10.9.24

in the soil

Someone has dumped a pile of woodchips by the start of the path for people to help themselves from, for mulching beds or laying paths or generally keeping things tidy, unwanted growths to a minimum; wherever these woodchips have been laid sprout a profusion of parasol mushrooms, fungus latent in the wood thriving in this cold and wet – wet rather than damp now, and cold in the wind even when the sun is shining, the bottom dropped out of the year. I missed the chance to plant a squash or two – the slugs would probably have had it anyway – and I have nothing to bridge the gap between the tomatoes and cucumbers, the former running to blight, and the winter greens and lettuces I am optimistically sowing into fresh-turned earth; even the blackberries have given up early, a few weeks shy of Michaelmas when the devil is supposed to go around spitting on them or pissing on them or in some way cursing them, still fruiting but tasteless and mean.

in the kitchen

At this time of year I feel you should be sick of summer, glutted with tomatoes and aubergines and peppers and green beans, long tired of courgettes, ready for pumpkin and mushrooms and long slow braises to return to the culinary repertoire; this year it is a relief to find the community veg bag still full of summer. A pasta sauce of red and green peppers almost-burned with red onion and sun-dried pepper paste, a risotto of sweetcorn, just a little dried mushroom in the stock to remind you what is to come – I crave the kind of soup thickened by the dissolution of a single potato, sweet and bright but murky too.

on the page

Reading Artemis Cooper’s authorised biography Writing At The Kitchen Table I realise that I did not know a single thing about Elizabeth David outside of her work beyond the fact that she was vaguely upper-class and (thanks to someone sharing an intensely glamourous publicity shot on Instagram) was at one point an aspiring actress; I am surprised by the picture that emerges even through the usually careful elisions of an authorised biography of a life lived freely and hard, from accidental internment in fascist Italy to the louche bohemianisms of postwar Cairo and back to England to revolutionise its food with a craving for a beakerful of the warm south. It is also somewhat heartening to read that even a writer of David’s stature and clear abilities found herself the victim of the commercial vagaries of the publishing industry.