Beckett's cucumber-slicing
Jan. 8th, 2006 01:14 pmBeckett was given the job of slicing the cucumbers. I watched him with something approaching amazement. His slices were so fine they were all but transparent, and they were perfectly consistent from one end of the cucumber to the other. Years after that I wrote to him from London. [...] He wrote back that, as far as poems were concerned, the cupboard was bear [sic], but that he did indeed remember that day, that lunch, the cucumbers. "I was thinking," he wrote, "about my mother."W. S. Merwin, Summer Doorways, p. 165.
Merwin mentions a Provençal onion and black olive pie, naming it socca. Yum. I looked for a recipe, but socca seems according to the Internet to be a chickpea-flour pancake, instead.
Pissalaless pissaladière?