28.11.23

in the soil

After the rains, the catharsis of digging. I experiment here and there with no-dig methods but conclude that they require either an ideal mixed homestead with chickens running around to scratch and to fertilise or else a large amount of bought compost and so in the main I dig, although when the soil is heavy clay and sticks in heavy clumps to the spade I wish I did not. As it is I have little enough to dig, half my plot is perennials kept in a feral state, left to fight their own battles in the earth, and require little intervention. These days not raining but still cold and a damp insidious cold at that there is no one else at the allotment and to dig is not a social activity, I do not break for coffee and a sandwich or to discuss the state of the hedgerows, it feels instead like catharsis, yes, or a ritual – turn the earth the earth turns the earth turns –

in the kitchen

There is a new butcher in town and so I find myself thinking about meat a lot more than perhaps I usually do, he has in particular excellent beef and I think about braising browned short rib with plenty of onion and wine, of salting a good brisket and serving it boiled with three different sauces, red white and green, of melting bone marrow into a pan of saffron rice, of smoking a tongue like a ham to serve with dragoncello, though in the end all I make is a big pan of broth, watch water gradually clouding and thickening as fat and flesh give up themselves as the windows steam over.

on the page

Everybody used to think they knew that pasta was brought back from China by Marco Polo on his eventual return to Venice, where in any case they do not traditionally eat a great deal of it compared to the macaroni-eaters of the south, the romance of Venice being in the rice and in the water. In fact in most of his Travels Polo shows little curiosity about local cuisines, being far more concerned with whether there is food available for a traveller’s cattle and horses, and potable water, in the desert places between civilisations especially. Of the people of Kashmir, for example, which must even 700 years ago have had a rich and interesting cooking tradition, he says only that their food is flesh, with rice and other grains; elsewhere, he might enthuse about the quality and quantity of game birds to be found, or disparage a tribe of savage, ill-disposed, and idolatrous people, who subsist upon the animals they can destroy, a marked double standard one might think.