18.6.24
in the soil
On a walk through town I see a pigeon dead on the kerb with no visible injury and then, between the road and the sea, a herring gull similarly dead, blood leaking out from beneath its beak presumably from the impact of its fall, the body and wings folded as if at peace. When I lived in Sicily I would see dead birds in the street all the time, the heat dropping them clean out of the sky – a swift, once, which never in its life should touch the mean earth – but heat cannot be it in this summer of ours. Bird flu, someone suggests, I don’t know. Away from the coast at the allotment the birds are all fine, the pigeons fat on fruit buds and brassicas and the equally fat slugs, a blackbird eying my moves as I dig up the broad beans to plant out borlotti, hoping for worms.
in the kitchen
I twice eat soggy-bread-and-tomato salads and entirely by coincidence spend a while discussing the particular texture that is used-to-be-crunchy-but-now-is-soggy found amongst other places in:
croutons in soup or well-dressed salad
buffalo wings
the little bits of potato left at the end of a roast dinner
katsu curry
escabeche of mackerel or mullet or sardine
a dish of deep-fried meatballs marinaded in sweet and sour onions I had in Sicily once
breakfast cereals of most kinds
friselle
or
a dunked biscuit
although this depends on personal dunking habits of course. In Italy most biscuits are (by design) hard enough to absolutely require a soak in coffee or hot milk before eating, like sweet hard tack. I like to take a Hobnob, say, and immerse it in cold milk until the bubbles stop rising.
on the page
Hugh Corcoran’s Two Dozen Eggs is a remarkable little thing, twenty-four small treasures to work your way through. With its neat recipe at the end of each story, vague enough to inspire, it feels and looks rather like a return to some lost and romantic mode of food writing, although it isn’t food writing at all really, despite its recipes and its restaurateurs and dish-washers and chefs but something new, exactly as its subtitle has it, pocket stories for cooks.