Still life

13 Saturday Sep 2014

Tags

Autumn, England, Fruit, Home, Ingredients, Nonfiction, Stories, Travel

These are pears that have fallen from the tree, next door to where we are staying in Chiswick, west London. It is a temporary stop-gap and we are house sitting and cat sitting a rather somnolent cross-eyed cat, an amazing shade of fawn. In fact everything in the house is on the fawn continuum so sometimes it’s hard to spot her. She is also the same colour as the envelopes that arrive from Hounslow council. Anyway, we have been enjoying the pears, that are apparently diseased. At the end of the street is a mulberry tree, which has just been cut back but earlier in the week the pavement was festooned with them, little car crashes all over the place, splats of pink, ruby spillages. We were keen to walk around them so as not to tramp mulberry stains through the house and spoil the general atmosphere of hotel calm. Which at the moment suits our mood, when normally we would be cradling the fruit in our hands and covering ourselves in the never-ever vanishing juice. Because when could you ever resist a mulberry? Never.

Although I have been posting from England regularly since I started blogging, it was as an LA resident. I would always eventually board a plane back to LA, full up on Bach’s Rescue Remedy pastilles and sodden with days of fraught tears. This time, however, I am writing as a resident of England, because we have moved from LA and are now back on English soil. My blog posts will lack, I imagine, some of the emotional freight they once had – nostalgia for crisps and autumn, the love of a good walk etc – and I will be a bit more, well, down to earth, maybe, but hopefully not prosaic. We will be returning to LA regularly so I’m sure I’ll have some interesting tales to tell from immigration, and the warm and caring LA drivers and those women with faces that look as if they’re made of brown candle wax.

In the meantime, I have turned the beam of my affection to those things that are difficult to find here – the type of sun and light in LA, which is almost a hard blue, all angles, and then driving, the thing that tormented me more than anything else; okay, I miss the grid system in LA. I miss grids. I miss driving in a straight line for hours at a time with no pedestrians, no people to ruin it, finding Say You Love Me on the CD player with my fingers (Fleetwood Mac Greatest Hits, track 11) tracing it like Braille in case the driver in front suddenly decided not to bother with indicating. And of course I miss our neighbours, who cordially and kindly took my cakes, sometimes as many as two a day (when things were really bad) and who became our friends, and then finally our family. And all the lovely people who scooped us up and fed us and listened to my various diatribes (“Cats need to be free to express their natural instincts!” “I’m European, I refuse to wear a bra”).

Sometimes I just miss the right turn out of the garage, the car tipping down the hill into the first sun of the morning, like a massive fruit in the sky, knowing it wouldn’t change, and being endlessly surprised by it. Here I’m not so much surprised as bemused by the amount of grown men in tailored suits eating Wotsits. Wealth, that’s a surprise, particularly here in London – it makes me want to go up to the chestnut-haired glossy mares drinking lattes in Chiswick House and ask how they did it, and could I have a look at their bank statements? I don’t remember London ever being so untouchably rich (reading John Lanchester on the subject helps).

So in that sense, I’m a foreigner, but in every other way, I’m home. ‘Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence’, Philip Larkin wrote. So no LA, no mad people, no Jessica Biel or citrus to beguile you with, but plenty of pears, cats, mulberries, unpacking and, when in London, extortion. It’ll be an interesting few months, thank you for following me.

Courgette plot

12 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

England, Gardens, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories, Sussex, Vegetables

Hard to say if this is an unusually buoyant time for courgettes or this is the norm. Everyone has a recipe, and people who profess not to be gardeners are growing courgettes and holding forth on what to stuff the blossoms with, and what size an ideal courgette should be (small). I was given a bag of courgettes by French-friend-Monique, and they were on the large side, almost marrows, though when I cooked them they didn’t become the sloppy, watery mess cooked marrows are famous for. They actually tasted of something but with big gangster-like seeds. I followed French-friend-Monique’s recipe for soup, which was so easy and lacking in peril of any kind that I kept asking her the same thing – is that it? – because being French I thought it would be difficult but taste very good in the end. Her instructions, repeated for my benefit, were to “put them in water with a stock cube and throw in some cheese triangles.”

She gave me two triangles and the soup was delicious, and the next night I put in two blobs of goat’s cheese, and I think that is the soup’s secret. I also added some ‘umami paste’ that was being sold off cheap at the supermarket because reportedly no one knew what they were buying. It is in fact a mixture of anchovy, olive, parmesan, and other dark and yeasty backnotes, but you are essentially buying flavour; a bit like buying a jar called ‘hope’. A friend who tried it couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was she liked, the soup a tease.

But you don’t want a recipe for soup. And it’s hardly, barely a recipe at that (I did in fact, unbeknownst to Monique, sweat the courgettes in some butter and olive oil with some garlic before adding the water, cooking it gently for 20 minutes and then whizzing in a blender with the soft cheese, because I couldn’t bear not to, but this is the Michelin starred version).

I made courgette and potato rosti – otherwise known as patties, polpette or even, and this might just be in my house, rissoles – and they came by way of a rather recalcitrant man in a tight vest who was weeding his plot in a walled garden I happened to be in the other day. The walled garden was spectacular; full of tall wavy bolting lettuces that made me think of Rapunzel, wigwams of fussy frilly sweet peas with their butterfly flowers, darkly mottled pears against one wall and espaliered plums on the other, covered in netting, which somehow made me think of bras. In the middle was this man, bending to fill his trug with slim purple beans.

At first he seemed friendly. “We’re just admiring the garden,” we said by way of introduction, because it was in fact private property, in the grounds of an old house, a retreat of sorts, but the gate had been open and so we had sidled in. “Of course, yeah,” he said and started to peel the drying sheafs off his corn cobs. “I like your courgettes,” I said because we were standing right by a strange serpent-like mass of them blooming up from the ground; blossoms yellow as butter reached out from the sides, and yellow and green snakes of the vegetable slithered over the ground.

“Yeah,” he said, or something like that. And I told him about my marrow-like courgettes from French-friend-Monique, and he said big was bad and did we have an allotment? No, no garden, mum said. No garden since 1976. That’s why she loved coming here, she was thinking of asking if there was a plot to spare. And then we started talking about what we could do with the courgettes, and he reeled off a list while he threw his corn into the trug and carried on peeling away at the next cob – “there’s courgette bread, courgette cake, courgette rosti, courgette soup, sweat them down with a bit of oil and garlic etc.” – and as he went on I decided I didn’t like him. It was just a feeling.

If this had been Monique she would have slipped us a few courgettes and thrust the blossoms in a bag with a flap of her hands as if it hadn’t happened. Not because I was expecting him to – but because I knew he was the kind of person who wouldn’t. “It was nice to meet you, enjoy your harvesting,” I said and moved away. He bent over his trug and threw in the corn with another, bleaker, “Yeah”.

And as we left we saw, right by the mottled pears, a trench of unused, overgrown spartan earth; a plot. That gave us ideas. Which we kept to ourselves until we left the grounds. And then we schemed and schemed and schemed away.

Courgette and potato rosti

Adapted from Mark Hix, the Independent

The idea with rosti is to grate cooked potato with – in this case – raw courgette and then fry in a little olive oil and butter until it looks like a golden haystack. I was taken aback by the sheer amount of juice the courgette extruded. I dealt with this by squeezing the (considerable) liquid out of the grated courgette using a tea towel before adding it to the potato. The rosti were light and subtle, grassy-green and fresh-tasting and I found dusting them lightly in flour before frying helped counteract the dampness. I ate mine with horseradish and a poached egg.

Serves 4

200-250g waxy new potatoes, boiled in skin, cooled then grated

1 large or 2 small courgettes

salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 clove of garlic, crushed and finely chopped

flour

2-3 tbs vegetable oil for frying

A couple of good knobs of butter

Grate the unpeeled courgettes using a cheese grater or something similar and then squeeze out the liquid through a clean tea towel. Add the grated courgette to the cooled and grated – and unskinned – potato. Mix well and season. I add the garlic here; I know this won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I think it adds to the heady freshness. Heat a non-stick blini or frying pan with a glug of oil. Add balls of the courgette and potato mixture dipped in flour to the pan once the oil is shimmering, press the mixture down a little with a spatula and cook for about 2-3 minutes until brown and crisp. Flip them over and add a little butter to the pan and cook for a similar amount of time. Serve with a poached or fried egg and a dollop of horseradish.

Pudding with goosegogs

28 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Baking, Cake, Dessert, Fruit, Ingredients, Recipes, Stories, Sussex

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Tentacles

03 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Cooking, Fish, Food, Ingredients, Los Angeles, Recipes, Sea, Stories, Travel

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 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.

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.

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. 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

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Breakfast, Crepes, Downtown, Food, Ingredients, Los Angeles, Recipes, Stories, Travel

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.

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 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

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrot and lemon salad

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

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

Cutting for stone

24 Saturday May 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Conversations, Food, Fruit, Los Angeles, Recipes, Stories, Summer

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.

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!

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

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Art, Bananas, Cake, Chocolate, Food, France, Recipes, Stories, Stories from the Stove

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.

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.

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.

Saladings

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester

On the turn

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Almonds, B&B, Chocolate, Ingredients, Los Angeles, Recipes, Stories, Stories from the Stove

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.

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.