One of my food teachers is an Episcopal priest-cum-chef, Robert Farrar Capon. In 1968, Capon wrote a slender book called The Supper of the Lamb. It's part cookbook, part theological meditation -- something like M.F.K. Fisher meets the desert fathers. (The book is, in fact, organized around a lamb recipe, and the title's biblical allusion is not accidental.)

The second chapter of The Supper of the Lamb begins with the slightly absurd instruction to spend "sixty minutes or so" chopping an onion. One onion, sixty minutes. The hour is to begin with the chopper looking at the onion, encountering the onion, having a "material...meeting" with it. After noticing its shape, its top and bottom, its blemishes, you proceed to removing its skin, moving so carefuly that you do not puncture, let alone slice, the flesh of the onion itself. And on and on Capon leads us, through a veritable onion meditation. By the end of the chapter one wonders if a single hour is enough time.