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Pudding with goosegogs

28 Monday Jul 2014

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These are red gooseberries, in case you were wondering. I didn’t realize that gooseberries could be anything but green, but here, as in many areas of my life, I am wrong. Red, yellow and white can be the goosegog, though Jane Grigson argues that none are as good in cooking as the green. These red ones were also on the small side, but I was too excited by the colour to do anything but shovel them up in my palsied hands and throw them into the nearest paper bag.

If you are English and have once seen a hedge or climbed a tree, you have also probably eaten a green gooseberry raw. It comes with a certain feral spirit and being too young not to be able to discern what is and isn’t ‘palate appropriate’. I do remember picking gooseberries (along with elderflowers, their natural bedfellows) and sampling the hairy little pod, being slightly put off by the veins, but somehow knowing I couldn’t not eat it. I was bemused by the elderflower picking, as it was for the making of wine, bottles of which would be stacked outside my bedroom window to ferment and mature etc but be still off limits to me.

However, the gooseberries would at some point make their way under a crumble or pie crust and then be served with cream or possibly ice cream. I even liked the sourness, that puckering beyond-lemon tartness, and the errant seeds that could be shot out like a catapult.

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All of this under an intermittently blazing and then thunderous English sky. Because I am now back in England, back in time for the thunder and lightning and wild seas and bursts of heat and ladybirds. It’s all gone a bit Brazil here, with long languorous days at times humid and close then cloudy then bucketing down then warm, blank skies of blue. People swim with an abandon I find worrying. Far far out to sea I can see a lone swimmer doing front crawl out beyond the buoy. Children dive in and sometimes they’re naked; another signifier I’m no longer in LA. I’m walking again and so is everyone else.

We are all striding out, wading through fields of old rape and thick stiff wheat. Everyone is eating ice cream – big swathes of white – and everywhere there are bodies in various stages of rotundity; tattooed, jolly, in love, or sullen with a fag on, and I find I’m watching them with the tutored eye of an Angeleno. I’ve become aware of size and shape and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Suddenly I’m shallow. I’ve come back just in time.

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But in the meantime there’s cake, or more specifically baked gooseberry pudding using a genoise sponge. All I previously knew about the genoise was that it was ‘difficult’ and a finalist from The Great British Bake Off dropped his all over the floor and was forced to scrape it back on to the plate, presenting it as a strange cloud of something dark with cream.

I made the gooseberry pudding to bring to a party, which served as an object lesson in what you shouldn’t do if you can avoid it: make something you’ve never made before for people you barely know. It looked fine, beautifully brown in that natural way of burnt fields and it smelled voluptuously puddingy. The gooseberries had risen up in revolt at being smothered and had formed a rim of sweet tacky juice. We walked along the seafront in Seaford to the party and the Pyrex dish kept itself cleverly hot all the way. And then the top collapsed, not in the way a flourless cake slumps, but it caved in the way meringue does. It simply all disappeared down a hole.

I grabbed what was down there and it was lovely and hot and gungy, and, I thought, terrifyingly uncooked. I then started to pick at it until there was an undeniable gaping hole in the centre of the pudding which was now unpresentable. ‘It’s the gesture that matters,’ my mother said reassuringly which translated into British English means, “This is a complete disaster and no one will say anything”.

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By the time we got there people were peeling off to swim, taking advantage of the sudden heat and sun and all around us were half-demolished cakes, a gammon ripped to shreds, bowls of depleted food and children dancing in that deranged way that happens just before an emotional collapse. My empty cake did not look out of place and by the time everyone had trailed back from the sea under a blanket of rain it appeared to be cooked. It’s rather like meringue in that way, I realize; a crisp outer crust, followed by a hole and then a deep drift of softness below. Actually it’s pudding – that is what it is.

Everyone said ‘Wow!’ a lot but they were also quite drunk. They talked at length about the sweetness, the miraculous crust and the tartness of the gooseberries. And that I had made a cake at all and who was I again? And would I like to come to Faversham? Did I want curry? More Steely Dan! the children cried and they danced red and sweating under the raindrops.

Baked Gooseberry Pudding

Adapted from Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book

I didn’t find the genoise sponge particularly tricky to make, though this might have something to do with my mother’s ancient Chefette free-standing mixer which whisked the eggs and sugar to buggery while I got on with reading the recipe. However, how difficult can it be to stand for seven minutes holding some beaters? This has quickly become my stand-by pudding and is also wonderful with rhubarb – in both cases the fruit can be chucked in raw with the barest tumble in brown sugar. You could use any sharp fruit here – cranberries also work well.

For the sponge

125g butter, plus a bit extra for buttering the bowl

1 large egg and 1 egg yolk (room temp)

175g unrefined caster sugar

100g plain flour, sifted (or rice flour)

½ teaspoon of mace and/or allspice

½ tsp sea salt

For the gooseberries

250-300g gooseberries (they do cook down)

25g-50g demerara sugar or any soft brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 160-170C/325F. Generously butter a Pyrex dish of about 1 litre capacity and 3-4 cm depth. Put in a tight-fitting layer of topped and tailed gooseberries and throw the sugar over them, tumbling them about to get full coverage. Gently melt the butter in a pan and leave to cool slightly.

Now for the sponge – the ‘trick’ is to aerate the eggs and sugar mixture, which means to whisk them together until they are very pale and light, almost white. At first they’ll be gloopy but after about 7-8 minutes the mixture will reach what is known as the ‘ribbon’ stage where it will leave a trail when the beaters are lifted out. Mix the flour, mace/allspice (actually whatever spice you fancy – ginger would be nice) and salt together in a separate bowl and then sift about half over the eggs and sugar, folding very gently using a metal spoon and working in a figure of eight. Fold in the rest of the flour very carefully, so as not to knock out any air.

Now drizzle the melted butter down the sides of the bowl, again gently but quickly working the batter. Now spoon this mixture over the gooseberries, smoothing it out to be level, and then bake for about 45-50 minutes. It will rise and then crack probably. Lovely warm but also gorgeous cold. It is not – though it will appear to be – uncooked inside.

gooseberry pudding

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Tentacles

03 Thursday Jul 2014

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You may not be of the tentacle persuasion. These are the tentacles of squid, and we peeled back the skin, disgorged the innards, threw away the eyes, and sliced the slippery white meat into rings. The tentacles we left alone, simply dragged them through flour and threw them into a bath of hot oil where they instantly froze, like the statues in Pompei. The squid is from Monterey, considered ‘local’ here, though it is over 300 miles away, going north.

This is strange to me, unfathomable really, given that we can drive to the sea in 45 minutes and swim in gorgeous, crystalline water. Malibu: a place where we have witnessed the sight of three stately California grey whales breaching the surface, their wondrous grey sheen, their size silencing, so that all we could do was point open-mouthed and watch as they shot up their water for us through their blow holes (not sure if that is the technical term). And then there are the pods of dolphins, the seals that pop up nearby as you’re swimming, darkly sleek and chubby. The pelicans fly slowly in a line, quite low, as if to be menacing. I don’t know where they are going.

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Today we watched a man pull a ray fish from the sea, a huge flapping thing that he slipped back into the water, pushing it in the direction of the outgoing wave until it complied and disappeared. The place is teeming with life. But the fish we buy comes from Santa Barbara or beyond.

My memories of calamari – squid cut into rings, dipped in flour and fried – are always connected with Greece, in particular Paxos and Anti-Paxos, where we sat on the beach our skin salted and burnt and in our mouths we would pop fried whitebait, calamari, crisp sardines, everything wetted by lemon juice, our lips and fingers stinging. The fish was caught in front of us. It came from the sea that we’d bathed and washed our hair in (on the days when we couldn’t afford a hotel and had to sleep on the beach). We had the luxury of local, where local meant watching a man climb out of the water and carry our lunch to the grill. Where we’d walk to the next beach to have a change of scene and escape the two men who had latched on to us from Corfu (“A couple of beers, couple of beds, couple of tokes, couple of smokes”).

I was a silly, naive and broke seventeen year old travelling round Greece with forty quid and a bedsheet. Yet we lived ridiculously: Greek salad, shoals of calamari and rice-stuffed peppers, glasses of inky wine. I remember the coolness of a stairwell in the scorching August afternoon and a throttlingly cold Coca Cola. And then the emergence into Gatwick, the drizzling English rain on our leather sandals. I went with my friend Brigid, and for some reason now lost to me, we fell out and boarded separate carriages going back to London. It was a shame because we had had fun and been quite dare-devil; we flew to Corfu with an Australian man my mother had met in the street and employed to ‘butcher’ (in retrospect) our kitchen. He deserted us almost immediately and we found ourselves straggling along a highway in the mad August heat with no idea where we were going to stay. A boy of around eight found us panicking at eleven, and took us home. We walked in and were led to a room where we stayed the night and then boarded a ferry to Paxos the following day. She walked faster than me, perhaps that was it. I used to watch her hightailing it over a hill and not even bother, and when we got back to London she just carried on walking.

I don’t know why this story came to me when this is Monterey squid from the Pacific, and not the Ionian sea and Malibu is not for a minute Greece. I suppose there’s something of the ruggedness and people are, on the whole, brown in both places. As in weathered and salty. And the squid – it was nice to buy the squid whole and dismember it, and to see its lovely purple sheen. And I had no idea squid had eyes. I don’t remember the eyes.

To clean the squid, pull the head away from the body and with your fingers empty out the body cavity (which includes the ink sac – wear an apron). The cuttlebone will be in there too, transparent and flimsy – remove it. Now gently pull the wings free from the sides and slip off the purple membrane (this is fun). Rinse under running water and drain. Cut into thickish rings (about 1cm diameter).

Keep the tentacles together by slicing just above the join. Remove the eyes and mouth. I keep the tentacles intact and fry them whole. The five squid I bought made up 1lb which was just enough for the two of us. There are those who like to soak the calamari in milk to tenderize it, and having done this once I don’t think it makes a great deal of difference. So, when you’re ready to cook, mix together equal amounts of plain flour and cornflour (cornstarch) with a pinch of sea salt. Fill a large, heavy-based pan a third full with sunflower or vegetable oil and heat. Throw in a pinch of flour and if it sizzles furiously, you’re ready to go. Drain the squid pieces well and pat dry, then drag them through the flour and shake off any excess. Fry in batches and when golden brown remove them to some kitchen paper. Sprinkle with salt and serve quickly, while they’re hot, with wedges of lemon.

Looking up

19 Thursday Jun 2014

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We went downtown for lunch. I keep thinking of the song from Little Shop of Horrors – “Downtown, where relationships are no go! Down on skid row!” It had been about a year since our last proper visit, and though I’ve been drawn to downtown since I first started coming here, I’ve always been a little bit afraid of it. When I first got here I’d take the subway down to the Walt Disney Concert Hall – I’d get off at Civic Center and walk up the steps into this blazing steel sunlight, and make sure I never looked up. Reverse vertigo, that is apparently the term.

Anyway, that part of downtown is all sheer tower blocks, mirrored and panicky, like huge razor blades cutting into the sky. So I would look either down or straight ahead, breathing in until I got to a traffic light and then latching on to someone who was also crossing the road, as if we were friends. I once did this all the way to the Central Library, (looking straight ahead without breathing, latching on) to see Alain de Botton give a talk on why Los Angeles is so badly designed and hostile to walkers. On my way back, now late at night, I felt myself being followed. By the time I got out at Hollywood & Highland I practically rushed head long into the stream of traffic, and found myself face to face with Joe’s Jeep into which I clambered, frothing my relief.

So it’s progress that now, some years on, I can walk around downtown and look up without my feet slipping around inside my shoes. There’s another downtown that’s quite different to those corporate mirrored facades that birds crash into, believing it’s sky. We were heading towards it – to Spring Street because we wanted to visit The Last Bookstore, now housed in an old bank, and all around us were old banks, dark and gutted it seemed, no lights on, the occasional towel flung out to dry as evidence of a transient life. The banks are in the Beaux Arts style, tall and flat-faced with lots of windows and there were lots of people here too, unlike the rest of LA which is glossily empty of pedestrians (as if we ruin it or something).

The Last Bookstore is definitely worth a visit if you like cavernous rooms bulging with books, a bank vault full of horror (stories), a tunnel made of hardbacks, another tunnel made of knitting yarn and a floor made of pennies. And seriously danceable music and crunchy leather chairs. I went in search of a place to pee and found Creperie Sans Frontiere in a little precinct that connected Spring Street and Broadway, the only place that would let me use their bathroom for free. “It’s hard to say yes and it’s hard to say no,” was the lady’s parting shot, as she gave me the key attached to an egg whisk. I took this to mean that she has to decide who she gives the key to and who to deny, and that she probably has this quandary quite often. I went back to tell Joe about it (‘Spring Street and 5th, Spring Street and 5th’) and found him with his feet up on a cracked leather pouffe in the Lit Crit section.

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The crepes (‘galettes’ here) were huge triangles, rather like elephant’s ears. They were 100% buckwheat, which the owner said she edged towards gradually, until finally flinging herself entirely at the buckwheat’s mercy. The taste is rich and earthy, nutty, almost sour. It looks like burnt black earth. You imagine it will taste of an old hat, but actually it’s lovely with maple syrup and some goat’s cheese, maybe a few pecans or a fried egg. The owner had a tower of Nutella; I imagine it would be delicious with that too. We tried to decide where we were: Paris, New York or LA, or none of the above. Or all of the above, and ourselves in amongst it. Downtown is a trip.

When I made the crepes at home (pictured above), I made them smaller, almost like blinis, and found they were much easier to handle. Buckwheat is not wheat or even a grain, but the seed of a plant related to rhubarb (and sorrel), and it absorbs liquid much more than other flours. However, once cooked, it can take on flavours and textures well. Syrup and honey, nuts, soft cheeses, nut butters, jam, ice cream and sorbet. It’s also gluten-free and if you don’t tolerate cow’s milk (like me) then you can add a vast array of ‘milks’ to the batter. Here I used coconut milk.

Buckwheat crepes

Adapted from Arrowhead Mills & David Lebovitz 

18-20 crepes

1 1/2 cups (350 ml) whole milk (or see above)
2-3 tablespoons of maple syrup or honey
A pinch of sea salt
1 1/2 cups (175g) of organic buckwheat flour
2 large eggs lightly beaten

Put the buckwheat flour in a mixing bowl with the salt, then make a well in the middle to which you add the milk and the eggs and the honey or maple syrup. Whisk continuously to create a thick batter. Buckwheat is more absorbent than other flours, so you may need to add more milk – aim for the consistency of heavy cream. Cover and set aside for at least 30 minutes – this batter does better if chilled overnight and brought back to room temperature before frying.

Heat a dab of butter or a small glug of vegetable oil in a non-stick skillet or frying pan over a medium heat, and brush some of it off with a paper towel (unless you like your crepes swimming, which I profess I do). Pour about a 1/4 cup of batter (about a ladleful) into the middle of the hot pan. The buckwheat batter (in my experience of now having eaten the crepes every day for the last seven days) will not move around much but stay where it is; don’t attempt to swirl it as it’ll resist. After a minute or two, flip it over and cook for about 30 seconds. Aim for dark, blistered and crispy. Pile them up on a plate and douse with maple syrup or rest some fried eggs on them. Fried eggs go very well, oddly, with buckwheat crepes – perhaps it’s the egg’s sweetness.

Pause

07 Saturday Jun 2014

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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.IMG_4675

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.IMG_4709

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.

Cutting for stone

24 Saturday May 2014

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One of the main differences between England and Los Angeles that I have found is that where I’m from there isn’t a van on the side of the road selling mangoes. And coconuts with a straw. On the way back from the beach, tailing our way back from Malibu, wending our way up through Topanga Canyon, past the waves of blossoming, listing fennel and tall grey-green hills, there is always at least one open-backed van with a Mexican lady selling her boxes for $10 a piece. It could be avocados or strawberries, you’re never entirely sure, but you’ll be alerted by the signs. And then inside there’ll always be more. We bought a box of nine mangoes, but by the time we got home there were only seven. Mangoes are very hard to resist particularly when they have that give to them; these were on their way to softness, heavy as artillery in the hand, but oddly human to the touch, like a thigh or a calf.

There is none of the banter here that you would get in England. A box of mangoes would yield at least a bit of to and fro about the weight – are you alright there, love? Oh, these ones are gorgeous, just cut it in two and have it with a bit of cream, lovely – a bit of rough and tumble, someone sighing that you were taking too long. There’d be something. Here the exchange is reduced to the price. There was no acknowledgement I was there from the man standing next to me, even though it was just him and me on the side of a dusty road. Him, me and the lady with the fruit. She had her hair in pigtails, which on her looked expedient rather than odd. The three of us did the deed knowing we would not be seeing one another again. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something, because as an English person it is hard to let a moment go by without some kind of dithering nicety.

Hot isn’t it? The sea is cold. This road is long, isn’t it? It’s very green here etc. There’s none of that in LA. Here strangers tend to the loud and polite school of conversation – as if you have fallen down a well or a manhole but have sustained no serious injuries and would be up for a chat. “HI, HOW ARE YOU?” “Good, how are you?” “GREAT. ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND”. Or they’re silent, as if you’re not there at all. I have swum close enough in the pool to be able to read the typeface on a novel (by John Green), without so much as a flicker from the reader, perched on the steps with her legs under water, her torso dry as a bone, her nails a perfect peach. I would love to have said “Who’s John Green?” but that would have been to break the seal of silence, opening up a conversation possibly without end, and anyway I could always look it up on the internet. I don’t really want to know who John Green is, I just want you to know I’m here.

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I gave two more mangoes away so we were left with five. It was after a conversation with one of our B&B guests. She’d stayed for only two days and was on her way out, up the coast to Big Sur. But we got chatting and then an hour went by, and she left with a mango in each hand and the rest of the chocolate-cardamom cookies, because they spoke to her ‘Indian soul’. Originally from New Delhi,  she is a writer, a reader and a lover of food. We exchanged favourite books; I will now be reading Climbing the Mango Trees by Madhur Jaffrey and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid. I hope my book recommendations made the grade, but it really doesn’t matter, because I had a conversation. A proper one. I made a friend. I bought some mangoes and gave them away. ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND!

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The trick to cutting into a mango, I have learnt, is to cut as close to the stone as possible. Cut on either side, vertically, so that you have two even slabs of orange flesh, and then a central panel with the stone embedded, which you can gnaw around. There is no point trying to be demure; you will be dripping in mango juice and picking the fibres out of your teeth, so you might as well enjoy yourself. Score the two halves of flesh (which will have the skin still attached) into cubes, which you can eat as you would an orange quarter or slice them off into a bowl to which you add lemon or lime juice.

A meal would be a mango and avocado salsa, to which you have added some chile, cilantro, sea salt and lime. But to my mind, one of the finest uses for mangoes is in kulfi, the Indian ice cream. It is made traditionally with malai (milk boiled down to cream) but it can be reasonably faked with evaporated or condensed milk.

Cutting for Stone is the name of a novel I have had languishing on my shelves for a while, unread, and now unreadable due to its being dropped in the bath (although the first chapter is fine and also very compelling so I will press on). I thought the title apt.

The little lunch

10 Saturday May 2014

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I seem to have an endless supply of browning and defeated bananas. We buy them principally for the B&B guests who never eat them. But they may do. They never say outright that they don’t like bananas; there may come a time when they will feel like one, and that moment will be hard to define, but when it comes we better have a bunch of bananas standing by.

I think in the last year we have probably had two straight-forward banana-eating guests. Still, we continue to buy them and then I make banana bread with the softening, spotting ones, which I give to the guests who don’t eat bananas and strangely they wolf it down. We have French guests now and they have what I think is the classic French attitude to breakfast – it should hurt. Their plates afterwards are beautifully smeared with arabesques of apricot jam and chocolate (from the chocolate banana bread, a variant*), the French press empty but for the coffee grounds, the French girls’ voices throaty from their first blissful draw of nicotine. Of course they are beautiful and slender. This is how it is.photo

If you are English and were at school during the 1980s you would have gone on a French exchange programme; you lived with a French family for a few weeks and the French student then came and lived with you. You learned their language and way of life and they learned yours, sort of thing. I also did this in Bilbao, northern Spain where I lived on chocolate biscuits for four weeks and learned to say “I know what you’re up to and I’m going to tell my mum what you did when I get home” in Spanish.

Annie was nicer; she was from Normandy and liked smoking and camping. She drank bowls of black coffee just before she went to bed, and wore extremely tight jeans. We were both fourteen but I got the impression she was worldlier than me. Sometimes we went on long walks into the countryside, or at other times she would hitch up the family’s pony – what she called a ponette – to a wagon and we would ride to an old lady’s house nearby and buy Coke from her fridge.

Annie lived in a rural area and there was not much to do except this, and eat chocolate sandwiches. I met other kids in the area because they too would wade into the fields, pale wheaten and straggly, and we would all smoke. I had never smoked like this before; filtered Gitanes, in a beautiful, uniform white that made me think of freshly laundered shirts. I watched them gulp back big blue lungfuls. I think I knew then I wouldn’t be able to inhale and remain standing. It was on my return to England that I did it in the privacy of my bedroom – I inhaled a Gitanes and fell to my knees.

Anyway, it’s all rolled into one in my mind; the smoking, the Coca Cola, the way Annie sat on a bench outside the boulangerie and handed me the long snout of bread to try, its crust sharp, almost splintery in the mouth followed by chunks of dark chocolate that she had fed into the crevices – our petit déjeuner, our ‘little lunch’ eaten vaguely in the morning. And lastly (and lastingly), the boys in the field one of whom in a lull in conversation languidly enquired “Do you make love?”

I think I pretended not to understand which wasn’t too far from the truth; something to do with the strangeness of the present simple. As if it was a hobby. It was the only time I remember being singled out for attention. I replayed the moment endlessly in my mind, trying to reframe my muteness as intrigue, but really I was just lost for words.chocolate142

I wanted to showcase these beautiful drawings of bananas and chocolate by Jasmin Bhanji, who currently lives in Kenya, though is formerly of north London, and it’s strange because since she’s gone to Africa, I’ve got to know her better and that is one of the wonders of the internet. I knew her in person in England (she’s my new cousin) and now I know her through her drawings and photos of her amazing pots and her blog, Jasmin Bhanji Studio.

*I lifted the recipe for double chocolate banana bread wholesale from Emma Gardner’s baking blog Poires au Chocolat (who in turn adapted it from Smitten Kitchen), so it would seem a bit silly to repeat it here when she has already done such a lovely job and I did nothing to improve it seeing as it was, in my view, perfect. If you like bananas and chocolate and a big fistful of cocoa powder and eating oblong cake, then this is for you. A bit naughty you might think for breakfast, but not if you imagine you’re a Parigot (slang for Parisian), in gold sandals and a lamé cardigan.IMG_1833

On the turn

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Food-wise, I’m waiting for peaches. That’s when I know I’m in Los Angeles. More than lemons and oranges, which have an all-year-round prolific, whoreish quality – if they’re not blossoming they’re bearing fruit, it’s a constant publicity machine – peaches can only mean early summer here. And they get riper and more aromatic and squishier as the weeks go by, the skin seemingly more paper-thin, the round globe of flesh beneath more sunset-orange, more dripping, before it goes over, starts to rot.

We have a nectarine tree which is coming into blossom and that counts as my stone fruit barometer of how things will be. The blossoms are pink and furtive still, with only a few little dazzlers. There is no point waiting for the fruit, which will be eaten by squirrels. Every year I have been thwarted by them and so I don’t bother now – they know the perfect moment at which the fruit needs to be eaten better than I do and besides they’re more likely to be up and ready. They demolished my sunflowers, full of nascent seeds. They eat all the bird food.

And we have B&B to do. We’re ‘doing’ B&B though sometimes it feels as if we are being done to, depending on the caliber of guest. Some make it easy. Our first guests since our return were from Amsterdam and behaved as if these were their last days on earth. They breakfasted early and then played tennis, swam in the pool and generally ran themselves ragged in a pleasant and contained way. They loved the place and we loved them for loving it all.

Then came a mother and daughter team – New Yorkers originally from Egypt – who alternated between days spent dragging around theme parks and long hours holed up in their room lobbing shrill and indecipherable insults at each other. They also filled our fridge with foodstuffs of no particular seasonal bias: Ranch dressing, a bumper box of strawberries, little dwarf tomatoes, chocolate milk, an enormous chocolate Bundt cake, boxed up. “Fresh,” the mother announced, “I need fresh.” As if this explained it. It may have explained their blocked toilet, which I had to investigate with a forced smile and a plunger.

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It was the Bundt cake that bothered me. They were passing up my homemade lemon shortbread, which languished to staleness. Five ingredients (lemon zest, butter, sugar, flour, almonds) versus – actually I lost count. They had me at sorbitan monostearate. I’m not against junk food in its place (a burger at midnight, fries, sweet fries for dipping into an omelette, a tranche of milk chocolate and a hot mug of tea), but if I’m being offered something home-made, I devour it. And I say thank you a lot. And where’s the fricking Ranch anyway? What is Ranch dressing? I need to know this before I leave.

Some strangers become stranger still, the longer you make their acquaintance; in this case, we were all mutually baffled by one another but tried for the sake of sanity to get along. They were nice people and kind in this instance: Joe did his back in and they gave us Tiger Balm and it helped. But it always happens in the first moment of meeting, the mould is set and there’s no turning back; the apartment becomes a set of enclosures, returning to rooms only when the keys are returned.

Back to blossoms. I will let you know when the peaches are in. In the meantime, there are rosemary blossoms (however, on the turn) to add to peach and nectarine and they are all edible. You could festoon salads with them, or adorn this cake with them if you are in favour of icing/frosting (they would need something to stick to, I should think). I immediately wanted to make chocolate cake; I wanted to make the opposite of the towering brown behemoth chilling in our fridge for seven days. So this is an austere, silken and rather un-American square of dark chocolate brownie spiked with rosemary. The herb gives it a silvery, savoury edge and the chocolate is dense and rather grown up. I also added a handful of almonds and two small clouds of cocoa.

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Life is butter

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

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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, 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 had a real laugh in Rome where we helped 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.

Frilly

20 Thursday Mar 2014

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I like flowers, particularly ones you can eat. These are wild garlic leaves (along with their flowers) that I found festering in the heat and growing through the railings of a building I have often wondered about, mainly because it’s called Corsica Hall and that sounds quite grand and Corsican though I gather it’s neither. You can smell it, the wild garlic, as you approach; that oniony heat, suppurating and cleansing and sweeping everything out like a broom. In fact it looks when washed rather like a collection of spring onions, and the general taste is milder than a clove of garlic. It can get a bit lost. What to put it with? Meat. Yes, go on. A bit of animal.

I have been discussing such things with my new friend the café owner in town. Every time I go in to have a cup of tea (last one free with my loyalty card) we talk quickly and furtively about food. Scandi, she said, that’s the new thing and I said yes, because I saw a TV programme with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in which he shoved onion flowers into the crevices of a huge leg of lamb just before barbecuing it and this was in Denmark. Then she has to go away and serve people but I know in her body language that she will come back and add something. So then she tells me about infusing flowers into custard, and this is absolutely the perfect time; gorse, rosemary, broad bean, dill, fennel flowers. Our conversations are quite tense because time is of the essence and everything must be boiled down to the bare essentials. I found garlic flowers. Really? Yes, I’ll bring you some. Okay, brilliant etc. And then today, I dropped off a small stash tied together with cotton. She wasn’t there which was just as well. A waitress put them in the fridge. I was like her dealer.

I think I may have found my perfect café. There’s a man who is there every time I go, and generally he drinks coffee, but the other day he was nursing a glass of white wine at eleven o’clock in the morning, and reading the paper with exquisite slowness. And they have a mushroom man, and they line-catch their cod from the seafront. And they made their own tables. I would like their life.IMG_3710

Meat reminds me of Clarissa Dickson Wright who died at the weekend. She didn’t just cook a lot of meat, she believed in it, loved animal fats, found vegetarianism deeply unsettling, and was generally a force of nature of the old-fashioned kind. Her appearance on Desert Island Discs is probably my all-time favourite interview ever, particularly in the face of the withering Sue Lawley, who is clearly trying to chasten her into admitting that the food she championed was unhealthy. “I’d rather eat a cream cake than take Prozac”, she shot back, mischievous and right. Mischievous and right, scholarly, fun, unruly, brave. Sorely missed.

Grilled lamb chump chops with wild garlic

With help from Nigel Slater

50g garlic leaves with bulbs and flowers if possible
Juice of half a lemon
a little olive oil
2 lamb chump chops

Lay the chops in a bowl and add the oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper, and give it all a swish so the meat is lapping it up. Chop up the garlic leaves roughly and add to the bowl. Press a few of the wild garlic bulbs & flowers into any cuts or crevices you can find in the meat. Allow this to sit at room temperature for a couple of hours if you can, moving the pieces of lamb around now and then and giving them a little knead. Alternatively, you can refrigerate overnight covered in foil.

Heat the grill to very hot (a charcoal grill is ideal but timings will vary according to how much heat you’ve harnessed. For this recipe, the assumption is you have a grill where the heat comes from above). Grill the lamb till firm and slightly charred at the edges, with as many of the leaves as possible tucked underneath. The lamb should be pink in the middle – about four minutes on each side. Serve with a few scattered flowers and left-over leaves. Lovely with new potatoes.

Nowhere but here

08 Saturday Mar 2014

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I’ve been here three seasons; a whole autumn, one full winter, the beginnings of spring. That translates as cold, long, dark, wet and angry. Gusty gales, the inexplicable (to me) spring and neap tides, the winter solstice and the darkest night. I’ve watched too many documentaries on BBC4, and I keep bumping into people who think I’ve already left. “Haven’t you gone yet?” “Still here?” or the weirdly judging “shouldn’t you have gone by now?”. And the sun is tepid – bright and cheerful but not warm. At the moment, and this moment is long, there is nowhere but here. Here is where I have a good doctor and no bills, no frightening and incomprehensible bills that have to be explained to me in a way that makes them even more incomprehensible.

Because Obama is still sorting out his healthcare, and for now we have no insurance and to be without insurance with a chronic condition in the US is scary. And people love to tell you how scary; a medical insurance broker in LA, over the course of a two-hour conversation, cheerfully painted a picture of precise Breugal-like horror at what would befall me if I continued to live an uninsured life. One of her client’s had walked out of the door one morning and dislodged one of her eyeballs – or her retina flew off. Or anyway, something happened to her eye and she had no insurance! I probably would have followed Francis Bacon’s lead in this case and popped my eyeball back in, which I read he used to do often after a few stiff ones at the French House.

So I’m here and it’s spring and I’ve already said goodbye at least twice to everyone. I am in that strange, drained nothing-doing state. An oddity in a world where everyone works, a permanent tourist, which is not half as fun as it sounds. And I don’t want to write about leeks or rhubarb, and I have tramped through enough Sussex undergrowth to know that the ubiquitous wild garlic leaves of which everyone writes are having an off year, or simply spring is late. So anyway I started cleaning. Sponging down the insides of my mother’s cupboards, shaking out the bowls and the bits of plastic appendage and the darkly mottled casserole dishes and the 70s colander. This bit was fun, discovering what was there and had been forgotten about. There were things that have followed me from Devon up to London down to Sussex, and sometimes even before my birth; some predate Woolwich!

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The pestle and mortar originally belonged to my Australian grandmother and came from her home in Sydney. I never knew her really, but I have her postcards and letters in her kind capitals and lots of photos, and a memory of brushing her long silver hair. Now that I am apart from my things, I can see how wonderful it is to hold something like this – its weight and shape, and to imagine fingerprints and palms. The beechwood handle has come unmoored from its porcelain head. There are marks from not sure where or what all over the bodies of both mortars. The very act of pounding is to replicate what she would have done, her hands under mine; a form of conjuring. Spices, herbs, pigments and powders – I know she was a natural alchemist. Maybe, who knows, if I pound away and for long enough I’ll get healed.

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Pounding herbs and garlic in a mortar is not nearly as arduous as it looks. It is actually very efficient – the whole thing comes together within a few minutes, the addition of oil is very satisfying, and then you’ve made it yourself and probably worked through a few grudges while you were at it. You are also ‘tempering’ the ingredients, putting them back into balance; in the Middle Ages, honey tempered vinegar, wine tempered fish and the mortar was the vessel to do it.* You are in control of things too, able to see and feel when particles become slosh (as it were).

The Catalan sauce romesco is still made in this way; peppers, nuts, oil, vinegar, bread and garlic are pounded into heady oblivion. As is pesto, skorthalia, the garlicky sauce from Greece, tahini, the Turkish classic tarator made with walnuts and stale white bread and Catalan picada, made with parsley and almonds (below).

It’s better to give approximations when it comes to pounding, because this is where feel is paramount, and it’s good to taste as you go; you can always add more of something. Add oil in very small increments to begin and then increase. I like herb/garlic sauces to have texture, with nuggets of this or that. If you don’t, pound on.

My version of a Catalan picada
1 small handful of blanched almonds (about 20)
1-2 garlic cloves peeled & a pinch of sea salt
4 big glugs of extra virgin olive oil
One big handful of roughly chopped flat-leaf parsley
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Crush the garlic with a good pinch of salt in a mortar until you have a smooth paste. Now add the almonds and keep pounding until amalgamated. Now add the parsley to the mortar, a small bit at a time, and pound until incorporated. Add the olive oil, trickling it in slowly and stir well before adding the lemon juice (add the juice after the oil otherwise it’ll turn the parsley brown). Lovely stirred into a fish casserole or simply served alongside mackerel or clams, sprats, lightly steamed veg or chicken, or stirred into salted yoghurt – really anything.

*Consider The Fork, a history of how we cook and eat by Bee Wilson, is a fascinating book and goes into some detail on the history of the pestle and mortar, if you wanted to read on…