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Apologies in advance, dear friends, if the following story contains elements of name-dropping and braggery. I will try as best as I can not to be obnoxious, but it has been such a long time since I had a moment of pure, unvarnished, gleeful pleasure, the kind that kept me at absorbed and rapt attention to the speaker. That moment came yesterday afternoon at the Chesapeake Theatre at Harford Community College, the speaker was Patricia Neal, the subject was Gary Cooper. As long as I live, I will never forget the sound of That Voice, the voice almost unchanged from the one in Hud and Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Subject Was Roses: "Oh, I adored him! He was a lovely man and I adored him." That voice was accompanied by a grand sweeping of her arms, as if she were trying to take the memory of Gary Cooper and hug us all with it. I know I felt hugged by it.

It is an awfully neat story, and an awfully grand adventure; I knew it would be, but I seriously, sorely underestimated how grand it was going to be. I have been at table for two hours, trying to find an eloquent way to say that I am a lucky woman, but eloquence is failing me today, so I might as well opt for plain-spoken truth. I am a lucky woman.

Lloyd and I spent the weekend with my dad and stepmom in Maryland. Going to visit the 'rents is always a good thing; we relax, we eat well, we drink red wine out of burgundy glasses; we watch Food Network and loudly berate the on-air talent (I find myself turning into Patrick Star and bellowing "Who *are* you people?" at the likes of Michael Chiarello and the low-carb guy); we fuss over, and are fussed over by, the 92-pound American Eskimo puppy and the 15-pound black cat and the 27-pound (this is not a typo) orange cat. We did plenty of that this weekend. We also went to a special screening at the Chesapeake of The Day the Earth Stood Still on Friday night. Between myself, my dad and my Lloyd, we have probably seen this movie a total of 100 times. I never tire of it. I never tire of watching Patricia Neal, cowering in terror before the robot Gort, saving Earth by crying "Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!" (My father loves this scene so much that he made me promise to physically restrain him, lest he leap up in his chair and start cheering at that moment. Trust me when I say that this was not an easy thing to do, as my dad is a big fellow.) But it has been just long enough since I've seen The Day the Earth Stood Still that I had forgotten all the other little perfect moments of that movie: the sheer creepiness of the scene where the world is shut down for half an hour; the scene where Klaatu provides the clues for Professor Barnhardt to solve the puzzle on the blackboard; the scene at the beginning that always made me cry as a little kid, where Klaatu is wounded by a panicked soldier as he tries to present a gift for the President; the scene where Patricia Neal's would-be fiance decides to turn the fugitive Klaatu in to the Pentagon and says, with braggadocio, "You'll feel different when you read about me in the papers," and she says, with wonderment, "I feel different now"; and, really, any scene where Michael Rennie has a lot of screen time. I had forgotten what a fine, fine man Michael Rennie was.

I would have been perfectly happy just watching the movie, but the college had a treat for us, namely Miss Neal, who took introductory questions from HCC professor Wayne Hepler. I was glad to hear that Michael Rennie was as suave as I'd always hoped he'd be ("I loved Michael! He was a wonderful man!", and I was especially tickled by Miss Neal's remembering that she continually cracked up on set ("oh, I thought it was hysterical", so much so that during the shooting of the pivotal taxi scene, Michael Rennie asked her, "Now, Patricia, do you plan on laughing like that in every scene?" If you watch that scene closely, you can see a moment where he almost loses it, where he comes close to breaking character and laughing.

The following afternoon, we went back to the Chesapeake for Professor Hepler's interview with Miss Neal. To say that she was delightful is to understate the case grossly. She was entertaining and lyrical and funny, candid about her attraction to married men ("oh, I was awful! Just awful!" and generous in her assessment of nearly everyone she worked with. She was full of affection for Gary Cooper (with whom she had had an affair for five years, and whose picture still adorns a wall in her bedroom), for Cary Grant, for Michael Rennie, for Andy Griffith (her co-star in A Face in the Crowd), even for Ronald Reagan, with whom she'd become friends while filming her first movie role, in John Loves Mary. Her voice was saturated with kindness as she remembered Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck; she practically glowed as she remembered one of her teachers in Packard, Kentucky, who fostered her love of acting. She was generous and loving about her ex-husband, Roald Dahl, calling his New Yorker short stories "fantastic" and saying that he had "done a really lovely job" of helping her recover from the three strokes she suffered in a single night when she was 39 years old and pregnant with their daughter Lucy. (Dahl's efforts at rehabilitation were a source of controversy; many people thought that his rehabilitation regime for her was brutal, but if Miss Neal has any negative feelings about them, they certainly weren't forthcoming in the interview.) About the only negative word she had in the whole interview was for George Peppard, her co-star in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Apparently she had met him on a previous job and they had got along well, but by the time they started shooting Tiffany's, Peppard had undergone a complete personality change and become, in her words, "a horrible man! Horrible!...and years later, when I heard he had died, I was glad!" Considering that Miss Neal appeared to adore just about everyone she had ever met or worked with, I can only come to the conclusion that success did indeed spoil George Peppard, and if he felt any bitterness about spending the last years of his professional life on The A-Team, well, he had it coming.

Dear friends, I so wish that there were an extant audio or video file to which I could link, because my transcribing all of this doesn't begin to do Miss Neal justice. How I wish you could have heard about her speak of her children, of the terrifying day when her infant son Theo was struck by a taxi and was plunged into months of surgeries and close calls, and of the loss of her oldest daughter, Olivia, who contracted a fatal case of measles when she was seven. ("She was a wonderful child, a wonderful wonderful girl...But she is no more, and has not been for a very very long time." Spoken with sadness, but without tears, with resignation and with deep, deep love.) How I wish you could have heard how smoothly she was able to move from discussing the hardest moments of her life to the most frivolous and whimsical, like the ads for Maxim instant coffee she did in the 1970's ("It was a job! I wanted to work! And I loved it, it was wonderful coffee!" And I really wish I could show you the look on her face during the discussion of Gary Cooper's affair with Ingrid Bergman. "I don't know how many people knew about that," she said.

"Well, we know it now," Professor Hepler said, gesturing at the audience and smiling.

Miss Neal looked at all of us, and drawled, "Spread it arouuuuuuund." The expression on her face was priceless.

I didn't think the weekend could get any better than this. If we had left at the end of the q&a session and just returned to the 'rents' house, my weekend would have been made. But we didn't. It turns out that the HCC radio station manager, who coordinated the weekend's events, is good friends with my dad, and thus it was that Lloyd and I were invited to join the station manager and his wife and her relatives, my dad and stepmom, and Miss Neal and her assistant at dinner. At the post q&a cocktail party, she had been looking tired, and we figured she would probably send her regrets and not come to dinner, but come to dinner she did, and she got her second wind quickly. My dad was seated next to her, and several pictures were taken of the two of them staring at each other with adoration. My stepmom was seated across from her; at one point I saw Miss Neal holding both of C's hands in hers, telling her that her mother had died shortly before her 104th birthday. "I think you'll live to 103, too," said C. Miss Neal looked thoughtful. "Oh, I don't think I want to live to 103. But I think 96 would be good, don't you?" Lloyd and I sat at the far end of the table and watched, captivated but relieved that the pressure would not be on for us to be clever and charming with the famous movie star. Unfortunately, my dad had other ideas and announced to Miss Neal that his daughter and son-in-law had accompanied them. "Where are they?" she called. "Oh, the flowers are in front of you." Lloyd obligingly moved the flowers. "Oh, there you are," she said, and I thought, this is so cool! Patricia Neal is waving at Lloyd! It was at this point that I decided to screw up my courage and move down the table and -- gulp -- actually chat with Miss Neal. We spent some more time oo-ing and ahh-ing over Cary Grant and Michael Rennie, and I had the sense that if it hadn't been so late in the evening, I could have had a good two hours' worth of Gary Cooper stories from her.

"We should get a picture of you two together, for your dad," said the station manager's wife, who had been sitting to my right during dinner. I was about to demur prettily, sure that Miss Neal had had enough flashbulbs popping in her face for one day, when she turned to me. "What a good idea," she said. "Shall we hold hands?" We moved closer to each other, we moved our heads closer together, and I knew the smile I was smiling was not a pretty one; it was the kind of smile you smile when you have had more than a little wine and are anticipating a bright flash in a dark restaurant. I tried to tone the smile down a bit, make it a bit prettier and less frightening, and then I felt my hand being clasped by the woman who saved the world with "Klaatu barada nikto," the woman who handed George Peppard a check and said "you're entitled to a week's paid vacation" with a now-understandable relish, the one that Paul Newman called "the one that got away" in Hud, and I knew that smile wasn't going anywhere.

Dear friends, I am back on my feed, but tonight I let circumstances get the best of me, and thus does another night go by without anything good to share with you. I promise, though, that come Sunday night, I will have an awfully neat story to share, so please do stay tuned. In the meantime, I realize it's too late to do this as a Veterans Day commemoration, but in light of the reported skittishness of certain ABC affiliates to join in tonight's airing of Saving Private Ryan, I would recommend, if you still have time to head out to a video store, to watch this instead. If you are not familiar with it, trust me, it is wonderful. If you are familiar with it, you know what I mean.

Tomorrow Lloyd and I will be headed down to Maryland to visit my dad and stepmom, who are taking us on the adventure that will form the basis of the awfully neat story. If I don't stop back between now and then, have a superb weekend, all.

Now it can be told:  I have officially sealed my fate as the office eccentric.  This morning I had planned to marinate the skirt steaks I bought for dinner (plus leftovers) in a mix of lime juice, garlic, salt and adobo seasoning.  Lo and behold, there was no garlic or lime juice in the house.  A normal person would have just settled on another marinade, but...oh, heck, do I even need to give you the punchline?

Reader, I took the damn steaks to work, along with the adobo seasoning and salt, as well as a freezer bag to hold everything.  On the way I stopped at Grand Central Market and bought a dozen limes and a head of garlic.  At the first allowable break in la Marche Futile, I sneaked into the cafeteria, squeezed the lime juice into the bag, crushed a few cloves of garlic and threw them in, shook in a little salt and a lot of adobo, and dropped in the steaks, which looked nice and tiny in the meat case at Whole Foods but turned out to be eighteen inches long each.  (Note to self:  For the love of Bog, please buy yourself a copy of Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery.)  I sealed the bag, mooshed everything together and was about to put it in the fridge when I realized that the steaks, already starting to turn dark from exposure to lime juice, looked like an enormous discolored heart.  I decided that if I kept it in my shoulder bag, it should stay pretty cool (and it did), so I carried back to my desk, half-wedged in the crook of my elbow, hoping all the way that nobody would catch me carrying my bag of raw meat.

I suspect I am not long for Cubicle World.

To prepare for my eventual exile, I decided to put my Research Girl cap back on, and thus it is that I find myself reading Sidney Mintz's 1985 study Sweetness and Power:  The Place of Sugar in Modern History.  Since lately I take my comfort anywhere I can find it, I find this paragraph from the introduction very comforting, and helpful in reminding me that no matter how dire our immediate past and future is, it still behooves us to keep an eye on the larger picture:

Though I do not accept uncritically the dictum that anthropology must become history or be nothing at all, I believe that without history its explanatory power is seriously compromised.  Social phenomena are by their nature historical, which is to say that the relationships among events in one "moment" can never be abstracted from their past and future setting.  Arguments about immanent human nature, about the human being's inbuilt capacity to endow the world with its characteristic structures, are not necessarily wrong; but when these arguments replace or obviate history, they are inadequate and misleading.  Human beings do create social structures, and do endow events with meaning; but these structures and meanings have historical origins that shape, limit and help to explain such creativity.

Incidentally, the skirt steak, while a bit fatty, was pretty tasty, especially when served up with butter lettuce leaves and Pickapeppa sauce for dipping.

And just because a) I'm in the mood for sharing a corny joke and b) I just heard it on the teevee, I shall share with you one of my favorite exchanges from Futurama:

Fry:  You mean the secret ingredient of Slurm is...people?

Leela:  No, you're thinking of Soylent Cola.

Fry:  Oh.  How is it?

Leela:  It varies from person to person.

Here's a piece of advice for keeping fate on your side, for keeping your karma well oiled: Never joke about being hit in the head. Don't even use it as a metaphor for shock, i.e. "When he told me he was leaving me for a troupe of extremely limber circus performers, I felt as if I'd been struck in the face." I know why hit-in-the-head/smacked-upside-the-head/punched-in-the-face metaphors are so tempting to use: they're evocative. They work. Being hit on the head really, really, really hurts.

Here is another piece of advice, not so much for keeping your karma well oiled but because it's a nice thing to do for your fellow humans: If you ride any form of mass transit to work, especially one that packs all y'all in like sardines, and you carry your stuff in a backpack, please, dear friends, please be careful with that backpack.

You can probably ascertain where this is going. The plan was to come home tonight, rig up the jelly bags to cook the last bag of apples and the last pound of cranberries, start cooking onions in olive oil and marsala and eventually turn them into whole wheat pasta with anchovy and onion sauce, make some phone calls and send out some overdue letters to friends who are much better than I deserve, hunker down with my sweetheart and watch our new Ren and Stimpy DVD. I contemplated all of this as I had my nose buried in the latest issue of the Art of Eating, and thus I didn't notice the young man exiting at 30th Avenue, whirling around, losing his balance and landing a blow squarely on my right ear. I don't know what was in his bag, but I'm guessing it was either a quantity of cast-iron skillets or a dead body. Whatever it was, it made my head ring and my bile rise. Four hours later, I'm feeling a bit better, but my ear still hurts like a son of a bitch and my neck is stiff and sore. On the plus side, I don't seem to have suffered any neurological damage, but then, as my friends and spouse would undoubtedly say, "gee, Jen, how can you tell?"

So there will be no jelly tonight, either in the making or the photographing. No lemon curd for Kimberly, who has been waiting patiently for it. No stirring of onions for half an hour. There is only gratitude that when I found myself running into Manhattan yesterday for an emergency cranberry run, I suddenly developed a craving for cheese grits, and thus did I find myself with cheese grits fixings on hand. I've been reading about a farmer who makes stone-ground grits, both the corn and hominy versions, and I know one day I will buy these lovely grits to serve at home. In general, I turn my nose up at quick-cooking corn products; to me, it's not polenta until I've been stirring it for half an hour (or throwing it into the oven for 45 minutes, giving it a nice stir and putting it back in for 15 more), but tonight I was glad for my cooks-in-seven-minutes! white grits. Four cups of water boiled on the stove; a pinch of salt went in, followed by a cup of grits, which were stirred, covered and left to burble for 7 minutes while I grated 1/4 pound of Asiago cheese and a smaller quantity of raw-milk Gruyere and cut a tablespoon of butter into four dots. When the 7 minutes were up, I threw the cheeses and butter into the pot, stirred like mad until the cheese was melted, and then let the grits sit until they were slightly less liquid but not quite solid. (Grits lovers out there will know what I mean.) Dear friends, I try not to tread the well-worn path of glorifying comfort food, as it's been done by so many who have come before me; some who have done it beautifully, others who have not, to put it plainly. Tonight, though, I raise the banner for cheese grits as a bowl fulla just what I needed. It is dark at 5, the day was unsatisfying and I am still in a bit of a stupor, but I have cheese grits to fortify me, pull me through the night and encourage me to think of grits and polenta, close cousins but never used in the same way in my kitchen. Depending on how long it takes me to fall asleep, I could have the whole thing written by breakfast.

Edit:  From our Funny How Life Works Department:  On Sunday morning I was on a tear because I couldn't find any fresh cranberries in my neighborhood.  They are a fixture from November to March, but I spent two days looking for them and couldn't find them.  Lloyd said he would look in our local evil supermarket, where he does weekly milk & paper products runs, but even Evilmarket didn't have them.  So into Manhattan I go, bitching all the way, muttering to myself about going to Whole Foods on a Sunday -- New York City Marathon Sunday, at that -- and paying extra money for the yuppie Giant Cranberries (Best for Salsa and Muffins!).  But if I hadn't made that trip, I wouldn't have walked by the grains aisle; I wouldn't have been seized by the urge for cheese grits, and I wouldn't have had all the ingredients waiting nicely for me last night.  So this pain-in-the-neck trip was a good thing.

I have to remind myself of this over and over, because on Sunday night I went out to pick up some coriander for the soup I was making for dinner, and what did I see at my local fruit & veg emporium?  I saw two guys unpacking case after case of bagged whole cranberries.  They are everywhere now.  Have you ever seen the Barney Bear cartoon where he is duck hunting, and in the seconds before duck season starts, all the ducks are in a conga line around his rowboat and over his head?  And then the season starts, and the ducks all vanish, only to resurface long enough to torture poor Barney?  And then the instant the season ends, all the ducks come back and resume the conga line over Barney's head?  That's how I feel every time I see another goddamn bag of goddamn cranberries.

Not that I take any of this too seriously.  Heavens, no.  (/wracking sobs)

Today at LuthorCorp I received a phone call from a dear friend who read my great post-election conniption and, just because she knew I needed it, did a spot-on imitation of Tucker Carlson on the night Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire. "Why aren't you being foody tonight? You were supposed to be foody. Come on, be foody." Why, certainly.

It is a good thing that Gareth Blackstock, the mercurial and acid-tongued chef played by Lenny Henry on Chef!, is not my editor, or my site administrator. If he were, he would probably be shouting right now: "Several WEEKS ago I remember hearing promises for a recipe for paradise JELLY. Since no paradise jelly recipe has been forthcoming, I can only assumed it hasn't ARRIVED yet...don't think I don't mind giving bog-variety preserving lessons on your behalf. I mean, I only have NINETY covers to prepare in the next hour and a half. I was hoping that something would come up to pass the time!" Dear friends, I am sorry about that.

I have been Googling tonight for a history of paradise jelly, but so far all I've been able to come up with is a single recipe posted in several sites under two different handles. It sounds like somebody is plagiarizing somebody, but I'll let them fight it out for themselves. I first read about paradise jelly in Laurie Colwin's last novel, A Big Storm Knocked It Over. Because Mrs. Colwin was a fan of the 1943 Joy of Cooking, I decided to look at my own copy to see if it included a paradise jelly recipe, and indeed it did. I believe that the internet versions of this jelly sprung off from the Joy recipe, because the proportions are the same: 20 apples, 10 quinces, 2 quarts of cranberries. (The internet recipe also includes two vanilla beans, but I've never tried it this way.) Because fruit varies so much by weight, I interpret these measures as 10 pounds of apples, 5 pounds of quinces and two one-pound bags of cranberries. If you don't want to be stuck dealing with jar upon jar upon jar of jelly, you can certainly scale the measures down, but I would definitely use twice as many apples as quinces, and I would trust your own judgment on cranberries. If you like them, use more. If you're not a fan, use less.

Last year I found myself caught unawares by the fall fruit season. Nearly all of the fruit I bought ended up in a pie -- and don't think for one second that I'm not noodling around with a version of paradise pie, to be shared with you as soon as I get something that sings out make me, bake me, eat me up, yum -- but I never got the hang of making pie and jelly in a single weekend, and as a result, it was a paradise jellyless Christmas last year. Lloyd and my parents were too kind to chide me for this, but I knew they missed it. My parents missed it on their toast and Lloyd missed his open-face jelly sandwiches, which he created one weekend out of a slice of focaccia (another house standard, based on a Carol Field recipe that includes olive oil and white wine in the dough, and is one of the most delicious loaves of bread I know how to make), a thin layer of creme fraiche and a thick layer of paradise jelly. This year, I won't be lazy, or disaffected, or clueless. I'll remember that every step of this jelly is a gift, from the selection of which apples to use (the house Winesaps? Golden Russets? Baldwins? Northern Spies?), to delving into the crate of quinces at the farmer's market, getting my hands and nose covered with quince fuzz and my head filled with that honeyed perfume, to watching the apples and cranberries turn a vivid red in the preserving pot, to doing the dance of cooking everything together, to the moment where we pop the seal on the first jar and dip the spoon in, inhale, sigh in a way that seems a bit over the top for a mere jelly, taste it and realize that no, we weren't being over the top. This is jelly with something to say.

Paradise Jelly

Yield: at least 8 jars (I'll have to let you know when I'm done!)

10 pounds tart apples

5 pounds quinces

2 one-pound bags fresh cranberries

sugar (see instructions)

juice of 2 lemons

Wash the apples and quinces, but do not peel. Cut the blossoms from the quinces and cut into 4 pieces. Put in a preserving pan, add water just to cover, bring the fruit and water to a boil and boil until fruit is collapsing. Pour the mix into a jelly bag and let drain.

Cut the blossoms and stems from the apples and cut into 4-8 pieces. Put them into the preserving pan along with the cranberries, add water just to cover, boil as with the quinces and pour into a separate jelly bag. Let both bags drain overnight, or for at least 4 hours. Do not squeeze the jelly bags, no matter how much they look like they need squeezing, for squeezing will turn the juice cloudy.

The next day, measure the juice. For every cup of juice, measure 3/4 cup of sugar, if you like a more tart, cranberry-accented jelly or 1 cup if you like a sweeter, more quince-flavored jelly. Bring the juice to a boil, add the sugar and lemon juice, stir, skim and begin testing for a set after 10 minutes. (Most cookbooks recommend that you cook no more than 4 cups of juice at a time, because it is trickier to determine a set if you cook much more than that, but sometimes I like to live dangerously and cook 6 cups at a time. Born to be wild, c'est moi.)

Meanwhile, boil your jars and sterilize your lids. When you see your jelly has turned into jelly (either by the sheeting test, the plate test or the thermometer test), decant it into the sterilized jars, apply the lids and screwbands and return them to the canner. Process them for 10 minutes. Take them out, listen for the satisfying ping of the seals forming, and wait for the jelly to cool down enough for enthusiastic consumption of it.

When you're done, you will have jars and jars of the world's loveliest jelly to show for your efforts, but odds are you will also be sweaty and disheveled and more than a little tired. (Or, if you are smarter about this than I am, you can ask a canning-inclined friend if s/he has made any paradise jelly, and are there any jars left? No sweat, no dishevelment, and you still have some jelly to show for your efforts.) One of the nicest things you can do for yourself at this moment is to fix yourself a cup of tea and a little snack, maybe some cream crackers with some of the leftover jelly you have decanted into a clean glass or jar for immediate consumption, and settle down with a good book. I finally picked up a book I have been noticing, looking at and poring over since its publication in 2000, Sallie Tisdale's purely amazing The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food. I like this book so well that I could quote the whole thing, but that would be a gross violation of Ms. Tisdale's copyright. Better that you go directly to your library and/or bookstore and peruse for yourself. In the meantime, I will share just one of the passages that sent me over the moon, one that addresses one of the noisiest bees in my bonnet, the degradation of language and meaning:

The individual is once again first and forward. The youth revolution first seen in the twenties, and its vibrant revival in the sixties and seventies, shrank in the eighties into something else. We call health "fitness" now. A minority of Americans eat healthy food and exercise regularly, but socioculturally this is the leading image of consumption and success. The constant presence of lean, mean, athletic and perpetually young white people in our shared images renders all the rest of us invisible. Wages fall, security drops away, the rich grow richer and the poor poorer, and at the same time -- and not coincidentally -- the image of happiness gets richer, leaner, younger, and farther and farther out of reach. We laugh at the bemused housewife of midcentury, caught between Betty Crocker and Betty Grable, but we are caught between teenage models and marathon-running CEOs, and we buy it, we buy it all the way.

Words like labor-saving, leisure, freedom and economical are early examples of a degradation of language forced by social change, something T.J. Jackson Lears calls the "collapse of meaning." For close to two hundred years, how things look has been becoming more important than how things are. Advertising offered less and less information and more and more messages of desire, more blurring between lies and truth -- shadows thrown and lights carefully cast to create false impressions. By the early twentieth century, slogns, jingles, free samples, and mascots were everywhere. Words like natural and homestyle appeared as new disinformation; in Waverley Root's phrase, these are the kind of words that deliberately "evoke but don't inform." Canned foods were a return to "home cooking," while raw and bulk foods were labelled "unwashed."

More recently, the words changed again. The food technology industry first co-opted natural, homemade and fresh from the natural-foods movement, and then corrupted their meaning by adding light and low. In the 1980s, New York's Rainbow Room offered a "fitness" menu guaranteeing the diner fewer than 500 calories and a bill of more than $30. There is a trend in kitschy and old-fashioned cookbooks, a return to the past, but it is not what it seems. "The classics," says a food magazine, "lightened and reinterpreted, are reappearing." Endless recipes are "reinterpreted" and "refined" and "intensified" and especially "lightened." Lightened, buoyant foods of flight, foods of the rarefied, the few...Food and Wine recently interviewed Ferdinand Metz, the president of the Culinary Institute of America and one of the keepers of the highest culinary standards in this country. Metz says he eats only super-low-fat, light food. He recommends making a souffle with skim milk and substituting cornstarch for the eggs. Other cooks, like those of the French Culinary Institute, offers similar recipes "favorable to your waistline," but they are changes that betray the meaning of souffle at least as much as calling frozen peas "fresh" betrays the meaning of fresh, the very meaning of peas.