31.10.23

in the soil

The only things moving are the bright green blades of garlic, the spear-leek, the onions as yet just sit there being onions. It is raining and dark, the pond is full and water collects in the folds of cabbages but when the sun comes out you can think about other places, other soils sitting still beneath warm sun and crisp winds. In Sicily you know the citrus is coming, heavy fruit shining gold between dark leaves, ripening towards winter’s bottled light –

in the kitchen

From the International Food Centre we get a bag of chestnuts which we score and roast that evening and eat with raki and strong cheese and a bag of kumquats which have sat in the fruit bowl going mouldy one at a time until today when I will cook the remainder in syrup with mustard seeds to make a sort of mostarda. To do it properly you must as with any candied fruit cook them and then for at least a week go through a daily process of recooking to boil off the liquid they will express, gradually replacing their juices with sugar but I am not sure I can be bothered to do this. Poached fruit, sweet and sour with mustard seeds, is in any case a nice thing to have sitting around, for cheese or plain meats.

on the page

Some sentences stick in your head long after reading and long after their context has mainly disappeared from memory, the sentences that make you wish you could write like that, or that you had thoughts like that to attempt to express. In John McPhee’s Oranges, a more or less sober account of the history and cultivation of that fruit, the reader is surprised in a discussion of superstitions around the growing of citrus by the assertion that

My own belief is that science erases what was previously true. The earth was the centre of the universe until Copernicus rearranged it. Life did begin in Eden before Darwin restyled it. In the early eighteenth century in Nuremberg, a woman did sit in the branches of an orange tree and kill it to the ground.