The weather here is like July in New York City--scorching days, sticky nights. My spinach plants are horrified, but the tomato seedlings are already in blossom.

Yesterday, for dinner, I invented cold carrot soup, topped with a salsa of hot pepper, cilantro, parsley, scallion, and lime. It was outstanding, should you ever want to try it yourself. The soup base contained peeled chunks of potato and carrot, plus some small chopped leeks, cooked in a light chicken broth (I'd poached chicken the night before, in water with bay leaf, thyme, and dried hot pepper) and seasoned with about a tablespoon of salt. Then I ran the cooked soup through a food mill and stuck it in the refrigerator for 6 hours or so. Just before serving I dropped a dollop of salsa into each soup plate. It was beautiful as well as delicious, and I was very pleased with myself.

Cooking has always been something I've taken to heart, though I have not always been a good cook and I still make notable mistakes--as with Saturday night's way-too-salty Asian noodles. It's interesting, though, how rarely I mention cooking in my poems and essays. Laundry tends to come up far more often. I wonder why.

After consulting my old 1937 Bartlett's, however, I discovered that other writers have not been averse to inventing epigrammatic opinions about cooks and cookery. According to Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of that gloomy tome The Anatomy of Melancholy, "Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen." But John Taylor (1580-1625), known for some reason as "The Water Poet," disagrees. He claims that "God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks." Two centuries later, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton (1831-1891), Earl of Lytton and Pal of Dickens, composed a remarkably wretched lyric on the matter:

We may live without poetry, music and art;

We may live without conscience and live without heart;

We may live without friends; we may live without books;

But civilized man can not live without cooks.

He may live without books,--what is knowledge but grieving?

He may live without hope,--what is hope but deceiving?

He may live without love,--what is passion but pining?

But where is the man that can live without dining?

Oy. I feel a certain Alexander Pope-style virulence coming over me, but I'll attempt to quell it. No one needs a thousand lines' worth of "The Cook's Rebuttal."