Mulberries

30 Friday Sep 2022

Tags

Autumn, Childhood, Divorce, Fruit, London, Stories

It was late summer, and this was a jar of mulberries we couldn’t open, in an old house that once stood in front of the River Ouse in Seaford. The house was loaned to us for reasons of my mum’s 80th birthday party. In the garden was a spectacularly craggy mulberry tree that had to be held up under the arms – like an elderly person over potentially hazardous terrain. Huge sagging branches, mammoth trunk and mulberries now long gone, potted up in syrup in a jar with suction so intense it resisted every implement we could put to it. So I put it back in the cupboard along with jars of homemade jam. The cupboard made me envious – summer all potted, preserved, labelled, suctioned closed. No entry.

Because I was once in another house as a child, equally but differently imposing, where there was a mulberry tree, I know that there is nothing like them. There is nothing else out there that can touch a bowl of bleeding mulberries – my small hands covered in scarlet juice. Red jelly (probably strawberry) with mulberries suspended magically. And white ice cream (yes it was white). There was a partially blind poodle who we expected tricks from, which looking back was unkind, except I was about six and didn’t know any better. Round and round she’d pirouette for me, her dull white head of curls and milky eyes following my dancing hand as I conducted her and wore her out.

The poodle lived in a posh flat along with a family of four in Chelsea – Elm Park Gardens – with a communal garden out the back. Black railings kept out the riff raff. I was sent there to live with them while my parents – back in Devon – ‘finalised’ their divorce. I remember not understanding this; why was this necessary? I went to school locally – Bousfield Primary, still there with a Beatrix Potter blue plaque – and endured the weekly humiliation of doing PE in my vest and pants. I spent a considerable amount of time truanting in the toilet.

Nothing was as it should be: the mother of the family, Christina, wore high-heeled slippers with feathers that tickled your toes, bit her nails to the quick, had fierce black hair and a decisive temper and smoked properly. Not like my mother who smoked socially, with wine or in distress. Christina was a rampaging smoker and a hitter.

As if to herald my new urban status I was fitted with a grey coat and velvet collar and each morning had Oil of Ulay cream – pink and obscenely perfumed – slathered on my face, which gave me scales like an alligator. Christina was married to a man called Frank Weir, who was a clarinettist and a band leader. I adored him and threw myself into his arms whenever he walked through the door and folded myself into the gap he made for me in his armchair when he’d settled down to watch television. They had two daughters and it was the younger of the two who sat with me under the mulberry tree where we played with dolls. Just to say, Christina died young, and Frank followed a year or two later, and the two girls were sent to live with an aunt up in Worcester.

I’m not sure still what I feel about being sent away like this, except I remember my first bodily awareness of what it means to be homesick. The silence of the top bunk. What else…Christina’s nubby fingers holding the mulberries, the deep scarlet and the perfumed sweetness of them and the soft suck of the jelly prised from the bowl.

Mulberries, just so you know, come around late summer, early autumn and there is no point seeing if you can buy them, please don’t go to a bearded grocer in Hoxton. They must be pilfered. It might be a bit of a wait, or you can buy a small mulberry tree from a nursery now and grow your own. I have one planted in my allotment and I’ve had my first small rash of berries this year. Elizabeth David put mulberries in her summer pudding: cook them lightly with sugar until the juices flow and use good bread. But Jane Grigson believes – in her fruit book – that the best way to eat mulberries is with cream, completely unadorned. Her compote sounds nice, though. And if you can get hold of a branch of someone else’s tree, stick it in the ground, it will grow.

His favourite butter

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Butter, Cooking, Food, France, Ingredients, London, Recipes, Stories

I have been cooking for a couple who live in Belgravia, and who spent twenty years in France and pronounce words – certain cheeses – with a proper French accent and when I was younger I found ths deeply unsettling until a friend told me how much she hated the way her Dutch friend pronounced the word Gouda. I am also cooking food from another time, when everyone ate cream daily. They are both slim and energetic older people who think nothing of eating a pudding every day, a gratin, cheese, bread, strong small coffee. Perhaps small is the key here, because occasionally they’ll remark on my portions and intimate that perhaps this is because of Joe’s rather gargantuan needs but in fact he is also a dainty eater. They like ice cream, tarts, pies, but in small amounts and eaten with style – at a highly decorative table in a room that I have seen but not yet entered.

“You can’t get food like this anymore”, the man said, as he passed me my ’empties’ from the previous day’s dishes – fish pie and lemon posset. “You can’t get it in a restaurant. Nobody makes this kind of food nowadays.” Dressed crab. Bisque. Onion tart. It’s true that no one quite eats like this. We are more timid perhaps. Shy of milk, the presence of Parmesan, nothing too florid, too lavish. “We love soufflés, Shepherd’s pie, sticky toffee pudding. No couscous.” These were my instructions delivered by phone and every day my journey takes me past that old London; Harrods with the bottle green awnings, the gold lettering, the Natural History Museum, the black railings everywhere, the white window boxes and lurid flowers. Big red buses. It’s hard not to feel a child again on the approach to Hyde Park Corner. You can imagine never seeing the same person twice. The doormen at the Wellesley. European women in varying shades of caramel, hair the same colour as their coats.

And then doing battle with that enormous roundabout. It’s probably not called a roundabout, but if you’re not already in the right lane, you find yourself going to Victoria station. Right in the centre is a bizarre series of enclosures impossible to navigate on foot. I’ve done it many times in the past and on every occasion have resorted to asking a stranger how to get across and together we have had a meltdown. I have never not had some sort of panic attack here. In fact it was while stranded under the Wellington Arch seven years ago that I decided to give up coffee. And always leave the house with at least ten pounds cash so I can hail a cab.

There’s possibly some Freudian impulse that has brought me back here, to a lilac mews seconds away. That and the money. I dropped off my portions today – smoked haddock in a mustard and Parmesan cream, homemade ice cream, chocolate sauce, ‘mocha-d up’, they said, approvingly. They love potatoes, so there’s them, new. And as I was leaving we talked about potted shrimp. He told me about his favourite butter only available in France. Jean-Yves Bordier. They both said it in a way I wouldn’t dare, with the breathful ease of two people who eat beurre and cheese every day of their lives. Who knew their French builders’ elegant coffee habits. And the life of weekly markets.

Occasionally I imagine that this is me – with my own favourite butter, for example. A liking for a specific farmer or greengrocer, someone who knows his peaches. I do actually: his name is Paul from Twickenham and he told me the other day about his grandma who made amazing rhubarb and strawberry crumbles for everyone and died sitting up, right there in the street on her stool, next to the fruit & veg. She was given a proper costermonger’s funeral with standing room only. But I wonder if that is sufficiently singular – whether it’s enough. It’ll have to do for now. I’m off to buy three tubs of cream and a tranche of Parmesan.

Food in books

24 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Andrea Ashworth, Books, Food, London, Reading, William Boyd

I’ve been away. From here, I mean. Though you may not have noticed, quite rightly. It’s been an interesting month, of reading books, one sometimes after the other, like the courses of a meal. And books that aren’t remotely about food or eating still contain passages that made me stop and want to write them down or pause. Logan Mountstuart, the writer in William Boyd’s novel Any Human Heart, eats dog food. First by mistake and then by choice, because it’s cheap and he’s now poor; he particularly likes the rabbit (‘especially with the liberal addition of some tomato ketchup and a good jolt of Worcestershire sauce’). This precipitates his move from London – leaving just as Margaret Thatcher becomes prime minister, 1979 – to France. A ‘rich haul’ of ceps and girolles, an occasional mushroom omelette, two meals a day and wine and potato crisps at night. He dies, I believe happily, his body discovered in the garden by a friend ‘who had come to Cinq Cypres with the gift of a basket of apples’.

I was relieved when he left England, his cramped basement flat in Pimlico, and spent his last years in a ruin with a dog and a cat in France burning cherry logs, avoiding the spitting acacia, with pine ‘bringing up the rear’ and eating proper food. The end of a wild journey through the century.

This meal, the one pictured here, was largely taken up with talking about books. We ate at Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch. I bumped into Ralph Fiennes picking over some oranges outside Leila’s Shop on the way there. It’s that kind of place (you can make your mind up what I mean by that…I like Ralph Fiennes. I like oranges. Perhaps it was the dark splendour of the interior of the shop itself that scared me). I felt more at ease with the van on the corner selling bacon baps and cups of tea the colour of malt. I don’t know what that says. And the old lady serving had yellow hair, like the colour of crayons. I’ve had more bacon baps in my life, and stewed tea (bag in) than hake, and laverbread butter, and apple galettes. I suppose that might be it.

Anyway, we ate the very refined food, as pictured, and talked about food writing. Or rather we rasped over the clamour of voices and general scraping of chairs, reduced to occasional semaphoring. What was that about Diana Henry? etc.

I am old, longing for quiet. And dare I say it, I’d rather read an actual book – a novel, or a memoir, a biography – than a cookbook, however learned. We all have to eat; a brilliant book will have stuff in it somewhere, about food, about the time, all in context and memorable.

I have no idea how Andrea Ashworth recalled with such detail the food of the 1970s, of her childhood in Manchester, in Once in a House on Fire. Terrible things happen to her, to her sisters and mother. Sometimes the bleakness and violence feels too sad to bear, but the details are poetry and she is a child again in the telling – Asda versus Kwik Save (Asda infinitely superior – ‘Kwik Save smelled of the weather’ ). When times are hard they eat boiled potatoes under ‘an avalanche of salt’ or Rich Tea biscuits sandwiched by ‘a glance of marg’ and wrapped in newspaper. When there’s a windfall there’s Country Life butter, real milk, ‘half a pound of white Cheshire cheese…grainy brown bread, Weetabix’. And then there’s whatever they’re given to eat or drink at the places they pitch up to in the middle of the night, on the run from a crazed stepfather – hot Ribena in Auntie Pauline’s caravan.

Or this about her favourite refuge: ‘I found myself falling in love with the edge of Auntie Vera’s toast, where the crusts were always slightly burned and butter caught without melting, so you got a glob of it on your tongue’.

Or there’s this, for beautiful words, all on their own: ‘I missed our daytime television and the haunting half-whistle of The Clangers, hiding in moon craters, singing circles to each other through the big black – echoing without words.’ I could go on. Anyhow, it’s better than a cookbook in my view and leaves you feeling full. I hope you read it. The end.

Pickle

03 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Christmas, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, Jane Grigson, London, Pickled, Recipes, Stories

Christmas, what a slippery thing it is. Odd that the things I made with greatest pleasure when the flat was warm and still, weeks to go before the intensity of it all, were the things that were left and forgotten about on the day. In fact, the last jar of pickled pears I put in my brother’s car just before they left for Cornwall, and there it sat next to the mountain of cases and bags the day after Boxing day. It looked pathetic, so small, and also promising because I think they will be eaten and savoured in a way that’s impossible when you are spooning things on to people’s plates in a manic, hot-faced way, pointing things out, trying to get people to eat massive amounts of food and unwrap presents and play games all within an eight hour window. The cheese grew dry, the quince paste overlooked. I think I forked a pear out of the jar in desperation and stood over the person as they ate it.

So I remember the making of the pickled pears with friendliness and calm. it was about a month before Christmas and I was leafing through Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book, wanting to find some way of not losing the depressed-looking pears in my bowl. I landed on her pickled pears recipe. Like me, she finds chutney ‘unsympathetic’, and so to spiced fruit, which requires a vinegar syrup to which you add what you like – bay leaves, blades of mace, allspice berries, some mustard seeds in my case. And then the fruit: pears here, but you could use plums, peaches, melon etc.

We tried them out when my cousin Lucas came round, and they were eaten scooped on to Stilton and with some goat’s brie, a crater-like round of white cheese which tasted cool like yoghurt and didn’t survive the weeks to Christmas, the smell so rotten and cloying, we were forced to bin it. We tried the quince paste which was nice but still too sweet and unmellow, and Lucas told me to make jelly with the quince debris, which I did that night, spending hours watching it drip soundlessly from its muslin pouch, afraid to move it and then cloud it over. The pears and cheese were followed by a cup of tea and a round of Bananagrams and us all pretending that that had been Christmas. Or could have been Christmas, the kind that takes you unawares.

I remember our conversation in a way that I don’t of Christmas day, which comes to me largely in images. The park early in the day, the quick furtive walk we did. Red cabbage that had somehow pulverized, standing in the kitchen eating blocks of stuffing, the Christmas pudding ready two hours after everyone had gone and its shining dome so perfect, the smell of concentrated fruit and alcohol sumptuous and totally pointless. We ate it watching Paddington.

What I have left now is the juice. I have half a jar of it, the pears long gone. Because it has sat unnoticed for this time, it is intense, dark, tea-like. It is gloriously spiced. Now I am using it to add to pulped garlic and honey, because of my rattling chest and snotty nose. There is nothing like a spiced vinegar syrup on January days, when the days are long and calm again. I don’t even think there are pears now, certainly none on the trees which are all black and knotted round here, like long witches’ hands. So make it for the syrup alone. I would. There’s a while before you have to share it. Happy New Year.

Pickled pears

Adapted from Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

To vinegar: this recipe calls for white wine vinegar, but you could also make it with cider vinegar, which is about halfway between wine and malt vinegar, and not quite as shrieking in intensity. You could use red wine vinegar if you prefer the drama of it. I left my spices in the syrup, as you can see above. They continue to give up their flavour though so cloves might be best left out if you are using them. Other possibilities are a small piece of ginger, bruised, the thinly pared rind of a lemon, a red dried chilli.

6 large firm pears
350 – 450g light muscovado sugar (or to taste)
250 ml white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon of whole allspice
5 blades of mace or small chunk of nutmeg (or both)
3 bay leaves
1 teaspoon of mustard seeds

Peel, core and cut pears into 8 slices each (or thereabouts). Cover with water – about 750 ml. Boil hard for five minutes. Strain off and measure the liquid. To 600 ml of the water add the sugar, vinegar and spices. Pour over the pears and simmer until the pieces are cooked and translucent – about 20 minutes depending on ripeness. Pour everything into a bowl and leave overnight. Drain off the liquid the next day into a pan and boil for five minutes to reduce it slightly and then pack the pears into warm-from-the-oven, sterilized jars along with the spices – unless you’re leaving them out. Pour over the boiling syrup and seal while still warm. Store for as long as possible before using; Jane Grigson says a month. I keep mine in the fridge. Lovely with cheese, ham, duck, or ‘a discreet vegetable or two’.

Is it me, Lord?

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 27 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Food, Ingredients, Jazz, Jokes, London, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories

I have been making a lot of chicken broth. Boiling up the bones and doing a lot of skimming and straining so that all that’s left is the clear liquid to which I add a few choice vegetables. There is a lot of condensation during this process and all our windows steam up. I feel soothed. It reminds me of Ella. Ella was my landlady in Kilburn, north-west London, who took me in at a moment’s notice the night before starting my three-year stint at RADA. I had nowhere else to go. I found her notice advertising a room pinned on the board somewhere and went to a phone box and called her. She immediately invited me over and there she was, diminutive and smiling, and we sat at her table in the kitchen and she offered me food and we decided that I would move in the following day.

I stayed there nearly a year and regretted leaving and wish to this day I hadn’t. I reminded her of Doris Day, she said. It was a modern, modest house and it was always warm and I seem to remember quite red. There were photos everywhere – of Jazz bands, of singers, of the American pianist George Sheering who she had known in Chicago where she’d lived for a time as a singer.

But it was her kitchen I remember most. It was small but well-stocked. I had never seen a fridge as full. Stewed fruit in black juice; prunes and apricots, a few curling lemon rinds. I never remember there not being a bowl of her stewed fruit in the fridge covered in clingfilm. And chicken soup with matzo balls that reminded me of school dumplings. I remember the blue box of matzo meal always in the cupboard and the practiced way she said the word, which was new to me; it sort of flew out of her mouth. There were beads of fat that floated like sequins on the surface of the soup, and endless chicken. I was fed. Sometimes I would get out of bed, and open the door to find her holding a plate of toast or a bowl of porridge for me and then she’d collect all her teaspoons. Or I’d come home to find the hushed quiet of a bridge evening and glistening noodles for me in the kitchen.

Sometimes we sat at the kitchen table and talked: she told me about her love of Las Vegas, of her life in Chicago before coming back to London with her two young sons and starting from scratch alone. We talked about performing. She loved Bette Midler and sometimes she’d play the video of her on Parkinson or we’d listen to George Sheering who she couldn’t believe I’d never heard of. Or she’d tell me jokes or sometimes sing with her microphone along to a favourite piece of music.

I think she found me surprisingly dull. I was an actor but not, like her, an entertainer. I was just finding out what that was: there were entertainers, there were performers and there were actors. I was an actor. I wasn’t as good as her at anecdotes, at the knack of turning your life into a skit. She got one joke out of me, which she made me tell whenever she had her family to dinner. I would dread it because the humour lay precisely in the delivery and timing. Having grown up adept at silly voices and mimicry I was having my ‘funny’ rammed out of me at drama school. But Ella made me do it.

It’s the last supper and Jesus is with his disciples. He decides to speak to them. “I know that one of you will betray me”, he says. There is consternation amongst the group and a stunned silence. One of them, Matthew, finally asks “Is it me, Lord?” “No, Matthew, be assured. It is not you”, Jesus replies. After a brief silence Luke asks the same question: “Is it me, Lord?” Jesus smiles and rests his hand on his shoulder. “Luke, fear not. It is not you.” One after the other the same question is asked. Finally, it is Judas who speaks: “Is it me, Lord?”

And Jesus looks at him and screams (imagine a vicious mimic): “Is it ME, Lord?….Is it ME, Lord?“

Actually it was me. I did the Judas thing and left her for a yellow room under the flight path in Fulham to look after a small French boy and was never offered anything to eat except once when I was given a soft-boiled egg in aspic. It meant I could live rent-free and stay at drama school where I was investigating my breathing, amongst other things. She was the nicest person who’d ever looked after me. She died last year at the age of 87. This recipe is for her.

Chicken broth

Adapted from my mother-in-law, Susan Travers

This version requires the chicken broth to be cooked twice; once for 2-3 hours on day one, then the next day for around four hours with a sleep overnight to help all the flavours concentrate. Having made chicken broth many times, cooking it for four hours ‘only’, I can say this twice-cooked method (cooked for me and lovingly) surpasses all my efforts: it takes the broth beyond the flavourful brown water stage into deeply rich bovine jelly. It is worth the wait.

Serves 4

1 medium free-range chicken
2 large leeks, washed and chopped in half
4 carrots, peeled and left whole
1 whole head of celery, trimmed
1 large onion (red is sweeter)
1 small bunch of parsley
1-2 sprigs of thyme, rosemary or 2 bay leaves
1 tsp of sea salt (also season later to taste)
1 tsp of black peppercorns (optional)

Put everything into the largest saucepan you have and cover generously with water (it should be about 2 inches above the bird), and bring to the boil. Then turn down the heat, skimming off any scum as it appears (and keeping the ‘schmaltz’ – chicken fat – for your matzo balls if you want to make them) and simmer very gently for about 2-3 hours, partially covered. There should be the odd bubble but nothing more.

Turn it off and let it sit overnight. Keep it covered. This pause in the cooking helps concentrate the flavours. The following day, bring to the boil once more, then simmer gently for around four hours, partially covered again.

There are two methods for serving: You can strain the soup using the biggest sieve or colander you have, into another pan. Add whatever vegetables that have kept their shape. When the chicken has cooled slightly pull off what you like and add it to the broth. Add some more parsley. This method will give the broth the appearance of a consommé – clear and rather elegant. Or you can simply ladle straight from the pot into a soup bowl; mucky but good.

Englishly wonderful

27 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Dessert, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, London, Pudding, Recipes, Stories, Sunday lunch

This is summer pudding. Perhaps they were being ironic when they named it, because it’s made using late summer fruit; redcurrants, raspberries. A clutch of other berries perhaps if you’re feeling rebellious. But it is more a dark and winy end to summer days. Bread soaked, I want to say blooded, in the juices of just popping fruit, crunchy berries with rather drastic seeds. This thing, this glorious crimson dome, came at the end of a proper Sunday lunch. I didn’t make it, I simply watched its procession from the kitchen out into the garden to where we sat under a canopy of grapes. I think I may well have actually said all this, Dimbleby-like, as it was carried forth. I might have provided some sort of commentary.

I do this when I’m nervous. I say what’s happening, as if for the benefit of an audience. If you like Brecht, then you’d feel quite at home sitting next to me during one of these events. I say things like: “I can’t believe we’re sitting under a canopy of grapes”. Other popular expressions: “it’s such an amazing colour!” It’s basically meta theatre and it makes things more exciting, I find. And also if you don’t know what to say, you just describe your surroundings. “If in doubt, enthuse” a friend at university once advised.

It came with a small jug of the juice – “blood of Christ” – and a bowl of thick and undulating cream – “what an amazing spoon, is it ancient?” – and then there was the eating of it. “How Englishly wonderful!”, said another guest. And it was. Not too sweet, gloriously sodden, the cream a kind of lactic counterpoint. I said all this, but no one was listening. The cold of it was intoxicating.

Liz grows her own fruit in her allotment that she’s had for ages. Fruit is easier to grow than vegetables apparently – blackcurrants, redcurrants, nothing to it – though I think we had her carrots. She also made the apple and mint jelly that accompanied our lamb, and my elderflower cordial was made by her, I think, in France. If this had been me, no one would have needed to ask. I would have volunteered all this information possibly before the removal of coats. But there you go. Some people, Liz being one, have no desire to broadcast their efforts, or to write about them. The festishizing of food is not her style.

The trip from Chiswick to Putney had taken ages, with full and fetid tube carriages crammed with people eating enormous flapping sandwiches. We were hungry and it was cold by the time we arrived and I was wearing a dress in denial of the unrelenting autumn wind with stupid bare legs. And then there were the five years of no one we knew making a Sunday roast in LA. Then there was LA, where nothing was full of fat or scaldingly hot, no gravy, no sauce or large florid ears of cauliflower, no chunks of melting lamb, or red-stained lips and purple tongues or waves of cream. I was unprepared for the Englishly wonderful aspect of it all.

And I was also reminded of being in England before when I was much younger and the odd thing about Sundays, the melancholy aspect to them; that they were always the end of something that hadn’t quite begun. But more than anything, this meal was served with complete knowledge of what a traditional Sunday lunch should be. And we were coming to it as you might after a long absence. It was all a bit of a shock. We left at 5 o’clock and then talked about it for days. We tried to nail down the pudding, what it was that made it so good. Perhaps more than anything it was that this went on. It was the routineness of it, and next year all being well at around the same time if we’re in the vicinity and we don’t get lost, we’ll try it again. Summer pudding, late. With whatever berries you have, and more if you’re feeling rebellious.

The classic summer pudding has only redcurrants and raspberries, but this pudding also had blackcurrants and in fact are a popular addition generally; they add a bit of clout and deep colour. This is Nigel Slater’s recipe, which follows the classic one expounded by Jane Grigson and the like. Spoon over any extra juice which will add drama and will possibly garner you a round of applause. Or pour the juice into a jug to serve along with some thick cream with a preferably ancient spoon.

2nd October – Liz’s thoughts on her summer pudding via email

“So glad you enjoyed the summer pudding! I regret to say, it wasn’t really according to a recipe, although I started with an Elizabeth David one and then adapted it as I went along…. I think it is crucial to use stale white bread , and E D says only use raspberries and redcurrant in a ratio of 3 to 1. The amount of sugar is optional (I think I used about a quarter of a cup) and a little water. Simmer fruit for 5 mins. At that stage I thought mine was too sweet so added blackcurrants, and then not sure there was enough fruit, so added some strawberries. As you can see, I made it up as I went along! A useful tip is to line the pudding basin with cling film before putting in the sliced bread as it makes it much easier to get out.”

Pause

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Cookbook, Food, Frugal, Ingredients, London, Recipes, Stories

Yesterday I put away most of my cookery books. The majority went into boxes, which were marked ‘cookery books (keep)’. I didn’t realize objects had the collective name of ‘chotskies’ and that anything from shells to bowls to framed photos could come under this new heading. Something about seeing all these books lined up, sentry-like, on the floor gave me pause. How many cookery books do I need? Or use? The sheer bulk of them was imposing, but sitting down to read them felt like displacement, a putting off of something. I returned from England to an entire bookcase full of recipes, gathering dust, slouching in the heat, cascading one on top of the other and tried to remember when I had developed this learned helplessness in the kitchen. For years and years I think I owned three cookery books. Which I barely used. They had pencil drawings of legumes and dainty fruits, or there were close-up photos of salad and cake where everything looked vaguely menacing and shapeless.

Mostly I was drawn to implements, because during my teens and twenties I lived ad hoc often for months at a time in such and such a place, as an au pair, as a cook in Venice, in someone’s converted garage in Rome, in a deserted flat in Peckham. I made do with what had been left behind or what I could use when the owners weren’t looking. What I could eat, how much of something I could take before it was hidden from me or labelled ‘keep out!’. The borrowed cup and saucer, the endless pilfered spoons, the bag of buns that would be tea. All those cafe and deli jobs when I lived on ham scraps and Danish pastries. Food was fodder, fuel to power me through the walk from one postcode to another.

When I was in my late twenties, I worked as a live-in au pair for a French couple in the London borough of Fulham, which subsidized my drama school fees. They had a three-year-old boy called Antoine and it was my job to look after him in the evenings and weekends. They had the best kitchen that I’d ever seen and the best implements. It was never made clear whether I was allowed to cook, so mostly I didn’t. I’d eat bread and butter, toast, a banana, things I could pick up surreptitiously and leave the room with; four biscuits curled into my palm, a slab of cheddar.

They had a food processor. This was new to me and very exciting. I had no idea how it worked, so when they were out I’d experiment; the best thing it did was shred carrots. Mounds and mounds of desiccated carrot, damp and juicy, which I’d salt and fleck with oil and lemon. They had no cookery books and I had none either, because I was living with the bare minimum, in a small lemon-yellow room next to Antoine at the top of the house.

I made the shredded carrot every day and ate it with an upended tin of tuna. I think that was how I never got ill. I read fiction, not Nigel or Nigella who only existed then in the margins, if I walked through a bookshop, say, or flicked through the television channels. I was never invited to cross the threshold of the French couple’s sitting room. I’d stand in the doorway and we’d have conversations, but I was never invited in. Only if Antoine saw me would he take my hand and lead me to the sofa.

Sometimes, in the night I’d hear him crying next door, and though I was given instructions never to go in, I often would, and he’d be standing on the other side clutching his trucks to his chest in a way I still think about. He also gave me food, invited me to sit with him at the kitchen table, and took me into the garden. Sometimes I ate my shredded carrot with him and he’d eat his mashed apple or his sausages (and then I’d eat what he left behind). I hope he is doing well.

I read this book by Alain Coumont at Le Pain Quotidien in Larchmont. I resisted the urge to buy it and instead I read it. I hope the simplicity of this recipe doesn’t offend, but really it’s not a recipe, more an idea; a thought about food that you might have and decide to execute. It’s permission more than anything. And it reminded me of what I did before books told me to. When I just fed myself.

Carrot and lemon salad

Serves 4 as a side dish or appetizer
4-6 carrots, peeled, julienned or finely grated
2 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
3 pinches of sea salt
Black pepper

Put the shredded/grated carrot in a bowl and mix with the oil, lemon juice and salt. Mix gently with your hands if you like, and then add some freshly ground black pepper. Serve quickly.

Saladings

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Farmers' market, Ingredients, London, Los Angeles, Nonfiction, Salad, Stories

We went to the Santa Monica farmers’ market on Saturday and it was nice to be in the vicinity of the sea again. I say vicinity, because it is more of a backdrop, its vastness not inviting – it’s simply resolutely there, this dark blue mass that lies further out than you would wish. People continue about their business as if it was all just streets, the pier crammed full of sight-seers, the market selling greens and other colours. Nobody bothers with it. No one swims; to even discuss swimming with people here is to enter into a conversation laced with foreboding. If I mention that I swam in the English Channel in the autumn months I am eccentric but harmless. To talk about swimming here, even in August, is to invite gusts of disapproval and worry. Because the sea is cold and possibly dirty and may be dangerous. As I say, it’s a bit out there here to swim.

Perhaps they reserve their outlandishness for their market stalls. Garlic scapes and leek scapes, purple artichokes lavishly heaped and spiky, bunches of Italian dandelion. We were drawn in out of curiosity, the need to know, rather than out of necessity. I recognize that I don’t need to eat the curling tails of garlic, fresh with engorged pod, or mulberries that look like worms. I don’t need heirloom garlic, with its brown and clawed cloves, or garlic chives looking like a posy of mown grass. Or baby leeks, or the long rods of spring onion with their fussy little beards.

But the lady was nice. She explained what things were and how they tasted (or at least admitted when she couldn’t) and then asked where I was from. “I have family friends who live in a suburb of London!” she said. “Actually, we have just had friends to stay from Kent, England,” said another lady who was waiting to be served. “They loved making fun of our accents.” She looked at me as if I not only knew these people but had egged them on. I’m used to this by now – the inference being I know everyone in Kent and am responsible for a lot of other places in England too. But it’s conversation – something I discover I need. It’s rather like the sea, chatting with strangers here; a bit far out, an attractive but faintly alarming proposition. A little bit choppy.

10344193_735841896466372_2046877898324788249_o

Perhaps God is in the dressing. I like the idea of a gremolata – a dry ensemble of lemon zest and herbs and garlic – immersed in a simple dressing of oil and vinegar. Here I used the spring onions I bought and couldn’t find an adequate use for, with some fennel flowers (Joe: “Are you trying to recreate the past?”), some garlic chives and some shredded romaine lettuce. This was my dressing or vinaigrette for some baby leeks that I blanched. I ate the whole thing with a soft-boiled egg, because the baby leeks reminded me of asparagus and I did in fact do some dipping. It was a warm salad of sorts, with echoes of Simon Hopkinson’s lovely Leeks Vinaigrette.

*I think this is the best description of the atrocious English salad of old I will ever read. Hope you do too.

“A few melancholy slices of cucumber, an approximately washed lettuce (iceberg, naturally), which appeared to have been shredded by wild dogs, two entire radish heads (served whole, presumably to avoid the risk of their proving edible in sliced form), a pale and watery quarter of tomato, the whole ensemble accompanied by a salad cream that at least had the virtue of tasting “like itself” – that’s to say, like the byproduct of an industrial accident. “

The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester

Life is butter

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Food, Ingredients, London, Los Angeles, Recipes, Singing songs, Stories

melon cauliflower. Get it? Life is but a melancholy flower. I used to sing this as a round in the days before iPhones and laptops. Before all the screens. We would sit in a circle in the garden and sing. That’s how we got our kicks. Singing songs and then cooking porridge if it all got too much.

Most of the songs were Elizabethan, and almost all were sad; someone was dead, or they refused to marry you, or you were trying to persuade the ferryman to ferry you over to the place you’d rather be, or there was a rose you knew who would remain forever a spinster. We would often begin in the spirit of silliness and jocularity and steadily it would overcome us, the words sung in strange counterpoint, soaring and dying; My poor bird wing thy flight, far above the sorrows of this sad night. And before we knew it, we were gone, transported to this other place of words sung and soaring.

I learnt the songs predominantly from a girl called Helen who I met in Rome when I was on my academic year abroad, and who then moved to London around the same time I did. She had a French girlfriend called Valerie and at that time it was trickier being gay in Rome than in London, and better all round for work, so they moved. It was her garden in north London that we sang in and occasionally she would accompany the rounds with her recorder. I don’t know what it is about the recorder but Helen stamped on any snickering which only led to more, and us having to begin again. It was better without.

I have no idea where Helen is, because this was before social media, and I lost her phone number many address books ago. She is lost to me. I don’t even remember her surname. We laughed a lot in Rome, where we helped out at an international school and managed the outings for the children (three months of panini and prosciutto, always warm and wet from the heat of the bus, and an orange). There was a lot of snorting and inappropriateness, looking back. We would never have been allowed if the time was now.

Those summer evenings in Helen’s garden got me through the London roughness after Italy, and I lazily lost touch because at that age I thought the world was full of Helens. I still can’t look at a cauliflower and not think of her. And I don’t know many people these days whose idea of bliss is to sit in long grass and sing for hours on end and then get up and make salty porridge.

I sometimes wonder what she’s up to, but I never worry. My grandmother would have said ‘she doesn’t make enough of herself’ because she wore no make up and scraped her wild blonde hair into a bun, but we were all tomboys and wore the same clothes day in day out, and nobody seemed to mind.

And actually, life is butter. Not sure about melons, though they’re perfectly nice. And cauliflower – well, let’s see. They are so much in abundance in the farmers’ markets here in LA (see how I did that? Got on a plane, crossed the Atlantic and before you know it…) and appear in a variety of colours and sizes: purple, popcorn-yellow, small as apples, big as bazookas. I chose one that looked as if it had been smoking Gauloises its whole life, roasted it with some anchovies and garlic and a few glugs of olive oil. The anchovies disintegrate into a salty tacky juice which works very well. It’s really brown salt. For Helen.

Roasted cauliflower with anchovies and garlic

Adapted from table366

Head of cauliflower, chopped
Parmesan cheese (optional)
Tin or jar of anchovies
Olive oil
4-5 cloves of garlic, unpeeled

Oven Proof Dish (8×8 or 9×11 is a good size) lined with parchment

Preheat the oven to 400F/200C. Spread the cauliflower out evenly in the dish in one layer (otherwise it won’t cook as well). Drop the anchovies round and about; remember they are very salty, so the more you use, the saltier the dish will be. Pour over a few glugs of olive oil; you want to wet the cauli but not completely drown it – say 4 tablespoons. Salt (very lightly if at all) add the garlic and give everything a good toss with your hands. Roast for 20-25 minutes until the cauliflower is slightly caramelized and the anchovies have melted. Stir and then grate over some parmesan or whatever hard cheese you like as long as it’s the melting kind – you can leave it out entirely and it will still taste lovely. Roast for another 5-10 minutes so the cheese has a chance to thoroughly melt. Let it sit for a little bit so it doesn’t burn your mouth or serve at room temperature.

I’m so happy you’re alive

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Not food, Uncategorized

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Books, David Sedaris, Humour, London, Reading, Stories, Writers

I met David Sedaris. It is hard for me to write this without italics or exclamation marks or at the very least a change of font; I’m thinking Garamond. I did wonder if I had dreamt it, but I have proof; I have the book, signed by him, and I have witnesses that we talked. Perhaps I should clarify; I haven’t just read David Sedaris, I have sucked him dry. I have read and reread him to the point where none of his stories hold any surprises. I know what’s coming, always. I read to reassure myself that the world has him in it, with his mass of menial jobs and his need to touch people’s heads at odd times. I feel a sense of possession about the books that borders on the kind of repetitive obsessive detail-orientated disorder of which David himself would be proud.

I waited in the book signing line after the show at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea – my first of his – like a child waiting for Santa Claus. The wait was horrible. He was taking an inordinate amount of time talking to people and also eating from little plastic boxes of feta and olives and greenery. He was actually stuffing his face; he must have been starving. He was drawing a caterpillar on the front page of a girl’s book, while talking animatedly to her about something I couldn’t catch, with bits of salad peeping out of the corners of his mouth. At the end of the show, during the Q&A, he had asked for two things: the hood of his stove had broken and he needed the name of a handyman who could come and fix it, and he needed a psychiatrist for a friend of his who was having a hard time. Could we please meet him afterwards with names and numbers?

It was finally our turn. I hadn’t planned to be here and now here I was, sweating with bright red cheeks and a borrowed coat. I’ve only ever had the books and now, thanks to a fabulous fairy godmother and a returned ticket, I had him. We approached and he immediately started talking about the weird coincidence of being given three recommendations for exactly the same psychiatrist. ‘There are times when I get kind of blue, but this friend really needs help’, he said. We talked about cycling in Sussex, where he now lives. He sometimes cycled as far as Angmering and I sometimes cycled as far as Newhaven. My name means ‘wisdom’ in Greek, did I know that? His face was both familiar and not, small ashen and with a bright and convincing smile. In fact it was his smile that was most in evidence, and gappy teeth. He smiled almost all the time, to himself, to people, while writing. He had a pencil case stuffed with coloured pens, and he doodled as he talked, writing in loopy black ink.

I forgot to say how much I’d loved the show; that’s what happens, you meet your hero and forget to say, that was great, thank you so much for lighting up my life for the past decade or so. That long dark night in Normandy when you tried to drown that mouse in a bucket got me through my own long dark night. The first book I ever read of yours, Me Talk Pretty One Day, was the only good thing that came out of a terrible relationship. I’m sorry your sister died. Do you still have to lick letter-boxes? Instead we talked about cycle paths. He gave me back my book, and I walked away, feeling a weird mix of wretchedness and elation. I had met him and hadn’t found the words. Then I looked at the inscription inside as we walked towards the exit, and it made me laugh so much none of the rest of it mattered. And it was what I’d wanted to say. Those were the words.

On picky eaters

“Neither were we allowed to choose what we ate. I have a friend whose seven-year-old will only consider something if it’s white. Had I tried that, my parents would have said, “You’re on,” and served me a bowl of paste, followed by joint compound, and, maybe if I was good, some semen.”

David Sedaris, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls