PHOENIX (By Dorothy Kalins, Newsweek) January 10, 2006 — These days there is a man with a whip on my shoulder, punishing me before I even open my mouth. No sooner do I crack a restaurant menu than out he jumps, threatening me away from not just the obvious (cheeseburgers and tiramisu) but from elementals (fresh cream, crusty bread, potatoes, pasta, meat in any form). Whipman's there at the supermarket, too, driving me toward labels that shriek "Lite," "Lo," "50% less fat than..." and, get this: "Tofurky." He thinks they're good for you. I see them as melancholy indictments of just how far we've come from the real thing. In an "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" world, what can we believe in? These days the simple act of cooking dinner requires the moral courage to say "Yes" in a world of "NO!"

I find myself turning to Robert Farrar Capon, the Episcopal priest and passionate cook who wrote in his soulful classic, "The Supper of the Lamb": "Food these days is often identified as the enemy. Butter, salt, sugar, eggs are all out to get you. And yet at our best we know better. Butter is... well, butter: it glorifies almost everything it touches. Salt is the sovereign perfecter of all flavors. Eggs are, pure and simple, one of the wonders of the world. And if you put them all together, you get not sudden death, but Hollandaise..."

At the mere mention of Hollandaise, Whipman turns apoplectic. After all, the gods of nutrition are not wrong when they counsel stern moderation in all things. But in the kitchen, no sooner does duty walk in the door than romance walks out. What's a cook to do? Well, Capon would have us consider our ingredients. Fall in love with them, really. He devotes 12 pages to a single onion, exhorting us to slice it, stare at it, "enter the onion itself." Is this nuts? I tried it with Brussels sprouts. This Brassica is best when you buy a two-foot-long budded stalk at a farmers market; there's no elegant way to carry it, so you brandish it like some medieval war tool. That's part of knowing it. Once home, there's no finding room for it in the refrigerator, but that's part of it, too. Its very unwieldiness forces us to deal with it as it lies on the counter. With nowhere to run, you behold in wonder how the perfect, tiny furls of miniature cabbage leaves are joined to the stalk by a disc of palest jade; as you sever the buds with small, sure knife strokes, you're worlds away from that frozen, foul-smelling scourge of childhood. With this much invested, nothing could make you overcook the little beauties. Just a few minutes in a watched pot of boiling salted water turns them so grassy green, you forget to remember Brussels sprouts are loaded with cancer-fighting phytochemicals.

Bringing home a pomegranate is like emptying a sack of rubies on your counter. Hold the full, fat globe in your hand; feel the weight of its potential. Slicing it crosswise reveals translucent seeds in patterns that are as good a proof as any of some divine being. Dislodge the seeds from their spongy white packing material with your fingers. Crush some between your teeth and let the sweet, tart juice fill your mouth. No wonder the pomegranate is thought to have been Eve's apple. Squeeze them for juice, scatter seeds generously over a salad, saute them with chicken breasts. And, here's the good news: the fleeting season for pomegranates is right now, in the winter months. And oh yes, there's this: pomegranate juice is thought to have three times the antioxidants of tea and red wine.

Even though it sounds like a joke from an old Woody Allen movie, recent studies have shown that chocolate—the unadulterated, minimally processed kind; as cocoa, in a drink, and the darker the better—has been found to contain healthy properties. We always knew it was good for the soul; now, it seems, it may be good for the heart as well. Which buys us, every once in a while, a square of 70 percent Venezuelan criollo, and buys off the man with the whip.

Healthy, it turns out, is food that, when it lands on our plate, is never very far from the state in which it was born. One enemy is the labor-saving kitchen appliance, whose unintended consequence is to distance you from experiencing both the glory of ingredients and the sensuous satisfaction of their prep. Turning your full attention to making a meal invokes all the senses. Taste the oil on your hand as it comes from the bottle; inhale Indian spices as they roast in a pan. It's better than biofeedback, with the same calming, centering effect. Use an old-fashioned hand-cranked food mill to turn bright cooked carrots and ginger into soup, and appreciate the rewards in what food critics like to call "the mouthfeel" of the richly textured puree that results. Smash hard black peppercorns in a mortar and pestle, and the sharp, pungent smell they release can turn you off grinders forever. Pound the rounded pestle over some toasted walnuts and salt in the mortar, add a few big handfuls of fresh basil, drizzle in a bit of olive oil, and invoking the hallowed motions of a hundred cultures over thousands of years, crush those leaves into submission. Now that's my idea of aromatherapy. Stir in some (hand-grated) parmigiano: blender pesto was never so sweet. As you straighten up from all this food work, intense and intentional, you feel discernibly lighter. Can that be? Yes, it's Whipman, scurrying off into the sunset.