Now We're Cooking with Gerard Manley Hopkins

Is this a food blog? Or are we hungry? So many questions. But to the point. In a post over at Best American Poetry, we are treated to a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "Pied Beauty," which is dappled with all sorts of lovely spring words and so inspired former chef and current writer Karen Resta that she created a very particular recipe based on said diction. The ingredients include "Well-marbled steak (brindled cow), Waterchestnuts (chestnut falls), Golden chanterelle mushrooms (finches' wings), Pear (whatever is freckled), Chili-Tamarind Sauce (sweet, sour), and Steamed White Rice (whose beauty is past change)." And the directions are a poem in themselves.

The poem is of course worth re-posting!

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins