Through The Children's Gate (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
I admire them because they are hard workers, and because they make delicious things. But, more than that, I like to contemplate the way they have to think in order to make the things they make. They are the last artists among us who still live in the daily presence of patronage. In the two centuries since the Romantic revolution, the arts have, one by one, been Byronized, set free from the necessity of pleasing an audience—a process that began with the poets and painters and took in the architects and novelists and has swept up, most recently, the rock musicians and shoe designers. All have taught themselves that they are there to instruct and puzzle an audience, not to please it. But although cooks are a source of romance, they are not themselves Romantic. They practice their art the way all art was practiced until the nineteenth century, as a job done to order for rich people who treat you as something between the court jester and the butler. Cooks can be temperamental—cooks are supposed to be temperamental—but temperament is the Byronism of the dependent; children, courtesans, and cooks all have it.
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