7.11.23

in the soil

A little pot in the middle of an otherwise empty bed holds a number of weeds and (intentionally) a sprig of bay laurel. My intention when given it was to stick it in the ground and let it take root as you can with brambles, hazel – you have seen the persistence of bay, how high it grows – but no, I am told, despite its evergreen persistence it is a Mediterranean plant, used to more heat and more light through its winters, I must keep it coddled in a pot until it is big enough to fend for itself here so far from its home. There was a fashion on the internet for mocking the appearance of the blobfish, a deep-sea creature which when brought to the surface has a comically distraught and deflated appearance. Similarly those who say bay doesn’t taste of anything have not seen or smelled one in its preferred habitat, a vast and sweet shadow in the warmer air.

in the kitchen

At home it is soup season – leek and potato sautéed in butter and cooked in water, salt and pepper and nothing more – and at work it is rice pudding season, a pudding I have made more I think than any other, so plain and so rich. This too I cook very simply, risotto rice and milk and caster sugar and I like to flavour it never with vanilla and rarely with cinnamon but always with a bay leaf, as fresh as possible with its heady scent nutmeg or mace. I like it just as it is but rice pudding – risolatte we call it at work – makes an excellent backdrop and as Fergus Henderson remarks somewhere a good excuse to break out any jams and jellies you have squirrelled away. An incomplete list of things I have served rice pudding with:

poached plums

poached pears

poached quince

stewed rhubarb

orange marmalade

plum jam

crabapple jelly

mosto cotto

grated cobnut

medjool dates

tahini ice-cream

nougat ice-cream

well-bletted sorbus pears, a scent of damp woodland in a warm bowl

on the page

Some writers and some books you have to wait until you are ready for, to mature into; this is what I say when people ask me of a recent purchase if I have read it yet. I bought a copy of William Morris’ utopian News from Nowhere more than ten years ago and in that time let it sit five unread on a shelf and eventually in a move gave it to charity, it was one of those old paperbacks with a typeface you have to squint to read. I still haven’t read it but I do now own it again in a smart edition of Three Works alongside the narrative poem The Pilgrims of Hope and the short piece (novella, I suppose) A Dream of John Ball. Pitched somewhere in tone between A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and the last book of Paradise Lost it finds the narrator assuring the eponymous priest that while his revolution will fail still a free and just society will inevitably come; so hard, to read the optimism of the past!