19.12.23
This will be the last leaf / notes of 2023 as I take a little break from growing and writing, although not from cooking! Thanks for joining me here either from psychogastronomy or since; if you’ve enjoyed it, please do like and comment and share and subscribe!
in the soil
It is just wet, wet again, very wet; during a day between rains I mulch the asparagus, most of it died back or fallen over, with bagfuls of dead leaves which are themselves wet, I pour wet compost into a still-dry bin, it is wet and cold, not even that cold but a wet cold, the kind of cold, my mother says, not herself young, the kind of cold where old people start complaining about their arthritis. In fact my bad knee has started hurting in the wet cold but I don’t say anything. At least the ponds and the water butts are full and nothing has frozen over or burst, instead the paths are churned and everything seems made of mud, the wet dead leaves and the wet compost and the earth of course, all made of a uniformly brown and wet substance, a primordial soup. I pull on a glove and find it sodden wet, left too close to the walls of the shed, and with a slug resident in the thumb.
in the kitchen
My partner has gone home to Italy for Christmas where I will join her and her family for New Year as is now somewhat traditional, as is also now traditional we had a small pre-Christmas dinner-and-present-swap before she left. One year this was a full-blown Christmas dinner, but this year we only have an evening free, not the time to be eating a full-blown Christmas dinner, and neither of us have the energy or the inclination to cook much anyway. A sort-of-festive traybake of potatoes and sprouts topped with beef köfte and buttered yoghurt is preceded as is also now traditional by vol-au-vents of shop-bought puff pastry and smoked eel. Eel is the only thing I buy that I really don’t think I should and so I feel guilty for the yearly indulgence but I tell myself that the ethics are complicated and it is from a sustainable fishery and in any case it is yearly, the vol-au-vents, stuffed also with horseradish and pickled beetroot are delicious of course.
on the page
The 12th century herbalist, mystic and composer Hildegard of Bingen was among her many accomplishments broadly correct about eels; while her male counterparts, up to Sigmund Freud and his obsessive search for the eel’s genitals, were convinced that they may have some special method of reproduction – Aristotle speculated that they simply appeared spontaneously in mud – she suggested that maybe they just went somewhere else to get on with their business. We are bad I think at really imagining what it is to live a life as eels do in such separate stages, that a seemingly adult fish should simply not yet have the organs of reproduction, we flatten a cycle and make it linear; we think of a caterpillar as a machine for making butterflies, when the brief life of a butterfly is really a sacrifice to ensure more caterpillars.