ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Flew into Bologna only yesterday, shattered after an early morning that could have passed for a late night; such are the travails of crossing London in time for a 7.10 flight from Stansted Airport. After a doze on the plane and another on the airport bus, I woke into a happy dream when we found our way to the market area.

After a good lunch at Tamburini, everything felt more than OK as we headed out of town, to start our journey west.

We arrived in Modena, which is Lambrusco country.

The meal at the Osteria Stallo del Pomodoro was affably served and began with this fetching amuse-bouche, a tart of soft goat cheese with pistachio and fried shredded beetroot. So pretty!

The antipasto misto was a marvellous misto of many interesting things. So colourful!

The Soffiato di Parmigiano-Reggiano was a cheesy mousse baked in a hollow pear and served with vino cotto. Very nice.

When in Modena… gelato with balsamico tradizionale. We behaved so nicely that the waiter gave us each a few precious drops of 25+ year old traditionale as a parting gift.

En route to Asti, we stopped for some inexplicable reason at the AutoGrill,

where the amusements are many. It is not what most countries stock their highway rest stops with…

On to Asti where the sun shone on our afternoon stroll.

A watchful dog:

Who wouldn’t want to shop at Save Money Square?

Supper at Il Convivio began with a warm and wonderful jerusalem artichoke tart, which was a sort of artichoke custard, with a sauce of local cheese and anchovies.

Then Ganascino di maiale – described as pork chicklets in the menu – braised in Barbera and beautifully seasoned; served on a polenta pancake which was a bit like a lovely dumpling.

When in Piemonte… of course it was necessary to finish with Bonet!

Tomorrow the biannual food and madness of Terra Madre/Salone del Gusto begins. Watch this space…

Back in London and what’s a food-loving poet to do but jump off the plane and onto the train and get myself to Islington to catch Poetry in the Crypt. Mike Bartholomew-Biggs

introduces the evening’s three featured readers and here are two of them; Franciscan monk, Murray Bodo, on his way home from Assisi to inner city Cincinnati

and the lovely Sue Rose whose first collection is due out next year from Cinnamon Press.

There were floor spots as well, including one from Peter Daniels:

After a wee drop with the poets at the Almeida‘s bar, I headed off into the night.

The next morning we had some breakfast at Gail’s Bakery, which offers an awesome brioche french toast with a decadent dollop of mascarpone

as well as a window full of breads and pastry, including some nice looking apricot-walnut bread.

After you’ve shopped there, you might want to stop for some cash, being careful not to be distracted.

We made our way to the South Bank Centre, crossing the Thames at Charing Cross on a beautiful autumn day

to check out the Cheese & Wine Festival that was enjoying big crowds on its last day. There was a lot to look at including some lovely breads to wrap your cheeses in

or if you prefer potatoes, you could get them smothered in raclette

and accompanied by French sausages

or a nice bowl of something hot.

There was British cheese

French cheese

and Italian.

There was a cheesemaking demonstration by organic cheeseman Bob Kitching, who taught young Thomas the bystander a thing or two about sampling a nice fresh Lancashire cheese.

While I think “companion animals” sounds like a lovely idea for an anthology, and I commend the Ontario Veterinary College for thinking to celebrate its anniversary by promoting literature on this theme, I must grind my axe on the conditions they’re imposing on contributors, ever so carefully, so as to split just a few familiar hairs.

I have some problems generally with anthologists who invite submissions for which they will offer no payment. A well-worn response by writers to this situation is to ask whether the printers will be paid? The people who make the paper the book is printed on? The truck drivers who transport the finished product? Then why not the creators without whose work the book does not exist? Though even so, being provided copies of the final collection is often enough to mollify me (3 copies in this case).

However. The guidelines for contributors to anthologies suggested in 2006 by the Writers Union of Canada are, I think, worth reviewing, even if they may be overly optimistic in today’s book publishing environment:

Royalties: “As a contributor to an anthology you can reasonably ask for a proportionate share of the authors’ usual royalty calculated on the list or selling price”

Fees: “A rule of thumb is $100 per page per edition in which the contribution will appear”

But to do as the editors of this anthology have done: offer no payment, and then stipulate firstly that the work cannot have been previously published, and secondly, that a reading fee must be paid… either condition is too much, and the two together are downright insulting.

Honestly, do we need the glory of being in print so badly that unpaid writers are willing to subsidize the publication of a collection that celebrates a well-paid profession? (Although perhaps if the publication credit came with a free veterinary visit, I could be persuaded this is a good deal for both sides.)

One question I have is just why the editors specify the submissions must be previously unpublished, and I suspect it may be that they fear copyright entanglements over material published in book form. Perhaps they are simply ignorant of the difference between books and journals, where the latter takes only first serial rights and leaves the author free to publish the work elsewhere.

But I strongly suspect they haven’t actually thought about it in relation to their own unwillingness to pay for the work. Being able to offer a poem, in my case, that has appeared in print for a nominal fee (literary magazines are, with luck, able to offer somewhere between $30 and $60 per poem in this country) takes some of the sting out of having an unpaid second appearance. And if this poem in a literary journal should have been previously read by its small and select readership, what harm does that do to an anthology later on? Particularly in this case, where the aim is not to garner literary creds: it’s a veterinary college, for heaven’s sake, and I’d guess the anthology is destined for the veterinary offices of the nation, not shrines of literature.

But even if the editors were to loosen their restrictions on previous publication, I would be reluctant to spend most of what I might have already earned from a poem in paying a reading fee (between $20-30 depending where you live) to submit it. (Though this fee does provide you with one copy of the anthology, even if you are not accepted for publication in it.)

As you may infer, this is not the first anthology I’ve encountered that puts harebrained restrictions on its contributors and then doesn’t even pay them. Where Canadian publishing is concerned, I’m afraid I continue to feel the pull of a downward spiral of water and a whiff of odure in its vortex.

Thanksgiving weekend has been and gone, but the sweet taste of harvest still lingers.

We enjoyed a thanksgiving salmon – grateful for the sockeye run this year – and baked it swiftly with garnishes of Black Krim tomato, sprigs of lovage, sliced ginger and lemon and a dollop of my brother’s white wine.

And it was good.

My neighbour passed a little acorn squash over the fence, and I found a trio of thanksgiving blackberries: tasting a bit Octoberish, but still, a glorious gift.

My carrots got a bit stunted but went well with the last of this fall’s epic yield of runner beans. Some organic beets and broccoli from Haliburton, salad of my cucumbers – still producing sweetly – and tomatoes,

a pie of local pumpkin,

and a few postprandial squares of quince paste rounded things out in a quasi-traditional manner.

The preserving marathon continues unabated. A salmon canning frenzy led me to divvy a whole salmon into ten luscious jars yesterday

while I was making quince & apple sauce and more quince jelly, which offset any fishy aromas that might have sullied my kitchen.

Things are wrapping up in gardens everywhere. At Haliburton Farm, the harvest was running full-tilt late last week, bringing lots of colour to the farm stand.

Some late raspberries

a giant turnip;

a couple of farmers bring it in from the fields.

Thanks to time, money, patience and the hard work of volunteers, the greenhouse that was destroyed on Easter weekend has finally been repaired and covered:

Tomorrow is the final vegetable basket of the year, with next year’s CSA program already oversubscribed:

It all started innocently enough, with a basket of quince, foraged from my dogsitter (in exchange for a share of the products) and a relatively free day. My ambitions were to make quince paste and quince jelly.

I peeled and trimmed the quince until I had 4 pounds of peels and trimmings, and 3 pounds of quince chunks. I put them in separate pots and started cooking.

After a short while, the discolouration disappears and the kitchen becomes fragrant with the incomparable scent of cooking quince. It’s a perfume you don’t forget.

When the quince chunks cooks down and become soft, in about 40 minutes, pass them through a sieve, add sugar, and cook – stirring all the while – for another hour or so until they deepenin colour and become thick. After a point, it gets so thick it starts spitting molten fruit/sugar, which adds a certain frisson to the enterprise. Add the juice of a lemon and spread on oiled parchment paper (actually a teflex sheet in this case) to dry for a couple of days. Once it’s firm enough you can turn it to get air on the other side.

Cube it and roll the cubes in sugar. You can store them for months and months in airtight containers in the fridge.

Meanwhile, the peels and trimmings are cooking and colouring as well. After a couple of hours, they’re darker and ready to strain – never pressing them lest you cloud the liquid – in jelly bags for around 4 hours.

Once the liquid has stopped dripping, return it to the pot with some lemon juice. The sugar, according to my recipe, is measured out (1 pound sugar per imperial pint) and warmed in the oven before adding to the liquid. You then boil it merrily, skimming the foam, until it’s dark and fragrant, and you get a good set. Then jar it up and process as you will.

Hey presto. How pretty!