Patrick Farrell , The New York Times; Joan Didion’s Thanksgiving: Dinner for 75, Reams of Notes
"She described making the roux, stirring slowly with a wooden spoon “until the flour turns the color of a dark pecan,” then casually adding ingredients as the day went on: bacon strips left over from breakfast, the stock from a chicken roasted the day before, “the bay leaf from the tree in front, the cilantro from the sea wall.”
She apparently never completed the essay, which seems apt. The point was not the finished dish, but the making.
“Yesterday I made a gumbo, and remembered why I love to cook,” she wrote. “Intent is everything, in cooking as in work or faith.”"
