"The Debt to Pleasure"

[fiefoe]

We now bid goodbye to winter (and fish stew) and come to spring. Tarquin's pompous foodie talk is somehow touching.

• a definitive brand of asparagus tips
• The ideological purity of this recipe is very moving.
  
• Lamb and apricots are one of those combinations which exist together in a relation that is not just complementary, but seems to partake of a higher oder of inevitability - a taste that exists in the mind of God. These combinations have the quality of a logical discovery:... lamb and garlic,... port and Stilton... chicken and wild mushrooms...
  

He keeps his reader on her toes:

• Some dishes seem to be charged with a psychic energy... which makes them attract attention,... inspire controversy. The same is true of certain artists. Again I am not thinking exclusively of myself.
  
• The discovery of a new artist is a discovery of new resources... (Stupid people have sometimes even claimed to find something of the sort in my brother's work.) 
• moths the size of pterodactyls -... the ingress into my room of even one of these behemoths (oops) would ...

Nicely put:

• We are aware of the form of the emotion, the structural space it ought to occupy, but not of the content, of the feeling itself. This discrepancy or gap manifests itself as a pressure of expectation, so that most of the great moments of life are accompanies by a subtle sense of anesthetized anticlimax. 
• Much natural or artistic beauty in the aforementioned genre of the familiar/famous, can only be sensed in the first few seconds of our encounter with it, before the filter of routine descends like a clanging shutter. 
• how many things in modern life are precisely that combination of shocking but not surprising
  

Allusions:  Spinoza ('the deep difficulty of excellence' ), Penrose tiling, Mallarme ("The Afternoon of the Faun"), temple friezes at Mahabalipuram, coup de foudre, Giorgio Vasari (credited with inventing the idea of genius here).