in the soil
In a week finally of hot summer sun – everyone sunbathes and barbecues and burns – there are two days forecast of light showers in reality rather heavy, one of which I spend at the allotment getting thoroughly soaked and wishing I had not bothered watering anything in the sunnier morning. For the good allotment gardener, their plot carefully planned according to the principles outlined in various government publications in order to get the maximum output from their little plot of land – no bed dug out without seedlings waiting to go in it – this is a time of gluts and good harvests, broad beans still going, courgettes beginning, soft fruit, potatoes, herbs; I would have picked a few currants and some fennel fronds were it not for the rain, but most of my plot is waiting, now, to ripen and to grow, and the rain of course will only help it.
in the kitchen
On the other day of light showers A is cooking a lunch for and at the local Community Gardens and I am helping her out; it is certainly not the worst kitchen I have ever stood in, prepping radishes and looking out at the rain. I am perhaps a typical chef in that I have no great interest in desserts and especially when I do pop-ups and so forth they are something of an afterthought, in fact they are almost always rice puddings with some sort of accompaniment. As the rain stops we serve little bowls of crema pasticcera topped with half a baked peach stuffed with amaretti, the juices pooling into the custard like a long summer sunset.
on the page
The Night Battles by Carlo Ginzburg (son of Natalia) is as translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi an almost compulsively readable account of a truly bizarre set of customs and beliefs extant among the peasantry in the Friuli in the 16th and 17th centuries, namely that those marked from birth by being born in the caul had a vocation as benandanti, good-walkers, with the sacred duty of (on certain nights of the year) leaving their bodies to conduct battle with witches and warlocks armed with sorghum rods as the benandanti were with fennel twigs; the outcome of these battles would determine the fate of the harvest. Although separated by centuries and by many particulars the cult (if it can be called that) reminded me immediately of the account in Dorothy Carrington’s Granite Island of those people in Corsica who right up into the twentieth century professed the ability to leave their bodies at night and go about in the form of animals in order to see who in the village would be next to die; the modern rational mind is as baffled as were the Inquisition in trying to make such beliefs fit into our ideas of the world.
it feels very necessary to make rice pudding now