I guess it’s safe to admit, ten years after I retired, that I would occasionally climb the steps to the pulpit with no script but just a cluster of ideas whirling around my brain and praying that I could somehow thread them together into a sermon. This risky strategy evolved from the Franciscans who understood that the genuinely authentic sermon came out of knowing your stuff and assembling your talk like the pieces of a jigsaw until the last piece, the big reveal, showed how it fitted together all along. Some of my congregation loved the excitement and learned to be patient. I never believed in the spoon feeding of platitudes taken verbatim from a commentary. Others were kind enough to describe it as a waste of time, and insult to their intelligence (what intelligence?), or told me they hadn’t understood a word. Actually I agreed with all of them – but for different reasons.
At this time of year I have similar problems with cooking. There are only two of us permanent residents at the Potwell Inn, so what the hell do I cook with all these aubergines/ courgettes/ figs / tomatoes and beans? What with the drought, the successive heatwaves and the weeds it’s a wonder that we’ve got any crops at all but we decided early on to prioritise the watering and we’ve kept most of our plants alive – hence the surpluses. There’s a deep satisfaction in harvesting just as there is in cooking, although standing in front of the stove sweating and cursing all day when it’s well over 30C is less than fun. Growing, harvesting, cooking and eating are like a genetic sequence; they always belong together and as such they’re a part of ‘the way we do things round here‘; our culture and the meanings of our lives.
Of course it takes a bit of practice to acquire the skills in all four disciplines, but compared with the times we started it’s a doddle. You couldn’t buy garlic, olive oil, any imported foods unless there was a deli nearby (we were lucky because we had two deli’s but we could barely afford to shop in either of them and in one of them they treated you as if you’d been brought in on someone’s shoe. Food and class are another complex that should be more familiar to anthropologists than they are. I was taught to cook by Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and others. Even in the swinging sixties, Penguin books i.e affordable books were still printed on the cheapest paper and were rarely if ever illustrated aside from the wondrously evocative line drawings by John Minton and others which, while failing completely to convey much sense of what a dish was meant to look like, resonated with the culture of which it was a part. You could learn the ingredients of a dish – let’s say an omelette – but never be repulsed by some disturbing image, glistening like like a rabbit’s freshly drawn guts such as feature so widely today in food-porn coffee table books. Then you were lucky if you got more than “get some eggs, break them and whisk them, put a knob of butter in the pan and cook the omelette whilst stirring (?) and shaking it. Turn it out. When you learned to cook French food from ED you absorbed far more of the regional geography and culture of France that you ever learned about cooking an omelette. But you certainly knew what to cook it in. The first part of her books tended to be about “The batterie de cuisine” and in Clifton where we lived there was a shop that sold good pans that we couldn’t often afford anyway. Jane Grigson, another writer of real heft, was the same. No pictures to speak of but cultural wisdom hovered like a graceful miasma around every page. Her daughter, also a cook, recalled that she occasionally might find a dead pig in the bath waiting to be dealt with. That’s my girl! Jane’s partner Geoffrey Grigson was a polymath poet, writer and botanist who wrote one of my favourite books – “The Englishman’s Flora” which I discovered only an hour ago is soon going to be re-published by Doubleday under the more appropriate title “A British Flora”. Geoffey Grigson’s extensive research goes beyond listing plants by adding fascinating material on their uses and local names. Once again a Grigson book comes close to being a cultural anthropology of plants rather than a dry list.
Anyway, on the stove in the picture at the top – fig compote cooking down slowly until it become a dark, sticky and fragrant mass – (representing the lower strings section in the flavour orchestra) and the lighter woodwinds represented by Marcella Hazan’s marvellous no.1 tomato sauce which is indispensable to the Potwell Inn kitchen. We make pounds of it and bottle it to last through the year. The peapods are going to be part of a vegetable stock to give some hinterland to a french style vegetable soup.
Regarding the climate crisis we went for a wander around Bath a couple of days ago and I photographed this lovely Georgian street running down towards the river from Walcot Street. I’ve mentioned before the fanatical opposition to any move by the council to reduce traffic in Bath. More than fifty years ago when we lived here, the Local Authority when not occupied with demolishing fine houses on Snow Hill and replacing them with Tower blocks, also commissioned the Buchanan report which proposed demolishing much of Walcot and building a tunnel to link the north to the southbound routes. This plan would have involved the demolition of all of the houses you see. When the houses were empty it planned to set fire to one of them so the Fire Brigade could practice putting out fires in Georgian buildings. The sensible citizens of Bath rose up against the whole plan which would have left Bath without one of its finest parishes and the city remained clogged and polluted by ever growing traffic. The traditionalists seemingly grew attached to the noise and the choking fumes and every time a remedy is suggested which involves walking or cycling they rush, screaming like banshees to the high court to defend the ancient right to drive at 40mph in a 20mph zone , to park on the pavement and to treat zebra crossings as suggestions that you might care to stop but if, on the other hand you don’t feel like it you may menace pedestrians without fear of tiresome legal proceedings. Most amusingly the High Priest of rage oftens begins his letters to internet groups by writing “I’m not normally one to complain”. We really don’t deserve him!
