Tag: Geoffrey Grigson

Christmas at the Potwell Inn

Mistletoe

Geoffrey Grigson lists so many myths, folklore fragments and healing properties for mistletoe that after the second dozen I gave up counting them. Many of them were concerned with fertility, citing the similarity between mistletoe berries and what he coyly calls the male part. I’ve tried to verify that by looking at photos (of plants, of course) but I don’t really get that one; unless he had some uniquely blessed male friends with an extra testicle for luck! However if mistletoe gives license for a kiss I’m all in favour as long as it’s between consenting friends. Never inflame a temptation unless you’re free to yield to it has always been my motto.

Grigson, whose book “The Englishman’s Flora” lives on my desk, wasn’t writing a botanical textbook. The reason his book is so useful is because it’s a work of anthropology; examining how how and why plants have been used in the past – which often also explains how or why they got their names. Just one example is Figwort – which doesn’t make much sense until you look at the tight purple rinsed flower and then discover that “fig” was one of many ways of describing piles and so it was thought (via the doctrine of signatures) that it would cure that very common and uncomfortable condition.

Anyway, enough of that! Christmas has come and still lingers like a houseguest with a toothbrush for a few more days before we all secretly breathe a sigh of relief and get on with our boring and predictable lives. The Potwell Inn, as always, was especially busy with overnight guests; some of them sons. Partners and children were visited and hugged on Boxing day. It’s conventional for clergy (and retired ones like me) to moan about the workload, and it’s true; Christmas was always hard going with up to 20 carol services. Christmas Eve was particularly heavy going with services at 8.00am, 10.00am 4.00pm and 11.30pm followed by no more than four hours sleep and then four more in the morning. Then, because I was constantly up and around until 3.00am and then again at 7.00am , it always fell to me to attend to the turkey, cook gammon and feed the five thousand between services until I finally got home, tyres smoking from roaring around narrow country lanes and share a bottle of celebratory champagne after which I would finish cooking dinner rather drunkenly, discover I wasn’t really hungry any more and fall asleep.

Christmas cooking can’t be fully described without talking as Geoffrey Grigson did with a form of culinary anthropology in mind. Coincidentally – or perhaps importantly, Geoffrey the poet was married to Jane Grigson the cookery writer who did understand that there was more to Christmas cooking than a few ingredients. Cooking is regional, familial, historical and associated with powerful spiritual connections because Christmas, solstice, yule and so on are all associated with a key moment in the calendar – the slow return of longer days. Farm workers, for instance, were often laid off in the weeks surrounding winter solstice and so Plough Monday – the day the plough was brought into Christian churches to be blessed; signifies that turning point in the agricultural year.

Every year the bookshops are flooded with Christmas recipe books, and yet – apart from a few novel bells and whistles – most of them miss the point altogether. Very few food writers have explored the deep connection between the recipes and the cultures that brought them into being. Cooking is an important aspect of anthropology and very few food writers have grasped that essential fact. Cooks will, for instance, try to tweak the Christmas pudding with a novel ingredient or two and describe the dish as “essential” without even attempting to answer the question “why is that?” One of the few, and one of my favourite food writers is Patience Gray. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about another of my favourite food writers who also managed to unite the recipe with a sense of the history and culture of a place; she was called MFK Fisher, an American writer who wrote some fine books about French cookery traditions. I’ve long thought that there must be some kind of genealogy for cookery writers and I even had a bash at creating one a couple of years ago. The piece I wrote is called “About a Book” and you can easily reach it with the linked title here. The titles of all the books and their writers are all in that incomplete list. These writers, and especially Patience Gray who lived much of her life in Puglia, penetrated the deep roots of the cultures they were writing about. Their books would still have been an inspiration without a single recipe – although I’m so glad they left their accounts. Modern cookbooks with their rich and unctuous photographs and endless hybrid ingredients make me feel queasy.

This year I missed my parishes more than ever before. Ten years into retirement we’ve finally reset our lives and I’m able to look back with a degree of detachment and write that with a few exceptions I loved every moment. I never saw myself as a great theologian – I was far too given to exploring heretical ideas for that. Real faith, it seems to me should bear a close resemblance to Odysseus’ wife Penelope weaving, or rather not weaving the burial shroud for her father Laertes in the Odyssey. If it’s not unpicked regularly, you’ll risk being hooked up with a dud, or a foolish or even a sociopathic religious sect. But with my background in community arts, I knew from the outset that the skill set needed for a full church is pretty much the same as it is for a full pub, and my preaching was always inspired and inflected by everyday conversations, about ordinary things with people I’d grown to love, however annoying they could sometimes be. Leaving them was a profound bereavement. Perhaps the Potwell Inn was the consolation I needed.

There is, of course, a strongly ritualistic element in Christmas cooking; much of it leaning on family memories of the past. For years we mentioned the possibility to our three grown-up sons that we might change the Christmas day menu. They were invariably horrified at the thought and so it was turkey every year until lockdown when I cooked Mexican just for Madame and me. It felt very naughty! Aside from that there are a slew of memories that we honour in the weeks preceding Christmas. Making Christmas cake and Christmas puddings demands the making of wishes, and thankfully we no longer have to lift the steaming puddings out of the wash boiler with a bleached white copper stick hooked into a looped knot in old torn sheets. These days we use the pressure cooker which still retains at least some of the drama.

On Christmas Eve I cook a piece of gammon; sometimes roasted in the oven and sometimes poached in cider, always flavoured with cloves, peppercorns, bay, star anise and sage. The leftover stock or meat juices are kept for lentil soup. That’s supper and breakfast in one. Then the stuffings are prepared echoing with memories of Elizabeth David; the giblets poached with a few root veg to complement the gravy and all set out in the cold ready for the morning. On Christmas morning the bird is stuffed, the pigs in blankets rolled in bacon painted with mustard and the steam begins to run in rivulets down the windows. Then there is roasting, basting and prodding and poking with the thermometer until we are all agreed that the bird is cooked and the roasties crisp. Gluttony follows as night follows day and then the blazing Christmas pud and for those with elasticated bellies, sherry trifle. Christmas dinner is liturgical; we know it’s not real life but for a few blissful hours we can pretend it is.

The sherry trifle is made from a recipe given to me by Gill, an old friend, many years ago and which has been riveted on to the menu for decades. The biggest problem is sourcing the crystallised angelica without which it just doesn’t look right. The last time I found any (in Penzance) I bought the whole stock, so now I need to begin the search again. Oh and cheap glacé cherries are dyed with a kind of red stain that leaches quickly into the whipped cream spoils it.

Then on Boxing Day inevitably cold turkey with bubble and squeak after which we strip the remaining meat from the bones and make about a gallon of stock, some of which we use as broth the next day, and the rest of which is reduced and frozen in cubes for later.

So that’s the menu for our lump standard Christmas dinner, but there’s another ingredient which carries even more emotional baggage, because on Boxing Day especially we eat pickles.

There are no eat-by dates on pickles and chutneys at the Potwell Inn. we open them up and if they’re not sporting a flora of moulds we taste them and they’re almost always OK. Chutneys can be awfully raw at the beginning but they greatly improve with age, and I can always remember each batch in the making. Years ago I bought a gross of honey jars with tin lids which will corrode pretty soon when in contact with vinegar fumes so we’ve learned to keep the honey jars for jams, jellies and marmalade and keep pickles and chutneys in Kilner jars with rubber seals. We grow our own red and white currants on the allotment; alongside beans, cucumbers, chillies, carrots, courgettes. Plums and damsons come from our friends in Severnside, along with medlars which we blet for two or three weeks until they’ve gone soft. The bletting, brining and cooking can take ages but once finished and bottled they’ll keep for years and in the autumn, when the cupboards are full, they lend a feeling of continuity and security as well as adding unique flavours to a lunch of bread and cheese. With this kind of food we dine with our ancestors. We inherited the thriftiness of our parents who lived through shortages and it’s heartbreaking to think that future generations may miss that strange comfort of making leftovers taste lovely.

So time now for me to cook supper – and meanwhile we at the Potwell Inn wish all our friends big hugs and restrained kisses and to all our readers a very happy Christmas and New Year.

Being annoying isn’t just a personality trait – it’s a vocation!

Yesterday’s food from the allotment

City centre life is something of a competition between optimism and pessimism much of the time. Even in this impossible summer season the vegetables still grow and ripen; our best ever crop of Alderman peas – they grow vigorously to six feet and more and this year, for unknown reasons, we’ve escaped the usual infestation of pea moth. The pods are full of large, sweet, delicious peas of a quality that make you wonder if the frozen supermarket peas are even the same vegetable. The polytunnel tomatoes (Crimson Crush) are their usual vigorous and blight resistant selves, in fact the maincrop potatoes (Sarpo Mira) are also blight resistant and so we haven’t seen the ruination of the whole crop since we started growing them. We’re holding our nerve this year and growing all our sweetcorn in the tunnel – last year I transplanted them outside when they were 2′ tall and they too gave us a lovely crop because the badgers, squirrels and rats left them alone. The courgettes still try and rampage all over the allotment, but we’re ruthless with them. The only surprise is that pollintions have been generally good notwithstanding the desperate shortage of pollinators. We can’t claim any credit for the blackberries aside from training them along the boundary fence to deter night-time visitors. Unlike most garden cultivars the fruits taste great but the thorns are long and sharp enough to snag a rhinoceros.

That’s all on the plus side, but more negatively we have to cope with the usual inner city challenges thick and humid air; of night time overflights to Bristol Airport; constant ambulances and police cars driving past with warning sirens blasting; juvenile seagulls – temporarily grounded by their inability to fly back to their nests screeching for food from 4.00am, kitchen waste strewn across the pavements by urban gulls and foxes, noisy hen parties in the airBnb opposite with occasional glimpses of male strippers doing their thing, and then the ubiquitous semi conscious junkies, dealers, drunks and out of control dogs crapping unobserved by their owners who make sure they’re deeply absorbed by important business on the mobile rather than doggy business on the grass. Then, yesterday afternoon a squadron of jackhammers, bulldozers and heavy lorries started breaking up the foundations of the old Homebase site ready for another completely unnecessary block of overpriced and under spec flats. Promises to build doctors surgeries, primary schools and community facilities alongside low cost housing will be broken as always with the payment of a small fine to the local authority. The snagging for the redevelopment opposite has continued for years with missing damp courses, missing fire safety precautions, crumbling lintels, lime green slime mould on the faux Bath Stone walls, windows improperly installed or not fixed at all, and, (following a conversation today with a very upset owner) meaningless insurance. He couldn’t talk about it because it just made him emotional and depressed. Any word of protest will result in angry responses from landlords and Airbnb owners who would prefer you not to know that this is not quite the Paradise Regained promised by the publicity. Naturally, for a student of life like me, it’s a marvellous field for research and we wouldn’t want to live anywhere else! The weeds are fabulous.

My interest in Geoffrey Grigson (The Englishman’s Flora) has continued and I wanted to find out why exactly he’d managed to fall out with quite so many people. As someone who has regularly been told that I’m the rudest person they’ve ever met I thought he might have something I could learn to improve my technique. However it seems we are simply inveterate bubble poppers and can’t help ourselves when we’re confronted by mediocrity and dishonesty. His collected newspaper reviews* are tough going – far too prolix and dripping with anger aimed at other writers who are now (decades later) absolutely unknown – so they seem like a drastic waste of emotional energy. Far better to go for a walk and try to identify that tall Dandelion looking thing on the pavement outside. Most of the spanners, fruitcakes and halfwits will lose their reputations purely through the attrition of time. I’m aiming to disappear long before I’m dead, but the prospect of cluttering up the memory of a computer in the middle of the Mojave Desert with the Potwell Inn blog for all eternity amuses me, as I shall be asleep under a rock in a troutstream somewhere having completed my million words.

But hey, The Englishman’s Flora in spite of it’s Grandiose “The” in the title, rather than a more modest “An”; and its inappropriately sexist attitude to non male botanists is a really interesting and useful book that attempts (against all the odds) to unite the great ship of field botany with the other great ships of folk medicine, regional and local names and even witchcraft; all of which are heading off in different directions. It’s a book that hasn’t yet fallen for the daft idea that the pruinose texture of a Sloe in the autumn can be completely or even adequately described by a DNA string. Who’d have thought that there’s a member of the Stonecrop family called “Roseroot” which lives high in the mountains and whose roots smell of – obviously roses. Who’d have guessed that the odd looking Pineapple Weed, which lives in farm gateways where it’s guaranteed a regular hammering, actually smells just like a pineapple when you squeeze its flowerhead. For me this is not at all evidence of the hand of God, but of the awe inspiring, wasteful and aesthetically dazzling creativity of evolving nature.

  • Geoffrey Grigson – “The Contrary View” 1974

Bloodstained Juggling with six balls

By Brook seen from the lawn of the White Hart in Ford

I’m wrestling with half a dozen recalcitrant strands of an idea that just might make a story. Of course it might also just make a WTF? mess – only time and a patient reader will tell.

So the first strand is this. I mentioned last week in The Potwell Inn blog that my copy of Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellously useful book “An Englishman’s Flora” is falling apart and I’d have to buy another copy. My clapped out paperback is a 1975 reprint of the original hardback published in 1958 and the pages are now turning brown and are foxed. The glue binding is breaking down and it’s just at the point where the pages start dropping out. I bought it for next to nothing in an Oxfam shop and I see that the cover price was less than £2 when it was new. Anyway, prompted by my resolution it went into our very small bathroom where I rediscovered what a magnificent resource it is and immediately searched out a hardback secondhand version for £17, presently on it way from another OXFAM shop in Harrogate. That’s thread one.

Thread two emerged when I was browsing through the book and randomly came across the entry for Dwarf Elder which is given no less than seven pages by the gloriously erudite Grigson. Married three times, his last wife was Jane Grigson the food writer who – I discovered today during my flurry of research – believed that food is such an important component of being human flourishing that it deserves the same high standard of writing as any other form of literature. Of course she was absolutely spot on which is why I’ve got a shelf full of her books. That’s a side issue, though for the purposes of this piece of weaving, but what a family they must have been!

The main thread concerns the Dwarf Elder because I only saw the plant for the first time this year on the footpath to the north of the lakes at Woodchester Mansion. According to the BSBI Plant Atlas 2020 it’s in steep decline across the country; probably partly due to the fact that it’s no longer planted as a medicinal herb often in churchyards in order, they believed, to improve its health giving qualities.

So threads three and four join the river at this point because Grigson points out that it’s a stronger version of the Common Elder, the roots and leaves of which can yield a blue dye and a powerful purgative. We should bear in mind that for many centuries (this plant gets mentioned by Dioscorides in his first century pharmacopeia ) – plants were prized more for their medicinal usefulness more than for their aesthetic qualities. However the more intriguing point is that its local name is Danewort and it was believed – perhaps due to the colour of the berries and leaves – that it sprang from the bodies, or more specifically the blood, of Danish invaders. The bloody colour and the doctrine of signatures gave the game away – it was thought. So far, so fascinating I thought, but then I (metaphorically) sat up straight because he wrote that the plant could still be found in 1974 in the village of Slaughterford which straddles By Brook. Hold on to that thought because I’ll come back to it for another thread. As it happens, and as you’ll know already if you’re a Potwell Inn regular, we drove over to Slaughterford only a few weeks ago in search of a pub which turned out to be in the next village of Ford. If you were even considering duplicating our trip I’d strongly advise approaching the pub from the A420 because the connection between Slaughterford and Ford is not much better than a muddy track.

But why Slaughterford? You have to ask don’t you? Grigson quotes the 17th century Wiltshire historian John Aubrey and then dismisses his assertion that Dwarf Elder aka Danewort or even Danesblood which still apparently grows in Slaughterford is the sign that a battle between King Alfred and the Danish invaders was fought in the village and resulted in the rout of the Danes with much slaughter. A quick scamper around Wikipedia establishes that the consensus today is that the battle was actually fought some miles away in Edington.

But in the early hours of this morning, I was mulling over what I’d discovered about Grigson, and another fact that came up was that he’d lived in “North Wiltshire”. Might he have lived in Slaughterford? was the tantalizing thought which kept me awake. The answer, after an early start on the laptop, was no he didn’t. But he did live quite nearby on the other side of Chippenham.

Gradually the picture was emerging that Slaughterford was not the scene of a famous battle fought by King Alfred and so how on earth did it come by such a gory name? The truth turns out to be that the name is a contraction from the Saxon of Sloe Thorn – and so the village name really means the river crossing where the sloes trees (Blackthorn) grows.

There must have been many crossing points on By Brook. At one time there were over twenty mills working there and we actually walked up the river past the last functioning paper mill in around 1970. Coming upon it while walking the banks from Corsham was quite a surprise – a semi derelict industrial site in the midst of the most beautiful valley. I’m waiting for my newer and more durable copy of the book to arrive, but what a fascinating journey from a Greek botanist to a 20th century poet. The Slaughterford myth gets repeated even in quite recent herbals – Mrs Grieve’s 1920’s book “A Modern Herbal” quotes it without comment.

There are two further points about By Brook I could make. Firstly the photos I took from the pub garden strongly suggest that the water is far more polluted and eutrophic than it was when we first encountered it in 1970. You’d probably find it impossible to make paper there now, and the brown trout also need clean and unpolluted water. But secondly, there is strong enough evidence to make it to the Natural History Museum website, that there is at least one family of beavers living on the brook. Thank goodness the beavers are vegetarian and therefore no threat to the local trout. In fact the fly fishers commissioned a report on the condition of the brook which recommended some modifications to the river bed to improve flows and slacks to help with breeding the native brown trout. Maybe they’ll get their wish granted free of charge by nature. I’m sure beavers and brown trout have lived in harmony in previous centuries before the beavers were hunted to extinction.

Postscript

My secondhand book arrived today – big thanks to OXFAM in Harrogate. It’s wonderful – in excellent condition and properly bound to lie flat. I absolutely love it! The paperback version can go back for an honourable retirement in the bookcase.

“Send three and fourpence – going to a dance.”

Shaggy Soldier

It’s not a great photograph for sure, but the family name Galinsoga triggered the memory of a story my dad used to tell about a wartime message which began as “send reinforcements, going to advance” and having been passed by mouth from messenger to messenger finally arrived at headquarters as “Send three and fourpence, going to a dance”. The trigger, of course was the similarity, when spoken, between Galinsoga and Gallant Soldier.

As ever I turned to Geoffrey Grigson’s marvellous 1958 book “An Englishman’s Flora” which lists Latin and English folk names, county by county for hundreds of familiar flowering plants. Galinsoga is something of an outlier in the book because it lists only one name by way of explanation to describe these “thin, long legged, little flowered daisies, ray flowers white, disc flowers yellow – annual, naturalised little cockneys in a waste corner or uncultivated garden” and makes the link between the plant name and the 18th century Spanish botanist Don Mariano Martinez de Galinsoga.

Many of the plants mentioned in the book have dozens of local folk names which would (at least the Oxfordshire ones) have been familiar to my mother. Every time I open the book I get a pang to think of the loss of local dialects; it only took a few turns of the page to discover that in Gloucestershire the Spindle tree was known as Skiver – which isn’t a name I’ve ever heard. But what about “Single Gussies”, “Smear Docken” or “Son afore the father”? What about “Arse smart”? The rich and earthy poetry of plant names has all but disappeared by now. I remember an old man in Pucklechurch delightedly telling my young sister that the Dandelion she’d picked was really called “Piss the Bed”. I can see the point of the Latin binomials if a native botanist of Gloucestershire was trying to compare Pulmonaria (Jerusalem Cowslip) notes with a neighbour from Herefordshire who called it Spotted Virgin” – but there’s a wealth of folklore and pre-scientific medical wisdom hidden within the local dialect names. It’s a great book to browse and I’ve almost worn my battered paperback copy out – I’ll have to shell out for a properly stitched hardback copy one of these days.