in the soil
The pile of debris-to-be-burned on the disused plot opposite mine that has accumulated all autumn from across the allotment, a tangle of ivy, twisting coils of bramble, hollow lengths of lovage and fennel stalk, great bushes of asparagus fern – not all it should be said ideally burnable – has not survived the winds of the last week, blowing first from the northwest brutally cold and then almost shockingly warm with the storm coming up from southwest and is scattered all over, a branch here and a branch there in the dying flowers at the top of the plot, stuck comically in the hazelnut tree; which is to say that we got off lightly, with no signs of a wider destruction. The broad beans poking a bare inch above the soil are too short to have been damaged, the new growth of artichoke and the leafless fig both young enough still to bend with the wind instead of breaking against it.
in the kitchen
A cook I used to work with from Goa was of the opinion that European cooks in general and English-French fine dining-adjacent chefs in particular were pathetically obsessed with making stock, spending hours boiling bones into a sauce to be served with neatly boneless pieces of meat when they could simply have all been cooked together in the first place, providing their own gravy, and I think that about that he was right. For the Beaujolais Nouveau at the restaurant I make a French exception to this – as perhaps many peasant and bourgeois dishes are exceptions to this – in the form of coq-au-vin, with big chunks of chicken and lots of wine but no stock, and then I prove him right by spending just as long making stock from the carcasses and wings to enrich something else down the line, and even longer clarifying a jellied stock of pig’s head into a beautiful jelly for no particular reason other than that I want to.
on the page
Agnes Jekyll’s Kitchen Essays are full of unnecessary jellies and although (published between the wars) they are supposedly aimed at the householder in the straitened circumstances of having rather less staff and disposable income than they may have grown up with the recipes within them – collected from a column written anonymously in the Times – do tend to assume that no kitchen is without an endless supply of aspic with which to encase or garnish a parade of saddle of lamb, cold roast game, lobster, crab, poached egg, fillets of sole, foie gras and truffle. It is hard not to laugh at a world which gives us popular and easily obtainable things such as bottled turtle, but hard also not to smile at the dismissal of marrow bone on toast as ogre’s food which is nonetheless too good not to be sometimes invited to the party.