4.2.25
in the soil
While in the kitchen there is a valorisation of the ability to improvise both in the romantic oh-there's-no-menu-I-just-see-what-looks-good-at-the-market way which everybody aspires to and almost nobody I suspect actually practices and in the oh-shit moment familiar to most cooks where as you realise the fish hasn't arrived – you've just burned forty-five portions of ragu – that braise is simply not ready – you have to make do with what you do have, the allotment requires a level of planning ahead I can still not quite get my head around; combined with my preference for sowing direct in the soil over planting out nurtured seedlings this in practice means that often in these between-times of the year half my plot is empty, uncultivated. As a wedding present we receive – a wonderful gift – a kind of seed bank organised by some friends where guests, some coming half-way across the world, have contributed some seeds to be sown, an artwork of the plant and some notes on its cultivation. Now, not much else to be done, is the time I should be looking through this and planning, perhaps this week I will.
in the kitchen
Some of my strongest childhood culinary memories come from my winnings in various school-fête raffles and tombolas. When at the age of 8 or thereabouts I won in one a bottle of Gordon's gin, the old-fashioned yellow label, my father suggested we make sloe gin, and we gathered the fruits and infused the alcohol and I (keenly into calligraphy at the time) made the labels and gave little medicine-size bottles of it to everyone for Christmas. When in another I won a tin of rice pudding I think – I am fairly sure – I just ate it, I still love rice pudding. I like it with cinnamon and bay and maybe nutmeg but not vanilla, at an old job we stirred a spoon of tahini through it and served it with medjoul dates, I like it with jam or jelly or poached fruit, at a supper club once I made rice pudding doughnuts and served them with shocking pink rhubarb. In the restaurant next week we have rice pudding and a quince and apple preserve somewhere between a compote and a jam, sweet and sharp.
on the page
After finishing that book On Mysticism I was left not quite satisfied but interested enough to read more widely around it. In the Oxfam bookshop in Canterbury I find a copy of The Life of the Holy Hildegard (of Bingen, that is), a contemporary account by two monks which has little to say about her beliefs, her much-praised herbalism (although she is constantly healing people by the power of prayer) or the mystical content of her visions, instead taking almost a picaresque form as time after time she is a) shown by God what she should do b) does not do it for fear of the judgement of ignorant men c) is struck down with illness for her inaction d) does what she intended to do and e) immediately recovers (by the goodness of God), which leaves the impression not of a great religious recluse but rather of someone who has hit upon an excellent way of getting people to do what she wants them to do, against their various prejudices.