Month: December 2022

Spring in my step at last

Sea Campion, Silene uniflora -photographed near Gunwalloe church 18th January 2022

It really shouldn’t be a surprise because it happens every year, but suddenly the thought of another year’s joyful plant hunting is filling my mind. The photograph – taken in Cornwall – is proof that spring is just around the corner and I am so looking forward to it; sorting out the books and maps and planning our visits to try and maximise our chances of finding one or two rarities amongst the old friends. When we go out plant hunting in the company of the vastly experienced Bath Natural History Society leaders I can only marvel at their sharp eyes and encyclopaedic knowledge, but they are so willing to share their expertise I’ve realized that half the battle is learning to access the databases that are available to anyone with an interest in plants, so now we go out equipped with maps and lists which save endless wasted time looking for plants that just aren’t there.

Is this sudden shift in mood just down to day length? Is there – somewhere in my brain – a sensor that, just eleven days after the winter solstice, sends a signal to somewhere else in my brain, telling it (telling me) to clear the decks? Is there a causal relationship between day length and the fact that I just opened Google Photos and searched for images taken in January? Is there an underlying hormonal link between this rain soaked day which lasts just a few minutes longer than it did a fortnight ago? – because I’m quite certain that it wasn’t opening the application that led to the shiver of anticipation but the reverse. Opening the photo album merely confirmed what I already knew – somewhere deep inside – that Coltsfoot, Celandines and Sea Campions will be there waiting in a couple of weeks when we return to Cornwall. I remember, one December, visiting my Spiritual Director, a truly radical Roman Catholic Sister. I was full of woe and feeling thoroughly sorry for myself and she told me that I probably just needed some sunshine.

Now we’ve moved into a (very small) city there won’t be any Plough Monday celebrations and I’ve no idea whether the Littleton Cider Club will organise a Wassail in the orchard behind the White Hart that Madame once helped to plant; although I have heard that the cider apples were very small this year, and so full of sugar the resulting cider is fearfully strong. I’m sad that I’m no longer involved in all those ceremonial markers of the farming year but it seems that my mind is still ahead of the game without any need for dressing up or handmade prayers.

It’s New Year’s Eve. We shan’t be up late – but tomorrow morning the old year will be vanquished in all its economic and political stupidity. Half our Christmas cards this year have contained critical remarks about the state we’re in, and that’s something I don’t think I can ever recall happening before. Is the serpent awakening? Tomorrow looks grey, with more seasonably cold weather returning, but Monday will be sunny, briskly cold and we’ll be out like plant hounds – sampling the air with cold noses and thick sweaters and greeting each tiny promise of new growth with hoots of pleasure.

I’m tempted at this point to quote Mother Julian’s “All will be well and all manner of things will be well”, but there’s got to be a caveat because of course unless we change course, things will not be well at all. The government will tell us that there’s no alternative but only a fool would believe them. Madame and I have the tremendous advantage of being old enough to have lived some of the alternatives to the way we do things around here (one of my favourite definitions of culture). There’s no state sponsored cure for the challenges we face because turkeys don’t vote for Christmas (or Thanksgiving)! The answer may feel as if it’s occluded by anxiety and sorrow but it’s there, waiting to be rediscovered and it looks a lot like a successful human community rescued from the debilitating clutches of the Gradgrinds, the curators and gallerists and all the other gatekeepers defending the system against artists and poets. We’ll banish the ambitious and the greedy and those who have never even discovered their own shadows, let alone learned to live with them. We shall only escape the tyranny of spreadsheets, efficiency curves and economic growth when we refuse to play that game and return to joyfully experiencing of the riches of nature without giving anything an economic value. We’ll get back to singing, dancing and feasting together in ways that defeat all the categories of sponsored division and to a community where Jacob Rees Mogg and his pals will have to make a thin living as pantomime dames, being laughed at in village halls and impromptu community centres all over the country: what a wonderfully cheerful thought.

Here are some more January 2022 photos – Happy New Year.

Staunching pancheon expansion lust.

There – I thought that the headline would attract some small interest! The loaf, by the way, is a fifty fifty wholemeal/white sourdough mix that I made last year. As you see, it makes a lovely – if rather close textured loaf – but I rarely bake it because the flavour is so intense it tends to overwhelm whatever you eat it with. Our everyday recipe is a combination of rye starter with organic white flour which, over 36 hours, develops a lovely rich wheat flavour without shouting at you. Barely a week passes without me learning something new about baking and although occasionally when I’m in a tearing hurry I’ll use the bread machine (I’m not a fundamentalist Sourdough Savonarola), slow is always best, and if – through lousy organisation or sheer idleness – I resort to the supermarket, I invariably experience buyers’ remorse.

Any sort of food, but particularly bread, seems to embrace far more than calories and glycaemic index. It forms a cultural space where memories and experiences jostle with history; even sociology and anthropology. Hearth, home and heritage; journeys abroad or even unexpected food closer to the kitchen all combine in a cloud of metaphor, where cooking and eating become a performance that can wake you out of lethargy or melancholia and set you on your feet again.

Last night we watched a lovely Greek film called “Green Sea” which explains perfectly what I’m struggling to write. It concerns a woman who has completely lost her memory apart from being able to cook despite having no sense of taste. She washes up at a working peoples’ seaside cafe and cooks food so beautiful that it brings alive, occasionally to tears, the people who eat it. It not only recovers the memories of the customers but it eventually restores her own when she has an epiphanic experience with a teaspoon of honey!

You may have noticed that I read a lot of books. On my desk at the moment are MFK Fisher’s “The Gastronomical Me”; “Welsh Food Stories” by Carwyn Graces, “Welsh Fare” by S Minwel Tibbott; “Beard on Bread” by James Beard and the recently published “English Food” by Diane Purkiss. On the shelves there are many dozens more. These are all books that explore so much more than recipes – but express cultures too. Films, in many ways, have a unique part to play in this exploration. I could – off the tip of my tongue – name ‘Couscous’, ‘Chocolat’, and Stanley Tucci’s ‘Big Night’ in which there’s a wonderful single shot scene involving his character cooking an omelette from scratch whilst conducting an argument with his brother. There’s ‘Babette’s Feast’, ‘Julie and Julia’ also starring Stanley Tucci with Meryl Streep and more recently ‘Bear’. Then there’s ‘Bagdad Cafe‘ – I could go on for ages. One day when I’m in the mood I’ll make a list.

So now, finally, I get to the pancheon thing. For fifty five years to the month, every loaf I’ve baked was proved in a Pyrex bowl. It was a wedding present given to us by my mother’s closest wartime friend. It’s grown into an icon for me; scratched to the point where I can barely see through it. But I’ve recently become so paranoid about breaking it that I’m finding it increasingly hard to use. It’s the only object whose use spans our entire marriage and I’ve got this irrational fear that something terrible will happen if I drop it. I’ve written before about my mother’s “little sharp knife” – a unique piece of bone handled but otherwise inconsequential wartime utility ware – that does it too. The few dressmaking knick knacks I still have from her working years – thimble, pincushion and so on have the same quality – and the sound of a sewing machine in the next door flat send me into rapturous childhood memories.

I need a new proving bowl, but finding one has become faintly obsessive. Fifty years ago I visited one of the few surviving local slipware potteries in the country at Wrecklesham. It finally closed down about ten years later after the claypit was sold off for housing land and the market for traditional slipware collapsed under the competition of pyrex, melamine and more glamorous (?) kitchenware, oh and the complete absence of skilled throwers . I’ll write more about that visit another day. They were still – just about – making a few pancheons for trendy interior decorations but they were way above what we could afford.

I’ve looked on and off for years for one, but the problem is that they’re very expensive when bought from antique shops and – not knowing when they were made – there’s always the suspicion that they’re lead glazed. Any acidic food left in them could lead to lead poisoning. It’s a shame because that glorious amber coloured and unctuous glaze is quite difficult to replicate without lead flux. But then, miraculously and almost certainly due to the surge of interest in home baking during Covid, one or two potteries have seen the gap in the market and begun to produce hand thrown slipware pancheons once again. Why bother? Well, for all the reasons at the top of this piece. Of course you can prove your dough in any old container, but bread making occupies a cultural space as well as the usual culinary one; and those of us who bake get tremendous pleasure from working within that almost extinct culture using traditional tools and equipment, and of course I trained as a potter when I was young – which is why I visited Wrecclesham all those years ago. Buying a new pancheon joins two of the threads of my life together. Best of all I’ve found a pottery less than twenty miles away that’s making them and as soon as they reopen in January I’ll be down there to check them out (fussy customer!) and if they’re good – and they look very good online – I’ll retire the Pyrex bowl and start afresh. It won’t do anything for the bread but it’ll do a lot for me.

More recently we found a potter called Nathalie Hubert down in St Quentin la Poterie in Provence and we bought some of her lovely oven/tableware which radiates sunshine into our flat whenever we use it, and then we invariably begin to talk about our travels there. Cooking, eating and sharing memories over a few glasses is at the heart of human thriving – not an optional extra for the wealthy. In fact the wealthy always lose out because they don’t have to struggle to learn the skills and find the money, they just flash the wad and it all falls into their laps, and straight out again. Of course it’s hard work excavating history, reading, practising, watching, talking and learning from the people who really know. But as Aneurin Bevan once famously said to a heckler – “If you’d just shut up and listen you might leave this place slightly less stupid than when you came in”

Winter Solstice – I should go down to the canal

Winter Heliotrope on the Kennet and Avon Canal

Christmas brings out my inner Thomas Hardy. I’d really like life to be like “Under the Greenwood Tree” his only cheerful, not to say funny book; but reality turns out to be – in the main – “Jude the Obscure”.

I wake up early this morning at around 4.30am and lie in bed filled with the sense of a recurrent dream in which I am slowly becoming invisible; a wraith moving through remembered places and among people I loved and some who loathed me -evoking feelings inviolable to passing time but always there; a miasma.

Madame asks “can’t you sleep?“; “No”; “What’s up?”; “Dreams”. A pause. “Go and make a cup of tea”. And so I shuffle off to the kitchen and boil the kettle – searching for a packet of shortbread biscuits to cheer myself up. I give myself a stern talking to: “For crying out loud – do try to stop being so down!” – so I read for a bit, drinking tea and eating biscuits. I’ve just started “The Waste Land – Biography of a poem.” by Matthew Hollis. I’ve been spending far too much time reading in the past, and I quickly run out of concentration – it’s possibly a bad choice for a chronic melancholic. Then I remember that this evening at 21.47 we will celebrate the Winter Solstice. For some bizarre reason it feels like a personal achievement, although in truth it’s the beginning and not the end of winter. But seasons come sheathed inside one another like celestial music, and so today we celebrate a subtle change of key. The buds are on the trees. The long winter nights concede their dominion to the sun and from now until the summer solstice the light dominates and thistledown memories give way to new life.

We haven’t been down there yet, but the canalside will be showing the first flowers of Winter Heliotrope. When they’re in their full glory they have a strange perfume – like almonds possibly – but subtle – you have to search for it. There will be Coltsfoot – but in eight years we’ve not seen it here in Bath, and in fact the last time I saw it I was on my bicycle taking a turn around my parishes bordering the Severn and I spotted it peeping through snow. Of course there are many winter flowering garden plants but they never lift the heart as much as wildflowers. We greet them one by one in the spring like old friends with whom we’d lost touch.

The seasons aren’t just measured by day length but by events like this and – as my sister reminded me yesterday – some time in mid January we will suddenly notice that the brief snatches of the themes we overheard in the overture, have broadened out and asserted themselves. The woodwinds have been joined by the strings and by June it will have become a full Brahmsian orchestra. The saints pass in procession; the old Christian calendar which had the good sense to borrow extensively from the (so-called) pagans – is the liturgical song of the earth. Plough Monday – the first Monday after the Feast of the Epiphany – when the Young Farmers carried an old Ransomes Plough into the church to be blessed and it was so bitterly cold that the Archdeacon lost his voice as he preached at the beginning of the old farming year and his breath crystallized in the air. These are the furnishings of the memory; a form of defence against the enslavement of technology and greed.

And so I shall throw off my gloomy cloak and we will celebrate. The season that begins tonight and lasts around two weeks is often deprecated as a festival of overconsumption and indulgence. From 1644 until 1660 Christmas celebrations were officially banned in England by the Puritans and replaced by a period of solemn reflection on our sins! – In their dreams! Of course Christmas and its revelries were never suppressed and our reputation for surly disobedience remains untarnished – but the celebrations always ran deeper than the deepest roots of imposed religion. The fear of the dying of the light and the joy when it returns defies all logic. We know perfectly well that the sun will triumph – until next year – and yet – the return of green shoots leaves us shuddering with thankfulness and we celebrate. In this time of catastrophic climate change we know that the unthinkable may yet come to pass.

And so this week, as we all meet up again, I’m cooking; practicing and planning. The diary is marked up with the day we need to collect our meat from the farm, the exact time and day I need to start a sourdough loaf to be ready, fresh, on Christmas day. We’ve hunted down our best pickles and chutneys; I’ve taught myself to bone, stuff and roll a chicken; our groceries and a good deal of wine will arrive early on Christmas Eve and there is fresh stock in the fridge. I’ve learned how to make hollandaise reliably with a good deal of help from our youngest (chef) son and so Christmas breakfast will be eggs royale, or benedict according to taste. Madame – who likes neither – will probably have poached eggs on toast; either way we all get spoiled. We won’t be eating anything like a month’s calories in a day. We’ll be spending money we haven’t got on treats we can’t afford but the government hasn’t crushed our will to live yet. Christmas Eve will be Italian; a light salad of lambs lettuce, dried ham and burrata followed by pappardelle in a rich ragu of tomato and ox cheek and Christmas lunch will be utterly traditional by popular demand.

In the midst of Covid lockdown Madame and I had a Mexican and really enjoyed it. For the first time in decades I haven’t made a Christmas cake or Christmas puddings – all far too rich for us these days and then the festival of cold meat and lentil soup will take us up to New Year’s Eve when we’ll probably be in bed by 10.00pm. I see nothing much to celebrate from last year apart from its ending and short of an unexpected political earthquake nothing much to look forward to. The earth, though, has her own seasons and we’ll begin by looking for those Winter Heliotropes whose faint perfume will certainly overpower the stench of corruption and idiocy that surrounds us. Our celebrations are an act of resistance.

And if I don’t post again before the weekend – we wish you a very happy time this weekend. Whatever name and faith you give it, we hope it’s cheerful Hardy, not too Laurel and Hardy and not at all dark Hardy!

How to cook an egg

2 poached eggs on sourdough – cooked by Madame

I wish – I really do wish that cooking eggs were that simple. Do it this way – do it another way – so many cookery books declare from on high, and you try it; book propped open next to the cooker, or in my case last week – laptop getting grease spattered while the whole attempt falls apart. In reality, eggs are quite difficult because there are so many rarely mentioned variables; how fresh they are; what temperature they’re at and so on. And then there’s the subjective issue of what exactly constitutes a properly cooked egg. Madame likes her boiled eggs well cooked with the yolks firm. I like mine with runny yolks and if they come out with snotty whites then that’s a price I’m prepared to pay, and even with a timer counting in seconds we regularly get it wrong.

Half of the problem with eggs is that the whites and the yolks set at different temperatures. Sous vide users have worked out a way to make perfect boiled eggs but my sous vide cooker gave up years ago and I never replaced it; I’m a cook not a biophysicist. As is always the case, the answer to questions about the way to cook an egg would need to be “well it depends”. I’m innately suspicious of terms like “perfect” and “authentic” which often hinge on entirely subjective criteria – I prefer to say “well I like it this way” and leave it to the questioner to figure out whether I’m a moron; [yes!].

Raw eggs are apparently a sovereign cure for hangovers – an idea I tried out just once when I swallowed a whole egg and immediately puked it back into the sink without even breaking the yolk. Of course the real problem with them is that they change state – ie from liquid to solid- extremely quickly, which is why your hollandaise will split if you take your eye off the ball for a second when it’s on the heat. Mayonnaise too will split at the drop of a hat; in fact the easiest egg emulsion to make is aioli which is almost bombproof or even better allioli in which the excessive garlic makes it impossible to get wrong. Greek chefs whisk an egg into bechamel which transforms it into an altogether lighter and more elegant sauce.

The fresher the eggs and the more natural the life of the hens, the better they’ll taste – except the very freshest eggs (laid this morning) are better left for a day before you cook them because they often won’t set. It’s a bit of a mystery how hens manage to make such beautiful things from slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails but they do; and however much we puff up the idea of saving the earth by eating insects, I’d rather break the process into two stages – that way we all get to enjoy ourselves.

Even getting the egg out of the shell is a matter of controversy. Some chefs show off by breaking them on the edge of the pan and shelling them one handed. Others tap the shell with a knife to get the process going (NB bits of shell are inclined to drop into the bowl and such is the viscosity of whites you’ll waste ten fruitless minutes chasing them with the tip of your knife. Finally there are those that prefer the sharp tap on a table – which works well until you get a thin shelled egg which bursts all over the floor. This hazard is much more prevalent in battery eggs. Organic and free range hens eat calcium containing dirt with their normal diet, and thoughtful owners give them grit too. Worms have an innovative process of digestion which is aided by grit – hence passing calcium to the lucky hens that eat them. One broken egg from a pack increases the price of the rest by 16%, and in times of inflation that’s not a price you want to pay.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should all get our eggs by Deliveroo from some ghastly factory run by Mac-Cock-a-Doodle. Eating less but better is always the way to go.

Eating together is an inherently communitarian and democratic act – never ever allow an expert to tell you what to cook and how to cook it. Experience, a good memory and a willingness to learn from your mistakes will make you a better cook than a dozen makeup artists, food stylists and dieticians will ever do.

Just when we thought it couldn’t get any colder!

Ice formed in a ditch

Looking back to my optimistic post about making 36 hour sourdough in late November I see that I wrote that the temperature outside in the communal hallway drops to about 12C in winter. Well that was then! After record breaking warmth in November we’ve switched to record breaking cold and this week the overnight air temperature has dropped to -6C and it hasn’t risen much above zero all day, and so the hall temperature – assisted by the open window downstairs which our neighbours use to disperse the tobacco and weed smoke – drops to about 6C. This last couple of weeks we’ve used the hall as a large additional fridge.

Living as we do in a concrete block of flats built to 1970’s specifications, we’ve been struggling with black mould on the walls for which the only remedy is keeping the flat warm – which costs about £120 a week; rotating a dehumidifier around each room and spraying the affected areas with bleach. A request for advice from our landlord (Church of England Pensions Board) has gone unanswered for three weeks. Just feel the love!

This morning it was so cold inside the flat that I had to resort to three layers and a woollen hat. Madame thought this was so funny she took this photo from the warmth and comfort of our bed – I possibly look like a miserable old git. But amazingly the sourdough had hardly slowed down during the night and so I was able to knock it back early – hence the grubby apron; not really grubby more spattered with bleach stains (see above). I make all sorts of bread, and the difference in flavour between the slow 36 hour sourdough and a quick four hour yeast loaf is so huge you wouldn’t believe they’re made with exactly the same flour

The kitchen is a real sanctuary during these troubled times. With the allotment frozen it’s the only place I can make things happen. This morning I knocked up some eggs benedict for a breakfast treat. The loaf is proving until this evening when I’ll bake it, and there’s a casserole in the oven – it feels like a small victory against entropy except that when we went up to the allotment to get some bay leaves we discovered that the rats had found our stored squashes and eaten the lot. I can’t get too cross about it though; there are bigger challenges to face.

I read somewhere this week that blogs with a vaguely homestead/self sufficiency feel are doing especially well at the moment. I can’t say I’d noticed it here at the Potwell Inn – maybe because this blog is not about polishing the political turd with a bit of lifestyle blather. We won’t bring about the desired paradigm shift with home made marmalade. Although I loathe William Cobbett’s reactionary politics, I do think that Rural Rides and Cottage Economy are an indispensable record of a period of great hardship in the 18th Century, and I’d be pleased if the Potwell Inn provided a similar account of these low and selfish decades.

PS – The algorithm that WordPress uses to pick similar postings has selected three that mention marmalade. Obviously artificial intelligence has a way to go just yet!

A ray of light

Hazel catkins beside the River Wye at Hay on Wye

I haven’t written for more than two weeks, which is an unusually long silence. There’s no particular reason apart from seasonal ennui and the slow collapse of our culture into angry senescence – OK so that’s a rather big reason, and the most dangerous of all. Whilst in Hay on Wye this weekend we scoured the bookshops and I came across a marvellous volume of essays titled “The Welsh Way – Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution” – which I devoured mostly sitting in bed in our hotel room because the drains in the building were blocked and the trenchant smell of sewage forced us us keep the window open, in spite of the outside temperature being -3C. It all somehow reflected my mood. Even on the drive home the sun struggled to shine and just hovered us like a black and white pastel drawing of a poached egg. Our dirty weekend had turned out dirtier in a different way than either of us ever imagined.

The book, on the other hand, is brilliant and gave me much food for thought hinging, as it does, on the continued fantasy of Welsh radicalism examined against its actual deployment over the past 50 years. “Could do better” hardly describes it. But the book also brought home how the individual and separate crises of our time are nothing more than related symptoms of the single malignant disease known as Neoliberalism. The book also gave me an unexpected metaphor expressing two ways of living with the crisis drawing on a structure I know well from the inside. Huw Williams writes of the contrast between the old independent and baptist churches that they were:

…… reformed beyond recognition by the Methodists. To [Iorwerth Peate] the Methodists performed a corruption of tradition, in particular in their aspiration to engage with the world, reform it and transform it. The true spirit of the original nonconformity was to distance oneself from the world, seek salvation in the next life, and carry the burden of this life with dignity and patience.”

Huw Williams; The New Dissent: Page 105. Neoliberal Politics and the Welsh Way

I was almost born into Primitive Methodism and later moved into the Wesleyans and from there to low church and then Anglo Catholic Anglicanism. A long path through the traditions that taught me a great deal about the ancient rift between the activists and the withdrawers. I learned well that withdrawal from the world, whilst it might feed the religious ego, just allowed the devil free range. Where’s the virtue in finding some new cruelty or horror to turn away from and ignore every day?

So the photograph at the top was taken – as the caption says – on the banks of the River Wye; now polluted almost to extinction by intensive chicken farms which have proliferated along her banks and which pour many tons of phosphorus and nitrogen from poultry manure into her water every day. The ray of light is that the tree was growing just a few yards upstream from the bridge under which I finally and suddenly realized that I had lost my faith somewhere along that long journey.

It’s December 14th and in just a week we’ll celebrate the winter solstice which signals the return of the earth from the darkness of the declining days and I remember the words of Mother Julian of Norwich ; ” … all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”