18.9.23

in the soil

Blight wants to take hold. I remember reading somewhere that however hard and scientifically we as a species attempt to prolong our lives we do so vainly in the face of cancers, that the more we learn to stave off other diseases and problems of the flesh the more inevitable we make that virulent decay; however well you tend your plants through drought and pest, in the damp of the English autumn, in the loss of the light, this creeping fungus is the cancer of the tomato. All you can really do is pick them early and look up green tomato recipes and hope.

in the kitchen

I have been away and have not set foot in a kitchen commercial or otherwise but instead admiring the cooking of others. Rich thin noodles with more bite than they deserve hiding beneath an extravagance of truffle, snug little dumplings, skewers of grilled onion and lamb and its liver, rolls of veal and pork collar, gnocchi swimming in cheese, oozing frittate, sandy hazelnut biscuits, just-set pannacotta, someone is selling scoops of sweet gorgonzola in waffle cones like ice cream but the queue is too long. On the train I imagine biting into a leaf of curly kale, really chewing nutrients, we settle once home for a vegetable biriani.

on the page

At the Long Table of the refectory of the House of the Wise on Roke the pupils of the school are served not by enslaved hobgoblins or by showy magic but by their own hands, ladling stew and soup from canteen hatches, no matter how many sit at this table there is always room. To my regret I never got round to reading any Ursula Le Guin until after she died at which point among the tributes I read that when asked what if anything she might change in any of her books that she would mention the communal pickle barrels at street corners in the big towns, restocked by whoever in the community has made or kept more pickles than they need and of course then I was hooked. A utopia must be built on food - on pickles, maybe.