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Rhona

Hail to the Queen

From the incomparable 1955 edition of the Good Housekeeping Cookbook – its pages starting to scallop at the edges, spine restored long ago with silver duct tape – and with a little customization, one of my mother’s triumphs: Queen of Puddings.

For pudding:
1 qt. milk
2 cups 2‑day old bread in 1/2 inch cubes
1/2 cup raisins, plumped in hot tea, sherry or spiced water for half an hour
2 eggs plus 2 yolks
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 tbsp vanilla
4 tbsp melted butter/margarine
For topping:
2 egg whites
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup blackcurrant or other fruit jelly

  • Heat oven to 350f. Grease 1‑1/2 quart casserole. In double boiler, heat milk until tiny bubbles appear around edges. Remove from heat; stir in bread cubes; set aside.
  • Break 2 eggs and 2 yolks into casserole; beat lightly with fork. Stir in 1/4 cup sugar, salt, nutmeg, vanilla, melted butter then fold in bread/milk mixture.
  • Set casserole in baking pan and place it in the oven. Fill the pan with warm water to 1 inch from top of casserole.
  • Bake, uncovered, 34‑50 minutes. Remove from oven.
  • Beat the egg whites until they form peaks; slowly add 1/4 cup sugar, beating till stiff.
  • Spread the jelly on the top of the pudding and then heap the beaten whites on top of that.
    Bake in pan of warm water 12‑15 minutes more, until the meringue is golden. Serve warm or cold.
  • Alternatively, heap the beaten whites/sugar directly on the pudding, leaving impressions in each serving. When you serve the pudding, put a dab of jelly in each impression.

I do not know of any poems already written about or featuring bread pudding, let alone queen of puddings, but if you try this recipe it may drive you to verse. The blessed Delia (I’ve just read that she baked the very cake seen on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed!) makes a version in individual ramekins, which is worth looking at if only to see how beautiful a dish it is.

Lady Sara

A year ago this week we lost our lovely Sara: Australian Shepherdess extraordinaire, aged 16.

…your gaze could cure
multitudes, the silk of your head
soothe any worry.
You teach us to taste
each morning as if it’s our first.

And day after day you lie
near my feet, dreaming and fixed
on some distant thing that is, at last,
outrunning you.

Last night we went to Alix Goolden Hall to see/hear a Ballet BC performance of the impossibly lovely Stabat Mater by Pergolesi . I hadn’t realised till I was home reading my cd liner notes that Pergolesi died at 26, and this was possibly his last composition. Quite a finale. In the recording I have, a countertenor, Michael Chance, sings the alto which is extraordinary, and it was recorded at Church of St Jude-on-the-Hill, Hampstead (London) by The King’s Consort, who play period instruments. “Forty minutes of undiluted peace” said one of the Amazon reviewers.

Off to dine with the relatives tonight, and I’m bringing dessert. Thank you Delia Smith (and my apple tree) for Baked Apple and Almond Pudding.

Next year in West Chester

I have been looking with longing at the program for the 12th Annual West Chester University Poetry Conference: Exploring Form and Narrative. Among the offerings are workshops on rhyme with Dick Davis, meter with Timothy Steele, a master class with Mark Jarman, and a keynote address by James Fenton, who is also interviewed by Dana Gioia. Alas I can’t fit it in this year, but perhaps I can make the thirteenth edition next year. Never been to Pennsylvania…

Back here on the Coast, I was minding my own business on Tuesday afternoon… well, to be truthful I was engaged in some anguished last minute edits of my poems for the final Form in Poetry class, when the phone rang and Peg said: so, we’ve just got some fresh crab, want to come over and help us eat it? I dithered for a number of seconds, remembering several ill-starred occasions under the sign of the crab back in my Edmonton days. Then I thought, well, maybe it was a passing thing. Maybe it was bad frozen crab crossed with too many libations. Maybe it was just time to give it another try. So I brought along a quiche lorraine for a back-up, but the crab was fresh and simple, boiled in salt water, needing nothing but a nice bit of french bread and salad. And it went well with gin! The best news was that I suffered no ill-effects at all, so that strikes off the only food I’ve ever believed I was allergic, or at least intolerant to. I am grateful.

Luminous shards

There is a word that has filtered into the collective consciousness of British poets, as memorably discussed in Peter Sansom’s enduring how-to text, Writing Poems, which first appeared in 1994, in a discussion about poetry clichés:

“Writers use them to try and lift flagging poems — hoping they will inject…emotional resonance. They do the reverse.”

He quotes Pound saying “one of poetry’s functions is to ‘keep the tools clean’… Using poetry clichés ultimately blunts the tools.”

His overtaxed word of choice is “shards”, one that I think is scarce in Canadian poetry. But I would like to nominate the word “luminous” for this decade’s hit list, a word which seems to be shining rather too brightly out of every other poem – particularly American ones – I’ve read in the last year. It’s a bit too… *poetic* to resist calling attention to itself; the poems I’ve seen it in seem to lean rather hard on it, and now I wince when I see it. It does appear a lot in reviews as well. A shame, as it’s a nice word. But it’s getting tired. Let’s give it a rest shall we? Anyone have a nomination for Canada’s most worn-out poetry word?

Rice is a fine word, one that can never be over-used in my cookbooks. And Kheer is one of my favourite desserts, a richer, runnier version of rice pudding, fragrant with cardamom, so good I have been known to eat it for breakfast. In my version, you forget the rosewater; substitute 2 percent / semi-skimmed milk for all or most of the cream; and add a third of a cup of golden raisins to the milk mixture when you add the rice.

Shriiink-wrapping culture & all about oats

So, the latest word is that the Cultural Section at Canada House is being ‘restructured’; our previous five representatives in performing arts and music, film and television, the visual arts and literature, have all been made redundant. Two new appointments will be made in Public Affairs, with responsibility for the entire cultural program.

On the one hand it’s a relief to know the program is not gone, but on the other hand, five experienced, well-connected and knowledgeable people have been jettisoned in favour of two new generalists. These are not interchangeable bolts that can be plugged in and out of a program, but dedicated employees taking their years of collective experience out the door with them. What a shocking waste.

Taking comfort in food and poetry then.

Madeleine sent me a stunning wee poem by Alden Nowlan, after we talked about the difficulties of making meaningful lives for our aged relatives. It’s called Aunt Jane, and it begins…

Aunt Jane of whom I dreamed the nights it thundered,
was dead at ninety, buried at a hundred.
We kept her corpse a decade, hid upstairs,
where it ate porridge, slept and said its prayers.

Speaking of porridge, I was interested to learn when I lived in Britain that there the word is used to mean any hot cereal, almost always oatmeal. But here in Canada, or at least as I understand it, porridge means hot cereal made of rolled oats. Our understanding of oatmeal is different too: what Brits call oatmeal we might mistake for oat bran, as it’s more finely ground than ours. And our distinction over use of the word porridge itself may be because we have so many commercially available hot cereals to choose from: Cream of Wheat, Sunny Boy, and my personal favourite Red River Cereal. Not to mention variations made with cornmeal, semolina and any combination of dried grains.

Continuing in this starchy vein, here’s an easy and simple sauce for pasta or better yet gnocchi, my current favourite comfort food. In a roasting pan, drizzle 3 garlic cloves (not peeled) and 2 large shallots, peeled and halved or quartered, with a tbsp of olive oil and salt and pepper and then roast for 20-25 minutes at 400, turning often, till golden brown. While you’re waiting, pan fry half a diced zucchini in olive oil till golden and set aside. Squeeze out the garlic and pop it with the shallots into a blender or food processor; whizz together with 1 large tin tomatoes with juices, 6 chopped basil leaves or 1/2 tsp dried basil, and 1 tsp balsamic vinegar. Sieve it so it’s smooth, and heat gently in a saucepan for about 10 minutes, until slightly thickened. Add the zucchini; heat through, season to taste, add 1 tbsp olive oil and serve over hot cooked gnocchi or pasta.

We don’t want no cultural representation

As I have been making regular visits to the UK since I stopped living there in ’02, I thought I’d let Ruth Petrie, for many years now our esteemed and capable literature officer at Canada House in London, know that I had a new book in print, and see if I could perhaps arrange a reading for next year’s visit. We launched my last collection, Old Habits, at Canada House in 1993.

So, on this the first day of Canada’s new parliamentary session, I was sickened to receive an auto-reply from Ruth, advising correspondents that “We in the Cultural section have, as of 3 April, been given redundancy notice. “

So much for the High Commission’s mandate to represent us in “Canada’s most important cultural export market in Europe and second only to the United States in the world..”