Modern peasant – part 2.

Modern peasant – such a slick title, and I was really pleased with myself for dreaming it up and writing about it a couple of days ago. On the other hand I was a bit cautious about using it in case I was stealing the wind from someone else’s sails – so I Googled it and got back a string of academic references and a book title: “The Modern Peasant, Adventures in City Food” published in 2013 and written by Jojo Tulloh. I’m giving its full title for reasons which (I hope) will become clear and so you can get yourself a copy too.

As it happened neither author nor title meant anything to me but I was intrigued enough to order secondhand copies of two of her books which hadn’t arrived by the time I wrote my piece, and I wrote on, unaware of the resonances between her work and mine. When it arrived I started to read it and I’m now halfway through. It’s almost alarming to see the parallels and tremendously reassuring to think that a generation and 25+ years behind, our vision continues. I always look at the bibliography in every book I come across which has one, and anyone who can freely quote from Patience Gray, Jane and Geoffrey Grigson, John Berger, William Cobbett, Dorothy Hartley .. and so it goes on – someone whose roots are so deeply set within the same humus that inspires the Potwell Inn – I know I’m going to love.

There are books I’ve read which express something that so profoundly resonates with me I know I’ll read and re-read them. Patience Gray, for instance, is one such writer whose recipes express something much deeper; a philosophy of life. Bernard Leach’s book “A Potters’ Book” does the same thing. Hidden within the instructions and formulae is a whole way of being human that can move us on to a different track. I first read the Leach book in one session one summer day, leaning against the library shelf where I’d found it. I didn’t understand the half of it and even now, each time I re-read it I find something new that I never previously understood. That summer afternoon I knew I wanted to become a potter.

So this rather lovely book could be the manifesto for the way of being human that Madame and I dreamed of living out, getting on for 60 years ago. Bread making, fermenting, growing, rearing, foraging, pickling and preserving are the chapter headings beneath which lies a rich mother lode of personal memories. I spent this morning rescuing a batch of Tayberry jelly that refused to set. Tayberries lack pectin and it can make very sloppy jelly; good for rice puddings but not so good on a slice of bread and butter. My discovery today was that by increasing the boiling point to 105.5C – just one degree higher – the jelly (rather less of it) set perfectly.

It’s early winter and our storage cupboards are pretty full. Some crops went well and some not so well. Our weekend in the Brecon Beacons gave us the chance to share ideas, swap recipes and cook together with our oldest friends which is always an inspiring time and makes my creative juices flow. We tasted cheeses and helped to send pigs off for slaughter. Madame and I have brewed beer, grown crops, kept a goat, made terrible wine and maintained a flock of increasingly heterodox hens. Every page of “Modern Peasant” contained a reminder of our journeys in France, Portugal and Spain in search of food we’d read about but never actually eaten. The tripe sausages in a motorway service station near Lyon that tasted of shit were probably the worst thing we ever tried. In Portugal I had to almost fight a waiter to try Feijoada in the one restaurant that still produced it in its original peasant glory. The waiters were so amazed that they surrounded me and watched as I ate, and I swear I found a pig’s tooth nestling in it. In another restaurant a waiter refused point blank to sell me Stone Soup because, he said, I wouldn’t like it. I insisted and I didn’t – but at least I can speak from experience.

Ah yes, we watched handmade cheese being made in Wensleydale and we’ve now eaten our way through many of the artisanal products which have come back from virtual extinction. The Gloucester Services on the M5 have become a place of pilgrimage for foodies; unimaginable 50 years ago! The Potwell Inn kitchen has been assembled from all the recipes we’ve ever tried and loved. There are always two or three types of stock on the go, and the longer we go on the more likely it is that we will have the exact right tool for the job. Two or three times a week you’d see sourdough proving on the stove in a bowl that was given to us 67 years ago.

So yes I was excited, encouraged and inspired by Jojo Tulloh’s book, and if you live in a small flat in the middle of a city and long to discover your inner peasant, this lovely book will set you on the path for sure.