense that my hand is never far from a knife, yet I will do no harm. From my Twelve, I will offer to him the Banquet of Trust.

“I will give him the dishes of childhood, each distinct from the other, so that nothing can be hidden. The food in bright, pure colors: white, green, red. With cheese, milk, and cream, the maternal foods with which kinship is created. I will present these in terra-cotta, the material of our foundation, the very earth that sustains us. The effect will be rustic but elegant, in the spirit of a carefree week in the country, free of protocol.”