Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Farrar Capon

A prayer, yes, but with its hands greasy from the kitchen. Capon hijacks the cadence of the Lord's Prayer and swaps salvation for supper, turning daily bread into “daily taste” - a tiny heresy that lands because it isn’t really irreverent. It’s devotional, just aimed at a different altar: the table. The intent is to sanctify appetite, to argue that pleasure isn’t a guilty sideline to the serious life but one of its proper languages.

The specificity does the heavy lifting. “Soups that spoons will not sink in” is comedy with a moral: reject the watery, the timid, the dietified. He’s praising thickness, risk, and commitment - food that announces it was made by someone who meant it. “Sauces which are never the same twice” smuggles in a larger claim about living well: the best things are not standardized. They’re contingent, improvised, responsive to mood, weather, the last splash of wine. That line is also a shot across the bow of industrial consistency, the supermarket promise that everything can taste identical forever.

Then comes the sly abundance politics: “more gravy than we have bread to blot it with.” It’s excess framed as grace, not waste - a vision of generosity where the limitation isn’t the pot but our capacity to receive. Ending on “pasta with a hundred fillings,” Capon gestures toward variety as a virtue: not novelty for its own sake, but a world where imagination multiplies inside ordinary forms.

Capon, an Episcopal priest as well as a writer, often fused theology with the sensual. This reads like a mid-century rebuke to Puritan restraint and modern convenience culture at once: a liturgy for those who suspect holiness might smell like onions and butter.