An Egg

Humpty Dumpty is not an egg. At least, he is not necessarily an egg. The rhyming riddle documenting his accident never specifies his species. An early illustrator decided the matter, and since then it has been taken for granted that the answer to the conundrum is not that Humpty is, as some suggest, a gun, or Richard III, or Cardinal Woolsey, but that he is a dapper, hapless egg. Perhaps we persistently depict this punch line because it so satisfyingly represents the permanent shattering that solving a mystery produces: look! We’ve cracked the code! Revealed the secret! Like a smashed egg, there’s no use in trying to pack a cracked code up again.

Eggs and secrets seem to go together. I was raised on tales of the jewel-encrusted Easter eggs made by Fabergé for the Empress of Russia across the years that turned the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Under the theme of “Things I Will Never be Given, but Should, Because I Would Know How to Appreciate Them,” my mother talked wistfully about those carved, jeweled eggs and their pricelessness. “The Violent Loss of Imperial Grandeur” was another favourite theme, so the Fabergé eggs got jumbled in with thrilling, blood-spattered allusions to Romanov executions, hemophiliac sons and the missing Princess Anastasia. The case of the woman claiming to be Anastasia, the one survivor, was of particular and abiding interest in our household.

I’m not sure if my mother was more attached to the idea of remnant royalty, or to the possibility of passing as that remnant. The woman who called herself Grand Duchess Anastasia was finally revealed to be a Polish factory worker: a posthumous DNA test betrayed the secrets of her bones. She was a peasant who tried on the crown. She made herself princess by piecing together shards of knowledge, etiquette and deportment, leading several royals to declare that whoever she was, she was no commoner. But childhood friends remembered her putting on airs and graces: she had cast the die for a royal life early on – history merely filled the cavity. At least she forced the race-obsessed Duke of Edinburgh to the indignity of rolling up his sleeve and having his Grade A cells sized up against hers.

It turns out that many of the recovered Fabergé eggs have given up their secrets, too. The first one, made in 1885, is an egg of plain white enameled gold, which cracks open to release a full, matte, golden yolk. This yolk splits in half to reveal a suede-lined nest edged with stippled gold “straw.” In this nest is a tiny hen, her feathers crafted from white and yellow gold. She is timid-looking, made nervous perhaps by the faint fissure running from her beak to her tail. This hinged incision gave access to the final “secret” of the egg – a diamond replica of the imperial crown that itself concealed a ruby pendant in the shape of an egg. As Fabergé wrote to the Emperor, the secret egg pendant “symbolises the Empress’ autocracy.” The secret and the autocracy are both long gone. Somewhere between governments, auction houses and collectors, the crown and its ruby egg vanished. The hen is relieved of her stony innards, her barrenness a welcome pause to the riddling, reiterative reproductions of eggs within eggs. And, of course, to crowns within crowns. These losses comfort me.

And yet, I know that my own daydreams expanded to fill the negative spaces of my mother’s. As she rehearsed how one might escape from Bolshevik bullets while stuffing as many Fabergé eggs as possible into a handbag, I mused on the ways and means of turning Bolshevik. I wasn’t sure if there were any Bolshevik hangouts in my hometown of Orpington. If so, they were not in evidence amongst the ironmongers and tobacconists on the High Street. So instead, I bought a man’s old, black overcoat from a charity shop and slouched around in it, trailing after my mother through Marks and Spencer’s. I thought some Bolsheviks, out for a Sunday afternoon down the shops, might recognize me as one of their own. They would take me in and train me. Thin, fiery-eyed intellectuals with ruined smoky voices. But they never turned up. Instead, my youth was apprenticed in other ways, one of which involved extreme egg crafts.

Every Easter my mother brought out a Tupperware full of white plastic moulds in different egg sizes, patterned like the crazy paving favoured for driveways and patios in the suburbs. My job was to polish the insides of these moulds scrupulously, until the plastic became glossy. Then we melted bars of “cake cover” chocolate over a double boiler, and using a child’s paintbrush, we coated the inside of the moulds with chocolate and left them to dry. If my glossing had been sufficiently diligent, the brittle half shells would pop out of the moulds. If I’d missed a spot, the resulting chocolate rubble went back into the double-boiler for another go around. The mimics of eggs were lined up to undergo secondary transformations into other Easter characters. My mother’s pièce de résistance was a chocolate egg cradle complete with chocolate bunny baby. One half of the egg was placed on its rounded back and tucked, attached with a dab of melted chocolate, inside its upright other half, which was hoisted to form a canopy. A flat bunny, pressed out from another glossed plastic mould, was tucked inside the cradle, its bunny ears resting on a fondant pillow, its bunny body draped with a fondant blanket. The edges of everything were then piped with icing and trimmed with sugar flowers. There was also a 3-dimensional rabbit, with a body made from a large egg, topped with a head made from a small egg, balanced sideways. This gentleman was given a piped orange carrot, some spectacles and a pair of splayed chocolate feet. Other eggs were simply piped together, a name iced on the outside and a flat bunny trapped inside – another doomed “secret,” revealed only when its recipient smashed their gift.

These chocolate bunnies and eggs were always dried on a designated window ledge to harden them up, until one year the sun broke uncharacteristically through grey English skies and we woke to find twenty-five slumped and sagging egg-creatures, cradles akimbo and secret bunnies half protruding from egg bellies. I was in favour of distributing that batch - driving around and knocking on doors, smilingly handing over the grotesque, faintly phylogenic revelations as our meaning of Easter. I was over-ruled.

This year, however, another opportunity for egg wonders (and perhaps horrors) presented itself. My local Fair Foods market announced that they would, for two weeks only, be selling Emu eggs. The first week I fell afoul of stiff competition to secure one of the first 40 eggs. I was told I would have to wait for the emus to lay some more. I waited. And thought of those enormous top-heavy birds with their knock-kneed bare legs folded under them. The next week, I got to market early enough to have my pick of the crop. In a round wicker basket, lined with wispy white and brown feathers, lolled a clutch of huge and wondrous eggs. Glorious in two-tone stipple of aquamarine overlaid with teal, they were the shape of a rugby ball and the size of a newborn’s head. I selected my egg. The shell felt as reassuringly thick as a teapot. Wrapped in brown paper, I carried it home.

Apparently emu eggs have less water content than other eggs, making them a little fluffier when cooked, and one emu egg is equal to about 10 chicken eggs in volume. I decided that scrambling my egg would showcase its fluffiness and allow us to taste its idiosyncrasies. I also thought I should retain a little greenness to the breakfast, to memorialize the shell and Dr. Seuss too. So I baked a batch of rosemary olive oil bread, and procured some parsley. The size and strangeness of the breakfast demanded a guest and delightfully, one arrived in the form of a friend who had undergone a small medical unpleasantness and needed recuperation in our guest room. On waking, we greeted her tartan pajama-d self with a real rise-and-shine plan: drilling two holes in an emu egg, blowing out its viscous contents, and then eating them! Post-operatively delicate though she may have been, our guest was game.

B fetched a hammer and a small brass nail. Balancing the egg in a drinking glass, I tapped a hole in both of its ends, and then B began. Blowing out an emu egg requires two hands, and two full cheeks of air. B looked like the north wind, and blew so hard her eyeballs hurt. We passed the task back and forth, partly because it was such hard work, and partly because watching the results was so disgusting and so compelling. The viscous drip from the egg’s other end soon became a gelatinous torrent that delighted and appalled the audience. Whenever the blower stopped to take a breath, a bubble or two would emerge at the blowing end and respirate slightly. We three looked on asquint. Eggs, we were forcibly reminded, are strange. They hint at prehistoric monstrosities and futuristic invasions. They bulge with vile potential and tell again exactly how brutal our eating habits are.

Although foundational to much cooking as an agent of rise and an efficient protein, an egg is also an implausible gustatory proposal, hated by many. It is too premature, too mucosal. A friend of mine was once forced by her primary school teacher, who hated her Gujarati vegetarianism, to stand in front of the entire class and choke down an egg. An egg is well cast as an instrument of such hateful regime-formation. Those of us who overlook or relish the grisly aspects of our animal-product diets speak of how “I like my egg.” We are particular about eggs and hold on to how those particularities define us. Perhaps this is because, in England and the U.S., we encounter eggs in the morning, when we have a chance to reinvent ourselves – but most mornings this is a chance we dismiss. The nameless, bewhiskered Everyman of Green Eggs and Ham, when invited by Sam I Am to taste a new egg dish, doesn’t welcome it. Indeed, he resists most strenuously and across many miles of uncomfortable travel before exhaustedly altering his tastes.

Perhaps that pestered, droopy-eared creature in his battered top hat is an Englishman. I say this because, in my land, we are made uncomfortable by joyous Sam I Am-ish expressions of choice and liberty such as “Sunny Side Up!” or “Over Easy!” When I first moved to the U.S., I listened, amazed, to these happily, openly coded exchanges in diners. The customer announced himself to the waitress, who then relayed his identity without judgment to the line cook: “Over Easy!” In England, we have opinions about eggs. Englishmen look askew if you peel, rather than slice open your boiled egg . . . or vice versa. There are camps, not choices. Nevertheless, there are delightful variations, once you’ve gotten through the shell. I had a fastidious uncle (a dyed-in-the-wool egg peeler) who introduced my brother and me to a magical supper called Egg in a Cup. Easily prepared by little fingers, Egg in a Cup consists of filling a large and amiable mug with torn up pieces of bread, small knobs of butter, a splash of milk, salt and pepper and the scooped out contents of a soft boiled egg. The elements are less important than the joy of the jumbled form, and the pleasure of the meal having a handle.

Eggs must be treated gently. I very lightly whisked my emu egg, incorporating its pale yolk with its water-clear “white, ” salted and peppered it, and then splashed in a little Jersey milk. In my largest sauté pan, I melted some butter over not much heat and then poured in my voluminous, single egg. All proteins benefit from slow cooking. So I cooked the egg lazily, allowing large curds to form without any agitation, occupying myself instead by slicing up the herb-flecked bread and toasting it.
Towards the end of the cooking, the curds broke up into smaller scrambles, and it felt like stirring porridge. Once plated and tasted, we all agreed that there was something gluey about it – which B spurned outright, but our invalided guest and I found compelling. I had expected a strong and savoury flavour, like a duck egg, but this egg was mild and determinedly creamy. It had a lounging, debauched quality and was so rich that it could have served 20. It seemed like the kind of thing to be fed to the survivors of an all-night party – mangled by drink and dancing and compromising situations, we awaken – a bleary Lumpenpolitik – to the grand nourishment of one green egg, sans ham. Put together again by a shared breakfast: no need for king’s horses nor king’s men.

Un petit d’un petit
S’étonne aux Halles
Un petit d’un petit
Ah! degr és te fallent
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu’importe un petit d’un petit
Tout Gai de Reguennes

From
Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames
Discovered, edited and annotated by Luis d’Antin Van Rooten

Fruitcake

Port Meadow is a large and ancient grazing ground in Oxfordshire. It is a floodmeadow, flanked by a thin, brambled-over stretch of the Thames, and no matter the season it is hung with a sense of the sodden. Mud and mists linger above, but there is also the feeling, as you make your way across the soft – ominously soft – ground, of something congressional below. Obscure half-paths emerge from out of the turf, criss-cross briefly, then disappear. The enameled colours of the narrow boats that sidle up against the abrupt riverbanks are the only real brightness anywhere. Cows, sometimes ponies, happen alongside you – sudden companions, made of meat and vapour.

“Freemen” and “Commoners of Wolvercote” have grazing rights on this wide, flat ground that has never once been ploughed, and it is a place where peripatetics become dwellers, and the more conventionally lodged – briskly out for walks in their green wellies - are the transients. One November day on the meadow I stumbled across a small and straggly television crew interviewing a group of Travellers. The water-proofed interviewer asked his wrap-up question: “So what’s the one thing most necessary in life?” Clearly bored by this quest for three seconds of nomadic wisdom, no one answered. Then a young freeman, a dreadlocked girl, leaned close in to the microphone and said, flat as a penny, “Cake.”

I have long been of the same opinion. An early and famous tantrum of mine was thrown over being removed from a café, and thus from the chance of cake, when the price list arrived at the small formica table. I am proud to report that my rage was so shattering, my aunt and uncle pledged then and there to remain childless for life. Since then, nothing much has changed. I happily rearrange my life, and the lives of others, around the pursuit of good cake and if I sniff such a cake on the wind, I am not to be deterred until I am sat down before it, fork in hand. But recently I realized – like the returning memory of a strange and portentous dream, hours later when the day is at its most raw and real – that I have been subduing a long dark craving for a particular kind of cake – a cake I rarely see anymore, a cake that lay submerged beneath my pursuit of other cakeish delights - fruitcake. As the winter months started closing in, I was gripped by the stubborn clutching upward of this old and betrayed taste. It had been, I calculated, seven years since I had made or tasted fruitcake. A week made of years. The need for fruitcake lay in me like a fallen clock weight.

A good fruitcake is made well ahead of itself. In my childhood, our Christmas fruitcakes were made by my Nana in Birmingham and fetched home to be iced by my mother in London. Nana made the cakes because no-one could make them like her. In her kitchen, pounds and ounces meant nothing – her cakes were made from handfuls. I called her recently – she has been eighty-three for at least ten years – hoping to reconstruct the gist of the recipe with her. But like the Travellers on the meadow, Nana was uninterested in passing along her knowledge. She denied that she had any knowledge. There was no recipe to be passed down, just a reminder, made in a thin voice over a crackling international phone call straddling time zones, to use brown sugar.

When Nana made the cakes, she made them a month in advance of Christmas and we drove up to get ours. We always seemed to make the drive at night. Sunk deep into the back seat of the car, I stared up and out of the window to catch the first sight of the illuminated city, promising myself that one day I would live in a high-rise and also be a bright window of light in a night sky. Once at Nana’s, my brother and I were layered into bunk beds. Leaning out a little, I could twitch the nylon lace curtain aside and watch the traffic go by. Double-decker buses satisfied me best. The towerblocks we’d driven past glowed with intimations of varied and sovereign lives. Now those lives roared past my brother and me, the buses glowing, their two decks packed with many faces alive with possibility. Later next day, we got ready to leave and make the drive back down in dreary daylight. I was told to retrieve a cake from where they were stashed under the sideboard, each one housed in a dented biscuit tin – the kind that had once held Christmas biscuit assortments. I pried open the lids to find the ones with cake - there was always one full of old keys.

Our cake came with us down south. We packed it into the car and waved our goodbyes. But that cake was headed south in more ways than one. It was bound for doom and damnation – in the form of Drink. My grandparents’ household was strictly teetotal. I was always told that Poppa’s years of war service on the submarines had shown him the evils of the bottle , and no-one was allowed to bring drink into his house. Herein lay a problem. A fruitcake is the most immortal of cakes, as weighty and mindful as a cheese. But its longevity must be procured through intoxicants. Sherry or rum, brandy or whisky: a fruitcake needs its tipple. So the removal of the cake from Nana’s to our kitchen was a smuggler’s run, and Poppa, who observed the handover in silence, must have known it.

Home again, I watched as the cake was unwrapped from its double-jacket of greaseproof paper and foil, revealing its pocked, seductive surface. The common practice, at this stage of things, is to stab the top of the cake with a skewer, or maybe a knitting needle, and then drizzle your liquor of choice over the holes, allowing it to sink in. Feeding the cake once a week or so renders it succulent and vivacious come Christmas. My mother, however, felt that this was doing things half-mast. Although there was many a knitting needle in our house – including a strange set of metal ones, sharpened to a renovated point by my teetotaler grandfather – my mother eschewed craft for science. She had a nurse friend, who wore starched white and navy uniforms, cinched with an affecting belt. This friend crept on regulation soles down a gleaming, squeaky corridor to a stock cupboard and acquired my mother a large hypodermic needle. Each week we undressed the cake and my mother drew a length of amber-coloured sherry into the syringe, then repeatedly pierced and incrementally released the liquid into the body of the cake, a drop welling up at the site of each puncture. I watched, entranced. Injections are particularly pertinent to the young, because they are such a definite encounter with state-sanctioned pain. They work in a phantasmal future, protecting you from diseases that others got before you, but from which your generation will be saved if you just – and you must! – surrender to the needle. And the fruitcake yielded, too, or perhaps it yielded on my behalf – accepting the slow slide of the long needle without sting, without complaint.

My family recipe, then, is for a brown sugar cake that betrays temperance and accuracies of inventory, and that gains its long life (as many of us do) with a little help from the medical profession. My first task, clearly, was to get hold of a large bottle of brandy. My second was to procure a hypodermic needle. And my third was to find a recipe with actual, measurable ingredients. The brandy and the recipe were easy – a well stocked drinks cabinet provided one and Nigel Slater stood gamely in for grandma, providing the other.

The second of my tasks stumped me for a while. I solicited a medical friend – a doctor. He cheerily agreed, but it turns out that doctors aren’t allowed in stockrooms, and after two abortive attempts to duck into one, he said my chances were slim. Nevertheless a few days later he was successful; a nurse sympathetic to the cause had been enlisted, I was now the owner of a sizeable syringe and a selection of sterile-packed needles – “We’re not trained what gauge to use for fruitcake,” he explained.

Furnished with contraband, I was ready to summon ingredients. A fruitcake must possess the gallantry of crumb, not be simply frenzied with fruit. And the fruits themselves – they should not be painted into living-dead charades of summer colour. They must be dark, they must not deny that they are aged, they must carry with them the signs of their survival. It seems to me that a fruitcake is indeed an audacious creature, but its audacity is a consequence of sly hoardings, dubious exchanges and shameless incongruities. A fruitcake is a brazen and aging hussy, tossing its head at strictures of season and locale, demanding indulgence, flaunting acquisition. It is an American southerner who tells it best; Truman Capote, who knew something about fruitcake, delivers a tale of the making of Christmas cakes that pairs an abandoned child and a simple, elderly cousin, raking ingredients out of the leaves of poverty and disavowal. The cakes are soaked in moonshine, bundled into a baby carriage and mailed to a president.

A fruitcake mixes fruits of the vine with those of the tree and the bush, all stolen from their own time, delayed into another. These fruits are picked at their peak of ripeness only to be dried, wizened for futurity, then revived again, swelled by alcohol itself aged and stored and fermented. A fruitcake violates generation and seasons and then revels in its own untimeliness – prepared in advance, preserved and often eaten long after the festival it marks. An aunt of mine was once at a wake where fruitcake was served. A nippy plate circulator observed my aunt's pleasure as she took the first bite and commented, “Good cake isn’t it? Corpse baked it herself.”

Cake thou art, and unto cake shalt thou return. Fruitcake is dyed with tannins, and it ingests its own avarice, starting to recall the blackest, earliest kinds of wealth, returning the cake to the sod that grew it. I therefore filled mine with the darker fruits - figs and prunes – fruits that saturate and irritate, and with the woodier, less prancing nuts – hazelnuts and walnuts. And my sugar was the most treacle brown I could find. I injected the cake over several weeks, and then I pressed the heavy blade of my largest knife to its firm crust and cut it like peat, its wet, half-ancient geology finally exposed.



SYLLABUS: FRUITCAKE
Slightly adapted from Nigel Slater
This is a large cake, enough to feed 16.

350g unsalted butter
175g light muscovado sugar
175g dark muscovado sugar
1kg total weight of dried fruits - prunes, figs, candied peel, and dried rather than glace cherries if you can find them. I used an equal mix of Bing and Ranier dried cherries – delicious.
5 large free-range eggs
100g ground almonds
150g shelled hazelnuts
500g total weight vine fruits - raisins, sultanas, currants,
5 tbsps brandy
zest of 1 lemon
zest and juice of 1 orange
1/2 tsp baking powder
350g plain flour

You will also need a 24-25cm cake tin with a removable base, fully lined with a double layer of lightly buttered greaseproof paper or nonstick baking paper, which should come at least 5cm above the top of the tin. If you skip this bit, the edges of the cake will burn.

Set the oven to 160 C/gas mark 3. Cream the butter and sugar till light and fluffy. Scrape down the sides of the bowl from time to time with a spatula.

While the butter and sugars are beating to a light and fluffy texture, cut the dried fruits into small pieces, removing the hard stalks from the figs. Add the eggs to the mixture one at a time - it will curdle but don't worry - then slowly mix in the ground almonds, hazelnuts, all the dried fruit, the brandy, the citrus zest and juice.

Now mix the baking powder and flour together and fold them lightly into the mix. Scrape the mixture into the prepared tin, smoothing the top gently, and put it in the oven. Leave it for an hour, then, without opening the oven door, turn down the heat to 150 C/gas mark 2 and continue cooking for 2 hours.

Check to see whether the cake is done by inserting a skewer into the centre. It should come out with just a few crumbs attached but no trace of raw cake mixture. Take the cake out of the oven and leave it to cool before removing it from the tin.

Bitter Orange

Weddings – pallid, repetitious – happen beneath the orange blossom, but bitter births, the ballads tell us, happen beneath the thorn. Bitter births, no two the same, stubborn shovings into the world, the sharp, bright reminders of forced or lost or hopeless love. We have a tree in our small, bricked garden, a tree of just such beginnings. Out of place, wrong, transplanted – it spites the odds, withstanding the wrong climate with a sort of belligerence. It is a gnomish orange tree, and it has blossom, thorn and fruit. The trunk is tripartite; it grows into and out of itself again, three separate trunks fused ominously together. And the leaves are three-part too. Poncirus trifoliata: a three-leaved citrus. The ghostly and scentless blossoms drift across the tree not once but twice a year, mistakenly, a way of coping with alien seasons. They come first in early spring, against the black mesh of thorny branches, then again in late spring, against a bright and poison green. The thorns are two inches long and dagger–sharp. And the fruit that comes – sometimes later, sometimes intermingled with its flower – is hard, round, sure and vehemently orange. But for all their hardness the oranges are covered in a light down – “pubescent,” say the botanists – and it’s true that they crowd the tree with a kind of adolescent feeling; social, often mottled, precipitate. The rush to fruit clutters the tree with eager masses and desperate outliers, and when they fall they rain down hard, careless of where they roll.

Most trees grow around us without benefit of narrative, but the strangeness of this tree has preserved the story of its origin. We bought our moody slice of house from a young French teacher named Michael, who had lived in the house for three years before he fell in love with a Montreal patriot who refused to come south, and demanded that Michael emigrate. With a certain urgency, Michael told us about the woman from whom he had bought - Miss Polly, who had been born in the house and lived there 90 years until she upped sticks to move in with the daughter-in-law widowed by her son. There were three things of Miss Polly’s that he was leaving with us, Michael said. The first two he had found in the attic crawlspace. A splintering frame containing a porous, elderly print of St. Anthony, the saint of lost things and lost causes. And another frame holding Miss Polly’s 1943 beauty school certificate. This diploma attests to Miss Polly’s training in “Scalp and Hair Treatment, and Beauty Culture.” Mary Pressley Norman, it declares in cursive, “is a competent operator in Marcel Waving, Water Waving, Finger Waving, Round Curling, Hair Dressing, Hand Moulding, Electrical Appliances, Sanitation and Sterilization, Anatomy and Skin Bleaching.” Miss Polly, Michael told us, didn’t care about the two framed guarantees. We could do with them as we wished. But the third thing – the third thing we must protect.

The third thing was the tree. No-one, she asked, should ever take an axe to her orange tree. From years of discipline, of Marcel and Water Waving, of Hand Moulding and Skin Bleaching, she had saved money for a trip to Jamaica. When she returned, she smuggled back in her hand luggage three small, green, thorny sproutings from her paradise. Somehow they reached toward the distant, cold Philadelphia sun, melded and survived. Old houses bear the marks of their travails. Our house is made of little rooms and passages that break the simple rectangle up into interlocking spaces, scarred from old leaks, the cracked paint of previous lives heaving beneath the clean new coats. Dark, textured by old paper, plaster, dented woodwork, bead and board and porcelain; our house has a whiff of the sinister. We hung Miss Polly’s certificate in the living room, its papery gold foil seal glinting in the dim light. In the dining room, St. Anthony clutches his heavy lilies and bends over the child Jesus. Their gloomy, glimmering halos blend together. And in the garden the tree lifts its crown of thorns, bright with oranges.

We have now lived alongside this tree for three years. Two Octobers came and went, twice the oranges hurled themselves like suicidal teenage lovers from their thorny branches. Twice I swept them in their hundreds under the garden door, where they were squashed by passing garbage trucks, or were batted down the alleyway by that year’s generation of lean and hungry feral kittens. Like the kittens, I am a scavenger. I fill my pockets with unidentifiable nuts found on walks, and have been known to steal the decorative kale out from under party platters, smuggle it home and feast upon it steamed,sautéed and stewed. But for two years these oranges in all their abundance failed to tempt me. I’d found some hints here and there that you could make marmalade out of them, but . . . you can make marmalade out of old boots if you smother them in sugar and boil til dead. Dry and hard, Miss Polly’s oranges were the bright emblem of her dedication to the sinewy goals of survival and beauty. There was none of the yielding effulgence, the lazy, juicy fulsomeness necessary for culinary pleasure.

But this year we enjoyed a long summer. The warm days stretched on and on. We went away for a month and, unobserved, the tree let down its guard. The oranges swelled beyond their usual clench, they ripened smooth and bright and taut with juice. When I stepped on one, it tore and its spill of seed and sap released a fresh, floral scent reminiscent of passion fruit. The tree was still in charge – in this year of lusciousness, it was commanding me to cook its crop.

It is the pucker of marmalade of which I am fond – there’s no point in marmalade slumped into sweetness. Marmalade is a sophisticated vice – half-kiss, half-bite. It grips the palate and pleases through severity. Which is why, of course, the English like it. It preserves the scold of the school dormitory on the breakfast plate of the civil servant. It encodes our sourness, our love of critique, our brutality, into a jar of brilliant orange. A friend of mine, a fellow-émigré, wears mostly marmalade-orange – her hair too – and I love her for it. She has plucked the English thorn from beneath the skin and learned to play with its point. For me, the thorn may be too deep. But a good marmalade reminds me that I owe a great deal to this bitterness that is both a taste and a feeling; it is a part of who I am. And making marmalade, boiling bitters, watching the bright brew quicken and shiver, watching for the setting point -- is an exercise in control and violence, in finding just that balance where the sharp limit of what is pleasing dissolves, stinging, upon the tongue.

It’s hard to explain Englishness here, in a country where a blind and saccharine Anglophilia makes idols of our worst selves. There will always be cruelties we cannot curb, so we suspend pith and peel, the orange’s protective shell, in the pressings of its own lost juices – reconvening the bitter and the sweet before we swallow it whole. Marmalade belongs to the slap of morning. Jam we use for comfort, at teatime, but marmalade hardly ever. Marmalade, along with coffee, breaks our fast through bitterness. Is this an exorcism of the night’s terrors? A hope to have faced the worst before the day begins? Or is it a philosophical affection for astringency? Astringents reassure us that we are feeling beings, let us feel the wound, but are styptic too – contracting our tissues, staunching loss.

The juice I wrung from Miss Polly’s oranges was a strange fluid. Tinged phosphor green and viscous, its scent was more flower than fruit. A waxy, lunar residue clung to my knife. I tasted a tiny sliver of rind, and even my hard-learned lessons in the benefit of bitterness failed me: it was pure wormwood and gall. Seville oranges, the traditional marmalade fruit, are prized for the particular bite of their rind, but these . . . my tongue recoiled and clove to the roof of my mouth. My source recommended repeatedly blanching the hemispheric rinds in boiling water. This, I was informed, would leach out the bitterness until its levels became tolerable. So I scalded the rinds over and over, discarding the water each time, and nibbling pieces to calibrate my progress. The bitterness, however, never even faded. It scorched my tongue and shook its fist at my efforts to quell it. Even when I became retaliatory, shredding it before submerging in the boiling water, it refused to give up its repellent powers. I’d laboured now for hours and my fingers itched to toss those iridescent shreds into my pan of hard won juice, but I knew that if I reintroduced that peel to the fragrant liquid, its charms would wither.

So I banished the peel and turned my marmalade into a jelly. It is delicious and strange, its flavour somewhat haunted – by both the tree’s sweet blossoms and the oranges' bitter rind. And its form, too, has something uncanny about it. Glassy, vapourish and possessed of a bewitching hint of the thorn.



Oh the rose of keenest thorn!
One hidden summer morn
Under the rose I was born.

I do not guess his name
Who wrought my Mother's shame,
And gave me life forlorn,
But my Mother, Mother, Mother,
I know her from all other.
My Mother pale and mild,
Fair as ever was seen,
She was but scarce sixteen,
Little more than a child,
When I was born
To work her scorn.
With secret bitter throes,
In a passion of secret woes,
She bore me under the rose.

-- Christina Rossetti

Peas

I sleep in a bedroom painted “Pea Green.” It is a colour that follows you into slumber, pulling the gate of the day to. I got the idea from a friend, who years ago painted every room (in a house I never saw, with his lover whom I was too late to meet), all in shades of green. A vegetal interior, top to bottom leaf, frond and furl. I imagine that this was like living inside out; they made themselves a house in which they could roam the greenwood. And it was a turning away from the taut business of choice: instead of seeking the one perfect verdant shade, they had gathered swathes of greens and chosen all.

The greenest fruit, the pea, has been used as a fulcrum for some dubious practices of selection. One of the stories that Hans Christian Andersen collected, The Princess and the Pea, tells of the prince who must marry a princess, and only a real one will do. One evening just such a princess turns up, sodden, seeking shelter from the rain. She is offered a bed of twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds too, under which a single pea has been stranded by a queen’s bony hand. In the morning, when asked how she slept, she complains roundly of something in the bed that bruised her all over. Seized by this as proof of the girl’s blue-blood, the queen whisks her to the altar with her witless son. Why did that pinched monarch think that this particular legume would single out a princess? Raised in the stalked siblinghood of a pod, a pea is as companionable as a syllable. What truck would it have with overseeing the segregation of real from pretend princesses? And leaving its siblings aside for a moment, the single pea, inside its own dashing jacket, is a fellow of two halves. The pea knows, surely, that we are all seamed creatures, as liable to split as roll.

My own feeling is that the small green pea in Andersen’s tale is actually a red herring. The princess satisfies her future mother-in-law not because she is a highly calibrated critic, but because she knows how to throw a huge hissy fit. The real princess knows to complain, even about the luxuries that cushion her. This is the true sign of aristocracy so-called. All lower orders are raised to emit thanks routinely, smoothing over the failings of others and anxiously sweeping the spaces we occupy, all to ward off eviction. I was always fascinated by the amplified, excessive comforts of that square heap of mattresses, but I was never sure whether I desired to be the girl atop them, or the secret but telling pea stifled under their weight. Of course, if the queen is right and breeding always tells, then my place in the story is as the unstoried chambermaid, who must heave down the manic pile of bedding in the morning, shaking her mobcapped head when she unearths the hard nubble of the pea.

The queen’s pea, to suit her purpose, would clearly have been dried, not fresh. Dried peas featured in my childhood, also as an agent of separation. On visits to my Nana and Poppa in Birmingham, we were served up green peas, heated from frozen, with our plates of meat and potatoes. But mysteriously, Poppa had his own special peas – marrowfat dried peas that had to be set to soak the day before. Curious, I would lower the swing-down step of the steppy stool, climb up to counter level and peer into the bowl of large, sullen peas submerged beneath the water. Their grey-green pallor, their wizen that swelled to a slow smoothness, held a kind of goblin allure for me. At dinner, I often petitioned to have a spoonful of them on my plate, partly to taste their floury outlandishness and partly to see if my childish request to share his food might penetrate the seclusion of my grandfather. Husked and dry himself, his taste for marrowfat peas came from the privations of the war. I don’t know if dried peas were part of the diet of the submarines he served in, or the civilian rations he came home to, but his special bowl on the kitchen counter was a signal that this household had been assembled in the crucible of war, and that the very taste of combat, as well as its silences, remained beneath the everyday prattle of the present. Our peas, green and verdant as the summer day on which they were frozen, burst sweet on our tongues even as I watched Poppa at the end of the table, lifting forkfuls of his own gray peas to his lips.

Beatrix Potter, writing in 1918 at the end of an earlier war, understood peas and the translations they could effect. She uses peas not to differentiate, but to muddle up class and place. Peas get Timmy Willie, the simple country mouse, into some trouble in a hamper. Having crawled in through a hole in the wicker-work and feasted on the peas inside, Timmy Willie takes a post-prandial nap and ends up transported to the city. In the city he must negotiate the nice manners, the neckties and dining tables of city mice. Out of place, transferred by the love of peas into the perils of sophistication, Timmy Willie longs to return home. He finally makes it back, under the protection of that most despised of vegetables, the cabbage. But the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse is not a tale of the indissoluble differences between classes and ways of living; it is a verdant love story. Potter’s watercolors are all tinted with dreamy greens in this tale, from the hammock-like pod Timmy Willie falls asleep in, to his geranium leaf umbrella, to the withered cabbage leaf that chaperones him back to his much-missed country life. Finally, when Johnny Town-mouse visits him in his violet-scented rural home, Timmy Willie makes his fancy friend a bed of grass clippings and the two mice sit together and share a herb pudding in the sun. Led from home by the aristocratic pea and summoned back by the humble cabbage, Timmy walks a green road that ends in fellowship; the country mouse has found himself a very dashing and nicely dressed gentleman with whom to share his vegetal idyll.

Timmy's green and savoury pudding stays with me as an ideal of hospitality - sprigged with the same foliage that canopies his modest dining table. So when I found shelling peas at the market last week, alongside a tangle of flowered and coiled pea shoots, I wanted to make something green and full of garden. I had invited my friend Bryn for dinner, to thank her for ushering me through a time of trial. Bryn is as lovely as a pea shoot herself, and real in a way that horrible mattress-piling queens could never divine. I felt that teacups should be involved in my homage to Bryn, because teacups are always, in all contexts, both homey and fancy – a mix, perhaps, of Timmy and Johnny. I have a set of glass teacups that I usually use to serve flowery tisanes, and it was these teacups that led me to choose chilled fresh pea soup. I found plenty of recipes that granted room to both herb and foliage. Some cooked a couple of fresh pods in with the peas, some used lettuce, and most used mint. I would use mint but also . . . something more.

What I found strange as I foraged for a recipe, was the universal agreement among cooks that green peas are, somehow, ineluctably English. It was “English peas” this and “English peas” that. The only exception, in a typical cross-channel stand off, is for the really tiny green peas – petit pois. Somehow the French have claimed land rights to the itty bitty ones. “The pea! It is English! You can see by its greenness, its pleasantness, its regularity! It is English!” “Pah! You English may have the regular pea, the galumphing big pea, but we, the French, will claim the tenderest, the tiniest, the sweetest!”

Not surprisingly, the history of the pea in both of these unpleasantly arrogant nations is a history of class distinction. In Paradisi in Sol (1629), John Parkinson writes: "Peas of all or most of these sorts, are either used when they are greene, and be a dish of meate for the table of the rich as well as poore, yet every one observing his time, and the kinde: the fairest, sweetest, youngest, and earliest for the better sort, the later and meaner kinds for the meaner, who do not give the deerest price." Meanwhile, across the water in France, a mania for green peas was prompted by a very real, very hissy-fit throwing princess indeed – an Italian one from a formidable family. Catherine de' Medici brought "pisella novelli" with her from Florence in 1533 for her marriage to Henry II and they soon became acclaimed as a royal dish – to be distinguished from the boiled peas eaten by the French peasantry. Little fresh green peas became the aristocratic craze. In a May 10, 1695 letter, Mme. De Maintenoy writes to Cardinal de Noailles: "The subject of peas is being treated at length: impatience to eat them, the pleasure of having eaten them, and the longing to eat them again are the three points about which our princes have been talking for four days. There are some ladies who, after having supped with the King, and well supped too, help themselves to peas at home before going to bed at the risk of indigestion. It is both a fashion and a madness."

In other words, The English and the French got peas from the Italians, then set about arguing over whose peas were whose, and denying peas to some and granting them to others. And true to form, both England and France conveniently forgot that peas are, in fact, Asian. The noble ancestor of the modern pea is believed to have dwelt somewhere between Afghanistan and northern India. My soup, I decided, would therefore have a tantalizing hint – almost unplaceable, but enough to annoy both English and French palates – of curry.

But culinary tussles over class and nation – and my own pedantic but ultimately delicious engagement – rage in vain around the pea. For quite some time now, peas themselves have quietly but firmly debunked the very premise of the battle. Once upon a time, British plant physiologist Thomas Andrew Knight (1759 - 1838), found a wrinkled, degenerate, miserable looking pea in a whole field of smooth green peas. Knight had ambitions to develop new and better breeds, and he suspected that treasures lurked in that tumble-down legume. A reach backwards, he realized, was in fact the way forward. A generation later, Gregor Johann Mendel chose peas for his studies of dominant and recessive traits, developing theories of genetic variation. Heredity, he began to demonstrate, is discontinuous. Princesses, in other words, are never real. Aristocracy and peasantry pop up where you least expect them – they are in fact interchangeable, inter-referenced variations on the same theme.

I sat in my kitchen in the morning, popping the seams of the pods and running a thumb along the ranks of peas. Shelling peas has a tactile rhythm to it and the peapod itself has a peculiar, Art Deco-like blend of symmetry and asymmetry. There is almost no work in the world as physically and aesthetically pleasing as shelling fresh peas. The peapods' mix of repetition – “as alike as peas in a pod” – and whimsy – those tapered, flutey-hatted stems – simultaneously awes and delights me. And the scent is pure summer.

That evening, Bryn tasted her soup delicately. She said nothing between her first spoonful and her second, but her silence was companionable, communicative and generous. She let me know she liked it by the way she blinked, slowly, dipping her spoon back into the taste of bright green.

Forbidden Fruit a flavor has
That lawful Orchards mocks --
How luscious lies within the Pod
The Pea that Duty locks --

-- Emily Dickinson





SYLLABUS: FRESH PEA SOUP

Serve this soup the same day that it is made, otherwise it will oxidise and lose its vivid green. The fiddly icing of the peas, before and after cooking, will help them retain their colour. The multiple sievings will produce a luxurious texture, but simply leave some out if you want a more rustic soup.

2oz (50g), 4 tblsp unsalted butter
6 oz or one bunch of spring onions or young, green-stemmed onions, chopped
one small butter lettuce, sliced
1 tsp sugar
1 1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp curry powder (best made yourself), or nutmeg
3 lbs in the pod, young green peas – save 4 or 5 of the freshest peapods
about 6 mint leaves
1 1/2 pints vegetable stock (or light chicken stock, or water)
salt and white pepper
crème fraiche for garnish
pea shoots or mint sprigs or reserved whole cooked peas to garnish

Heat a medium saucepan over high heat for about 1 minute. Add 4 tablespoons of butter and when it foams, stir in the onion, curry powder and 1 tsp of salt. Turn the heat down to medium and cook 5-7 minutes until the onion is translucent. Do not let it colour. Add the lettuce, stir to coat well and cook another 4-5 minutes until it has wilted. Stir in the mint leaves and turn off the heat.

Put the peas in a bowl, cover them with ice cubes and toss together to chill them.
Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add the sugar and the salt. Remove the ice cubes from the peas and, adding to them, set up an ice bath of ice cubes and water with a colander sitting in it. Add the peas from to the boiling water. It is important that the water returns to a boil as quickly as possible, so only cook them in small batches, maintaining the boil. Cook for 7-10 minutes, depending on the quantity and quality of the peas, being sure not to undercook them. You should not strive for an al dente texture. Removing the peas with a strainer or slotted spoon, immediately dunk them into the colander in the ice bath. Repeat this process until all the peas are cooked, boiling the 4-5 peapods (for flavour) with one of the batches.

Puree the peas and the onion-lettuce mixture together in a food processor, adding a little of the stock to loosen it a little. Then scrape the puree through a tamis if you have one, or the finest mesh on a food mill. Place the puree in a blender with about half of the vegetable stock and blend. Adjust the consistency, using the rest of your stock. Pour through a Chinois and chill well. Once cold, add salt and white pepper to taste. Serve decorated with pea shoots or mint leaves and a small scoop of crème fraiche.

Hot Cross Buns

The world is made, it sometimes seems, to pucker around us. It has a drawstring of rules and regulations, substitutions and evaluations, examinations, meter readings, caliper-pinchings and drive-by assessments. The worst of it is: we consent to these cinchings in. We sign on to living in the small print. We come to believe that black-out dates should apply, and that if we don’t fulfill requirements, we have only ourselves to blame. Then we add our own astringencies: sideward glances and snide gossip. When we manage to squeeze past bureaucratic barbed wire, we turn to check if those behind us will snag their clothing. Sometimes it is hard to know how to live around and about these fetters. And most times it is hard to remember that they are fetters at all; so natural have our self-policings become.

I was recently nudged to consciousness regarding culture’s tendency to criminalise the good life, when I learned that in 1592 a law was passed against buns. Yes, the tender bun, that sticky friend. Once this mild-mannered bun stared mournfully out from behind a legislative portcullis. The law was passed under Queen Elizabeth I, and it forbade bakers to “make, utter, or sell” any “spice cakes, buns, biscuits, or other spice bread (being bread out of size and not by law allowed).” An exception was made for funerals, Christmas and the Friday before Easter. It’s difficult to imagine that a Queen could forbid a baker to utter a bun. Putting forth pastry hardly seems like treason. But the decree was issued in a time when any whiff of Papistry was exactly that: treasonable. And Papistry was brought to mind by the incense-like spicing, and the heavy symbolism of the cross-bearing bun.

The law was roundly flouted and finally revoked. Like most regulation, it refused the weight of history even as it pushed against it. The Springtime practice of eating small, spiced cakes marked with a sign of the season is found in many ancient cultures. The Egyptians marked theirs with a pattern representing the horns of an ox. The Greeks and Romans also made flour and honey cakes and marked them in honour of Athena, goddess of the moon. The Saxon, after daubing himself with wode, made crossed buns in honour of the goddess of light, Eostre. Christianity, of course, asked Eostre to slide over and before she could blink, it had stolen her hat. Eostre became Easter and the cross on the bun that had represented the four phases of the moon and the four seasons of the year, came to be seen as the cruciform. Now in spite of my Catholic upbringing, it seems clear to me that no baked goody should be asked to sport a reminder of an unpleasantly stretchy death. And yet the Hot Cross Bun has proved affable enough to withstand even this. It has a kind of portable hospitality. The bun is the culinary equivalent of the vanity case: a domed supply of the small luxuries that can help you put yourself together again. Cushy, sweet, sociably spiced and jeweled with dried fruit, it appears on street corners, and in nursery rhymes, and in tuck boxes. It even gets taken, like an apology, to bears unfortunate enough to live at the zoo.

This year I had been feeling caged and melancholy myself, and I decided that I would cheer myself up by trying my hand at Hot Cross Buns. Down from the shelves came my battery of English cookbooks, and I spent a happy hour leafing through various ladies’ various bun strategies. Not a single American cookbook could help me. Like many English treats, the Hot Cross Bun does not please the puritanical palate of the average American. I believe this is because of its affinity to fruitcake. Speckled with dried fruit, a Hot Cross Bun carries a suspicion of Christmas across the calendar to Easter, and the American tongue, offended by fruitcake in December, is doubly insulted by the little spiced bun come springtime. Many people loathe the slow, philosophical chewing that must accompany the consumption of dried fruit, and they wrinkle their noses at the crystallized citrics of mixed peel.
I have a nanny-like, tutting disdain for such pickiness. I adore the tartness of the peel and the way its parched texture interrupts the downy dough. I procured currants – not raisins, which would be too big and fleshy – and light brown sugar, to impart the warm colour that would best co-ordinate with its spicy scent. (Elizabeth David rightly sniffs at the commercial turn towards whitening the bun). As for my spice mix, I ground it myself from allspice berries, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves – and then I added that most mystical of flavours: mace. Made from the amber caul of the nutmeg. I played favourites with the spices, holding back a bit with the cinnamon and topping up the nutmeg and clove. The spring eggs I’ve been able to buy these days are extra broad of chest, with proud brown shells and intently saffron-coloured yolks – worthy components for my buns. The milk too, has become rich with the new season. A couple of sunny walks to the market and everything was lining up nicely. The last ingredient, however, was an important one. I had a particular ambition for my bun dough to be decidedly yeasty. I wanted it to carry the brewy tang of yeast as part of its posy of aromatics, and I desired dough that was soft and bready, rising high, but eager to compress like a good feather pillow. Given these aims, I decided that this was no time for character-less dried yeast – I must make my buns with fresh.

Because I make my bread from a sourdough starter, fresh yeast was not something I’d shopped for before. I knew from some web research that it was a relatively rare commodity, so I set out early on Friday morning – Good Friday – prepared to devote a few hours to the quest. I suppose it is a sign of how far I have strayed from the One True Holy and Apostolic, that on the day when I should have been at mass, mourning the death of Jesus, I was charging around Philadelphia in search of a rising agent. But truth be told, I’ve never had much patience with waiting, be it for the resurrection or for the rising of my bread. B. is always cautioning me to give it just another hour, keep the oven door closed just a few more minutes – wait, wait until it’s done. Well, it turned out that I was going to have to summon what little stamina I possessed for my yeast quest. I began with the posh supermarket around the corner, the chainstore that markets the “wholeness” of its foods under the grand cynicism of having swallowed up independent health food stores and cooperatives. Unsurprisingly, no fresh yeast there. Nor, indeed, bread flour. Consume, ye bourgeois hipsters, but don’t cook! My research had warned me that middle-class shops rarely carry fresh yeast and that I am more likely to find it at the cheaper supermarkets with working-class customers. Sadly this logic failed me when I dipped into the Value-Mart down the street – no fresh yeast there, either. Undaunted, I trotted off to the local cookshop in the Italian Market, happily chancing upon a shiny dime en route. Ever since moving to Philadelphia, I have made it a habit to pick up pennies whenever my path crosses them.
The small, brown, forgotten coin – I have even seen people toss them aside with irritation, and I like to take the poor orphans into my custody. They go into an ancient wooden box in my sitting room, and their humble aggregations remind me how happy I am to live in such a walkable city, and how friendly a city this is: paved with gold it might not be, but it is dotted with copper. But the best pennies are, of course, dimes, so I was smug about my Good Friday find.

Yeast, however, was proving more elusive than the loose change of brotherly love. The cookshop had none, neither did the co-op. Worse still, people were automatically testy about my request. “This is fresh yeast,” one server insisted after guiding me by the elbow to the familiar packets of freeze-dried nodules. “It’s fresh yeast that’s been dried.” More than one person wanted to know why on earth I would want such a thing, and the woman at the stuck-up urban artisan bakery was downright mean. No, they wouldn’t sell me fresh yeast, yes they used it themselves, but no I couldn’t buy any, not even a tiny piece. I trailed home dusty and downcast. How could it come to this – that yeast, the earliest domesticated organism – foundational to our culture – our leavening - could prove so out of reach that I could be ridiculed for wanting it? Even the discovery of another two city pennies on the way home couldn’t console me. As I turned the corner, however, I saw what I see every day. The two bread factories at the end of my street. And I realized that what I searched for had been beside me all along (although don’t ask me to admit that this was where two sets of footsteps on the beach became one . . .). Like elves, or stone-rolling archangels, or perhaps like Easter Bunnies, the men who work at those bread factories only do their magic at night. I went home and whiled the afternoon away until I could go and beg them for yeast.

When I returned, at midnight, the teams of white-t-shirted South Philly guys were in full corps de ballet action, swooping and sliding huge pallets of bread from factory to truck. But they good-naturedly stopped to field my quirky inquiry, ruefully informing me that they stopped baking there a month ago, and that now they are only a distribution center. Still, they eagerly climbed on board the yeast-finding mission, shaking their heads at the news that daytime bread purveyors had laughed at me. “There’s lots of bakeries who will give it you,” they said. “But you have to go to the big ones, the ones that bake at night. Or try a pizza parlour tomorrow.” Once they’d established that I had a car, and wouldn’t be traveling on foot, their chorus settled on Anastasio’s as the bakery to try. “They’ll probably even give it to you for free!” I liked how happy they were to give away the goods of others, and I persuaded B and our nieces (who’d lurked around a corner while I did my importuning) to pile into the car and set off for the address deep, deep in South Philly that my neighbour-bakers had given me.

By this time it was 1.30am, and the reason the merry bread-men had not wanted me to be on foot is that I had to make my way through some of the more burned-out parts of the city. We passed many a rusted corpse of a car, and then something that looked like an actual corpse. My companions grew somewhat squeaky, and I felt the mood of our charabanc turned a little against me. What had seemed like a charmingly batty quest was now edging toward the scary. By the time we reached the bright lights of Anastasio’s, my companions were like a pack of twitchy-whiskered, swivel-eared nocturnal creatures, perhaps ready to defend me from the talons of danger, but just as likely to melt into the night at the least sign of trouble. As I disappeared through the battered swing doors to the factory, I caught sight of their three intent faces, on the look-out from behind the rear window, faintly striped by the windshield heating element.

But of course, entering Anastasio’s was like entering the Emerald City. The dozens of friendly bread men were practically singing, and the hot, toasty, utterly permeating smell of sweet white bread made my head feel like it was going to float off my shoulders and bob around like a balloon. For the umpteenth time that day I repeated my request. It was met with hearty good cheer and I was waved towards “the big guy, with the Chicago Bears hat – he’ll help you.” Occupied at the falling-off point of a massive conveyor belt of Kaiser rolls, a truly enormous specimen of Philadelphia manhood stood like the PSFS building, red of face and happy to help. He tipped back the peak of his hat, stuck his yellow pencil in the waist of his white apron and told me to follow. Leading me through an obstacle course of crates of rolls, loaves and hoagies, he beckoned me into a cold room. There, like the iridescent ghosts of gold bars, were piled hundreds upon hundreds of white, wax-paper wrapped bricks of fresh yeast. With an enormous hand, he gave me one and for what I received, I was truly grateful. I asked how much I owed him. “75 cents,” he answered. I gave him a dollar bill and practically wafted out of the factory, brandishing my prize at the waiting entourage. As I opened the car door, I saw it – another penny, mangled and chipped – my thirteenth cent of the day. Recognizing a baker’s dozen when one literally appears at my feet, I reasoned that this windfall might well buy me an indulgence -- a pardoning of my own chips and fissures.

And indeed, the next day I produced a spirit-lifting double batch of the soft, fragrant buns. The fresh yeast frothed into a thick mousse, and the dough rose as swift and certain as the sun. Having read that yeast is good spread thickly on toast, I nibbled at crumbs of it as I cooked, savouring its tongue-coating creamy pungency. My tranquility was punctured by one further test: the flour paste crosses I piped on the buns before baking contracted and broke into segments as the buns beneath them puffed in the oven. But the debris brushed off easily and the replacement I lit upon – marzipan – tasted so good, I relearned the lesson that never sticks: failures often force us to forgo convention for obscurer, better options. What did stick, magnificently, was the bun wash which I fashioned from thinned Golden Syrup. That buns need bun wash enchants me. And that this wash turns you sticky seems too bucolically wonderful to be true.

Long ago the bun broke loose from legal snares, and now – with a little persistence, and some midnight questing - the bun can help us leap over stricture and strain, and even find gratification in it. Oscar Wilde knew all about finding pleasure at the end of a tether. The ever-hungry Algy, who eats all the auntly cucumber sandwiches and devours muffins “calmly,” so as not to get butter on his cuffs, learns the art of Bunburyism from his gallivanting chum, Jack. The fictional friend Bunbury is the alibi that allows these fellows to pursue many a wayward jaunt. And the delicious nature of this waywardness is semaphored to us by Wilde across the footlights, over the heads of the dress circle and through the centuries: there is, he shows us with the arch of an eyebrow, many a lawless pleasure to burying oneself in bun.



SYLLABUS: HOT CROSS BUNS
Makes about 18

1 lb (500g) white bread flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 oz (30g) fresh yeast
2 oz (60g) soft brown sugar
1/2 pint (300ml) whole milk
3oz (90g) butter
1 egg, lightly beaten.
3 tsp mixed spice*
1/2 tsp ground mace
3 oz (90g) currants
2oz (60g) candied chopped peel
marzipan for cross
bun wash: Golden syrup thinned with water, or 2oz (60g) sugar and 5 tablespoons water

*Elizabeth David’s mix: 1/4 oz nutmeg (1 large nutmg), 1/4oz allspice (3 level teaspoons), 1/8oz cinnamon bark (one 6” stick), 1/8oz whole cloves (2 scant teaspoons, about 30 cloves), 1/8oz dried ginger (a piece about 2 inches long). Grind all ingredients in a spice or coffee grinder.

Warm the milk to blood heat.
Crumble the yeast into a separate bowl, add 1 heaped spoon of the sugar and enough of the warmed milk to cream the yeast. Set it aside to froth – which will take about 10 minutes.
Put flour and salt and spices into a warmed mixing bowl. Rub in the butter, then stir in the sugar. Form a well in the centre and pour in the frothy yeast mixture and the beaten egg. Gradually adding the warmed milk, mix into a dough, adding as much of the milk as the dough can hold. It should be soft, but not too liquid. Add the currants and peel and knead for about 6 minutes in a mixer, or 10 by hand. The dough should come together in a ball and start to look smooth and glossy. Place in a clean, greased bowl, cover tightly with plastic and leave it to rise until it is doubled in size. Depending on the warmth of your kitchen, this might take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Plan on an average of 1 hour.

Knock down the dough, cutting it into manageable portions for rolling into several large sausages. Cut the sausages of dough into a total of 18 portions and shape each one into a round, tucking its edges under and smoothing its top. Place on a baking sheet and leave to prove again for another 30 minutes. Slice or snip fairly deep cross shapes into the tops of the buns (don't worry that the buns turn misshapen at this point) and then bake in a preheated 450F/230C/Gas mark 8 oven for 10-15 minutes until assuredly brown. On removing, brush liberally with bun wash while the buns are still warm. Then decorate with rolled or cut strips of marzipan.

These buns will be magnificently soft when right out of the oven. To eat the remainder (supposing there is a remainder), either split and toast them, or warm in a gentle oven (the marzipan turns wonderfully golden brown). I believe the bun then fares best when slathered with good butter.

Oma's Pumpkin Pickles

A pumpkin is a pod of plenty and paucity. Its taut hide restrains both a density of flesh, and a mass of debris – damp clinging fibres and flat, blanched seeds – that scramble the fruit’s dark chamber. None of this complexity is fully disclosed, it always seems to me, by a knuckle-rap to the exterior. Its heft and creased bulges resonate with the promise of simple, stolid bounty. A pumpkin does not blink. But as Simone Schwartz-Bart puts it, “Only the knife knows what goes on in the heart of a pumpkin.” Push your knowing knife into the hard flesh, feel the wound grip and resist the blade, lean down against the knife handle and slowly crack open the pumpkin’s halves. Now it yawns open, a strangely empty mess, the flesh already weeping clear, clean jewels of liquid. What is it that is really there? It’s not entirely clear where to find the meat of the thing. The preeminent icon of fullness and harvest, the splay of a pumpkin forces the cook to salvage and glean. The meal is in the remnant.

Perhaps this is why we feel compelled to coax pumpkins into becoming massive. Everyone loves a huge pumpkin. It’s the perfect side-show attraction: gather round! guess the weight! Its neon bulk is flatly baffling. Just how we like it. A pumpkin is an exaggeration, and we like to take the helm and steer it into further absurdity and marvel. We run it aground in its field, its orange knobble a picture of tilt and stasis, as if seized mid-roll. Each one a vagrant copy of another. Then we line it up for competition.

Laura Ingalls Wilder tells a suspenseful tale of pumpkin hopes in Farmer Boy. The young Almanzo, who will grow up to fall in love with Laura, nurtures a prize pumpkin by feeding it milk. He cuts a slit into the vine, then “under the slit Almanzo made a hollow in the ground and set a bowl of milk in it. Then he put a candle wick in the milk, and the end of the candle wick he put carefully into the slit. Every day the pumpkin vine drank up the bowlful of milk, through the candle wick, and the pumpkin was growing enormously.” When the day of the county fair arrives, Almanzo’s pumpkin gets rolled into a soft pile of hay, polished and sent off for the competition. A fat judge cuts a thin wedge of Almanzo’s pumpkin, conferring and comparing as the young boy grows ever more dizzy and breathless, before finally leaning over and thrusting a pin with a blue ribbon into the fruit. The prize, however, is not the end of it - Almanzo is made trembly by victory, and is struck by the sudden worry that his enormous pumpkin is a fraud because he fed it milk. The sickening lurch of inadvertent wrong-doing is often as much about the realization of the randomness of rule and regulation – the stakes are so high, but the laws so spectral. How are we to know? What if we are amnesiac learners, and forgot the rules on the way to the prize? When asked “How’d you raise such a big pumpkin, Almanzo?” he stammers between truth and deceit. He finally confesses the milk diet only to be reassured by a consortium of jovial men that some tricks are – wink wink – sanctioned. The glory of a win cannot, however, be fully restored, and the chapter ends with the young boy unsettled and anxious to shake off the flurry of the fair. A dark hollow lurks, perhaps, in every triumph.

But if Almanzo’s giant pumpkin and its success at the fair leaves him feeling empty, a giant pumpkin, I have learned, can also soothe lingering Weltschmertz. One evening over dinner with my friends Imke and Heidi, conversation fell to foods beloved but lost to us. Imke is from Germany and she told tale of her adored grandmother’s sweet and sour pumpkin pickles, and of their yearly production that would engulf the kitchen and engage all the grandchildren. The pumpkin recipe was the prized result of Oma's famous charm: long, long ago the grandmother had winkled it out of Frau Meyerholz, who made the pickles at the local delicatessen in Bremerhaven. The delicatessen shut up shop many years back and Imke had not tasted the pumpkin pickles since her grandmother’s death.

Now I am very partial to a pickle. It is a taste I have inherited from my mother’s side of the family, who all have ulcerous stomachs which they torture with their love obstinate of things preserved in brine. But I had never had pumpkin pickles before, and I was most intrigued. Imke promised to get hold of “Oma’s” recipe and translate it for me. In the meantime, she and Heidi left the suburbs and bought a lovely row house in Philadelphia. I quietly determined to surprise them with a jar of pumpkin pickles to celebrate their new home as a place of respite from the foot-weariness of emigration and the peripatetics of love and work.

The recipe that she delivered called for 10 kilos of pie pumpkin, and I set off to the market with both my bike baskets unfolded and ready to hold piles of small sweet pumpkins. But although the market’s weekly newsletter had promised pie pumpkins, when I arrived at the Fair Foods stall, there was nary a pumpkin to be seen. I asked Emily, the orders manager, and she smiled ruefully and pointed over my head. I turned in the direction of her gesture and saw one single enormous orange gourd, striped and handsome, snouted and tailed. It didn’t look like a pumpkin at all. Emily explained that she, too, had expected tiny pie pumpkins, but what had arrived from the farmer was a crate containing this single enormous gourd. It was a heritage varietal, as sugar sweet as the little pumpkins, but, like Almanzo’s prize of long ago, it was huge and glossy and self-satisfied. Emily was decidedly grim about her mistake – no-one would want a pumpkin that large and she was going to have to use it as decoration and take a loss. She glared at the pumpkin and it beamed back, sunnily oblivious, basking in its own, vast glory.

Happy for a shot at easy heroism, I borrowed some of the pumpkin’s smug satisfaction, and told her that I would take it off her hands and help balance the books. I basked in her gratefulness as she crammed my purchase into a giant brown paper bag of dubious strength. Then, heaving my burden up, I attempted what I thought was a suitably benevolent, airy kind of amble. I managed to keep that up for a few steps, turning to wave a cheery good-bye. But the pumpkin was not only big, it was heavy. By the time I reached the neighboring pastry stall, I had to lower the pumpkin to the ground, adopt a two-handed grip and start dragging the thing backwards toward the exit. Two people took pity on the pink and perspiring girl with the enigmatic encumbrance, holding open the double doors so that I could get to the bike stands, and another passer-by helped me heave the bag onto the rack on the back of my elderly cycle; the monster would not, of course, fit into my baskets. It perched, tipsy, on top, like Cinderella’s coach upon its delicate wheels. An anxious footman, I lured my be-pumpkined old bicycle home, holding my breath as I led it over curbs, and cursing aggressive motorists.

I wondered, in fact, how Cinderella managed, when her elegant coach stopped still on the stroke of midnight, reverting to pumpkin form and rodent scampering. Did she abandon it, exhausted by her magical journey from poverty and back again? Or was she so conditioned to servility and thrift that she hauled the massive thing home and turned it into pickle? Pickle is, after all, the pantry’s pre-eminent arbitrator of bounty and scarcity. Perhaps, when Prince Charming turned up with that crystal shoe, he found his beloved elbow deep in pickle brine.

At home, I hacked the beast open and began festooning the kitchen with pumpkin peel and innards. The recipe called for much and varied application of different vinegars and I set up stations with marinades and canning liquid, bubbling pots and cooling Ball Jars. Oma’s directions, filtered through time and translation, were detailed and idiomatic – it was much like having her at my side. There was only one feature upon which I stumbled. The recipe stated that my pumpkin should be cut “into smaller pieces” which was parenthetically translated as “(5 x 5 cm cubes).” I hesitated. These so-called “smaller pieces” were certainly smaller than the entire pumpkin, but still, 5 x 5 cm is roughly the size of a lime. This, to my mind, is substantial. Most of the pickles I’ve eaten have charmed in part through being diminutive – baby beets are baby, a piccalilli is made from delicate florets. A large dill cucumber pickle is one thing, but these slabs of pumpkin unnerved me. A quick browse of other pumpkin recipes, mostly Indian, didn’t help – they all called for tiny dice. My knife hovered, ready to cut my future pickles down to size. But then again the recipe was so careful, I couldn’t imagine that a mistranslation had occurred. I also remembered that Imke’s family happens to be a family of enormously tall, milk-fed people. Imke herself is 6 foot tall and she is the shrimp of the clan. I concluded that, “like people, like pickle,” and steamed ahead with the transformation of my giant pumpkin into slightly less giant pumpkin pickles. And anyway, my Ball Jars are marked “WIDE MOUTH.”

I bathed the pickles in herbal vinegar, and then set them up in a spiced and tooth-achingly sweet red vinegar in which I floated cinnamon sticks and coins of fresh ginger. The vinegar bath was so potent it made me cough as I stirred it. The filled jars had to rest for 2 weeks before we could deliver them to the threshold of a newly purchased and lovely home. Imke made a special corned-beef dinner called “labscouse” – a North German specialty – to accommodate the pickles, though she said that they are good with any meat dinner, from sausages to pork-chops to duck. Imke exclaimed pleasingly over the pickles’ “echt-ness,” giving particularly vigorous reassurance about the correctness of their size. We speared the pickles with forks and sliced through them, realizing that it is a rare joy to experience the firmness of pumpkin flesh; we are so used to the smooth, soft pies and cheesecakes of the fall season. But these pickles resisted and then yielded to the teeth in the most satisfying possible way. Their sweet, pumpkiny spiciness filled my whole head, sinuses and all, with flavor, and I lit up like a jack-o-lantern between bites of starchy potato and salty corned beef.


Hymn to the Belly
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Room! room! make room for the bouncing Belly,
First father of sauce and deviser of jelly;
Prime master of arts and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine, the spit,
The plough and the flail, the mill and the hopper,
The hutch and the boulter, the furnace and copper,
The oven, the bavin, the mawkin, the peel,
The hearth and the range, the dog and the wheel.
He, he first invented the hogshead and tun,
The gimlet and vice too, and taught 'em to run;
And since, with the funnel and hippocras bag,
He's made of himself that now he cries swag;
Which shows, though the pleasure be but of four inches,
Yet he is a weasel, the gullet that pinches
Of any delight, and not spares from his back
Whatever to make of the belly a sack.
Hail, hail, plump paunch! O the founder of taste,
For fresh meats or powdered, or pickle or paste!
Devourer of broiled, baked, roasted or sod!
And emptier of cups, be they even or odd!
All which have now made thee so wide i' the waist,
As scarce with no pudding thou art to be laced;
But eating and drinking until thou dost nod,
Thou break'st all thy girdles and break'st forth a god.




SYLLABUS: OMA HANSSEN'S PUMPKIN PICKLES

For about 10 kilograms of pumpkin (a very approximate amount), the pieces of pumpkin will be filled into glasses together with the canning liquid and the spices. This means that one has to guess how much canning liquid one needs in order to fill the glasses; one can mix additional canning liquid if the first batch doesn’t suffice.

Peel the pumpkin and remove the seeds, down to where the pumpkin flesh is firm.
Cut the pumpkin into smaller pieces (5x5 centimeter cubes).

Marinade: Equal parts vinegar and water.

The necessary mixing relation is one part vinegar to one part water. Oma Hanssen always used something called “Doppelessig,” an intense vinegar that isn’t available in Germany anymore. Apparently, herbal vinegar is an acceptable substitute. (note from Syllabub: “double vinegar” is any vinegar that is over 6% vinegar. It was hard to find, but I found that Italian vinegars tend to be “double vinegars.”)

Put the pumpkin pieces into big tubs and pour the marinade over them. You don’t have to entirely cover the pumpkin, because the pumpkin is still going to release water – you can pour in marinade to about 6 cm below the level of pumpkin, but stir the pieces several times to make sure they are equally marinated.

Let sit for 24 hours, then discard the marinade.

Canning Liquid
Equal parts red wine vinegar (for the beautiful color) and water
Sugar
Ginger
Cinnamon sticks

Mix the liquid with the spices and the sugar and bring to a boil

Oma’s example for a medium pumpkin:
Approximately 1 liter vinegar and one liter water
2 kilograms sugar
3 pieces dried ginger (large, i.e., each should be the size of a small potato) or sliced fresh ginger (approximately 150 grams)
Cinnamon sticks: approximately 20 pieces that are 3 centimeters in length

Tasting and refining (very important)
--let some of the canning liquid cool down in a cup (it is very hot!) and taste; add additional spice in accordance with preferred taste (though this differs from person to person, of course, one should make sure that the solution is intensely sweet, sour, and spicy, because the taste will be soaked up by the pumpkin)
As necessary and in accordance with personal taste, more canning liquid can be mixed and cooked

Completion
Take the previously marinated pumpkin pieces and bring them to a boil in the canning liquid
Let cook until the pumpkin pieces turn slightly glassy in the margins
Fill the pieces into the clean canning jars
Fill to the rim with the hot canning liquid and the spices
Take the lids (twist-off is best; they should have been boiled before) and close tightly
Let sit at least 14 days before eating (it takes this long for the taste to become really good)

Oysters

The other day, upon returning from a trip to the Pacific Northwest, we celebrated the thrill of things chilly. We had left town with one red, paunchy suitcase and we flew home with one red suitcase plus one well-insulated brown cardboard box. The suitcase trundled out first onto the luggage carousel, and then we waited intent, willing our box’s trim corners to be the next to shoulder through the black rubber fronds that concede you your baggage. We both held our breath a little, saying nothing, but dually fixed on the worry that our box might be broken open, its innards melting – or worse, that a savvy someone who lived behind those black rubber fronds was tucking into our frosty treasure chest.

We had bought oysters. Bought them, and ventured to travel with them. Traveling with oysters is the mollusk equivalent of egg-and-spoon racing – an attempt to carry a little of the crash and tumble of West coast waters back to the cement shores of the Delaware river. It is an attempt that seems amiably idiotic, loosely genial, yet it is also perverse in its squandering of location, obscene in its decadence. And it is a practice that is fully catered to by the Pike Place Market in Seattle. The fish stalls there brim with braggadocio – the fishmongers yell and toss huge, beautiful fish across counters to each other, catching the whim and wallet of the tourist. If you linger by a pile of shells, they will whip out a small knife and pry you open a clam or an oyster to taste. All the stalls assure you that they can pack their wares for travel, and some will even deliver the aquatic parcels to you at the airport, fully equipped to withstand up to 48 hours in transit; a Pike Place oyster could safely fly all the way around the world.

This is a curiously cosmopolitan end for an oyster, which otherwise lives its entire life anchored to one spot in the ocean. Is it because each oyster is housed in its own, hinged suitcase that they are suggestive of the portable? Or is it the horizon curve of an oyster’s shell, the rugged mountain terrain of its back, the inner seascape, that makes us want to palm and pocket it, like some primordial GPS device, then produce it glistening and triumphant, just in time for a far flung feast?

But maybe our urge to transport them has less to do with the creatures than with their medium. Raised in ice-cold waters, good only in the frosty months, we serve them on beds of ice - it is to ice that they truly belong. And the history of ice has always been – paradoxically for a substance that is the definition of stop-action – the history of transport. Before the invention of refrigeration, snow and ice were the most audacious cargo of all. Their travel and storage were costly folly for empires, aristocrats and their anxious mimics. Elizabeth David’s Harvest of the Cold Months is a history of the dazzle and excess of ice, and she details the fascination that runs from Medici banquet tables set with ice plates and goblets, to the child compelled to lick an icy pole. She tells the story of a commodity that, across its slow transit, tithed most of itself to summer suns, and of wealthy men who commandeered mountain snowcaps, transporting them to their estates and inverting them into their conical, sunken ice-houses. Nowadays a bag of ice is cheaply bought, but the glint of its melting, wasteful preciousness remains. Wedding planners order up ice statues of swans (a nice touch, given that the swan was the marital interloper between Leda and her husband King Tyndareus), while much-hyped Russian vodkas are served in metropolitan bars made entirely of ice, and ice hotels in Sweden and Canada, which melt away after each season, offer the ultimate getaway for those who prefer their pleasures cold, hard and short-lived.

Catching snowflakes on our tongues for the brief burn of their melting is something we don’t grow out of. So perhaps this is why we flew a pile of oysters across a continent to our friends. And why I eschewed the traditional accompaniment of mignonette in favour of something a little more frigid and crystalline. The tiny dice of shallot in mignonette has often struck me as a disturbingly crunchy interruption to the briny pause of the oyster. I wanted the consummate condiment - an acidic embellishment with no competing texture, something that would slide respectful but brazen into the nakedness of the oyster on the half shell. My solution: granita. Granita is that grainy version of sorbet – inversion, even, since the sorbet-maker is desperate to avoid the ice crystals that distinguish granita. Granita is flavoured ice that you’ve irritated by stirring and scraping or shaving until its shards are revealed. Just as the oyster’s outer garment is all craggy ruffle, the granita has a glorious rasp that bites, just before it melts luxuriously to an intensely flavoured liquid. I made three of them: a bright green cucumber lemon affair, a femme fatale made from white balsamic, and a chile, lime and mint ice spiked with a little fish sauce. Our oysters were of three kinds too: Bluepoints, Kumamoto and a larger, humbler oyster that didn’t even have a name. These last worried me as I opened them – they had hardly any liquor – but when we sat down to dine, they pleased us perfectly well. The Bluepoints and Kumamotos were sweet and sleek, the spoons of granita subsiding into their mix of flesh and liquid.

It has always struck me that the oyster is a creature of diversity – made up of the most pearlescent whites, but frilled with carbon black, some shadowed by dilutions of blue and green. It is muscle and organ and gill and we eat it all. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the oyster may change sex one or more times across its lifespan, occupying its sex distinctly at any given moment, but without commitment. When the Elizabethan Orlando spots the Muscovite who will break his heart, she is dressed in a costume that “disguises the sex,” made of “oyster-coloured velvet.” The two indeterminate young aristocrats are skating over the frozen Thames, at a Frost Fair. The scene beneath the ice forms a narrative of evolutionary motion baffled by stasis: “So clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay motionless in a trance, but whether their state was one of death or merely of suspended animation which the warmth would revive puzzled the philosophers.” The difference between boy and girl, life and death, the things we think have so much meaning – are suspended here, as immortal androgynes skate the surface of the frozen deep wrapped in oyster-coloured silks. Even age, and the fruits of the Fall, and filthy commerce, are immobilised to make possible Orlando and his lover’s gliding passage. “Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth.”

Ice is brutal, numbing, but its suspensions provide clarity. It kills and it preserves. It slows time down. I am more like an old bumboat woman with my skirts full of Eve’s fruit than I am like either the immortal Orlando or the timeless oyster. But I once swam off the coast of the Isle of Mull on a bitter January day. I swam and gasped until my limbs evaporated and I was nothing more than a beating, slowing heart. I felt the thump of myself. My silts and valves. The oyster has filtered freezing waters its whole life, existing in the frozen interstices of time and sex, anchored in the huge swell of the sea. As Eleanor Clark puts it in The Oysters of Locmariaquer, “there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes.”

The oyster has also sifted the tides of fashion and fortune, its own status shifting – sometimes the emblem of luxury and extravagance, it has also been the despised food of the workingman. Many have hailed it as the misshapen emblem of misery and seclusion: Charles Dickens makes the bivalve the analogue of that Christmas-party-pooper Ebenezer Scrooge who is, he tells us, as “Secret and solitary and self-contained as an oyster.” But Scrooge is our measure of change, our lesson in how the hardest heart can be melted – even if only by terror. Like Orlando, the tight oyster Scrooge catches hold of immortality: 'I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!' M.F.K.Fisher, in Consider the Oyster, pities the beast she biographies: “Life is hard, we say. An oyster’s life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation . . .” This oysterly inertia, this liquid dissipation in ossified ugliness, makes people uneasy. It is eerie, that quiver beneath the silent shell that reminds us of stubborn, shameful pleasure-taking. When Shakespeare sees the world in an oyster, it is the thief Pistol who speaks the line, threatening to take what he will: "Why, then the world's mine oyster, / Which I with sword will open." Pistol’s violence and vengeance remind us that the oyster is eaten alive.

But surely the most complete dissipation requires frolicking with that which is ugly and brutal? True bucolic pleasures incorporate the grotesque: they do not spurn it. This is why we see the world in an oyster, and serve it at our feasts. It is in the vile body that we find our revel, and in the sacrifice of it that we face ourselves. The oyster may be a dubious food, but we are a dubious animal and a relish for the oyster is a savouring of the elemental. Its minerality carries the trace of rock and sand upon which we precariously build our lives, and its salinity is of the seas we came from. A friend brought, to our oyster feast, icy Chablis pressed from grapes grown in French vineyards nourished by chalky soil made from age-old oyster shells. In that wine and those oysters, brought together across seasonal and geological stretches of time, and across continental and oceanic measures of distance, we tasted the friable press of ice-ages and their thaws, the pull of moons and tides, and the monstrous shudder of life. And we hoped that we will not – while suspecting that we will – come to say with Oscar Wilde, “the world was my oyster, but I used the wrong fork.”



SYLLABI: THREE GRANITAS


Chile, Lime and Mint Granita
Recipe from Le Colonial restaurant in San Francisco

2 cups water
2 mint sprigs
1/2 cup fresh lime juice
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup Asian fish sauce
1 teaspoon chile-garlic sauce (sambal olek)

Bring the water to a boil in a small pot and add the mint. Reduce heat and simmer until the liquid reduces by half. Remove from heat and add the lime juice, sugar and fish sauce. Stir the mixture until the sugar dissolves. Discard the mint sprigs. Add the chile-garlic sauce and mix well.

Transfer the mixture to a stainless-steel or glass pan and place in the freezer. Whisk the mixture every 10 to 20 minutes and continue to freeze until the mixture is consistency of shaved ice, about 2 hours. Break up crystals and whisk before serving.


Cucumber Lemon Granita

2 large English cucumbers, peeled and seeded
1/4 cup water
3 teaspoons aquavit or Hendrick’s Gin
3 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt


Coarsely chop cucumbers and purée in a blender with remaining ingredients in 2 batches until smooth. Taste and adjust flavours to your liking. Pour into an 8- to 9-inch baking pan.
Freeze, stirring and crushing lumps with a fork every hour, until evenly frozen, about 2-3 hours total. Scrape with a fork to lighten texture, crushing any lumps.
Serve immediately or freeze, covered, up to 3 days (rescrape to lighten texture again if necessary).



White Balsamic Granita

Dilute white balsamic by half with water and add a couple of drops of lemon juice. Freeze as above.