5.8.25

in the soil

The sky is still grey more often than not and the sunny days I do not have free so again in a light drizzle – wet enough to demand a raincoat, too humid to do much work while wearing one – I take a look around the summer plot and decide it is too wet to cut the grass and too wet to weed much, allotment gardening at this time of the year is like fermenting, I think, in that what you are doing is no longer an active intervention but rather dealing with the consequences of what you have set in motion weeks or months before, you have to accept after a point that there is nothing more you can do except to harvest what is offered and maybe to tweak and to tidy a little around the edges. Everything is running rampant after all this rain, the beans are overextending their poles and, falling, latching on to their neighbours', the cucumbers are ignoring my attempts to corral them and striking out across the grass towards a shadier bed, grasping blades on their way; at the top of the plot the cucuzze are doing the same upwards, latching on to the hedgerow damsons in search of light. I make sure the seedlings of kohlrabi and turnips are protected from the slugs, I pick a handful of beans and a few cucumbers and I leave the few blackberries for the birds.

in amongst the beans and cucumbers I found an earthball or poison pigskin puffball mushroom. Much smaller than the edible puffball, these look a bit like a truffle and smell powerfully of “good” mushroom and are beautifully glossy inside but are toxic to eat.

in the kitchen

I honestly could not tell you what I have cooked at home this week, maybe nothing at all – we have had our niece staying and eaten out when I have not been at work and had day trips and family dinners and so on. At work it is time for my favourite dish of the summer, a little plate inspired by one at Polentina and another at Towpath, good buffalo mozzarella seasoned with salt and oil and oregano (this is always on our menu) with a salad of pickled cantaloupe melon, red onion, two kinds of cucumber, a mix of green and purple basils from the community gardens, lots of black pepper, very fresh and somehow very English-country-garden summer – pastel, cool – despite its Italian ingredients. (In Summer Cooking, which seems written very much with white linen and lawns in mind, Elizabeth David has a recipe for a sort of melon salsa to go with cold roast pork). We overorder lemons and so I also make a huge amount of lemon ice cream which will have to go with something or other, next to a cake or in a brioche bun or just in a bowl with a little biscuit. On one of our day trips we go to Morelli's ice cream parlour and I have a soda float with vanilla ice cream and lemonade and perhaps that could be reversed, I think, lemon ice cream and cream soda or perhaps that would be foul.

on the page

I have hardly read anything this week either for the reason stated above, maybe half a chapter of David Graeber's Debt which I am finding slow (because very interesting) going and last night I reread the "Max Ferber" section of The Emigrants as I have been intending to do since Frank Auerbach's death, I had forgotten the passage at the end in which the narrator quotes extensively from the journals of Ferber's mother as, trapped in Nazi Germany and awaiting inevitable deportation and murder in the camps, she retreats into her childhood and youth, the rise and fall in her family's fortunes as society creeps its way towards atrocity.