‘Cooking the Books’ is a phrase used so regularly to mean ‘falsifying financial accounts for the purpose of tax avoidance or impressing company shareholders, that we forget that any book is entirely a preparation, often refined to high degrees of their readership’s taste, of raw materials that have cruder forms – forms less satisfying to that audience, that lack the flavour given by clever combinations, sometimes involving complex techniques that take considerable time. In To the Lighhouse, Mrs Ramsay, like Virginia Woolf, loved to have her cooks prepare Boeuf en Daube:
An exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish took the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish and she must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass to choose an especially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savory brown and yellow meats, and its bay leaves and its wine and thought, This will celebrate the occasion…
–To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
Mrs Ramsay appreciates the art of others (Marthe the cook who has no life but her art, dedicated to people who don’t value her as a person) but uses it to flatter her special guests. But then, aren’t Virginia’s books cooked too! But who is the cook, who the person who serves delicate tastes of the well-off bourgeoisie in that wonderful but divided writer?
With love
Steven
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