Recipes

Recipes for food that can be served at book club meetings for Death and the Dervish

Long ago, my father had bought me some hard pastries in a peasant cloth, and a much nicer kerchief spread over the coarse linen. 

"Life is larger than any principle.  Morality is an idea, but life is what we live. How can we fit it into this idea without damaging it? More lives have been ruined in attempts to prevent sin than because of sin itself."

"Should we live in sin then?"

"No.  But prohibiting it doesn't help at all.  It creates hypocrisy and spiritual cripples."

"So what should we do?"

He laughed , as if that made him glad.

The woman brought in sherbet. 

I lowered my head and breathed in the fresh scent of early summer, greedily, wishfully, more, more - the dankness would soon creep into the transparent red fragrance of the cherries. I touched their tender young skins with my soled fingers.  In a moment, in an hour they would shrivel and age.  No matter, no matter.  That was a sign, a message from the outside world.  I was not alone; there was hope.

She didn't change her life much; she continued to eat only black rye bread and to drink water, and continued to sleep on bare floorboards, with the bare stone on her breast, but in her eyes there was no longer only the thought of death.