We had a trip to the market in St Nazaire d’Aude this morning, where there was a bit of everything on offer:
This little pig was there to raise money for an animal rescue charity, although I thought positioned rather dangerously near a sausage stand.
Just came across this sweet story about a heritage breed of chicken that has been revived in India, to help counter the trade in industrial egg and poultry production.
And while we’re in a positive mood, another happy story, about the rise of garden-sharing by urban gardeners.
On my eternal quest for food poems, I found this one by Helen Dunmore, called Wild Strawberries.
Back already from a week in Shropshire, enjoying good food and better company as we whiled away the week talking about food and food writing with tutors Lindsey Bareham and Paul Bailey and enjoyed the opportunity of a lifetime to break bread with Claudia Roden, who was a delightful, articulate and well-travelled guest speaker.
On arrival last Monday it had been deemed warm and fine enough weather, after a week of record-breaking rains, to sit on the terrace for a before-dinner drink. Unfortunately this left us open to an enthusiastic welcome by hosts of Shropshire midges, wild with appetite. I had in all my years in England somehow never personally experienced midges and always imagined them as some smaller variety of mosquitoes, but now I think they are more like a tiny, carnivorous mutation of the fruit fly, which has evolved with an insatiable taste for human flesh and an instinct that causes them, en masse, to try to enter the human head by any available orifice. More like what we Canadians might call a no-see-um. Ouch, by any name.
Luckily we had a few distractions of our own: a generous sampling of excellent breads and local cheeses (clockwise from top left: Wrekin White; Stinking Bishop; Gloucestershire Brie; Shropshire Blue; and Cothi Caws Cynros goat cheese)
and some wonderful Old Spot ham
from the nearby Ludlow Food Centre,
which we visited on Wednesday. A custom-built local food shop, in essence the farm shop of the Earl of Plymouth estate, 80% of its provisions come from 4 counties (Shropshire, Worcestershire, Powys and Hertfordshire). It has a central selling area surrounded by kitchens, from which resident cheesemaker Dudley Martin produces butter and cheese;
desserts (she was finishing work on some raspberry brulees during our visit) from food prize-winner Catherine Moran’s Sweet Stuff Slow;
meats, responsibility of the centre’s butcher John Brereton (from the estate, including organic beef, lamb and traditional Old Spot pork);
coffees (roasted and ground in-house), baked goods, and preserves like this Thai Perry Pear Pickle.
It was all, as they say, food for thought and we talked about the centre for the rest of the week, with interest and ambivalence. While there I picked up a little morsel of Tipsy Cherry Fruit Cake, the handiwork of The Simply Delicious Fruit Cake Company, and it was. The jam and pate I bought at the same time will be sampled later.
We were near a pretty village called Clun, where they have a castle with views of the town:
We ate well, by our own fair hands, with a little help and challenge from Lindsey’s and Paul’s collection of recipe books. Wednesday’s team were the winners of favourite all-round meal, with some Chez Panisse chicken, roasted vegetables, baked potatoes, and a garlic, pine-nut and cream sauce to bind it,
and a self-assembly apple crumble made of 3 different apples, with rum-soused raisins, crumbly flapjack and lots of double cream.
There were many other nice things to eat and drink through the week as well….
Now I must prepare myself for a change of country and cuisine as I’m off to France tomorrow.
It seems I am not the only one on the planet with these twinned obsessions. On Friday I went to Farringdon Road and found my way up the near vertical stairs of the Betsey Trotwood, which by its position I’d guess is frequented by Guardian writers and which boasts music and poetry nights, and locally-sourced foods (though I think not including the tiny bag of crisps I purchased from them at some considerable expense: when did they go up to 80p I wonder?). Friday night’s reading theme got its title, as the lucky winner of the bottle of Italian brandy was able to identify, from The Naked Lunch: Unspeakably Toothsome – an evening of food poems. Co-hosts Annie Freud and Roddy Lumsden read and invited a number of other poets to read also, from their own work as well as favourite food related poems by other poets. Each poet participating was rewarded with a food and drink goodies parcel rather than a fee.
Readers included: John Stammers (reading John Berryman, Frank O’Hara‘s “For Grace after a party”), Simon Barraclough (reading from Titus Andronicus, and Anonymous); ex-chef Angela Kirby (Peter Phillips – “I want to be buried in a restaurant” and Anne Stewart “To a melon”); Isobel Dixon (Les Murray – “In a time of cuisine” and Jonathan Swift “Green Leeks”); Mark Waldron (Russell Edson “Mouse” and Mattea Harvey “Setting the table”); Roddy Lumsden (Paul Muldoon “Holy Thursday”, Neil Rollinson “Scampi” – and a memorable poem of his own about the horrors of eating stroganoff in Shannon Airport); Annie Freud (Wendy Cope “The uncertainty of the poet”, DH Lawrence “Figs” and Bertolt Brecht “Buying oranges”); Cath Drake (Michael Ondaatje “Rat jelly”, Jacques Prevert “Breakfast”); Heather Philipson (Wallace Stevens “Floral decorations for bananas”, Frank O’Hara “Animals”); Susan Grindley (Lewis Carroll “Walrus and the carpenter”) and Tim Wells (Rodney Jones “First coca-cola” and Luke Warmwater “Hungry for pizza”).
One afternoon I caught up on some Radio 4 listening and heard a recent Food Programme about anchovies, which told a by-now familiar tale of looming extinction: the best varieties of anchovy are being harvested for volume rather than sustainability, and so we are likely to lose them altogether before too long.
Brunch yesterday was a delightful piece of french toast
at Sam’s…
I now embark on a week without (gasp) internet access. See ya later!
Safely in England once more where I arrived on a windy, sunny day, and where it’s been the quintessential English weather ever since: cloudy with sunny periods and a chance of rain.
Only a couple of days on the ground, I’ve had a nice bowl of lentil and coriander soup at my dear old wine bar, but otherwise not eaten out. And why should I when the food at home is so good? Tina made us an excellent supper
of guinea fowl in wine sauce last night, with roasted cherry tomato halves, boiled new potatoes and sweetheart cabbage,
which looked pretty cool but didn’t offer anything wildly different in terms of flavour.
Just before I left, Mary kindly sent me this link to an excellent article about the state of fruit these days. I thought this bit said its piece neatly:
..the supermarkets demand that fruit is picked long before it ripens: it doesn’t soften until it rots. This makes great commercial sense. It also ensures that no one in his right mind would want to eat it. But, happily for the retailers, we have forgotten what fruit should taste like.
And vegetables, too, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s noticed. One of those attending the food issues town hall meeting told us that if you pick your fruits and vegetables before they’re ripe (to allow them to be transported and stored by supermarkets) you are also losing the nutritional value they would have if allowed to ripen naturally. So we are at double nutritional risk: picking today’s worsening quality fruits and vegetables (bred for higher yields and durability rather than flavour and nutrition) at less than their peak nutritional stage of ripeness.
I’ve also made a first irresponsible visit to the Oxfam Bookshop where I found a copy of So Shall We Reap, by Colin Tudge who I’ve heard speaking well about food issues on Radio 4. Much to think about in these pages, like:
…at bottom, the problems of humanity as a whole are those of biology. If we really want to survive in the long term (and ten thousand years is ‘the long term’; not the thirty year projections of conventional economics) then we have to begin by thinking of ourselves as a biological species, Homo sapiens, and the earth as our habitat; not simply a stage, or a tabula rasa, on which we can impose any manner of fantasy and whim. We need to see that farming must march to its own drum – that of ‘good husbandry’, founded in sound biology, and steered by respect for human values; and that this in many practical ways runs totally counter to the modern mantra which says, in the chill phrase I have heard so often these past three decades, that ‘agriculture is just a business like any other’.
Which reminded me of the chill phrase that I have heard too often, that poetry or literary publishing should also be seen ‘as just a business like any other’ – which is not and has never been true: there is and always will be a need for subsidy and public support if we want to see Canadian culture survive. The writers of Canada, and other artists, are taking action against recent well-publicised culture cuts by the country’s conservative government, which is about to announce an election. There’s a new website, Department of Culture, to help promote cultural causes in the electoral battle.
Looking ahead, I’m going to a food poetry reading tonight, and on Monday I will disappear off to Shropshire for the week, to attend a food writing workshop.
