9.10.23
in the soil
Rooting around for horseradish the blade snaps clean across the middle, that which cannot bend must break, I fetch a spade to dig out the serrated point and the stubborn woody spice. It is too warm really for the work of digging which must be done and shirtless I water turned-over soil with sweat, I wipe my face with my cap, pull blighted plants up at the root, I collapse in the nettles and spend the day itchy and sunburned. There is something in this month that feels like beginning, the harvest over, the gluts done, the borrowed earth given back to the worms and the millipedes and the fungus, the sense that everything dies and all is well.
in the kitchen
In the sometimes-rushed sometimes-drudgery of prep work there is a pleasure in turning a great mess of something into neat piles – a box of carrots diced for soffritto, a sinkful of inky cuttlefish into slim white ribbons. This week I make a Sicilian dish of sweet-and-sour rabbit, the small bodies cut and trimmed into portions, ribcages set aside for broth, loins kept separate to roast just-pink. It is an easy enough and satisfying thing to make, you dice say two onions and two carrots and two sticks of celery and sweat them in olive oil with capers and raisins, add honey and good vinegar and just enough tomato puree or passata to make the sauce rusty and then you add rabbit which you have braised with its trimmings and with stock veg and a piece of salt fat pork and a little of the broth, or chicken maybe, or feathered game; or make a darker sauce for a darker meat, chocolate and red wine and hare.
on the page
Actually this week I have read almost nothing but cookbooks and the time I might have spent reading other prose I spent chipping slowly away at the TLS crossword so what sticks in my mind is a Calabrian recipe for stewed castrated lamb of an almost luminous red in the accompanying photograph, the braising liquid reduced to almost nothing around the meat so it resembles most closely the skewers of marinaded lamb tikka you get on butcher’s counters during barbecue season.