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Lightning cake, sloes and plums

Looking for something to do with a basket of plums, I turned to my mother’s old Boston Cooking School Cookbook, whose spine is now made of electrical tape and which has all manner of interesting thing poking out between the pages. In it I found a recipe for Lightning Cake, and the suggestion to add a layer of plums or tinned prunes to the top, with a sprinkling of cinnamon sugar. The batter rises up and surrounds the fruit and it looks decorative and tastes heavenly. Here’s my version:

Lightning Plum Cake
1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup milk
3 tbsp melted butter
1/4 tsp lemon zest
1/2 tsp vanilla
about a dozen fresh plums, halved and pitted
juice of half a lemon
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon

  • Beat egg and add sugar; add sifted flour, baking powder and salt; add the milk and melted butter, lemon and vanilla. Pour into a buttered 7×10 pan.
  • Lay the plums cut side down over the top of the batter. Sprinkle with lemon juice, and then with the sugar mixed with the cinnamon. Bake at 350 for about half an hour.

To go with this I’d recommend a poem by Gillian Clarke called Plums (which I have in her 1985 Selected Poems) rather than the William Carlos Williams one (afraid I never did like that poem and found his act of pilferage unforgiveable). Here’s a blog entry with yet another plum poem, by WS Merwin, although I am not sure that sloes are really ever known as night plums; that sounds more like a lipstick shade to me. If I could have laid my hands on any sloes in Victoria I’d have made a batch of sloe gin, which is a strange and unique substance that somehow preserves the pucker of the sloe even after its long bath in alcohol.

Horses and kidneys

While I was in Edmonton last week, a couple of people mentioned a book that had been recently launched – Ride The Rising Wind: One woman’s journey Across Canada by Barbara Kingscote – about a woman who rode across Canada on a horse.

This made me think of a gorgeous poem, Jack, by my heroine Maxine Kumin; it’s the title poem from her most recent poetry collection. I was lucky enough to see and hear her at the AWP conference in Vancouver in 2005, where she was the gracious and feisty subject of a tribute by five other poets. Her reading of this poem had us weeping in the aisles. I had forgotten that it starts with a meal of corn on the cob, so topical in these days of seasonal plenty.

Last night we had steak and kidney pie, which was the ritual dish my mother used to make for all large family gatherings. Kidneys can be a stinky thing to handle but surgical gloves help, as does soaking the kidneys for an hour or two in slightly salted water. I don’t think she added mushrooms to hers but I do to mine; otherwise I think this is the gist of her recipe.

Steak ‘n Kidney Pie like my mama used to make
1/2 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 kg stewing beef, in 1 inch chunks
1/4 kg beef kidneys, trimmed and soaked for 1-2 hours in salted water (or well rinsed)
1 onion, chopped
2 cups fresh mushrooms, scrubbed and sliced or quartered
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
2 medium carrots, diced
1/2 cup dry sherry or red wine
1/2 cup beef broth

  • Mix seasonings in flour and use this to dredge beef and kidneys. Fry the meat in batches in hot fat (bacon fat, according to my mother) until brown on all sides. Remove meat to a casserole. Cook the onions in the same frying pan; cook till transparent and add to casserole, scraping the brown bits into the mixture. Next brown the mushrooms and add them to the meat. Then combine the garlic, potatoes and carrots and stir into the pan for about 5 minutes, until hot and partially cooked. Mix into meat mixture. Stir in sherry and broth; add bay leaf. Cover casserole and cook in 350 oven – or on low heat on the stovetop – for 1 hour, or until the meat is tender, stirring occasionally. Remove and cool; keep overnight if you like or freeze until you need it.
  • When ready to serve, cover the mixture with puff pastry, propping up the pastry with a ceramic pie bird if you have one, and cook in a preheated 375 oven for 1/2 hour, until pastry is puffed and brown and meat is bubbling. You can divide into smaller casserole dishes so you have individual servings if you prefer; adjust cooking times accordingly.

Perhaps the poet Unknown was thinking about steak ‘n kid when (s)he penned this verse in 1880:

I surely never hope to view
A steak as luscious as a stew.
The latter is the tasty goal
Of elements in perfect whole,
A mad assemblage of legumes
Exuding warm ambrosial fumes,
Each seasoning of proper length,
Proving in Union there’s strength.
A steak is grander, it is true,
Yet needs no special skill to brew.
It is an art a stew to make,
But anyone can broil a steak.

Market Envy

We have a lot of excellent markets and farm shops in Victoria, but reading a pair of articles in the Guardian about food markets made me pine and yearn all over again. Borough Market is one I try to visit every time I’m in London, and it seems to get better every time; the variety and quality are staggering, and the ambience incomparable. In the companion article about new vs traditional food markets the excellent point was made that marketeers offer human contact in an age where we’re removed not only from the source of our food itself but also from the people who raise, process and package it. And that small scale trading in food is not a bad way to make a living, for both sides of the barrow. Supermarkets are cheap, fast and impersonal, like so much of our world today; I’d rather give my money straight to the farmer if I can.

It’s not unlike buying discounted books: if you buy a cut-price read from Walmart or Costco or an online discounter, you are also cutting the royalties of the writer, which are slender enough. So too the farmer loses on the profit margin for retailing through supermarkets. So I don’t begrudge paying a supermarket price to a farmer any more than I do paying the retail book price to an author (who’s had to purchase the book from the publisher).

Something struck me in a recent interview with 87-year old Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

“My poetics are totally different to something like the Ginsberg school, which is based on the idea of ‘first thought, best thought’. It is a solid concept to get the most direct transcription of your consciousness, especially if the person doing it has an original mind. Allen Ginsberg had a fascinating and genius mind and so the poetry is fascinating and genius. But when this method is laid on to thousands of students, many of whom don’t have original minds, you get acres of boring poetry.”

The 100th post

Goodness, I have blogged 100 times since February.

Years ago, when I was still naively eyeing the glossy chrome and enamel glitz of Kitchen Aid mixers, pining after industrial-looking Kenwood kitchen machines, and had bought a wimpy but ever-so compact Braun all-in-one mixer/food processor/blender to fit in my tiny English cupboard, my mother had the wisdom to snap up a couple of Bosch kitchen machines for herself and my sister-in-law. These are serious mixers, but more importantly they sell on the principle that you keep them for life and add bits and pieces as you need them. Mine has a blender and slicer/shredder in addition to the mixer with its whisk and dough hooks and has been churning along happily for over 20 years, its white finish yellowing but its motor unfazed by anything I throw at it. The local supplier is helpful and creative, and her very useful website now offers online cooking courses by the batch, using simple narrated slideshows. There’s a free one on making bread in 1 hour 15 minutes, and if that doesn’t make you rush out and buy a Bosch right now I don’t know what will.

There’s a good discussion about poetry on CBC’s Canada Reads pages. During this year’s Canada Reads series, the question was asked, What makes something a poem and not paragraph? and the query was finally answered by several poets. I thought Susan Musgrave’s response was particularly good: “It troubles me that others worry about this distinction (between what is poetry and what is prose): either the poem affects you, or it does not.”

Another literary competition with a charity reaping the rewards has a looming deadline. The Canadian Aid charity offers commercial publication of a previously unpublished book-length manuscript. Deadline is August 31.

Boris, Billy, Ted and a nice roast chicken

A little awkward to post while being harassed by my desk ornament (yes, folks, Boris is back… he had the sneezes and needed another round of antibiotics so, well, umm…)

Been reading a new Billy Collins (The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, Picador 2006) and liked this bit, from Monday:

The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

And a little more from Ted Hughes:

Much has been said about the therapeutic value of uninhibited writing, and though no doubt that can go to the point where mere confusion enters, it is one way of talking about the pleasures and the healing effects of reading and writing poetry.

All imaginative writing is to some extent the voice of what is neglected or forbidden, hence its connection with the past in a nostalgic vein and the future in a revolutionary vein.

I had a revolutionary experience with a roast chicken on the weekend. Following the guidance of Lynne Rossetto Kasper, I rubbed a whole chicken with olive oil and then slathered on a paste of 1 tbsp minced rosemary, 1 large minced garlic and 1/4 tsp salt, stuffed a couple of sprigs of whole rosemary in the cavity, covered it in plastic and refrigerated it for 24 hours, and then roasted it at 350f at 20-25 mins/pound, the first half on its breast and the second half breast side up, basting it with cooking juices at intervals until the thickest part of the thigh read 170f on the thermometer. It was gorgeous. The finish was to drizzle it with a 3-4 tbsp artisan balsamic vinegar (or slice it first and and drizzle with balsamic). It was beautifully moist and well flavoured.

While I told Jennifer about this triumph, she reminded me that only a few weeks ago I had been reading to her about the use of salt on meats. A magazine I’m extremely fond of is Cooks Illustrated, which is a food nerd’s dream, featuring experiments from America’s Test Kitchen (something I’d never heard of before I started reading the magazine). In the August issue they were performing merciless experiments on barbecued chicken and explained (with diagrams) the effects of salting chicken for 3 or 6 hours. At 3 hours the flesh does not absorb the salt and you end up with dry chicken (which is why popular wisdom says not to salt roasting meats). But after 6 hours, the salt is drawn into the flesh and you end up with flavour from the salt and from any other water-soluble flavouring agents (e.g. herbs and spices but not oil-solubles like capsaicin, the hot element of chili peppers). They prefer salting to brining if you are dealing with chicken because they found brining made the skin soggy, and salting leaves it crispier.

Not talking about poetry and not eating oysters

I enjoy talking prosody or fine technical points in the context of a workshop, but otherwise I’m not a one to want to discuss poetics with all and sundry. On this matter I was glad to find a kindred spirit in WS Merwin, who made a few seemingly timeless points when his 1956 collection Green With Beasts was made Poetry Book Society Choice:

“I don’t usually like literary conversations, though I deeply enjoy talking with writers other than poets about the practical side of getting things written. I like talking with some people about particular poems: though I think that in such conversations all I usually do is to try to describe a quality that excites my enthusiasm in a poem. I do not like writing about poetry… Above all I do not like trying to generalize about poetry…

…I think that one of the dangers of modern poetry has been a tendency to become inbred. Its small audience enhances the danger. It even seems possible for some poets to write as though critics, even particular schools of critics, were a fit and sufficient audience for poetry.”

He then makes

“one of the few general statements I feel safe in making about poetry. It is a mystery. It is a metaphor of the other mysteries which comprise human experience. But, like some other mysteries, it gives us a feeling of illumination – one mystery giving us a name by which to know another.”

I’ve been feeling some illumination from reading a collection of writings by MFK Fisher called The Art of Eating. Her prose is exquisite. In The Well-dressed Oyster she begins, firing on all cylinders and out of both barrels:

“There are three kinds of oyster-eaters: those loose-minded sports who will eat anything, hot, cold, thin, thick, dead or alive, as long as it is oyster; those who will eat them raw and only raw; and those who with equal severity will eat them cooked and no way other.

The first group may perhaps have the most fun, although there is a white fire about the others’ bigotry that can never warm the broad-minded.”

One suspects her allegiances lie with the second group.

“..almost every oyster-eater who does not belong whole-heartedly to the third and last division, would die before denying that a perfect oyster, healthy, of fine flavor, plucked from its chill bed and brought to the plate unwatered and unseasoned, is more delicious than any of its modifications. On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell.”

At least we have her words to savour, in lieu of a leisurely oyster harvest on the beach, since red tide has robbed us of some of our summer fun.