ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Needing some fresh air, I took a walk around Oltretorrente, just across the river; BBC Weather said it was foggy and cold. Who can you trust?

I was trying to study some Italian this afternoon when I got distracted by La Stampa’s photo pages taken from LatteArt. So if you are good at decorating your cappuccino, you can send your photos in to the website, or you can refer to it for demos on making la foglia (leaf), il cuore (heart) or la mela (apple) designs on your cup at home. All you need is a steady hand. And good luck.

That got me thinking about other hot beverages.

• Maybe once you’ve finished messing about with cappuccino you can move on to a spot of tasseography.
• Did you know you can now earn a Tea Appreciation Certificate? (…Only in Canada you say?)
• When I first moved to London and worked as a temp, there were still Tea Ladies to be found in many of the offices I worked in; indeed there was one in our company’s Johannesburg office as well. It was one of those jobs that should never have been phased out, since machines are lacking in character, sympathy and common sense. I loved meeting these ladies who were always kind to newcomers and who knew everyone in the office, and their drink preferences. It’s good to see there are still places in the world that employ them: I found positions advertised in Kuwait and Kuala Lumpur.
• Did you know there’s a web page devoted to the Ovaltineys? On it you can hear that old standard “We are the Ovaltineys” (once heard, never forgotten).
• Horlicks has a fun site with interactive information about sleep (hint: the answer to sleep problems is often a nice cup of Horlicks).
• Sketos, metrios, glykos or vary glykos: how do you like your Greek coffee? Learn how to make it with a series of helpful photos.
• Long ago I tried mate, after reading something that glamourised for me the gourd and bombilla used to drink it. Now it seems to be everywhere, often known as Yerba Mate, although this sounds slightly redundant as my reading suggests yerba (Argentinian spelling of hierba, or grass) is the raw ingredient, and mate is the hot beverage. I didn’t know it had quite so many names though: Erva mate; Congonha; Paraguay cayi; Paraguay tea; Jesuit’s tea; St Bartholomew’s tea; Hervea; K’kiro; Caminu; Kali chaye; Erveira; Hervea; Erva-verdadeira; Matéteestrauch.

I was confused when I first moved to England about use of the term “corn” – which to North Americans means the yellow kernels that brighten every summer picnic. In England it’s used in its traditional and more wide-ranging sense, meaning any grain, and generally the kind that feeds livestock. According to Michael Pollan, it used to mean literally any grain at all – including grains of salt, hence the expression “corned beef”. And hence the qualifier “sweet” which is added to the kind of corn that people eat, as in sweetcorn.

While passing through London in November, on my way to Italy, I happened on a copy of his recently published and much-praised book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, right there in the Bloomsbury Oxfam Bookshop. Delighted I was, but long in the opening of this fascinating story. I have started reading it this week, after coming upon an interview with him recorded a few months before the book hit the shelves. The interview is more about Pollan and his research and writing methods than the content of the book, but he does preface the interview with a reading from it and answers some interesting questions about it at the end.

(Corn Maiden, in the sculpture garden of The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Santa Fe)

And so I’ve been reading the first section, which is a depressing story about the appropriation of corn – one of the traditional foods of American Indians – by agribusiness, and about the enslavement of American farmers to corn subsidies which in turn has created such a surplus of corn that its products form a shocking part of the fabric of American life, from sweeteners to manufacturing materials.

And if we thought it was cruel to feed cow by-products to cows, it turns out it’s actually not much better to feed them corn, which they aren’t designed to digest either (they are grass not grain-eaters). Luckily Pollan is a talented, humane and funny writer, so it’s possible to survive the facts he’s presenting to his fellow humans. I thought I’d take a break and look at some of his other writings today.

His 2003 article about Slow Food (from Mother Jones magazine) is interesting reading, particularly following turkey season. I hadn’t realised, when I wrote my poem, Lamenting the Turkey, that I was writing about Broad Breasted Whites, but seeing them described in Pollan’s article as “mindless eating and shitting machines” that are so deformed by breeding they cannot reproduce without artificial insemination, I’d say that’s exactly what they were; lumpy and awkward like the poem. Here it is, (from Cartography) – let’s dedicate this iteration to Pollan and to omnivores everywhere (oh, and by the way I do -really!- like eating turkey but will of course be more diligent about buying traditional breeds in future..).

Lamenting the Turkey

Stub-winged idiot, a food whose life
is a brief hymn to gluttony: crescendo of feathers
and flesh fills our tables, bloodlessly knifed
as the red leaves of Christmas bloom in the background,
remorselessly bright.

In a time we’re kneeling to stars and shepherds
this is our chosen meal: a feathered blunder
so dumb it drowns in rain, gaping at skies
as they seal its throat with liquid wonder.

We adopt all the symbols of peace
but consume the corpse of a baleful thing:
it riots at the scent of blood, will slay
wounded brothers with its bladed chin.

We fill the season with music, and stop
this wobbling voice with a plug of bread;
it ends its time as it always lived:
stuffed with food, yet never fed.

So this is our festive platter:
a death of stupidity and fatted fear,
naked and shining beneath the candles,
a meal we gobble in the gullet of the year.

Saturday night in the duomo: Gospel in Cattedrale by Cheryl Porter – singing in English and preaching in fluent Italian.

With her International Gospel Messengers.

In Parma, New Year’s is all about the fireworks. Garbage cans were not the only things feeling a little nervous on Sunday night…

Just before…

…and after.

Dance of the broken bottles, Piazza Garibaldi.

The tree on Piazza Garibaldi.

We spent yesterday in Colorno, trying to eat our way through Asia. Amy, representing Hong Kong, gathered her pan-Asian army of chefs – Andy from Taiwan, Donghyun from Korea, Louisa from Australia – and together they fed us well, very very well. We are ready for the new year.

Amy’s Asian menu

Only the beginning… Thai carrot salad, sushi, beef with eggplant, rice…

A Korean favourite: Bi Bim Bap!

Spending the day digesting it all. Thought I’d try some feasts for the eyes for a change. A friend of a friend is a sublime photographer of the Tuscan landscape and many other things beside. Check him out: Fabio Muzzi. Phew. Photos so beautiful you want to eat them for breakfast.

I was nosing around to see what other photos were posted of this neck of the woods. A site called TrekEarth has a gorgeous selection of photos from all over the world, including this region, Emilia Romagna – a few beauties of Parma itself.

You can take a virtual tour of Parma in a number of 360 degree photos on the Comune di Parma website.

Travelling on Ryanair is … an experience. One of its peculiarities is that passengers are charged many hidden fees: for use of a credit card to make the booking, and for checking a bag, for example, and they give not so much as a cup of coffee away for free in-flight. So it’s not as cheap as you might first assume when you see 99 cent fares. But okay, so it’s the only game going direct from Parma airport to London, with your (count ’em) 15 whole kilos checked baggage allowance (which you’ve paid for the privilege of bringing). And then you get the thrill of rubbing up against your fellow passengers in the scrum at the boarding gate and you can try to out-run them on the tarmac for better seating. I won’t attempt to describe the experience of dragging (heavier than it sounds) 15 kg of suitcase without wheels (never again) through the seething inferno of holiday travellers at Stansted Airport on Christmas Eve. Brrr, may I remember enough to never do that again, and may I forget the rest.

For my return to Parma, I chose to alot a hefty corner of my 15 kg to a lovely smelly bag of cheese from the well-regarded and cunningly-named Cheeses, which has been doing a queued-out-the-door trade in Muswell Hill for some years. Not least because the shop is tiny – holds three thin customers at a time, with floor to ceiling shelves of this and that to look at while you wait. It has one modest display case which manages to hold a prime selection of farmhouse cheeses from Britain and beyond. I saw a piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano lovingly displayed and simply described (“exquisite” I think was all the sign said, or needed to say) and a bevvy of French beauties perched around it in various postures of diminishment, and beyond them a hearty selection of British cheeses.

The cheesemonger looked very weary – it was getting on to the evening of December 23 and his sign advertising baby wheels of stilton had probably lured a few dozen extra souls ithrough his doors – but he cut me some fine wedges of Cornish Yarg, Berkswell and aged Caerphilly. The women behind the counter were cheery and helpful and pointed me towards some Millers Damsel digestive biscuits to go with my selection. Luckily for my baggage allowance I managed not to come away with a slate cheeseboard or jars of chutney or tins of quince cheese to go with, nor even a fragile package of inky Charcoal Wafers, though I was sorely tempted, but they were recommended for brie, camembert or goats cheese.

After a few days’ rest for the cheese, yesterday afternoon we gathered in my Parma kitchen to test our palates and practice our tasting terminology, yeah verily once more for England.

Yarg, I’d learned, was not an obscure Cornish word after all, it was the name of its early makers (Gray) turned around. A little disappointing to be disillusioned, but the cheese is made from a 13th century – and it seems a tried and true – recipe. Wrapped in nettle leaves, it looked very handsome, its ivory paste contrasting nicely with the dark green wrappings frosted by a pale mould. Lots of butter, rendered butter, and a bit of tangy sweetness – and perhaps a little pineapple? It had been described elsewhere as young with a fresh, faintly lemony taste; creamy under the crust, yet firm and slightly crumbly at the centre. And it was too. Many thumbs up for this one.

Next we examined the Berkswell, a ewe’s milk cheese made in the Midlands, and named for the village which took its name from the Saxon chief, Bercul, who was baptised in the ancient well at its centre. I read somewhere that it had been originally developed from a Caerphilly cheese recipe, although it bore little resemblance to the one we tasted after this. We admired its rind which has a tan, cobbled appearance – must be moulded in a net? We found its ivory paste smooth and firm, the tang and texture reminding us of cheddars of our pasts; a hint of animal aroma reminded us it was a sheep cheese, but the flavour was subtle and sweet. It struck us as being quite different in flavour from its Italian cousin pecorino, and people liked it for being a happy contrast to the Italian wonders all around us.

The last to fall under the knife was the aged Caerphilly; unusual, they told me at the shop, to find an aged version, as it’s usually eaten quite young. We noticed the moulds on the rind and the thick, even nail (undercrust) which when tasted was soft and silky in contrast to the dry, fine sponge of the centre. Its colour ranged from ivory in the centre to straw yellow in the nail. I’d read that it was eaten by Welsh miners to replace the salt they lost in their labours, but it wasn’t an overwhelmingly salty cheese. It had, when I unwrapped it, a whiff of ammonia but that didn’t linger after resting and cutting. It evoked aromas of yogurt most strongly, and for its texture Louisa dredged from her olfactory memory a comparison with a Greek cheese, like (but not) Halloumi. I suppose the salt content makes it a dryer cheese than most? Caerphilly is a sweet, crumbly cheese that’s nice in cooking; I remembered some Glamorgan Sausages I’d eaten at a New British restaurant once and they were a beautiful melding of salt, cheese and leek. Not nearly enough left over to cook with this time even if I wanted to…