ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Well if the shops and restaurants are closed, my classmates have left, the larder is bare, the river is dry and the nutria have fled, I guess it’s time I thought about moving on as well.

Here’s how the optimistically named Torrente Parma looks today, as it has for weeks:

I guess that goes some way to explaining why we haven’t been attacked by mosquitoes as we were led to believe we would. Though others not so close to the ‘river’ have had it worse.

It’s going to reach 34 in Parma today, and will only manage a grey 20 in London, with more of the same in the near future, so I’ll be packing my brolly and leaving the sunblock behind. Watch this space for endless whingeing about English weather over the next couple of months…

A final lunch yesterday at Sorelle Picchi, which afterwards closed for the holidays. One more bowl of cappelletti in brodo for me and tortelli di zucca for Kathy. Yum, we did it.

And here’s how the rest of the neighbourhood’s looking:

Andy whipped up another wonderful Taiwanese dinner last night; then on the way home Jenn, Tim and I paused for a K2 conetto. Mine was passion fruit (sooooo goooood!) and peach.

I am in that expat no-man’s land of oddly categorised flours, strange leavening agents, unfamiliar baking pans and an oversized toaster oven to bake in, so I try to forgive myself the many baking failures I’ve experienced this year, even as I challenge myself to empty those cupboards before next weekend’s departure date for London. A good conjunction of contents and necessities as the restaurants and shops that aren’t closed now are likely to be next week. The price we pay for not living in a tourist town.

And even more prices to pay for sending mail through dear confusing Poste Italiane. Today I learned that:

• it is cheaper to send packages to Canada than to England by surface mail
• it is cheaper to send packages by expedited delivery to England than by surface mail
• there is no book rate
• there is a book rate, only it’s not called a book rate, it’s called M-Bag. There is a picture of an M-Bag on the information page about this service, but the bag isn’t something you need to buy in order to use the service. Or that’s today’s information anyway.
• it says on their website that Poste Italiane offers a customs clearance service for non EU inbound parcels at 5,16 euro per item (blogger’s note: this ‘service’ delivers the package to the customs office, and is in addition to any duty that may or may not be charged by Italian customs, which presumably is an extra service to the grateful customer)(maybe the generous interpretation is that the word ‘service’ simply doesn’t translate easily into Italian?)

Stay tuned, it’s likely to get sillier still before I’m done.

I don’t recall exactly what led me back to Anne Carson’s amazing poem sequence, The Glass Essay, but I was thrilled to discover the whole thing on the (bless the living memory of Ruth Lilly) Poetry Foundation website. A gift and a half for a poet who lives halfway round the world from her own personal poetry library. If you can’t face reading the whole thing at one sitting (and I find it hard to stop once I start), check out HERO. Stunning.

Today when the UK is again struggling with Foot & Mouth disease, I have retreated to the couch where I have been reading a terrific book, Last Chance to Eat, by a Canadian (via England) food writer, Gina Mallet.

Although it’s full of interesting facts, figures, anecdotes and recipes, I’ve found (thanks to this year’s education) two factual errors. One of the errors – that sent me running for my cheese technology notes – has to do with Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, which she says can only, according to the rules of the “Dominazione di Origine Controllata… be made only between 15 April and 11 November, when the cattle – producers of a quality milk called Pezzato Rosso – are grazing on fresh grass rather than eating silage.”

What is wrong with this statement is: there is no date restriction on production of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (it’s made year round); and the cattle are not allowed to eat silage or to graze on fresh grass because of the risk they might eat wet grass that has the same fermentative effect as silage. Fermented feed puts the milk at risk of developing heat-resistant bacteria, butyric clostridia, which causes cracks and holes in the cheese paste, making the cheese unsaleable as Parmigiano-Reggiano. (The cows producing milk for Parmigiano-Reggiano are, for this reason, not free range; they spend their lives in cow sheds.)

The regulations actually specify no silage, to preserve the safety of the cheese, the reliability of the ripening process, and the purity of the flavour. The rules are laid out and administered by the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano.

The Pezzata Rossa she mentions is a traditional breed of cow once widely used for Parmigiano-Reggiano production, and is still used for a more exclusive product, Parmigiano-Reggiano delle Vacche Rosse. But since there is no restriction on the type of cow used for Parmigiano-Reggiano, dairies use higher yield breeds like Friesians.

The other error I came upon is to do with BSE, mad cow disease and its human incarnation, variant CJD, which Mallet attributes to 109 sufferers identified in 1993 having eaten more veal than others. But I remembered it being reported that the 10 sufferers identified in 1996 had eaten more beef (except for the one case who was vegetarian, presumably) – the highly processed kind, found in pre-fab meat pies, frozen burgers and the like, where presumably there is more animal byproduct than you’d normally be consuming.

And according to a WHO fact sheet on the subject, “infectivity is mainly found in the brain and spinal cord of clinically ill animals over two years of age.”

Anyway, the latest statistics for world-wide infection show that there have been a world-wide total of 201 infected through to July 2007. So I’m not sure where the figure of 109 UK cases came from; perhaps there was some early confusion between sporadic CJD and variant CJD.

Anyway it led me into some interesting reading around veal, including a piece by the rather fierce Guardian food writer, Joanna Blythman, which is a good summary of the ‘why to eat more veal’ argument – which hinges on the biological fact of dairy, namely that cows must get pregnant and give birth in order to lactate and give us milk and dairy products, resulting in a living byproduct, namely veal. Which is a point most of us, in our blissful detachment from the source of our food, have never considered, in our haste to condemn veal crates, which are banned in Europe from this year in any case.

An amusing animation about dairy farming in the US…

And finally, if you liked The Matrix, you’ll love The Meatrix.

Happy to say the weather has continued to be bearable – verging on glorious. Amazing what a couple of weeks of devastating heat can do to your standards of what is ‘hot’. It does help not to have to get on a sweltering bus twice a day as well, of course.

It’s been a week of catching up – on sleep, on correspondence, and cleaning and packing up ready for what lies ahead. We are all heading towards our internships: a couple of months of assorted projects. Some will go to Slow Food, others to Eataly, another to the Barcelona markets; others will be slinging curds at Murray’s Cheese or bopping round Bordeaux Quay. Me, I’ll be back in London, and working at London Food Link.

Meanwhile, a couple of lost friends reappeared in various guises: like Aileen Downey, a fabulous voiceover actress whose history has included a role as a rabble-rousing Russian revolutionary at the ill-fated London MOMI, as well as time spent slaving over database entries. (Some of you will be able to guess which of those career highlights converged with mine.)

I filled in my registration form for the Food & Morality conference in Oxford, and looked over the offerings at the Bristol Poetry Festival. I’m doing a reading in Bath in September and sniffing round for others, though it’s probably too late to set anything more up at this point.

Cousin Tina sent me to this article about losing your parents in adulthood, which I share now with my fellow orphans. I liked this bit:

While the fact of your parents’ death ceases, with time, to be your first waking thought, the map of grief has many roads which, I suspect, one travels in some form or another for the rest of one’s life.