It was a long day of such transformations, as one after another the raw stuffs of nature—chunks of meat, piles of wild fungi, the leaves and pods of plants, and piles of pulverized grain—took on whole new forms, many of them wondrous. Bread dough magically rose and crisped; desiccated mushrooms came back to fleshy life; meat turned brown and caramelized; indigestible beans softened and sweetened; the leaves of herbs inflected whatever they touched; and all these unprepossessing parts of things combined into what promised to be greater and more delectable wholes.
