Snap out of it!

13 Thursday Mar 2014

Tags

Cafes, England, Fitzrovia, Food, Guide, London, Nonfiction, Stories

Actually, I’m fine. And I’m English so it’s my job to suppress all those untoward feelings of failure and loss and give myself boils and cysts instead. And something unusual has happened: I love London! All of a sudden, the place I have hated for about 25 years, give or take a year or two in the middle, has become somewhere rather exciting and magical. I think you have to have a few seminal moments in London; something has to have happened to you there, otherwise it’s just another capital city with a lot of people and escalators. And it’s so expensive it brings tears to your eyes and I will never ever go on the London Eye ever again.

RADA happened to me fifteen years ago. I went up for the day last week and went to the same area, though this time it was to meet the lovely bloggers, Rachel from Rachel eats and Evie from Saffron Strands, and to eat at Honey & Co, the Middle Eastern café (very good cakes, a bit hectic). It’s not that Fitzrovia is particularly beautiful – it’s not Prague or anything (I’ve never been to Prague).

It’s just that when I stepped out at Warren Street tube station, there I was, back in 1997. And it’s more or less the same, minus the porn shops and O’Brien’s, an Irish café that sold the biggest and cheapest coffee and the biggest, cheapest croissants ever, and no one had any money so that was brilliant. And if we weren’t paying – it was a benevolent acting teacher wanting us to do ‘a Pret run’ – then it would be off to Pret a Manger, returning with a box of hot pastries and smouldering Mochas and little change out of a twenty.

But what’s amazing, what’s strange and unsettling is that really it’s the same. If you get out at Warren street tube station, then clearly you’re doing that because you want to go to French’s Theatre Bookshop. I did this the other day and it was still run by a man who looks as if he hates you, because he knows you’re not going to buy anything. He looks a bit like Philip Seymour Hoffman though and I think that’s why on this particular day I didn’t mind his sullenness.

I never liked this shop and still don’t. I’m not sure why; something to do with young hunger and ambition and where it all goes. Then you walk down Tottenham Court Road, unless you want to go the other way to Villandry on Great Portland Street, which is one of those glittering delis with a very posh café and people who look like they have no pores. Instead, you go down Tottenham Court road (past the Scientology shop, don’t go in) to Goodge street, which is where RADA students generally disgorge themselves from the tube station. Goodge street is an interesting street, full of little places to eat and drink and if you walk on you get to Charlotte Street, which crosses it. Charlotte street is home to the Charlotte Street Hotel, where I have taken the odd eye-wateringly expensive tea.

It’s also home to my uncle Alex Hollweg’s paintings and whenever I see them, they remind me of the wooden fruit he made in the same jauntily rich colours that sit in his sitting room. The Charlotte Street Hotel, though they serve nice nuts, deals in the kind of exclusivity and luxe that made me feel forever an outsider. I remember sitting at the bar feeling like a scruff. But I have sat at the bar, and I can say it is a fine place to be, particularly if someone else is paying. My brother for one. I remember it was an evening of convincing; him trying to convince me to do something I wasn’t sure about. Anyway, I did it and it was a disaster. But thanks for the wine.

Back then I would have bumped into people – teachers, other students, Val. (Val worked at the front desk at RADA and basically ran the entire school and I think still knows my bank details. She also knew her way round a bagel). The place was a village in the middle of the city. You couldn’t go a hundred yards without seeing someone you knew, sometimes even someone who happened to be in the area by chance, an old friend apropos of nothing. It was all so easy; I have never quite got that back, that feeling of effortless unfolding, of friendships made blithely. It was that kind of place and time. Young love. So it was all the more delicious when the three of us last week went for a walk after eating. We did the back streets and didn’t really notice anything, too wrapped up in each other and our exuberant conversation. Streets were missed, the tubes came and went, we crisscrossed London, still mithering on about Nigella and Nigel and Simon, our faux friends from the world of food. So anyway, I went back and it was good.

Made me snap out of it.

Chop, chop

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe, Uncategorized

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Food, Ingredients, Kitchen, London, Shops, Stories, Theatre, Utensils

David Mellor’s shop lives at No.4 Sloane Square in London, yards from the Royal Court Theatre. I would at this point in my life far rather go into a kitchen shop and buy a chopping board than go and see a play, or indeed audition for one. In fact, I steer well clear, scared of bumping into someone from my former life, the theatre bar at the Royal Court witness to a handful of deeply felt humiliations. A theatre bar is not in and of itself a relaxing place to be anyway; everyone is subtly networking or nervous for a friend or relative about to perform (or jealous), everyone is sweeping the room, status – yours and theirs – is being constantly, silently re-negotiated.

You can’t just go up to someone. Which is what I used to do before I realized it was not done. There’s Tom Stoppard! Why, he gave me a small but not insignificant cheque at the beginning of my drama school career. I shall go over and thank him in person. Why not? He looked through me. And then he carried on smoking.

I never developed the right persona – some people do and it’s like armour, I suppose. I know them – charming, robust, flirtatious when needed, personal and then oddly impersonal. After my theatre bar exchanges, after auditions, and meetings, I always felt as if I’d just emerged from a car crash. Or a beheading.

I think that’s when I started going into kitchen shops and reading cookbooks; the balm at the end of a day of commercial castings, speaking my name and my agent’s into a camera before pretending to have road rage or candida (sometimes both). At David Mellor’s I headed straight for the chopping boards, past the sparkling glasses and his signature cutlery. And there it was; the smooth, rounded rectangular board with the hole in it. I had been admiring it at my cousin’s. New it was planed smooth of any imperfections, a plain, pale ash wood, but I knew what it would become with time.

I have always had a thing about chopping boards – I notice them in the same way people notice shoes or jewellery. A chopping board is a living thing and the more it lives with you the more it absorbs all the things you chop on it. I love the way Becky’s board has those little serrations all round the edge, which makes me wonder what they were for and why the centre is relatively empty.

I suppose you could call it a character study. Though I like a bit of pummelling and pounding – the vivifying effects of a pestle and mortar – there’s something to be said for smashing something, breaking it, or chopping it, or creaming it with a knife. You know the way that garlic can be chopped into a paste, the knife swishing this way and that like a paintbrush until the garlic is practically emollient: I like that.

So I bought the chopping board, and the beautiful, slightly MI5 assistant wrapped it in white paper and slipped it into a black paper bag, and we emerged into the Sunday sunlight and walked to the Tate. All the way there and all the way back, (and during) I thought about the board; what I would anoint it with. Garlic. Lemon zest. Parsley or basil. Splat, Chop, chop, scrape, crunch, chop, chop, chop, chop, swipe, swipe, bang. Smile. Repeat to fade.

You can make a pesto (basil, garlic, pine nuts, parmesan) or a picada (Catalan version with parsley and almonds) or a pistou (Provencal version using garlic, basil and oil) on a chopping board, as long as you transfer everything to a bowl before adding the oil (though olive oil is the perfect way to replenish your board – rub it in with a soft, lint-free rag if you have any spillage). Gremolata is a ‘dry’ sauce usually served with osso buco (braised veal shank) and uses garlic and parsley and lots of lemon zest. Try two large handfuls of parsley, the zest of two lemons and two cloves of garlic, reducing them all to a thick slurry. The board, the kitchen, your hands and you will smell intensely of these things afterwards.

Empty legs

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Almonds, Baking, Food, Jane Grigson, Lemons, London, Los Angeles, Stories

I had my first shiatsu session the other day (along the same lines as acupuncture but using physical pressure instead of needles), and the man told me I had ’empty legs’. I had empty legs and empty feet, particularly my arches. This is nothing new – when I was a drama school student, the teachers’ main beef with me was that I had ‘dead legs and frozen eyes’. Someone else was described as having ‘no back’. It’s something to do with parts of our bodies being absent to us. The answer these days is to swim more, but I have not ventured into the English Channel since November and certainly don’t intend to now, with the huge brown swell, the sudden big lurching tide that would vanish me in a second. All I do is look at it from the balcony; a passenger on a boat that never docks.

But I know what he means about swimming. In LA I swam every day in an open-air pool. The area was fringed with merry red Bougainvillea, insubstantial as paper and smelling of nothing. My wet footsteps evaporated behind me making me handily invisible. It was all man-made and relatively new; units instead of flats, everything built for the purpose, everything clean. At first glance there is nowhere to hide, no nooks or crannies so you are exposed to the neighbours wanting to chat/complain about the perfect temperature of the water, the ‘chill’ in the air when there is none, the only thing fluttering being the leaf of a book or a butterfly. It feels an empty landscape.

Until you take yourself off; behind the tennis court is a narrow pathway where there is a pendulous lemon tree; Eureka lemons that are thick and pock-marked and heavy in the hand and need a hoe to get a purchase. Sprouting like mad hair is wild fennel and the smell is strong and medicinal and follows you to the orange trees, their diseased leaves and strongly floral blossoms heady like some kind of deathly elixir. A wild peach tree stands anonymously with blossoms like any other and tough herbs lead the way round the complex. Yards from the pool is this alchemy of smell coming up from the dust.

For me the pull to this landscape is stronger, particularly now that I know about our own Meyer lemon tree and its rash of blossom and the ‘eight or nine’ hummingbirds that visit it every day. And Joe is there doing the B&B in my stead, greeting the guests, not making the lemon shortbread or jam or ironing the sheets (‘I’m not going to do it like you’), but feeding the stray cat and getting rave reviews and being lovely as only he can be. Here in England there is rhubarb and snowdrops and long cold doused days and the obscene trickle of rainwater as it finds the nape of the neck. Bay trees stand to attention outside glossy eateries but it rarely occurs to me to take a leaf and scrunch it up, and smell its warm spiky clove-ness.

Occasionally it feels like fun; the new roomy Circle Line and the hoards of children on half term holiday on the tubes and the buses up in London (‘hold on to the yellow, Imogen!’). A small boy in a bike helmet traces his F Words To Work On next to me with his finger: frightened, fallow, fall, fat. And suddenly I feel bereft that there’ll be no Imogen in LA, none of these terribly English moments. So I make myself think of the sun, like a huge melting pat of butter in the sky. The blue will be the most unEnglish blue. The herbs will be virulent, wild and prolific and the air will smell of them. I’ll stride out, lunge into water and then feel it evaporate on my skin. I’ll have my own bowl of lemons, the car, the pool, that constant sun again (always the same), a brilliant dry cleaner, empty streets. Hopefully no more empty legs.

The B&B lemon shortbread began life as Jane Grigson’s shortbread knobs in her Fruit Book though I have doctored them with lemon zest and almonds. They are incredibly simple to make: melt 175g unsalted butter over a medium heat and add the finely grated zest of two lemons. Allow this to infuse and cool. Then add to the butter 200g of plain flour, 25g of ground almonds, 125g of sugar and a pinch of sea salt (all mixed together beforehand in a bowl). Make a sandy paste and then roll the mixture into little teaspoon-sized balls which you then press slightly to flatten. Bake on trays with parchment paper at 150C/300F for about 25 minutes. They’re done when they’re golden brown. Sometimes I drop a couple of torn bay leaves into the melted butter to infuse – is this wrong? I don’t know but I like the smell and fish them out before adding the flour.

One jar only

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Christmas, England, Food, Fruit, Ingredients, Jam, London, Poetry, Recipes, Stories

Horseradish and mustard seed. Apples and quinces. A dollop of something that smarts and sears is what is required now. I found the last quinces of the season where I am staying, tiny little gnarled things covered in crystalline cobwebs. Yellow turning to black and as small as tomatoes. And I found some Granny Smith apples that were bunched on a tree in someone’s front lawn. Green, luminous and numerous and unpicked. The rest of the garden was bare and suburban. But the apples were a cartoon green. Perfect and unmarked, with an almost waxy sheen.

“Excuse me, can I help you?” the voice behind us was arch and querulous. I quickly retreated my camera. We turned on our best smiles. “We were just admiring your lovely apples” I said. “Well, come on then, I’ll give you a tour. You can have some if you want.” I promised her a jar of spiced apple jam in return and she perked up. We followed her round her plot and listened to the story of how they bought the house, 40 years ago, and how before that the actress Dame Sybil Thorndike would sit in the conservatory and ‘be round the bend.’

“Won’t you come in? You haven’t eaten? You must be hollow.”

We walked into the house. It too had been untouched. Simple and spartan and her husband Colin was also both these things. Small, white-haired and dainty. He was writing Christmas cards but when we came in he looked up as if he’d been expecting us and started talking as if it was a continuation of an earlier conversation. Our hostess went off to make coffee and came back with a cafetière. She was unsure what was in it; tea or coffee. “Perhaps it’s the most revolting thing you’ve ever drunk?” She enquired smiling and I ate a soft biscuit. The songbook of the musical Cats sat on a side table.

We talked about Cornwall – they had just sold a holiday home in Looe. Very pleasant, pronounced Colin. I had spent some time in Cornwall as a child when my dad moved there. “You probably won’t have heard of the place,” I said, “because it was a tiny hamlet on the edge of Bodmin Moor called Henwood. It had a riding school.” “Oh, we know it well,” cried Colin, in his soft burr. “Do you know Ted and Mary?”

“Now tell me again – where do you live?”

Joe and I paused. He was sitting in a too-small green chair drinking tea-coffee. What do we say? Los Angeles? But we’re English, it was all too complicated. “Ormond Drive” said Joe, where we’ve been for exactly two days, house-sitting. Free-basing, I suppose you could call it, in Hampton, suburb of London, green and leafy, not really a town. A town lite, heavy with history. Colin got out his Cats songbook, and started to read from Growltiger’s Last Stand.*

His bucko mate, Grumbuskin, long since had disappeared,
For to the Bell at Hampton he had gone to wet his beard;
And his bosun, Tumblebrutus, he too had stol’n away-
In the yard behind the Lion he was prowling for his prey.

“We should really push off now. We haven’t done any shopping”, Joe said. “Oh, yes of course. We’ve ruined your morning”.

“And the apples?” Joe asked, as we stood on the threshold. We put on our winning smiles again. Colin gave us an apple each. I was expecting more of a flurry, and two seemed a paltry sum. It was enough for one jar only, which I had promised them. And they had asked us in, they knew Ted and Mary. It was Christmas. Colin had read us poetry. Time to be kind.

Spiced quince, apple and mustard jam

Adapted from Felicity Cloake, The Guardian

Like its cousin, the apple, quince makes a wonderful pairing with pork (think Christmas ham), but is good with any fatty meat. The sweet spices, and the warm hit, make this jam an especially good partner for cheddar or other hard cheese. English quinces are now all but over, unless you can find a few malingerers as I have here, but Cypriot and Turkish grocers, and Middle Eastern shops will have their luscious and bulbous imports, so there’s no excuse. Ginger can be used here instead of horseradish, or as well as.

500g ripe quinces (or a mixture of quinces and apples)

1 shallot, finely chopped

100ml cider vinegar

175g light muscovado sugar

5cm horseradish, peeled and finely grated (or ginger)

½ tsp cinnamon

1 tsp mustard seeds

2 tsp mustard powder

Peel the quinces, cut them into sixes, remove the cores, then roughly chop the flesh. Put the fruit in a pan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, and leave to cook for half an hour until soft. Drain, then mash or blitz to a pulp in a blender.

Put the quince back in the pan with the remaining ingredients, except for the mustard seeds and powder. Cook for about 20 minutes, until thick, then take off the heat and leave to cool. Stir in the seeds and mustard powder. Decant into a sterilised jar (washed with soapy water, rinsed and then put in a hot oven for ten minutes) and refrigerate.

* Originally from Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S Eliot

Salad of pears

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Autumn, Cookbook, Food, Ingredients, London, Nonfiction, Recipes, Salad, Stories

My first salad. Not the first salad I’ve ever eaten – that would be a bit perverse – but the first one I’ve written about here. The blue cheese is not essential; it is the pear and watercress that makes the dish, but a nice Stilton or Roquefort lends a lactic headiness to proceedings. This crosses the border between indulgence and virtue. Yes, it has a lot of fresh, raw greenery, but that mustn’t deter us. And it is a meal in itself. Have some hot crusty bread, a jug of dressing to mop up, and nothing else is required.

Pears are one of my favourite things. They are tricky, temperamental. The moment between just ripe – your thumb making the slightest depression in the skin, the juice ready to spill – and pear-rot is a hair’s breadth. They are peaceful to look at, a still-life, long and sloping, the Modigliani of fruit. I love Conference* pears the best – their mottled, taupe skin, slightly rough to the touch. They ooze and fall into your mouth, but never collapse. It’s good to eat them from the point down. In fact they fit in the palm perfectly.

This recipe – minus the blue cheese – came by way of my Australian aunt Cynthia and when we took it on, perhaps unconsciously, we would always serve it in an Aboriginal bowl made of wood. It was a strange shape, like an opened clam, and on the outside there were black inked carvings. You weren’t supposed to wash it, but we did, and it withstood this neglect and abuse for years. It still exists now as a receptacle for other things, looking terminally dusty. But we used it in London mainly, in Redcliffe Square, and I sometimes sat and ate this salad and watched Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley leave their flat from the house opposite. Sometimes, I would see them through the glass getting ready for things. I once inadvertently walked past his door when he was coming down the steps to be ‘caught’ by a paparazzo. Afterwards, he and the photographer stood around and chatted.

This was around the time when strange pairings were encouraged generally. It was as if we had woken from our Eighties torpor, ready to push the boat out. There was lamb and pears, for example. The macrobiotic diet was doing the rounds and there was talk of yin and yang. Things that were acidic needed to be mixed with things that were alkaline. Even the area was mixed: rent-controlled apartments such as ours existed alongside celebrities and landed gentry. Earls Court, although at that time largely Arabic, still had the residue of transplanted Aussies, like my mum, who had arrived in the late Fifties and stuck around.

Strangely, this recipe hasn’t dated, nor is it ubiquitous. It has survived the fashions and vagaries of the time. It reminds me of interesting couplings. Of rubbing along. I think it might be worth a revisit.

Pears, watercress and blue cheese

Adapted from Ruth Watson, The Really Helpful Cookbook

Serves 4

2 large handfuls of watercress

2 or 3 ripe-but-firm pears

100g Roquefort (or other blue cheese) – you can improvise with the amount

For the dressing

1-2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

4-5 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

1 tbs honey

1 tbs Dijon mustard

Pinch of sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Make the dressing: dissolve the sea salt with the balsamic vinegar by giving it a good swirl, then add the mustard and stir throughly to combine. Slowly drizzle in the olive oil until it’s all mixed. Add the honey and stir. Put to one side.

Break up the watercress and remove the stems. Artfully arrange onto plates. Peel, core and cut the pears into sixths (or quarters if they’re quite small). Do this at the last moment to prevent the pears from browning, or slather in lemon juice and put to one side. Leave on some of the skin if you like a bit of texture. Tuck the pears into the watercress and season with some black pepper. Crumble some blue cheese over each plate. Drizzle with the dressing and some extra honey if you like. Serve immediately. Likes hot bread.

*Bosc pears are a good substitute in the US. In fact, they are plumper and juicier.