1.7.25

in the soil

I arrive expecting a summer abundance, the first of the courgettes maybe, that fruit which were last week barely the size of my little finger will have shot up as courgettes do almost into marrows but instead (starved of water, this heat) they are arrested at the size they were and do not look as if they intend to grow any more and so I cut them off, make way for more fruit to come. You can see where roots are deep, the bramble and the artichoke and the little fig tree lush and leafy as if watered daily, the horseradish I cannot quite get rid of in my herb bed growing high and green, smaller plants suffering. For various reasons I like to grow from seed directly in the soil rather than planting out seedlings and I think (I like to think) this makes them more resilient, stable and spreading in their home; certainly the cucumber plants are doing well, sprawling themselves out across the soil as they like to do, running along beneath the beans climbing upwards. I cut probably the last bunch of agretti, growing branchier than I would like, and am amused to see the grass just downhill from it is the greenest to be seen, the rest yellow and balding, beneficiary of its regular soakings.

in the kitchen

Although ice-cream is always welcome hot weather I think calls for tepid food, everything cooked in advance and left to sit around until you can be bothered to eat it. Nick Bramham at Quality Wines has a very good line in tepid food, I keep seeing his stewed green beans on Instagram and want to eat them. Other good tepid foods:

caponata

potato salad

escabeche of whatever

greens cooked in olive oil with chilli and garlic and maybe some anchovy

oily pickles

soup!

In Sicily they make a soup of tenerumi which are the tender greens of cucuzze, a particular variety of squash, with potato and tomato and maybe some of the squash too and they serve that thoroughly tepid on hot summer days. My cucuzze are yet to even grow their true leaves so that will have to wait until later in the summer.

on the page

I learn from a piece in Eaten magazine that the battered fish that would eventually become fish and chips was originally designed as a tepid food to be cooked in advance ready to be eaten for the Jewish sabbath, served hot as it mutated into a British street food, perhaps to suit the British taste for eating things scaldingly hot. People in this country do tend to be weird about fried food that has been sitting around to go soggy, which it only really does if you've fried it badly in the first place or piled it up on top of itself to gently steam; in Italy, on the other hand, they love frying things nice and crispy and then immersing them in some kind of marinade. This took me a while to come round to but I get it now.