Leaving home

14 Thursday Jul 2022

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Travel, Uncategorized

Tags

Allotment, Ingredients, Italy, Stories, Venice

Aubergines were the first things I learned to cook properly, by which I mean repeatedly. I cooked for a contessa in Venice in my late teens for a year while deciding what the rest of my life might look like. The contessa’s housekeeper Donatella used to stand over me during my first attempts at melanzane alla parmigiana. For weeks afterwards, I marvelled at my ability to fry the slices until crisp, but not scorched, to layer them with parmesan and mozzarella and to mound with tomato sauce – what the contessa pronounced sose (like hose).

And then Donatella’s absence from the kitchen started to hurt. The aubergines suddenly refused to crisp up – they became mere oily vehicles for the tomatoes and cheese. Ever since it’s been something I can never completely count on. One day crisp and sultry, the next not. It was the dish that I was asked to make often as it stored well in the fridge. The flavours would develop nicely so that by day two or three everything would come together into an aromatic brew of garlic and tomatoes and it was solid enough to cut into rectangles.

It was the dish I made for my mum when she came to visit. I found her in the car park by the train station, the only bit of Venice that looks like any other place: municipal. I had left home by coming to Venice to work, and in those days letters were really all you had, because the alternative was to stand in a booth with a flimsy partition by the train station and sob down the line, which was expensive. I look back at this now as if it was pre-war, it was so basic, to only have letters and the very occasional expensive phone call. But it worked, because by the time she visited we had been apart for six months and I’d gone through the worst of it. I made the melanzane alla parmigiana for her and put it into plastic boxes and carried them to the station.

I had found her a room in a waterside house full of bohemian types and wanted to make sure she had food on her first night. It didn’t occur to me to buy milk or bread or tea. I still remember all the kitchen towel the melanzane used up – the best thing for absorbing all the grease. She didn’t last at the house because it was too noisy with too much party-going, and by now her bohemian days were limited more to reading about them and then getting a good night’s sleep.

I caught up with her in between my shifts. Going home, I first had to pass through the under storey of the palazzo where I lived, which housed washing lines and an upturned boat. The smell was the mixture of earth and Daz or the Italian equivalent. The water from the canal slapped the floors and the stone echoed under foot. I remember climbing the steps to the first floor and feeling the thick walls and knowing the door would never close quietly. My mum visited me once there and I introduced her to the contessa, who thereafter pronounced me ‘from a good family’. What the criteria was I wasn’t sure; my mum’s politeness? Her waxed coat? I remember being proud she had passed muster but also aware we were being judged.

Can you believe in the year I was there I didn’t take a single photo of the food? Not the fish market with its loot of rust-red crabs, and layer upon layer of glassy-eyed gawpers, or the stalls of lolling fruit at the Rialto where I was dispatched daily, my old lady’s shopping trolley bouncing on the flagstones behind me. I can even remember the way the shopkeepers wrapped things: smooth, white paper oblongs that slotted into my shopping bag.

I suppose I thought it was just food and not worth documenting. So I took endless photos of bridges and washing lines. I was too busy reading, shopping, cooking and getting up very early each day to teach English to a lawyer who studied while walking to work, the only time he was free, so we’d scale bridges with his exercise book open and I’d teach him the present simple. Once, when I was explaining a grammar point, he reached across and took my hand. It wasn’t in a predatory way, just impulsive and loving. I ploughed on while he stared at me, his hand holding mine. He was so unlike the Italian men I knew, that I can only speculate he was temporarily unmoored.

This is the first time I have grown aubergines at the allotment. I thought they would be difficult because they need a quantity of heat and light that I normally can’t provide – my greenhouse is overshadowed by a plum tree. But this scorcher of a heatwave is perfect for them and they are currently elephantine, with wonderful bruised purple flowers.

The recipe in Jamie’s Italy for Melanzane all parmigiana is really good – I have used it more times than I can remember. The recipe in Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook uses mozzarella as I was instructed to (perhaps this is a Northern thing) and there is a whole section devoted to the frying of aubergines. Her two rules are: salt the aubergines first and let them stand for 30 minutes (this was in the days when aubergines were more bitter). The second rule reveals my error vis a vis sogginess: ‘aubergines must fry in an abundant quantity of very hot oil. When properly fried they absorb virtually none of the cooking fat. Never add oil to the pan while the aubergines are frying’. Indeed. She is also a fan of ‘drawing off’ excess liquid during cooking. ‘After 20 minutes (in the oven) pull out the pan, and, pressing with the back of a spoon, check to see if there is an excess amount of liquid. If there is, tip the pan and draw it off with a spoon. Return to the oven for another 15 minutes.’ This addresses the issue of oiliness on all fronts.

Melanzane all parmigiana

Lightly adapted from Jamie’s Italy, Jamie Oliver

3 large firm aubergines
olive oil
1 onion
½ a bulb of spring garlic or 1 clove of regular garlic
2 x 400 g tins of quality plum tomatoes or 1kg fresh ripe tomatoes
Wine or sherry vinegar
1 bunch of fresh basil (30g)
3 large handfuls of Parmesan cheese (freshly grated)
2 handfuls of dried breadcrumbs (optional)
A few sprigs of fresh oregano
150g buffalo mozzarella

Trim and slice the aubergines 1cm thick. Peel and finely chop the onion, and peel and finely slice the garlic.
Place a large pan on a medium heat with 2 or 3 glugs of olive oil, add the onion, garlic and a couple of sprigs of oregano, then cook for 10 minutes, or until the onion is soft and the garlic has a tiny bit of colour.
If you’re using tinned tomatoes, break them up, and if you’re using fresh tomatoes (which will obviously taste sweeter and more delicious, if they’re in season), very quickly prick each one and put them into a big pan of boiling water for 40 seconds. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and put them into a bowl of cold water for 30 seconds, then remove the skins, carefully squeeze out the pips and cut up the flesh.
Add the tomato flesh or tinned tomatoes to the onion pan, give the mixture a good stir, then put a lid on and simmer slowly for 15 minutes, or until thickened and reduced.
Pre-heat a frying pan. You will need ‘an abundant quantity of very hot oil’ (MH) to fry the aubergines. Do this on both sides until lightly charred – you’ll need to work in batches. Blot them on kitchen towel.
Season the tomato sauce carefully with sea salt, black pepper and a tiny swig of the vinegar, then add the basil. You can leave the sauce chunky or you can purée it.
Spoon a layer of tomato sauce into a 15cm x 25cm baking dish, then add a fine scattering of Parmesan, followed by a single layer of aubergines and then a layer of torn up mozzarella. Repeat these layers until you’ve used all the ingredients up, finishing with a little sauce and another good sprinkling of Parmesan.
Toss what’s left of the finely chopped oregano (leaves not sprigs) with the breadcrumbs and a little olive oil, then sprinkle on top of the Parmesan. I sometimes don’t bother with the breadcrumbs.
Bake at 190°C/375°F/gas 5 for 30 minutes, or until golden, crisp and bubbly – it’s best eaten after a rest at room temperature as you won’t taste anything if it is piping hot. It can also be served cold.

Growing aubergines: you generally sow the seeds in January/February time and treat them like tomatoes. However, you can buy plants from May onwards (so this advice is too late for this year, sorry). They thrive under glass and like masses of heat and a fine, well-drained soil. There are many different varieties to grow. Nigel Slater in Tender is full of good advice about them in the kitchen and the garden, and I recommend reading what he has to say. One of his tips is to salt the aubergines not so much for the bitterness, but as a way of ‘relaxing the cells’ which means there will be less uptake of oil during the frying process. Some of the aubergines he grows are so beautiful, small and creamy rose/ivory in hue, more egg than aubergine, shape wise. Again, it’s easy to forget there’s so much more to the aubergine than the big purple whale from the supermarket. Here are a few from NS’s list to tempt you: Violetta di Firenze (‘White fruit, flushed with violet’), Rosa Bianca, Applegreen, Baby Rosanna, Black Beauty (‘Lustrous, handsome, extraordinary girth’).

A treacherous herb

01 Sunday May 2022

Posted by Sophie James in Gardening, Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Early morning, Herbs, Ladybirds, Recipe, Rosemary

5.30am. Unable to get back to sleep (it’s light, birds howling/something howling, not sure if it’s a bird/lots of waking up noises in the undergrowth outside) so I get dressed and cycle to the allotment. I know because of the lowering sky I’ll be alone. So I am not surprised by the emptiness, no cars, just the slowly falling mass of rubbish, like an installation that the council are reducing, like a toppling cake. The first and last time, we’ve been warned. My mood matches the air, sky, temperature. Stormy, flat, tearful. I hack away at the rosemary bush which is so overgrown the weight of it is flattening the flowers and hanks of it cover the path, so that every time I pass it grips me in its resiny hands. I’ve decided it needs to be tamed, as do I. It’s something to do at 5.30am.

S from a few plots over waves in a sheepish manner, and disappears inside his poly tunnel. I lop off more wizened rosemary hands and arms. A young robin, its breast still tufty and slightly marbled hops near me, then hops on to one of the hacked off rosemary branches and watches me. I love the smell but even more it’s the silvery needles, deep green and surprisingly soft. I feel bad cutting it all off and it looks like an awful haircut, like the ones I used to give myself as a child, serrated fringes and lopsided ends, the hairdresser startled and silent, trying to figure it all out.

Monty Don says you should replace old rosemary bushes after a while as they grow so rangy and chaotic but I love the fact this rosemary has grown into a gnarled tree, like a mulberry or a wisteria, its knitted branches hiding couch grass, convolvulus, marjoram, a little posy of forgotten geraniums. I rip up the grass by the roots and start to clear the area feeling both decisive and desolate because it is neater but less interesting, less organic. The sides of the rosemary still hang over the path, long silver fingers, arms outstretched. It takes me two hours by which time K arrives on his bike.

While I am working I imagine that one day I will have to give this plot up. We will move. We are already planning it, we can’t afford to buy in this area, don’t want to; no sea, no massive skies etc. It is not just the rosemary bush, which I bought from a nursery as a small plant, and which has grown into itself, it is the DNA of the place, which is now mine. It feels unthinkable to let it go. I wonder if it will be like the moment when you move from a house, the paintings lifted, the sofa and all the stuff gone and revealed is the dead space, no longer yours. Will it be like that at plot 10? I wonder. The quince tree, the mulberry, the dwarf apple tree. The rows of dusty gooseberries, the sorrel I grow pretty much for the compost heap. I am there in little filaments, bits of me everywhere. Even, or especially, the ground, which for six years I have fed, over fed, burdened with compost, manure, comfrey. It’s probably exhausted by me.

K approaches with a small pot filled with strawberries and upends them into a bag for me. I’ve already had a couple of my own, dipped in the watering can for a quick clean. But these are bigger and better than mine. We have a laugh about the fact that I can’t give him anything in return except piles of rosemary which he wouldn’t know what to do with. Actually, if we could cook outside, if we could make a fire (we can’t), we could dip a branch of rosemary into olive oil and brush some fish with it.

It’s easy to overdo it. The oil from the leaves can overpower. Elizabeth David called it a treacherous herb. And she doesn’t like eating the spikes. And she thinks too much of it can kill the taste of meat. Oh well. They take as cuttings very easily, and I have a line of them growing in pots in the greenhouse. I think I needed it, the oil on my hands, the strength of the smell in the air, the scale of the branches, and it was good to find space and the robin enjoyed it too. It walked up and down the new-made path, and found the different levels interesting. On my way out of the allotment I passed C in his plot who was admiring a ladybird and I had one accidentally in the side pocket of my bag which I handed over because he said he was collecting them for their beneficial effects on his broad beans. It crawled from my hand to his. He walked off with my ladybird. My allotted time over, I leave. Generally better than before.

Alys Fowler on how to take softwood cuttings of rosemary and other perennials here. I have written about lamb and rosemary and apple and rosemary cake and there is also elsewhere on the blog a recipe for labneh with lemon zest and rosemary. There is a very good rosemary and chocolate brownie recipe by Ben Tish here.

Onward

23 Friday Apr 2021

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

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Allotment, Nigel Slater, Peas, Spring

I am an opsimath, apparently. Those who learn only late in life. I had to get to my middle years before I went outside, not just in the summer, which until I was 35 I believed outside was for, but all year, and even better in the winter months, because of all the space I could be alone in – so much more of it when it’s cold.

Spring is an extrovert’s time, busy, crowded with growing and incident. This time, it is magnified by the fact that suddenly all the shops are open. Clothes flap in the wind, installed outside charity shops, and lines form outside the library, each person with book in hand, barbeque coal heaped up outside the hardware store, men with newly shorn heads. Spring promises everything, it is the archetypal over-promiser…it promises renewal, hope, sun and warmth, and a trip to Marks and Sparks for fresh underwear.

But when snow fell, that day on April 12^th, it was as if winter had come back. I went to the allotment very early, snow falling thick and silent, and the wheels of my bike made furrows showing up the dark beneath. I was alone there. I planted out some mangetout seedlings, hopeless as they later collapsed, limp with fatigue. I can’t think what possessed me to do it, except I was alone and felt demented with happiness about it and wanted to be productive.

I loved being there, even though the snow revealed my actions, my footsteps halted by the greenhouse, not a step behind, which is, to be clear, not ‘my land’. I was once asked, as if in a court of law, about a footprint found on the back plot; the plot holder was new, so hadn’t understood that we are free to walk around, as long as we stick to paths. He wasn’t new to passive aggression though. Or being a knob.

Later it was as if no snow had been. There is always a feeling of the fragility of the enterprise at the allotment, which works by tacit agreement; not to talk too much, not to intrude or nick things, not to bring up politics or go on a rant. It is communal without being in any sense shared.

I like the odd chat; I like how Richard, from one plot over, always sits with his back to me, his face to the sun, and sorts through his seeds. I feel his presence, which is kindly and calm. But my relationship is more with the place itself, an unprepossessing area next to a railway track, but which is still full of blossom; pear, plum, apple trees rampant with it and as I stood back from the peas, having tied them sadly to stakes, the blossom rained down like snow.

Peas, I have come late to you too, believing that you were difficult to grow. Advice is very mixed, depending on who you read. Nigel Slater (another one who loves winter – perhaps it’s the jumpers) is a fan and has written a very useful ‘pea diary’ in his book Tender (Vol.1)

In it he tests Douce Provence (‘a forgotten pea from a time when legumes were grown more for drying than for eating fresh’), which is said to withstand frost and Hurst Greenshaft which is a very popular variety (‘Long pods and good cropping from plant about 60cms high’) and which I have ordered along with Kelvedon Wonder (a heavy cropping dwarf variety). He also recommends Lincoln and Onward, ‘a delectably sweet pea that is probably widest grown’. Sarah Raven on the other hands gushes about Alderman and there is a video of her munching on the peas raw, furrowing her thumb through the pod, and eating them like sweets.

Another delight is to watch how the tendrils coil around pea sticks (they need something to scramble up). Hazel is traditional, but any prunings work, as long as they can stand upright. I fell off my bike transporting a bushel of branches for the purpose.

Definition of opsimath comes from The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, a timely read, very short, and I think a miniature masterpiece. Green peas and ham recipe here.

Small green plums

10 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Food, Fruit, Italy, Poetry, Stories

‘Surprise/after so long/of a love/I thought I had scattered it about the world’

This beautiful string of words is by an Italian poet called Giuseppe Ungaretti. This is one of his easier ones. We used to say it in the manner of Cilla Black: Surprise! It sounds just as good in her Liverpool trill, in fact. But funnier and less sincere. This was back in the day when we were at university and revising for our end of year exams and anything to get us through it helped. Small tables in the corners of rooms, a lot of smoking, endless tea, the sound of the put-upon mum next door playing nicely with her children in the garden. My friend Angela would wait for a sigh, followed by the sound of a paperback being closed (she had bionic hearing) before making her entrance with a cup of tea.

Apparently I was a bit of a diva about being disturbed back then, my train of thought snagged by an interruption. It all mattered so much; having to re-sit as I did, because I’d failed a paper the first time round, meant I spent the whole summer revising. But now I still have those poems etched in my memory which I am thankful for, as well as having a free higher education and a huge wealth of actual experiences that did not involve the world wide web.

I remember cheque-books (in the off licence: Who do I make it payable to? Cashier: It’s all right we’ve got a stamp. Me: (writing on the cheque) It’s Alright We’ve Got a Stamp LTD), mix-tapes, actual love letters, long afternoons spent dressing up, sitting up all night talking and walking home at dawn, cream teas. Watching as people were brought over on a plane to see relatives they’d given up for dead forty years earlier on Cilla Black’s Surprise! Surprise!

The poem above has meant different things to me at different times in my life. At the time, at 20, it meant: I am an intellectual and I write in pencil in the margins of books I can only buy in Grant & Cutler. Now I understand it to mean, what matters is here. It’s been here all along. Or, it’s behind you, in the case of these plums. After three growing seasons, I have taken on a fallow plot behind me, which has been producing little green plums, Victoria plums, pears, apples, damsons and rhubarb that no one has thought to or been allowed to help themselves to. I’m sure I could have and no one would have been any the wiser. To think these plums have been dropping silently into the long grass all this time to be eaten by wasps and foxes. Which is possibly why our resident fox has such loose bowels.

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We don’t know what they are, a gage of some sort, but they are ripe, small and soft and full of the green juice. Avoid the ones with the caterpillars in; they feed inside ripening fruits and then mid-bite you look down and see a dark brown residue – caterpillar frass (poo). This is often accompanied by a tiny maggoty thing that rears up to meet you, with a massive smile on its face. Surprise!

I met up with Angela recently and we talked about those times – my tendency to fall down stairs, our shrine to Victoria Wood, our innocence and excitement at everything. How we fell in love platonically and how no one ever talks about that. And how we used to talk relentlessly in brackets: Hello Emma (yes, you can come in but your calves have to stay outside). Our love for Joan Hickson and Charles Hawtrey and the complete works of Marvin Gaye.

And here is the poem in Italian, which I will endeavour to remember without resorting to my book:

‘Sorpresa/dopo tanto/d’un amore/credevo di averlo sparpagliato/per il mondo’

I stewed the plums: cover the base of a heavy pan with a film of water, add the (preferably stoned) plums and a little sugar/honey/maple syrup/nothing. I sprinkled on some ground ginger and star anise. Simmer until the plums collapse, about fifteen to twenty minutes. Put lid on and leave until morning and eat with yoghurt. Or pot up and refrigerate. Also lovely sieved and made into a purée.

The colour mauve

06 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Garden, Uncategorized

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Edible flowers, Food, Gardening, Seasons, Summer, Thoughts

Already this is an entirely dated picture. A week in allotment time is six months in normal. The California poppies have collapsed beneath the weight of their stems, the central path has become powdery and yellowed under the harshness of the sun. Bees like mauve. So they are still feasting, swarming over the borage, the geraniums, the sweet peas and the lavender. What’s left, just, are the nasturtiums, redly hot and peppery, calendula, verbena bonariensis (I never got round to finding a replacement for my frostbitten lemon verbena, so I have mint tea instead, a few hairy leaves in some boiled water can be a virtuous start to the day).

The heat requires shade. I am growing, from a root cutting given me by an allotment friend, a grape vine which is still in its curly glossy beginnings. It went into shock at first, a state I know well. But it has recovered. The plan is to train it over a structure and then sit under it with a Pimm’s getting steadily drunk, with ice cubes. See borage flowers below for cucumber notes.

I still find that the allotment works for me. It doesn’t stop anxiety, over-thinking, self-absorption, worry, but it diverts them into small achievable tasks. And before you know it, you’re semi normal again! You’ve just had a conversation with someone! You strung a sentence together. I find that time passes and at the end I’ve been delivered into my body again, for free. Well, £70 a year is quite reasonable if the brief is: grow vegetables and some fruit and find sanity.

I cycled to the allotment on Friday to pick something for dinner, sorrel, some parsley, a few gooseberries dusty in my hand; whatever looked easy and pickable. It was early evening, a time I find ripe with difficulty (what have I achieved today? Ever? Etc). I met two children on the path, five and a half and seven years old they told me, who came with me to help me pick. The boy was barefoot. I had never met them before but we became instant friends, not sure how this happened but they trooped over to my plot to help me full of chatter and questions. Do you have any pets? The boy asked. No. Not a dog? Not a cat? No. This worried him, I could tell.

We picked some radishes and marvelled at their perfect spherical shape and hot pink colour. Do you like radishes? No, they both said. Too spicy. But they enjoyed washing them under the tap, revealing their perfect pinkness, glimmers of white beneath, the pink shorn away by bite marks. Have a nasturtium, I said, and the boy put a petal in his mouth and instantly looked aghast. What were we doing eating flowers? He stood there, face shut in some internal torment of wrongness. I can’t eat this, he said quietly, and spat it out.

He was quickly diverted by the task of separating out equal bouquets of radishes to take back to their mum. I’d forgotten how ferocious this can be, making sure it was ‘fair’. The girl had all the big ones, so a reshuffle was required. As we walked back with our stash, this happened.

Boy to me: What are you going to eat with your vegetables?

Me: I think I might have some fish.

Boy (excited): So you DO have pets?

See what I mean? Diversion. Meeting people. Radishes. Pets. Children. Barefoot. Bike.

And then I felt normal. Happy summer holidays to you all.

P.S These are borage flowers. They have the merest hint of cucumber about them. You can add them to salads and ice cubes to put in drinks if you fancy. They lack the kick and personality of nasturtiums but are very pretty.

Clearing

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Gardening, Not only food, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Allotment, England, Gardening, Nature, Spring, Stories

I start on a bit at the allotment and clear it: along the border that separates my plot from next door’s, around the rhubarb, thick with last season’s nigella and bindweed, the rhubarb itself trampled by a fox or the man behind’s bulldog – a sweet, lolloping animal that often lies down beside me and falls asleep in the sun.

I edge. Then I collect stones. The earth is thick with them, almost like shingle or scree. I pile them up in flower pots as I go and the idea is that I will eventually pull up the central path that divides one side of the plot from the other and which consists mainly of couch grass and dandelions and fill it with the stones that I find. A crunchy path which will block out the light and suffocate all the weeds, so to speak. Other neighbours have done this and I know it works, and I love the crunch and sharpness underfoot. I am forever figuring out how long I can live with the path looking as it does.

The clearing starts to infect every area of my life – and the shed. The shed with its tiny mouse carcass and debris from two years back. Now it is clean and clear and in order – I have mugs and a gas ring and a kettle and tea. Otherwise known as ‘facilities’.

The shed is a small wooden room and makes me feel child-like when I go in. It’s also a good place to wee and spy on people. I wish I could sit at the table – above, under the kettle – and write and potter about, but the plot exerts a tyranny over me whenever I go because there is always far too much to do. I spend my days longing to be there, And then when I’m there I go at it with such force it’s as if there’s a teacher standing by taking the register and holding a stopwatch.

Today I followed a nice New Zealander to a fallow plot one over from me because it was full of disused timber and it needed to be cleared so it could be offered up to a newcomer. The discovery of wood – branches, planks, logs – has become a source of intense pleasure since I began at the allotment. I scour fields and woodland and skips for wood I can use on the plot. I prefer this to bricks but bricks will do or tiles at a pinch.

I clear in order to fill the spaces again; I pulled up a small carpet of nigella, as I said, because it had become so wild, and then sowed other flowers – calendula, cornflowers – in its place. What was wrong with the nigella? It is an endless cycle of clearing and filling space and sometimes you have to stop; today I made myself stand up and watch as two butterflies with amazing black and red markings hovered over the herb bed, noticed bees alighting on the flowering angelica. A white moth. A single magpie. Sweet peas like huge green hands full of colour grasping at nothing. That kind of thing. And when it rains – always weirdly a relief – there’s the shed and the respite from going at it, a reprieve from clearing for a time.

Despite once being illegal to grow flowers on allotments, most plot holders now have an area given over to a swathe of nigella, dahlias, a drift of poached egg plants or nasturtium etc. I would just have herbs and edible flowers if I had my way but that’s not allowed. It’s easy and cheap to grow any of these from seed, and do it now: calendula, nigella, borage, sweet marjoram, parsley. They can all be sown direct into previously watered soil. Calendula goes very nicely in salads; scatter the petals, leaving behind the thick bits.

Unfurl

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Gardening, Nature, Soup, Vegetables

Tulips, daffs, forget-me-nots, garlic. Wildly flowering blossom. It is so exciting to be at the allotment. Everything is happening. And yet I am still alone there. It won’t be until mid April that the regulars will come and so in the meantime I am here and it’s all mine. There are rat droppings in the shed and forgotten potatoes from last year have sprouted into the space where I have sown carrots, there is a carpet of grass in the greenhouse, the windows are filthy, couch grass pushes its roots underneath everything, it is everywhere, every day there are fresh sightings. Weeds flourishing is always the sign that it is time to start broadcasting seed. I can’t bring myself to start clearing and washing the greenhouse glass because there is no water yet, it would be a case of me a cloth and a jar of vinegar.

I like the mat of grass in there anyway. It gives off a dry rustling heat as I drag the greenhouse door along its clapped out runner and walk inside. I like it derelict because it reminds me of finding abandoned houses and setting up camp in them as a child far away from parental interference. Why does everything have to be clean? I imagine gardening in my bare feet and lying down in the earth under the sun’s rays. But then I’m aware this wouldn’t be suitable for Hampton, dormitory suburb of England. And I have an 88-year-old neighbour one plot over who would think I was dead. He’d worry.

The best time is morning. Early as possible before anyone is awake. I’ve been here at 4.30 when I’ve woken into darkness and decided to give it a whirl, the ground slick with snails, the slowest parkour imaginable; snails hanging upside down on the bins, leaning against leaves like Gene Kelly, nonchalant. A world of slime.

Anyone would think that given that I spend so much time there, that my plot would be amazing, full of verticals and ploughed within an inch of its life. My other neighbours, Russians with a small boy, do more in a weekend than I manage in an entire season. I saw them this morning, him on the roof of his homemade shed with a fag on, heard the boy, who was swinging a piece of fence, their place dedicated to blue gauze which they had hanging over big wooden struts, to keep out nature – slugs, birds, foxes. In the foreground were manicured clumps of flowers and fruit bushes. How did they manage it when they’ve not even been here? I am here all the time. I manage nothing.

I like being near to their industriousness though. Sometimes I see the dad out in the street or on the bus and we have chats about the allotment or about our various ailments, and because of this, there’s a quiet empathy between us which makes working there easy. I know they don’t expect me to hang around, we’ll wave and nod and exchange pleasantries but no cups of tea or too many anecdotes. It’s important not to become too attached to growers, to maintain independence; a chat can easily take up too much time, grow unwieldy and then the next time you feel obliged to begin it all again, and then you’re never alone. You’re talking about Brexit and Trump. It’s ruined then.

You find you’re there ever earlier, to avoid the inane chatter. Chatter is what I grab my bike and ride to avoid. This is not the same as being happy to see people, which I am generally. So this is the bit before. Before summer when I avoid the weekends and the loud free-wheeling manic-ness of small children. Sounds occur now but they are abstract in nature, a solitary laugh, the tipping of a wheelbarrow, stone and tin. The rest is a kind of busy silence, where everything is alive and beyond me, the soil dry, sun everywhere. A time to unfurl.

My favourite thing at the moment is the new sorrel – a tight bundle of lettuce-green leaves, ripe for picking every day. It is a year-old plant grown from seed and it should be bitter by now but is still tart and lemony, turning a muddy taupe when introduced to heat and disintegrating totally in soups. It is the cousin of the handsome rhubarb, both of them astringent and singular stand alone perennials. I have not yet eaten sorrel raw, except pinched between finger and thumb and eaten in furtive shreds, so I only know it as a flavour and not quite as a texture. It would be nice to have those shield-like leaves in a salad bowl and feel the crunch. I am still afraid of fibre, but I will get there.

FullSizeRender

Sorrel Merge

I add sorrel near the end of cooking time and it merges with all the other ingredients lending a sharpness and depth. Recently, I made a carrot and butter bean soup to which I added the leaves of parsley and sorrel five minutes before the end and the stalks earlier. Please use the stalks. If you’re interested in having an unadulterated sorrel experience simply sweat some young leaves in olive oil until they break down into a purée and keep in the fridge under a film of extra virgin.

Olive oil, onion/shallot, garlic, carrots cut into thinnish rounds, butter beans, parsley, sorrel, sea salt, a few tablespoons of yoghurt, butter for the brave.

I have deliberately not mentioned amounts. If you’ve read Julian Barnes’s book A Pedant in the Kitchen you’ll know how infuriating he finds this. Whatevs. You can combine butternut squash with the carrots and you can also add celery along with the onion. Really it’s a melange of vegetables made liquid by the addition of some stock or water. I like to add a knobette of butter to the vegetable mess near the end, but you don’t have to. I think it lends a velvety quality.

Gently wilt the onion or shallot in a small amount of olive oil, then after a few minutes in which they’ve had a chance to soften, add smashed up garlic, sliced carrots, chopped herb stalks, butter beans and stock/water. I didn’t add the whole tin of butter beans but a handful. Cook over a medium heat until the carrots are soft and then add a generous handful of parsley and a fist of sorrel leaves and the butter if you fancy. The sorrel will turn mud-coloured. Cook for a few minutes more, or mere seconds if you like it very fresh. Liquefy in a blender and add a tablespoon or two of yoghurt, some sea salt and a smattering of fresh parsley, sorrel or other soft herb at the end.

Weathered

25 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Food, Gardening, Growing vegetables, Operation, Spring

I seem to have a thing about shoes. Here I am at the allotment on a blissful May morning wearing shoes that are more hole than sole. It has taken me a while to get back here. I never thought it would take me this long but anyway here I am. I worked through the winter and it was just me and my allotment neighbour. There was very little to do because I’m not a fan of brassicas which tends to be the over-wintering vegetable family. I can’t quite remember what I did now; I think I walked around the perimeter edging everything which is a fantastic way to dispense rage. Having an edger slicing through the soil as if it was pizza is one of the great gardening devices and should be given out by the NHS. If in doubt, edge.

So, anyway, I had bowel surgery – ‘your op’ is how it has been renamed perhaps to make it more cuddly – so then when spring came along, I was unable to do anything except watch as weeds burgeoned, spreading over the formerly pristine and frozen bare ground. Finally, the plot became as I first found it: a wildly waving sea of green. There were no distinguishing features except huge rhubarb jazz hands, flopping ears of anemones, ragged tulips, molehills, dry and gorgeously rich. It reverted to its natural state as if I had never existed. Fair enough.

Now that I have been away, there is the temptation to do things differently. To be changed in some hard to define way that will express itself in my writing and in my day to day life, in the choices I make, the direction I go in. What I grow. There is pressure, coming I admit from me alone, that because I have ‘been through something’ – something ‘major’ – things will be different now. For a start, I’m off sugar and any kind of sweetener for the time being. This initially was hard, awful in fact because sweetness is a kind of basic primal need. I understand that carrots are sweet, but so is a slice of almond cake dripping in citrus syrup accompanied by a cup of tea, delicious and ordinary in equal measure. And I’ve never been someone who would take cheese over pudding. I wish I was a savoury person, but I have been known to stare at pictures of pudding for long silent minutes. I just gravitate there.

The truth is I’m the same but my habits have changed. And carrots are sweet. And though there is something perversely satisfying about pulling out weeds, the long slow rip of threads of a root system, the harmless throwing into the next plot of slugs and snails that I can’t bring myself to kill, the bald earth free of stuff, the wild part of the allotment that remains is really exciting. It defeats me, just looking at it. It is hoary, hairy, it slumps and rises alarmingly. Fruit bushes are hemmed in by unknown green objects. The things I have planted nearby – my dwarf mulberry tree – look genteel and a bit prim. A bit Barbara Pym.

For now I’m going to let this second half of the plot be, there’ll be a bit of binary going on. There is the right side, which has now, thanks to some elbow grease and some dainty plantings of potatoes, French climbing beans, sweet peas, a renewed herb patch become respectable and will pass muster with the allotment manager. And there is the left side, a wild and unkempt mess of weeds throttling the fruit, a prairie of long grasses, dandelion clocks and nettles and clover. I can’t yet bring myself to rip it all up. It is doing a job.

And there’s no rush. I suppose what is to be relished here, at the allotment at 8am on a Monday morning, is that there is nothing to be done. Apart from the fact that there’s a lot to do and tricky, life-defining things happen and you’ve got to seize the day and we are all so fragile when you come to think about it. I love the allotment because it makes me feel so overrated. I know I should crack on, but maybe not today. Whatever, really. My aim is to live whateverishly for a while.

Windfallen

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Autumn, Food, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories

Because we have to admit to winter. And that this is the last of the homegrown fruit: apples. The rest is Lidl’s. And dour farmers’ markets. Swede, turnips, parsnips. I’m quite looking forward to digging in winter, actually. I was speaking to one of my allotment neighbours and he said it was wonderful; digging in the cold, the harsh flat wind coming at them and going home to a warm house, skin flushed, muscles stretched. Cold brittle days with blue sky can be miraculous. Particularly if you’re working physically and you have a good pair of gloves.

But back to apples. And cake and tea and windfalls. Around about now there are apples on the ground, left to rot. Often there are holes in them, rusted, old holes that you know have housed a maggot. Or some other creature possibly still alive.

At the allotment, there are trees heaving with apples, and most of them are on the ground now, unpicked. But you’re not allowed to take them because being caught taking other people’s produce even though it’s on the ground, half-eaten, cloven in two and that horrible defeated colour of yellow – it’s a crime, punishable by immediate eviction. I’ve already been shouted at by Mike, the allotment manager for “resting my chicken wire” against the over-flowing community bin, so I’m sensitive to the small print of communal living. I don’t want to be evicted or ejected. It’s a delicate thing, belonging.

Paul, my twinkly allotment neighbour, smiled at me with his eyes when I told him this, about not picking. “But we do though”, he said under his breath, like a Dickens character. It was exciting. But then I thought – they’ve been here a while, six years. They know the code. I hear them laughing with Mike under their canopy of grapes, I see Mike’s large ankles sticking out at the bottom, so I know he’s sitting down. It’s a tribal thing. Or maybe it’s because I’m a woman who enjoys reading and growing sorrel.

On my way back from the allotment a few days ago, there was a tree and it had spewed its load on to the pavement in front of me. Cooking apples, hulking things, spilling everywhere. The front door of the house was open and builders wandered in and out. In the drive was a skip. Inside the drive were even more apples. I picked up a few on the pavement and chucked them into my bike’s basket. I edged inside the drive as a builder wandered out. I was trespassing now. “Excuse me but do you think I could pick up some of the windfall apples?” I asked. “Of course”, he said. “You can take the whole tree if you like”. He smiled and walked back inside. It was as if I’d asked him if I could possibly eat the rotting vegetation that was languishing at his feet.

The cake – apple and rosemary with a glug of olive oil – is perfect for a cold day, good with a cup of tea, and all you need for tired muscles, frayed nerves and for sensitive types.

Apple and rosemary olive oil cake

Adapted from Lili Vanilli’s Sweet Tooth

It’s a bit misleading to call this an olive oil cake because there are 2 tbs of it in total and there is also butter. I’m simply lifting the title from the book, and it sounds nice. And it tastes very nice too, sumptuous, appley and damp; I have made it exclusively with almonds on a few occasions, and on every other occasion gone 50/50 with flour/almonds or hazelnuts. I put more apples in than the recipe asked for (240g) and I would suggest you go even further. I’ve had dry apple cake before and it tastes pointless.

Scant 100g plain white flour

Scant 100g ground almonds

1/3 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

1/3 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp baking powder

85g unsalted butter

85g light muscovado sugar, plus extra for dusting

2 eggs

2 tbsp olive oil

300g peeled, cored and diced Bramley cooking apples or sharp eaters or a combo

½ – 1 tsp fresh rosemary, finely chopped

2 – 3 Bramley (or other apple) slices

1-2 fresh rosemary sprigs to decorate

Grease and line a 23cm round cake tin (I used tin foil though I know you shouldn’t – it was fine). Preheat the oven to 180C fan assisted/350F. Whisk together the flours, spices and baking powder to ensure they are all well mixed. Set aside.

Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy – about 4 minutes. Beat in the eggs, then add the oil and beat to incorporate. Mix in the diced apple and chopped rosemary, then fold in the dry ingredients.

Put this into the prepared cake tin, level the edges and lay the slices of apple on top however you like. Coat the surface of the cake with a fine dusting of brown sugar. Dip the sprigs of rosemary into cold water, dust with brown sugar, then press into the top of the cake.

Bake for about 30 – 35 minutes or until firm in the centre and an uncooked spaghetti stick or skewer of some kind comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in the tin for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely, or serve warm.

The growing season

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Allotment, Baking, England, Fruit, Gardening, Summer

I have an allotment. It’s ‘five rod’ which is 125 square metres and it has known better days. Waving weeds, a broken greenhouse, a shed, three pairs of Wellington boots that are sprouting wild flowers or hold stagnant pools of rainwater. The wellies start from small, a three year old I’d say, to adult. And there is something sad about them, the way they are standing to attention against the shed wall. As if something happened that I’d rather not know about. Whoever she is, she left me some tomato fertilizer, a book on allotments, a watering can and a small parcel of the blackest soil replete with worms. There is also a gooseberry bush, raspberry canes, a mass of rhubarb and one of those barbecues you buy at the garage. It’s almost a friendship. And some bolting tomatoes.

Nothing more is known. Of course I said yes. We’ve been here eight months! I had put my name down, and then forgotten all about it; no one now gets an allotment. But here I am shaking hands with a tall, white-haired man in support stockings, and he’s telling me about cherry trees. About the trio of fruit trees behind the plot I’ve chosen which has similarly been left to grow wild.

There’s something incredibly exciting about a fruit tree. It implies permanence in a way that a line of onions or potatoes can’t. Also a tree is beautiful, its blossom giving way to the fruit. Every year it will come back. Fruit that can be pilfered and pocketed or guzzled round the back of the shed. You can sit under a fruit tree and drink tea and read a book.

I threw some netting over part of the cherry tree I could reach, so that there might be some left after the birds and started pulling up weeds with my hands. I can’t yet draw up a plan. If I had a plan, then it would be a job, a task. And already with allotments, there is that whiff of tyranny. You have to maintain ‘your’ path which is always to the right of your plot. You need to decide whether to go down the route of mesh and bark chippings, or cutting it like a lawn. This made me sweat a bit, and so did their pack of instructions for planting from north to south, to dig or not to dig, rotovating, the price of manure. I was to look out for prehistoric flint tools. I was advised to plant spuds the first year. There is a man near me whose plot is all potatoes.

I was thinking more along the lines of thyme and lavender and nasturtium because it reminds me of those slopes in LA rampant with their dusty colour and floppy leaves. Sorrel. What else: fruit that can be picked when ripe (blackcurrants!), a swathe of colourful Califormian poppies for ease and because they like neglect and a dusty ditch. Tomatoes that can feel the sun. Basically I’d like a mulberry tree.

But first it’s a place to come. At the moment there is a wicker chair which when you sit on it gradually subsides so you are actually just sitting on the earth – from here I can be quite invisible and watch the woman mowing her path, the couple bending over their plants. The train rattles by. The man who said something disparaging about my grass is hiding behind a wigwam of sweet peas. I am using a child’s digging fork at the moment. I may or may not get back to work.

Roasted rhubarb

This is from Mark Diacono’s book A Taste of the Unexpected. He’s the one who tells you to plant Szechuan Pepper and quince and something called Oca. His books are glorious and so are his recipes. He also says ‘you can be a neglectful, even abusive, carer of rhubarb. It is quite hard to kill off.’ Result.

500g rhubarb (trimmed & cut into 5cm pieces)
65g caster sugar
Zest and juice of a small orange

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. Put the trimmed and chopped rhubarb into a roasting tin, toss with the caster sugar and the finely grated zest of the orange. Arrange in a single layer and then pour over the orange juice. Cover the dish with foil and roast in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Then remove the foil, give it all a good stir and put back in the oven (sans foil) for another 15 ish minutes until tender and syrupy and starting to disintegrate. Lovely with Greek yoghurt or cream or ice cream and an ‘independent crumble’ – see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for this.