Lions and Monkeys and Consommé
Karen Blixen
When Karen Blixen, (the nom de plume of Isak Dinesen) was asked:
Do you like monkeys?
She answered
‘Yes, I love them in art: in pictures, in stories, in porcelain but in life they somehow look so sad. They make me nervous. I like lions...’
Karen Blixen had style, both in life and art – it compelled her. She had a contempt for the timid, the solid, the everyday. She drew an analogy between the process of making consommé and that of telling stories: ''The recipe calls for you to keep the spirit but to discard the substance of your rough ingredients: eggshells and raw bones, root vegetables and red meat. You then submit them, like a storyteller, to 'fire and patience.' And the clarity comes at the end, like a magic trick.''
When she was dying of malnutrition, Blixen would eat nothing but oysters, gelee royale and dry biscuits; on her final visit to America, a lion-hunter lionized, she dined on oysters with Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.