Nothing better on a cold winter day than a bowl of lentil soup. When I was a kid I hated lentils. Most children hate them. My mother used to say: “Lentejas: si tú quieres las comes, si no, las dejas” rhyming “lentejas” with “dejas.” Something very Buddhist for an Italian Argentinean matriarch.
The mentioning of these legumes made me want to reread Alan Bennett’s Bed Among the Lentils (1988). One of a dozen hour-long monologues for BBC called Talking Heads (nothing to do with the band created by David Byrne.) All, except two, feature female protagonists, played magnificently by British stars: Routledge, Walters, Atkins. Lentils is available in YouTube, starring Maggie Smith.
I won’t explain why lentils —everything looks very brownish— because I don’t want to give some of the plot away in case you want to watch it. Or read it in the Picador paperback edition if you are allergic to Ms. Smith. I wonder if it exists as audio book. Audio books are so popular now. These monologues would be fantastic to listen to, although those top-of-the-line dames are hard to match. How about audio cookbooks? I picture Sophia Loren—or Sofia Vergara for a younger generation—reading Marcella Hazan’s Lentil Soup with their sophisticated accent. Or a vegan version of the soup in Spanish that requires powerful, voiceless velar fricative j’s in lentejas. I can only picture it sensuously narrated by Penélope Cruz.
— New York City, Tenebrae, 3/31/2021