Tag Archives: Stories

Mulberries

30 Friday Sep 2022

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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.

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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.

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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. 

A bowl of mulberries

Leaving home

14 Thursday Jul 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aubergine flower

Melanzane all parmigiana

Lightly adapted from Jamie’s Italy, Jamie Oliver

  • 3 large firm aubergines 
  • olive oil 
  • 1 onion 
  • ½ a bulb of spring garlic or 1 clove of regular garlic 
  • 2 x 400 g tins of quality plum tomatoes or 1kg fresh ripe tomatoes 
  • Wine or sherry vinegar 
  • 1 bunch of fresh basil (30g) 
  • 3 large handfuls of Parmesan cheese (freshly grated) 
  • 2 handfuls of dried breadcrumbs (optional) 
  • A few sprigs of fresh oregano 
  • 150g buffalo mozzarella
  1. Trim and slice the aubergines 1cm thick. Peel and finely chop the onion, and peel and finely slice the garlic.
  2. Place a large pan on a medium heat with 2 or 3 glugs of olive oil, add the onion, garlic and a couple of sprigs of oregano, then cook for 10 minutes, or until the onion is soft and the garlic has a tiny bit of colour. 
  3. If you’re using tinned tomatoes, break them up, and if you’re using fresh tomatoes (which will obviously taste sweeter and more delicious, if they’re in season), very quickly prick each one and put them into a big pan of boiling water for 40 seconds. Remove from the pan with a slotted spoon and put them into a bowl of cold water for 30 seconds, then remove the skins, carefully squeeze out the pips and cut up the flesh. 
  4. Add the tomato flesh or tinned tomatoes to the onion pan, give the mixture a good stir, then put a lid on and simmer slowly for 15 minutes, or until thickened and reduced. 
  5. Pre-heat a frying pan. You will need ‘an abundant quantity of very hot oil’ (MH) to fry the aubergines. Do this on both sides until lightly charred – you’ll need to work in batches. Blot them on kitchen towel.
  6. Season the tomato sauce carefully with sea salt, black pepper and a tiny swig of the vinegar, then add the basil. You can leave the sauce chunky or you can purée it.
  7. Spoon a layer of tomato sauce into a 15cm x 25cm baking dish, then add a fine scattering of Parmesan, followed by a single layer of aubergines and then a layer of torn up mozzarella. Repeat these layers until you’ve used all the ingredients up, finishing with a little sauce and another good sprinkling of Parmesan. 
  8. Toss what’s left of the finely chopped oregano (leaves not sprigs) with the breadcrumbs and a little olive oil, then sprinkle on top of the Parmesan. I sometimes don’t bother with the breadcrumbs.
  9. Bake at 190°C/375°F/gas 5 for 30 minutes, or until golden, crisp and bubbly – it’s best eaten after a rest at room temperature as you won’t taste anything if it is piping hot. It can also be served cold.

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

Update 21/7/22

Semi-derelict

17 Tuesday Aug 2021

Posted by in Garden, Travel, Uncategorized

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She stood on the doorstep with a carton of blackcurrants, the top decorated with the pungent leaves. English but so long in France that she was a bit like Jane Birkin; she had a way of speaking English that sounded translated. She was an illustrator and had bought the house semi-derelict with her French husband and turned this annexe into a one up one down house for paying guests. I found it hard to warm to her, but I recognise it now as jealousy. The garden was ramshackle but loved and beautiful to me for that reason, with ducks and their ducklings skittering about, while various cats lounged on the vegetable beds. He – the husband – was a fanatical gardener and barely spoke. As if it was all too much, or he’d gone feral here, with the woodland at the bottom of the garden and the stream, and the birds he was protecting. Don’t go near that tree, he said, because they’re nesting. He was French and so his insouciance was more acceptable, don’t ask me why. They were both not exactly host material.

Over the years, I have listened to/read the same story told through various lenses, but the words are the same; rambling, derelict, remote, dusty plain, our hideaway, our tumble-down cottage, our house (well, one of our houses), we couldn’t find the front door for the brambles, didn’t even know there was a swimming pool, it wasn’t on the spec, rotting floorboards.

Often they wonder if it is worth it, because of the upkeep. And travel more difficult now. We are so lucky, they always say. And I think, yes you are. To be in France or elsewhere in the seventies or eighties when property was cheap, and you had a few extra bob. Then you held on to it, improved it, gradually the area became more sought after. These accretions are often slow and subtle.

The pioneer spirit looks different now, more calculated, and documented up the wazoo. I wonder if we could ever return to the relative innocence of Patience Gray in Honey from a Weed (‘I was able to light a fire, start the pot with its contents cooking, plunge into the sea at mid-day and by the time I had swum across the bay and back, lunch was ready and the fire a heap of ashes’.) or Elizabeth David brushing the fish with branches of rosemary dipped in olive oil. My own mother bought a three storey house in southern Spain for £2,000, now long gone. All the walls sloped, and swallows nested in the rafters. We had no glass in the windows only shutters. We would get lifts to places in the back of the post mistress’s van or occasionally the back of a tractor. What I remember was how unrelaxing it was. Hard work. We were dusty, tired, often bored, but our skin shone from the olive oil, sunshine and mountain air. Also: the coffee, the tomatoes, the smell of the bakery with its tough brown loaves. The way bits of wall came off on your clothes.

I suppose my mum’s place too was semi-derelict, or as one guest called it – in the days when strangers responded to an ad in Loot and were sent the keys – ‘your hovel’.

The punnet of blackcurrants are swiftly deployed. And I am left with the tale – that they zoned in on this area of unflashy northern France, their demands were few; a bus stop so their daughter could get to school on her own, relative ease of access to a town, a garden to grow vegetables. Then they got to work, quietly and slowly until they built a life.

The blackcurrants are washed and not dealt with in any way, the ‘beard’ still intact. Then they are gently heated on the hob, with the tiniest splash of water along with the sugar. They are cooked when the skins split, and then you eat them like that with ice cream, yoghurt etc. Or once cooked you can push them through a sieve to get a purée. They still retain their tartness, despite sugar, and always arrive in the same way; offered in an old ice cream carton, from a muddy hand, or a repurposed punnet. Some currants will still be attached to the stalks, leaves will be amongst them, the colour reminiscent of beetles. Or ink. Or soot. They are not glossy. I tend to eat them raw as I work my way round the allotment.

Blackcurrant compote (to add to meringue and cream or rice pudding or ice cream). Adapted from Nigel Slater, Tender Volume 2.

300g blackcurrants, 3 tbs caster sugar (or to taste), a shake of water (2 tbs)

Wash blackcurrants, pull from their stalks if necessary, put them in a stainless steel saucepan, with the sugar, water and bring gently to boil. As soon as they start to burst and the juice turns purple, remove from heat and set aside. Leave to cool, then chill.

Companion

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Bread, Uncategorized

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“A companion is literally ‘a person who you eat bread with’. The word comes from Old French compaignon.” The Oxford Dictionary of Origin Words, Julia Cresswell

This is not where I live. The light is different. This light comes from a north-facing window, with the edge of a neglected plant poking into the frame. Can you tell it’s by the sea? I know by the shape of the loaf that it is some loaves back, when I was using lots of seeds, soaking them for hours; sesame, both black and white and pumpkin seeds. There will be some stoneground flour in there but it is before my Ancient Grains period. It looks like a good-enough loaf; a batard. I make two at a time – a boule and then this one. I have to decide who would benefit from which shape. I have decided my mum prefers the batard for ease of cutting.

I make them to give away. Our kitchen has become a tiny bakery, producing two loaves every couple of days or so. Sometimes, we have a loaf left over or an urge to hold on to one overtakes me and it hangs in a (cotton!) bag at the back of the kitchen door. I have become wedded to the smell of rising dough, hot but not quite baked, and the turn around when the lid is removed from the oven 20 minutes in. The fact that it is a process measured out in minutes, a stop watch handy so I can get on with something else in the meantime. I have moved beyond just sitting there staring at the blackened window of the oven.

I like the clank of clay, the different vessels I use for the purpose. The oily fist of flour (einkorn does this best – gathers itself into silky clumps). The best bit is when the bread is baked and it makes minute sounds, bubbling and popping in the ear, like a tiny river of lava. Also, there are the bronzed sesame seeds on the loaf itself and how the bread has torn in the oven, torn and risen and the ‘ear’ has scorched.

But mostly it is the smell. I always wish my mum could receive the bread still hot; the feel of warm bread in her hands, turned out of its pot, parchment paper ripped off, the bottom rapped to check for a healthy hollowness. As a potter she will know the feeling. I sometimes can’t bear that it will go cold – will ‘die’ in some way – and in those moments I might give it to a startled neighbour. I sometimes cycle it over to a friend’s house and leave it among the pots outside or sitting on the mat.

But it has been mostly bundled into a jiffy bag along with a book (Elisabeth Luard at the moment), and sent down to Sussex to my mum, where it might arrive the next day or it might not. From the beginning of lockdown, I took the parcel to my local post office, and before dropping it into the mail sack, the postmaster would cradle the package in his arms. He would lift it to his face, and rock the bread back and forth, smiling. He did this every time; stand in silence with the fragrant parcel held in his arms like a baby, smelling the warmth while I tried to smile through my mask. I imagined the bread slowly cooling until it arrived stone cold on my mum’s doorstep. He got the best part.

There are some good einkorn bread recipes here at The Perfect Loaf as well as really good beginner loaves. I have yet to feel sufficiently ‘proper’ in the sourdough stakes to include my own formula here. Maybe one day.

Thank you, Pippa, for the info about the origins of the word ‘companion’.

Are you growing?

23 Tuesday Mar 2021

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I used to live in LA and a waitress once asked me this question in a place called Cafe Gratitude in Larchmont. I think my reply was something like ‘not as such’. They meant it along the lines of spiritually growing, nothing to do with seeds. And then they returned with plates covered in bark and leaves and something that looked like tile grouting but was ‘cashew cheese’. Now we are in Hampton, land of corner shops, Quavers and Percy Chapman’s seed potato emporium and I am growing like billy-ho.

But back then, there were avocados hanging in front of us, skins like alligator hide. I drove, and I still go to sleep thinking of the way I undertook long journeys. The way I turned the car into the turn-left lane: I was so good at that. Sometimes I thought I would get pulled over for driving without adult supervision.

During my time there, I volunteered at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino every Tuesday and worked in the herb garden, which was fringed with citrus trees. Chinottos, grapefruit, ponderosa lemons that lay on the ground, stem still attached to the tree. I’d sit there after lunch and meditate to the sound of the sprinklers and think: here I am. Then I’d collect all the fallen kumquats and stuff them down my trousers, to make marmalade later.

But it was the herb garden I loved. There were many different varieties of a single herb. I remember thyme mostly; coconut, lemon, spicy orange, creeping. I remember scented geraniums. I remember different sorrels, some with red veins, and huge waves of rosemary. There was ‘false garlic’ which we were instructed to get rid of, despite the delicate pearl at the base of each stalk which tasted of onions. There were cardoons and one of the other volunteers talked about his Italian grandmother rolling them up and cooking them in a pot.

Afterwards, waiting for my friend Tristan who I gardened with and who was my lift there and back, I would look at my collection of things on the bench and take photographs of them. Then I’d get in the car (belonging to Tristan) to be driven howling (by him) along the freeways back to LA, where I might partake of a vegan gelato for the walk home or we’d exchange reading material, and talk of English things.

The herb garden was where I got the idea that growing things was a good way to spend the day. I used to arrive back in LA feeling different. Better, having had my head freed to think random thoughts while cleaving herbs in two and talking to Kelly, the head gardener, about our families and homesickness etc. Gardening is much like driving when you are partnered with someone – you tend to be looking in the same direction with little eye contact and this, combined with the therapeutic aspects of sinking your hands into soil, can give rise to a candour that is often missing when you’re face to face.

No one since our return to the UK has uttered the words Are you growing? Which is funny because I am. At the moment, it’s garlic, globe artichokes, jolly polyanthus and dependable forget-me-nots. And herbs of course, my main love. Now I am waiting for people, with the warmer days, to turn up, which is my starting pistol at the allotment. So that we can have those chats that can only happen when you are both facing the same way, eyes averted or shielded by the sun, hands in the earth. It has been a safe and evenly spaced place to be this past year and I am forever grateful for it. 

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Kelly Fernandez, in the photo above, has been head gardener at the herb garden and the Shakespeare garden for 10 years. Thank you, Kelly for kind permission in using the pic.

Me alegro

29 Thursday Nov 2018

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Despite how healthy this picture looks, these peppers never belonged to me. I lived next door to a storeroom and it stored things like beers and tins of things as well as mountains of red peppers and tomatoes and the like. Once, all the bottles of beer in a crate rolled down the hill on their way to the sea. I stopped them by putting my leg out and then running after them, like a parent chasing after her kamikaze child. Only one bottle got broken and the man thanked me and said that he was the owner of the bar, next to my apartment, and if I ever wanted anything I was to come in and ask for him. I remember thinking how nice that was and I was only doing what anyone would have done in the circumstances.

I found the crate of peppers incongruous, sitting there unattended. There was no one in the street but me, although in the photo there is a suggestion of human activity from the open door on the left. But at the time, there was no noise. This is the street where I lived while I was teaching last year. It is in Sitges, just outside Barcelona.

Up until then, Sitges was a place I had only heard of, and only from a man I once worked with in a delicatessen whilst as a jobbing (unemployed and depressed) actor. He was someone who subtly undermined me as I attempted to slice cured meats, who nitpicked about the way I piled sausages. He was not a very nice man and when he said his tan was attributable to a holiday in Sitges, somehow Sitges became as horrible as him. I never wanted to go there. I would go and sit in the toilet and cry and then have to re-introduce myself to whoever I was serving and weigh the pâté. I’ll never forget the awful feeling of my hands shaking over the digital scales. And his red face bearing down on me.

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Also, delicatessens are a strange place to work. Things swimming in oil, the obsession with clingfilm, the smell of cold astringent objects, piles of goo. The colour brown. That weird rind on pâté. People who work in delicatessens are rarely warm – have you noticed? Because they, like the food, must remain chilled otherwise they’ll go off. Just a theory.

My very first exchange, the morning after I’d arrived, was with a waitress with black hair and a black mood who pretended not to understand the word tortilla. I thought – he is here, his spirit has contaminated this place. I never went back there even though her cafe was on the corner of my tiny pedestrian street and I passed her every day blackly sweeping up, looking as though she was still mulling over my ridiculous request. She never acknowledged me nor I her. So my first meal was spent looking at a blank space where a plate should have been and Joe drinking very good coffee.

Then I realised I had locked us out of the flat and had to call the estate agent who was hiking in the hills of Catalunya. Of course he was. He sent a sympathetic slightly cryptic message telling me not to worry and all would be well and because we had nothing else to do, we went and ate lunch – a plate of grilled sardines and patatas bravas smothered in a red sauce – made from peppers. Those red peppers are everywhere in Catalunya, a kind of culinary leitmotif.

I never saw that man from the bar again. I never went in there, preferring the open air restaurant on the pontoon over looking the sea, where the waiters fed bread to the fish. Looking over the side there would be masses of dancing fish and no bread, that’s how quick they were. The waiters were all young and friendly and prone to hand-holding; if there wasn’t a table until 3pm, I would get my hand held. That’s one of the reasons I went back, but also the food was good, with a limited menu written in chalk, always finishing with tarta de santiago, sliced as thin as paper with a rosette of cream.

The food though was not the most important thing. It was the colours of the food, the brown paper bags, the heaps of artichokes, the big orange mounds of mango, the tiny streets where my bike would fit, the sudden sweep down to the sea. The sea. I had my own bit, which had a white wind-break, a kind of fence, owned officially by the yacht club but it’s where I once left my watch (still there on my return), where I left my swimming costume hanging, where I sat and imagined the water before going in. It was near two ice cream shops. It was as ice cream always is, unless it’s Italy circa 1988. Never as good as you want it to be.

Down each of those alleyways, would appear the face, from time to time, of a student. Sometimes, we would go through the polite dance of ‘hello,’ sometimes we would feign ignorance, not see each other. Because Sitges is so small, that work seamlessly blends into all aspects of life. You are your work, and so arguments, wandering out of the sea topless, eating, walking, standing – all will be duly noted. Not going out will be too. Because Sitges is a party town, a drinkers place.

The red sauce I think is, must be, romesco? But perhaps not. In all the time I was in Sitges I never asked. Just nodded and ate it. It was lovely.

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Small green plums

10 Thursday Aug 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearing

25 Thursday May 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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a sad centre

14 Friday Apr 2017

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This is what happens to some cakes, the ones that rise and then fall. The ‘sadness’ occurs in the centre which slumps defeatedly. Tamasin Day-Lewis was the cook I learnt this term from. It is purposeful, the slump, and not a mistake. Although here there is a hole; cake has been gouged out. It is that kind of cake – bitterly chocolatey, with espresso poured into the mix and with it almonds and butter. I only had a Pyrex dish to bake it in, because I was at my mum’s and I’d taken all her cake tins, slowly, stealthily, over the years. But it didn’t matter because it rose and fell as it should, was luscious and divine, thickly glottal and needing no accompaniment.

This is the most beautiful surface to photograph on. I never do anything to prep it, it is simply the north light and a navy counter hastily de-crumbed. I have had many late afternoon sessions, far at the end of a long corridor, where it is quiet, away from the bashing sea and the compulsive view – long stretches of water fill the windows at the front. The sea disappears gradually, engulfed in mist and the sun’s dazzle. You can’t not look. At the other end there’s nothing much, except height. I have been coming here to this plain seaside town for the last twenty years. I have never found a countertop to better it.

Late afternoons when we’ve trailed huffily up the stairs (92 of them) desperate for a cup of tea, after (just) getting the little green bus from Alfriston on a Sunday. Or a late swim in stagnant August weather, or I’m despatched to make something for an impromptu high tea. I’m miles away from it all in the kitchen and there are never any scales. I make do with the ones my mum uses for throwing her pots, I use her Cheffette mixer bought from a charity shop. I make a cake I ‘shouldn’t’ eat. “Are you allowed that?” is always the question I’m asked. As if I need written permission from a doctor before I can eat cake.

The flat belonged once to the painter Augustus John and when my mum bought it, it belonged to a potter, who with her husband decided after a year that Seaford was too friendless a place, and moved on back to France. From the beginning there were troubles; the building had heroin addicts and pigeon feeders and lots of ‘structural issues’. Neighbours were non-compliant. But my mum was left with a kiln and a room converted into a studio, perched over the English channel – overlooked only by the sea.

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Seaford has no grand architecture. There are no great restaurants, food culture, no ‘scene’. It has a long and manmade shingle beach, is in a bit of a wind tunnel. It isn’t Dorset or those places in Suffolk that people flock to to eat organic ice cream and wear long ‘wraps’. It reminds me of the towns Paul Theroux visited in The Kingdom by the Sea, where he travelled by train and on foot round the coast of Britain during the period of the Falklands war. Seaford has a defeated, slightly belligerent air. It is true what he says here:

“The greatest advantage in this tour was that a country tended to seep to its coast; it was concentrated there, deposited against its beaches like the tide-wrack from the sea. People naturally gravitated to the coast, and they wore fewer clothes there – it was normal on the coast to be semi-naked, exposed”.

He is also a bit mean about us – it’s one criticism I have of the book. It is easy to be mean about Seaford and I can see it through others’ eyes. But it is twenty years of my life, the branch line train, the wave goodbye (with a jar of something from the health store, something earthy), the two florists and their reasonable bouquets, Paul’s Plaice the fishmonger and the vinegary smell of the sea within, Sussex Stationer’s and the smell of new books and wads of paper, the long sloping road to the sea and then the sea, green or blue, smarting under the sun if it’s out. And then turning into my mum’s and the key under a pot and the note in the letterbox – I’m on the beach, bring down avocados. And then the cake that at some point must be made.

Chocolate espresso cake

 Taken from Tamasin Day-Lewis, Good Tempered Food

TDL is quite firm here on her use of whole blanched almonds, roasted and then ground, but having done it this way many times, I think there’s a real difference in the end result; texture and nuttiness are emphasised. 

Serves 8-10

185g (6.5oz) unsalted butter, diced, plus extra for greasing

185g (6.5oz) dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids) broken into pieces

50 ml (2fl oz) very strong freshly brewed coffee

6 eggs, separated

185g (6.5oz) unrefined caster sugar

185g (6.5oz) blanched, roasted and coarsely ground almonds

Heat oven to 375F/190C/gas mark 5. Melt the butter and chocolate together with the coffee in a bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. Resist the temptation to stir. While they are melting, cream the egg yolks and sugar in an electric mixer until pale and light, about 8-10 minutes. Continue to whisk, adding the now melted chocolate and butter.

Stop the machine, remove the whisk and fold in the *almonds with a metal spoon. In a clean glass or metal bowl whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks. Stir a spoonful into the chocolate mixture to lighten it before folding in the rest. Pour the mixture into a 10in springform tin with greased sides into which you have placed a circle of buttered greaseproof paper. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn the oven down to 325F/160C/gas mark 3 and continue cooking for a further 40 minutes.

Remove the cake and leave in the tin set on a rack until completely cool. Turn out of the tin and remove the paper. Delicious served with creme fraiche but also lovely on its own.

*I would recommend roasting rather than toasting on the hob as this tends to scorch the almonds – roasting in the oven (preheated to the above temperature) for a few minutes (5 – 10 min) will give them a burnished colour without burning, but you do need to check regularly.

Aftermath

07 Saturday Jan 2017

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There was a man I recently talked to who said he always steamed his vegetables; this made me feel sad. I have a steamer and it is currently doing time on the top of my fridge, covered in a suspicion of ancient cobwebs. I come from a long line of Midlands folk who would not know what to do with a vegetable steamer, who rarely drank water (‘water is for washing’) and who needed proper animal fat for a day to pass without incident.

My grandpa had red hands, almost purple in hue, small and puffy and strangely delicate with ridged fingernails. He would wash my own small hands in the sink finger by finger as if whittling wood. He began many of his sentences with the word ‘why…’, which was in his lexicon the beginnings of an answer he was formulating. He was a timber merchant and had brylcreamed hair and resented the amount of trifle I ate and was constantly wiping my fingerprints off the glass doors. But of course I loved him and was in awe of the way he polished my shoes.

I remember the pristine plastic bag he would give me at Christmas, long like a sleeve. Inside was a Bunty comic – he was obviously ‘advised’ – and something to do with stationary and pencils. The smell of newness. I have always loved the smell of Christmas, the colours, the citrus, the nuts, the dome of disgraced pudding. However much you feel the bubbling up of resentment somewhere in your being (inevitable) it is hard to quash the feelings of excitement, of occasion, it’s always hard to sleep on Christmas eve. Presents, gold wrapping, a basted bird, the morning walk in frost, the sudden intimacies with strangers.

I have little recollection of what I ate with my grandparents at Christmas, except there was always trifle at some point and I remember the pudding on the day, hot and cascading with complicated fruit and brandy butter which I ate by the spoonful followed later by a spell of biliousness in the back of granny’s car. Breakfast would contain dry Alpen mixed to a rough cement with single cream (top of the milk).

Now the trees are on their lopsided uppers, kicked to the kerb, empty of trinkets. The only red thing left is a poinsettia, the oranges the only thing orange. It is over! It is not even the beginning of the end. It’s a whole new year. There is nothing tenuous about it. We must begin anew. My granny eventually turned her back on butter, switching to Flora margarine – something to do with Terry Wogan’s influence. But I can’t – butter is balm, particularly now in January, when darkness falls at four and the cold works its way pincer-like through all my layers. Fat makes you feel better. Well, me.

Here is a recipe for buttered carrots to which you can add the following: more butter. And a knife point of paprika, thyme, garlic or bay leaves. Adding some sweet potato can also be lovely; it will disintegrate within minutes though. I should say that I always add garlic to this. It is delicious alongside hummus or mixed with a bit of yoghurt or feta. It becomes a soup with ease, simply add water or stock. Meat stock can give it an intensity you should be prepared for.

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Buttered carrots

A bag of carrots, preferably organic (my bag says 650g)

Generous knob of good quality butter, min 25g (I use President)

Garlic, 3-4 cloves or more, bashed and chopped

Thyme sprigs (optional)

Melt the butter in the saucepan with the garlic and the (diagonally if you like) sliced carrots and coat well, add thyme or another herb here if using and a pinch of salt, then add sufficient water to cover the lot and bubble away until this has reduced to a stickiness. The moment it is ready is entirely a personal preference – I like my carrots almost burnt as it seems to bring out a corresponding sweetness, but Jane Grigson says the point of readiness is when the liquid is ‘reduced to a shiny, colourless glaze’. If you would like to make this into a soup then I would add more water and/or stock at this stage, bring it up to a boil and then blitz.