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We are nature

30 Tuesday Aug 2022

Posted by Sophie James in Not food, Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Art, Environment, Exmoor, Writing

I wrote an article on environmental art (with the title We are Nature, taken from a quote by Andy Goldsworthy) and interviewed some lovely artists and – if you would like to – you can read about it in the new issue of Exmoor magazine. I was so inspired talking to them that I was tempted to give everything up and start a brand new life, but Naomi the editor advised I get over my cystitis first, which I am endeavouring to do. It was also lovely to return to my ‘neck of the woods’ after so long. I am a West Country girl and I know these here parts. The issue is available to order from the website (details below).

I wasn’t sure I knew what environmental art was (so many artists resist the term, but we had to call it something – other options are land art/eco art) but that in itself became a starting point for discussion. Amongst many things it explores the effects of time, the relationship between people and their natural environment and the beauty in loss, decay and regeneration.

It can be urban or rural, ephemeral or permanent, and is often made with found materials: leaves, flowers, branches, ice, stone. You may not even notice it. There is a debate about whether it even needs to be noticed. There is also nothing preachy about it, it doesn’t exist to explicitly ‘tackle’ environmental problems.

I like the performance art side of it, because it speaks to the performer/actor in me. I like its obliqueness. I also like how it attracts an outsider view, and outsiders generally. To paraphrase artist/sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, it takes you somewhere you’ve never thought of going, “whether it’s in the mind or the world.”

Thank you to metal artist/sculptress Belle Cole, sculptor Michael Fairfax and beach artist Ieva Slare and her family for such lovely chats and genuinely inspiring views of the world.

And lastly, the photo above is of me and my dad, on Exmoor, 13 years ago. I was about to get married and move to LA. I was very happy, and strangely relaxed despite all the planning, probably because I was based on Exmoor at the time and was infused with its spirit, and everything was just…unfolding. Also, my dad, Tony James, is a ‘proper’ writer, a journalist since the age of 16, and a West Somerset ‘local’, having been adopted many years ago from his native Derby. Still supports Derby County though. He is one of Exmoor magazine’s lead writers.

Andy Goldsworthy: “We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”

One of the original environmental artists Richard Long on A line made by walking: “My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art.”

Find out more about the magazine at facebook.com/exmoormagazine & https://www.exmoormagazine.co.uk/shop/editions

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a quiet loaf

20 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by Sophie James in Bread, Uncategorized

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Bread, Home, Sourdough, Walking, Writing

I like the way the parchment paper is hugging the loaf and how it has moulded to its shape during baking. This is a sourdough boule. I decided to embrace all the cliches and start my own starter and once I got going, it’s hard to resist the jiggly, bubbly mass of it and the pub-like aroma. I have welts and fissures on my hands to show for the effort and the heat from the pot it cooks in is as ferocious as anything on bonfire night.

What I enjoyed is that it tied in well with my evening walk. After the folding, the dough needs to fill the bowl quietly and this takes a while, so I would take myself off, do a circle, look into people’s living rooms as the dusk crept in and overtook the day, and the lights went on. It was intoxicating, seeing people. They became seductive, instructive, and if a window was filled with a rainbow, then it was a family house, and sometimes the family would advertise itself more thoroughly; with cuddly toys stacked up, or a notice pleading for me not to eat beef.

On one there is a notice on the gate with the sharp instruction to “please DO add a ribbon to our rainbow fence”. The fence is festooned with ribbons tied into bows, and the tree towering over it is trailing them, long and glossy and just at head height. Each time I approach I try to pull a ribbon off a branch, so I can tie it to the fence, and am left standing there, yanking at a ribbon that refuses to come loose. Is this what I am supposed to be doing? I walk on.

As it is a suburban street in a quiet, residential area on the outskirts of a Greater London suburb, the changes have been so subtle as to be almost non-existent. Slowly, by stealth, it has become slightly louder recently, inching its way back to normality. Which is not very loud. I have longed sometimes for the quiet of an urban street, to luxuriate in the silence, the shock of its stillness. To walk for miles during the night through empty streets and stand in front of St. Paul’s. Or go back to a time when I used to walk home at night because I needed to remember all the details of an evening in a way that only feet can do.

So when I let myself in, at 10 sometimes 10.30, my skin flushed from night summer air, and begin to dust a surface with flour, I am carrying with me all the remnants of those walks I have taken and forgotten about. Evening walks with my dad in West Somerset, with views of the brown Bristol sea. Night walks I took in Sydney as a teenager, chatting and walking into spiders’ webs. Walking along the promenade in Sitges after a long day’s teaching, my friend Jonny carrying my bags, and watching the ink-black sea crawl up the sand.

The quiet brings it up, loud and insistent, it tells me what I care about and what I miss. I then have to shape the boule, which is my favourite part, dragging the dough closer to me, over and over, creating surface tension, the dome of it tight and jiggly and ready for the fridge.

IMG_5197

This is the sourdough recipe I have been using. The Perfect Loaf is also really helpful.

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Nasturtium-leaf sandwiches

02 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by Sophie James in Recipe

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Food, Ingredients, M.F.K Fisher, Nonfiction, Recipes, Stories, Travel, Writing

IMG_6815

Avram Dumitrescu

I discovered nasturtiums and the food writer M.F.K Fisher around the same time, so it seems fitting to include them both here. This recipe might also sum up Fisher’s approach to life and cooking, as it is both daring and in some senses obvious; nasturtiums grow wild, as well as being the easiest things to cultivate, and most of us have a loaf of bread knocking about. The rest is up to you.

Her life is hard to summarize without reducing it to the amount of times she moved house. She was a true vagabond, shuttling between France, Switzerland and her native California; back and forth she went like a ping-pong ball. Possibly because of this, she had a complete lack of vanity about where she cooked and with what. Some of her early, settler-influenced dishes read like one of Edward Lear’s nonsense poems – clabber custard, cocoa toast, tomato soup cake – but her message is disarmingly relevant. Eventually, we must ditch the gurus and find our own voice. Fisher herself was entirely self-taught, spurning even her French landlady’s attempts to school her in the basics. She simply made it up as she went along. The limitations of her surroundings, and the lack of equipment – in one house the radiator stood in for a stove, and in another, the cold meant she cooked wearing a fur coat and gloves – dictated what she was able to prepare, and this was what excited her most; that making do is liberating, and we are confined by choice.

She is the antidote to our learned helplessness – our need for ‘experts’ – and the champion of trial and error. She wanted us to feel our way, physically and psychically, through the food we cooked. About this, she said “I believe that through touch, or perhaps because of its agents, other senses regain their first strengths.”

A devotee of offal at a time when Miracle Whip was considered classy, and a life-long hatred of American salads sets her apart in ways that even now appear radical and eccentric. She is often described as America’s answer to Elizabeth David, but I think this is to do her a disservice. To my mind, her writing has the tough lyricism of the survivor. Flinty, resolute, economical, she was a woman raised under big skies in a brave, new world.

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Nasturtium-leaf sandwiches

I know it may be controversial, championing the ‘wich in these carb-free times, but perhaps it’s due a revival. There can be nothing more satisfying than a torn hunk of baguette, with some sharp cheddar (crisps optional), or a few slivers of smoked salmon inside a thin, wheaty shell. And then there is toast, at which even the thought makes my cheeks sing, and gives butter a reason to live.

If you’re craving something cleaner, you could make a nasturtium salad; it works in much the same way as watercress, being from the Indian cress family. In fact, the word originally comes from the Latin nasus tortus, meaning “twisted nose”, supposedly because of what it does to your sinuses. Creamy clouds of pepperiness and a shock of blossom covered in the lightest of dressings is springtime in a bowl.

From With Bold Knife and Fork, M.F.K Fisher (1969) 

Makes about 40

1 loaf white Pullman* bread, crust removed, sliced lengthwise into three 1-inch slices

¾ cup butter, softened

2 cups nasturtium leaves, tightly packed

Nasturtium blossoms for garnish

“Using a rolling pin, firmly roll each slice of bread to flatten. Spread each slice on one side with butter. Reserve 6 nasturtium leaves for garnish. Finely chop the rest of the leaves. Spread the chopped leaves over the buttered side of each bread slice. Then, starting from a long side, roll up each slice into a log. Wrap each log separately in plastic wrap and refrigerate until the butter has hardened, about 2 hours. (Once the butter is hard, the logs will stay rolled.) Cut the chilled logs crosswise into ¾-inch-thick slices. Arrange the slices on a platter and serve garnished with nasturtium blossoms and the reserved leaves.”

 

* Otherwise known as a ‘sandwich loaf’ – the name Pullman comes from their use in the cramped kitchens of Pullman railway cars. These days, most sliced bread is actually a Pullman loaf: square, and baked in a long, rectangular, lidded pan. I used some sliced rye and wheat bread I had in the freezer and lopped off the crusts.


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