20.2.25

in the soil

Not even a smattering of snow this winter, not here nor in the Veneto where I spent a day watching radicchio growing, but today it is wet and spring-warm, there are lambs suckling in the fields which two days ago shone with frost, menus are beginning to green with wild garlic, budding alexanders, first signs of a new year. I should really get the pruning done, I think, before the earth wakes up in earnest, I should get more sleep, I should write to my aunt – instead I sit on the too-early train and write this.

in the kitchen

Tonight I am cooking a meal in Hastings or rather Saint Leonard's at a restaurant called Bayte which like all one-off meals I treat as a chance to flex culinary muscles I do not use in my day-to-day work, cook recipes I have not cooked in a while, and in the process give myself arguably too much to do. It is nice, though, because however much I love the food of Southern Italy it is nice to salt rhubarb and leave it to ferment and then cook it with garlic and spices into a dense sour relish, to make chocolate mousse treacly with muscovado sugar, to sauté turnips aged in grape pomace and make a soup of them with white beans to top with smoked eel which I half-hope nobody will order so that I can eat more of it.

on the page

A short tract on Witches, Midwifes and Nurses argues quite convincingly that while the modern attitude of the medical establishment towards complementary medicines, herbalism traditional and tribal is that of science against faith in its original form during the medieval witch hysteria the opposite was true, herbalism being based on deep knowledge and empirical observation while trained professional doctors could only prescribe leeches and prayer, and in fact not until the advent of germ theory could medical science really be said to rival traditional healers, the whole doctors-vs-witches affair being little more than sexism, a systematic patriarchal battle over that ancient field the body. The book being American I was shocked to learn as I perhaps should not have been that the United States had destroyed the trade of midwifery entirely, male surgeons driving women from the profession.