Clean shirt, steeping scarlets

"Home again, home again," goddy help us. To take one's bearings: years of negotiation, reduced to one or two intact, untouched, unruined customs, conduits of vestiges of dreams in their entirety. If anything holds, it's bread, and it's butter, some impossibly undisplaced sweetheart, in plain sight.

So, "Jack is having his break-fast, eh?" No one bothers much, but an apron blocks the view, just in case. "Well, he has to meet us all later, but he can get there by himself."

Quietly, a lady, whose job has been his growing strong and bright, takes her Christmas bonus in his eyes, guarding through the ages, Mr Jack.

Coulis des fraises au poivre vert, parlez vous

A pint of very ripe strawberries, hulled

A tablespoon of soft green peppercorns, drained

A quarter cup of simple syrup: of 2 cups sugar, 1.5 of water, a lob     of liquid glucose, reduced and skimmed and strained

A half lemon, only its juice

Macerate and slip through a blender. Then mash the precious cargo through a tamis at least once; and let it barely simmer in a bain-marie until he bounces down the stairs. Let him inhale it, for his spank, and let him spread it on a wedge of spoonbread muffin that you dipped into the Normandy butter from that holiday, he never saw you take.

Michel Roux

Sauces

  Sweet and savoury,

  classic and new

Kate Whiteman, translation

Rizzoli, 1996©