17.9.24

in the soil

However anticipated – however inevitable – it is hard to avoid a sense of failure when blight hits the tomato plants, especially perhaps as the fungus seems to spread from the end of the allotments where we are, next to the hedges and then the open fields, before moving into the rest of the plots; to see plants nurtured from seed through a difficult summer blacken and rot from the stems, leaves wither and curl, still-green fruit turn a murky brown; there is nothing to be done about it, though, except not to grow the tomatoes in the first place, which I do consider, every year. This year my one bushy tomato plant, protected a little in a pot, only managed three ripe fruit before the blight arrived, and the amount of green tomatoes I am left with is barely enough for a jar of chutney. Next year, concentrate on cucumbers, I tell myself as I do every year. At least now the hopes of the summer are over and nobody expects very much from the next few months, maybe the cauliflowers will swell up nicely, maybe the chicories and hardy lettuce I lazily broadcast will come up and give us their bitter winter green.

in the kitchen

Weather and ingredients and craving at last for the kind of cooking you can gently put together, chopping this and sweating that and browning the other, and then pop in a pan or in the oven with a bundle of herbs and leave to putter away while you get on with something else, even if that something else is “prepping all the rest of the menu”. We all love a soffritto of onion, celery and carrot cooking slowly away in whatever fat is appropriate, but even more satisfying sometimes are the recipes which manage to do without – there is an Olia Hercules recipe for rabbit which involves not much more than sour cream and a lot of caramelised garlic which I like very much. At work we have some beef shin without a purpose and I remember the Tuscan stew peposo which I was introduced to by the late Russell Norman’s restaurant Brutto; not having his book to hand I follow Rachel Roddy’s recipe in the Guardian which (I compare the two later) is even simpler than his, just beef and whole cloves of garlic and wine and black pepper and you eat it with a hunk of bread.

on the page

I am reading too many things at once again and I don’t have much to say about any of them. The Elizabeth David biography I read last week sends me off to finally read some Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell, which I cannot read without picturing the pompous Larry of his little brother Gerald’s stories, the comedy bohemian of the Durrells TV series, which just makes me want to rewatch La Chimera; I am also reading Nikos Kazantzakis’ God’s Pauper, a hagiography of Francis of Assisi, and the weirdly entertaining The Castle of Fratta which makes me think of Gormenghast with its sprawling turrets and cavernous kitchens and of The Baron in the Trees but is mainly peculiarly itself.