Honi Soit
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Trending
    • CAPA Board Passes Motion Removing SUPRA Voting Rights 
    • The momentary victory of mass politics: reflections on Kissinger and Australia
    • “We are freedom fighters”: pro-Palestinian protestors march amidst end to seven-day ceasefire
    • An invitation in: SCA’s ‘New Contemporaries’
    • NTEU to delay new fixed-term contract limits that fail to cover higher-education workers
    • Mohammed Shami: The Muslim cricketer who carried an Islamophobic nation to the Men’s Cricket World Cup Final
    • Moving beyond the theoretical: Privacy law reform in Australia
    • Digital privacy, missing voices, and cookies: IAPP Summit 2023
    • About
    • Print Edition
    • Advertise
    • Locations
    • Contact
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok
    Honi SoitHoni Soit
    Thursday, December 7
    • News
    • Analysis
    • Culture
    • Opinion
    • University
    • Features
    • Perspective
    • Investigation
    • Reviews
    Honi Soit
    Home»Misc

    Cooking With Don DeLillo: Moroccan-Style Beef and Couscous

    By Hector RamageMarch 11, 2015 Misc 3 Mins Read
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    For ingredients, I go to the supermarket. Immediately, I see deals: on fruit, on meat, on crackers. Buy with FlyBuys and save up to 5%. The produce surrounding me is nothing but data made immanent, data extant at the beck of some screenlit bureaucrat. There is a benevolence to these deals, a smilingness.

    First, I need vegetables. I pick through carrots: gnarled ones, smooth ones. I hold them up in the fluorescence like some exultant worshipper of Priapus. I sense curious glances, and eyes averted, as a dog senses a home’s resident phantom. A woman pulls her son closer and hurries onwards. Around me, data to be winnowed or tumesced. I grab a tomato, gaze at it in awe. Where has it come from? From distant shores, from the Acheron’s far bank, in a container of burnished Teutonic steel. The fruit of the Dead. I take four.

    An air of sexual ritual hangs over the way husbands and wives handle the produce, a quiet atavism, a yearning for passed carnality. With his forefinger, a man traces crosswise a packet of sliced salmon, and his wife responds, caressing an aubergine’s waterglazed flank. I am transfixed by this display, but must still find couscous, eggs, diced beef. I wrench myself onwards.

    Finally, I have assembled the meal’s ingredients. On the radio a woman sings of bass, of how she is all about it. The song confers upon us shoppers the mantle of epic narrative, a mythic telos that somehow reaches far beyond the meals we hope to create in the near future.

    The checkout line contracts and lengthens, tacitly peristaltic.

    “Hi, how are you?” asks the young man at the counter.

    “Brilliant,” I say. “I feel re-animated, re-vivified.”

    He looks at me warily. Ancient narratives eddy and rear in our duologue. He is an attendant at this temple, I am an initiant. I have sought and found data, and I am leaving with it. I push a trolley of information made manifest, push it before me, apotropaically.

    “Is that cash or credit?” he asks.

    “Immolated and reborn. Foetal against some cosmic placenta.”

    “Um—” he says.

    Around us rise the bips of the serried checkouts, a fitful countdown.

    “Sir, how are you paying for these items?”

    A man glides past on a mobility scooter, hollowcheeked.

    “I’m going to have to call security, sir.” I realise that have been narrating the scene out loud. As the young man calls for security, I say, “The young man leans down and speaks into a microphone, asking for security to checkout 3.”

    Two large men move towards me, eyes small and eager. I realise that the violence they are about to enact is a consummation, a sacrificial crescendo. Here are neolithic huntsmen slaying an auroch. Here is Jack Ruby producing his revolver. People are gathered to watch: here are a million cinemagoers’ eyes as Willard kills Kurtz, finishing the story that began downriver.

    How heartening to know that in the quotidian act of purchasing ingredients we can collapse history’s false partitions, can thread ourselves into the fibrillating rope of time and memory. How heartening to know that I, should I will it, can be a player in the past’s troupe.

    beef cooking Couscous DeLillo Don Don DeLillo Moroccan Style Beef Recipe smilingness

    Keep Reading

    A letter from the future

    Whorescopes: Semester Two, Week Three

    Whorescopes: Semester Two, Week Two

    Whorescopes: Semester One, Week Nine

    Whorescopes: Semester One, Week Eight

    Whorescopes: Semester One, Week Seven

    Just In

    CAPA Board Passes Motion Removing SUPRA Voting Rights 

    December 7, 2023

    The momentary victory of mass politics: reflections on Kissinger and Australia

    December 6, 2023

    “We are freedom fighters”: pro-Palestinian protestors march amidst end to seven-day ceasefire

    December 4, 2023

    An invitation in: SCA’s ‘New Contemporaries’

    December 4, 2023
    Editor's Picks

    Puff, puff, pass: What does cannabis legalisation mean for student communities?

    November 1, 2023

    Privacy is not dead, yet

    October 26, 2023

    ‘A patchwork quilt of repression’: The disappearing right to protest in NSW

    October 17, 2023

    The lights are on, but no one’s home: inside USyd’s International House

    October 10, 2023
    Facebook Instagram X (Twitter) TikTok

    From the mines

    • News
    • Analysis
    • Higher Education
    • Culture
    • Features
    • Investigation
    • Comedy
    • Editorials
    • Letters
    • Misc

     

    • Opinion
    • Perspective
    • Profiles
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Social
    • Sport
    • SRC Reports
    • Tech

    Admin

    • About
    • Editors
    • Send an Anonymous Tip
    • Write/Produce/Create For Us
    • Print Edition
    • Locations
    • Archive
    • Advertise in Honi Soit
    • Contact Us

    We acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The University of Sydney – where we write, publish and distribute Honi Soit – is on the sovereign land of these people. As students and journalists, we recognise our complicity in the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous land. In recognition of our privilege, we vow to not only include, but to prioritise and centre the experiences of Indigenous people, and to be reflective when we fail to be a counterpoint to the racism that plagues the mainstream media.

    © 2023 Honi Soit
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms
    • Accessibility

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.