I think of Babette as female, and always associated with the wonderful novella Babette’s Feast, by Karen Blixen or Isak Dinesen (she of Out of Africa). We read the story and watched the film several years ago in our Book to Film group, and both were really heartwarming. Obviously not in a sentimental way. See https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/dec/13/babettes-feast-review
I’m currently working on my drawing skills, with a graphic memoir in mind – a wee change from always text text text. As you can see I have some distance to go. However I thought I’d share it with you, for a laugh.
Canasta tomorrow night cancelled! The road to Gauldry likely to be impassable (and we get lost going there even in the best of weather). So it’ll be us with Archie (superhound, here for his holidays), soup and telly. Stay safe, everyone.
There was a brilliant food programme on recently – an Eid Special of Saturday Kitchen Live. All the presenters and guests were observing Ramadan, and talking about how fasting made them all the keener on food, and the joy of sharing it as a community. One of the guests was Saliha Ahmed Mahmood, and I recognised her from Masterchef, which she won in 2017. Another guest complimented her on her gorgeous frock, and she quipped that it made a change from NHS scrubs. Because she’s also an NHS gastroenterologist. What a woman! I bought one of her books immediately afterwards, and have read it cover to cover.
Her subtitle ‘A Food Lover’s Guide to Digestive Health and Happiness’ means a lot to me just now because my painkillers have left me – ahem – constipated. Not a joyous condition, and I realise I’ve been far too unsympathetic in the past to others suffering similarly. Saliha’s take on gut problems is evidence-based, commonsense and friendly, and who would have thought that writing on this subject could make you laugh out loud?
High fibre is the way forward. I knew that of course. Saliha further charms me by suggesting frozen veg and cans of beans as the budget way of achieving digestive heaven. Good woman. Lots more to write about all of that in due course.
About a year ago, our Life Writing tutor gave us the task of drawing a map of a place which had been significant to us at some time in our lives. I found myself drawing the house and surrounding area – a little over a mile at its widest – where I’d lived from the age of 3 to 6. Actually it wasn’t three whole years as there was a sideways move in the middle, with the return of my father to the home, and a move between houses. I’m now 66 but my memories of this place are quite vivid.
The biennial Belgian Beer Festival held at Giffordtown Village Hall took place on Saturday night. As always it was led by Everyman Doug Wightman – beer lover, lead tea chest bass player in the inestimable Black Cat Jook Band, writer and late GP of this parish.
It was a great night. We had six bottles to sample – three of us sharing each bottle – and how satisfying, that first sip when you’re still stone-cold sober and know you have lots more easy pleasure and company to come. Chips and mayo were served somewhere around beer 4 or 5, adding to the general comfort. At our table we took notes and gave a score and indulged in lots of silly nonsense and extensive reminiscing.
I have found I’m not very good at tasting. I sniff and swill and swallow and wait for the aftertaste, and often struggle to find the right word for what I’m experiencing. Lots of tasting vocabulary is, I feel, downright pretentious; and I’m always suspicious of people who wax lyrical. Perhaps wrongly, I reckon they’re just parroting something they’ve read somewhere. Also, while I’m rummaging around in my mind for a suitable description, I start noticing other people’s responses, and get fascinated by the group dynamics involved. There was none of that pretentiousness stuff on Friday night, and while Rod the Moothie took some ‘proper’ notes, Lesley and I devised the Telly Alternative Tasting Scale.
I give your our menu, with the TATS grade attached:
ORVAL, 6.2% ABV – Soap Opera, generic (light and delicious, quite frothy, knock it back)
WITKAP, 5.5% – News at Ten (respectable but not what you’d call distinguished)
DE DOLLE ARABIER INTERVAL, 8% – Top Gear (in yer face, macho, showing off)
DE RYCH AREND DUBBEL, 5% – Captain Pugwash (playfully multi-layered and a bit cheeky.)
NOIR DE DOTTIGNIES, 8.5% – Poldark (Darkly handsome. Fit and feisty, with a surprising frisson of Hygge – Coorie in Scots)
GOUDEN CAROLUS, 8.5% – Gentleman Jack (Spirited and sophisticated, definitely on a journey. A big favourite round our table.)
The first three were light, the second three dark. Make what you will of my notes, I doubt very much whether they’ll help you choose your next Belgian beer, but maybe you’ll have a wee laugh.
I’m now on the search for a beer to conjure up Happy Valley. Something full of action, character, low life, high drama, tension and suspense. Double chips and mayo will be essential.
On Friday I walked round Birnie Loch with my friend Rhona and dogs. Above is a picture of frozen bulrushes – it was a bright, cold, sunny day and the first time I’d done that walk since before my hip op, so I was very happy. The walk reminded me of the poem by Imtiaz Dharker, in which she describes how proud her father was of his command of the Scots language. The link I have given is a video of Dharker reading this poem out a few years ago – it’s magnificent, funny and poignant.
Meantime it’s Burns season and I’m putting together a Burns quiz for a wee event this Friday. My desire is always to point out that other Scottish poets are available… A quiz structure lets you do some of this while also spiering into the life of Burns himself, and uncovering the amazing times he lived in – the Scottish Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, fuelled by ground-breaking inventions and so on.
So I’ve been browsing his poems on the Scottish Poetry Library website which, as ever, is a great resource; I especially love their collection of women poets’ responses to Burns. And I have hugely enjoyed re-reading Tam O’Shanter and Holy Willie’s Prayer and many others.
At the same time, I have tickets for Brian Bilston, dubbed ‘The Twitter Laureate’, who is reading from his work at Toppings in St Andrews on 6th February. Now there’s a poet for our time! and he isn’t even Scottish. I read his novel ‘The Diary of a Somebody’ and laughed, cried, sighed all the way through.
Also in this past week, my Lifelong Learning Dundee class in Life Writing has started again, and with all this poetry talk, I’ve been wondering whether poetry nowadays is much more about life writing than fiction? This seems important to me as I’ve written both memoir/life-writing and fiction; in both prose and poetic form. Burns wrote purely in verse as far as I am aware, addressing many real-life subjects – but in my view, his most successful poems are in long narrative fiction. Yes, that’s especially Tam O’Shanter I’m thinking about. Bilston is a great commentator on daily life, and what it is to be a writer. His novel must, I’m guessing, be based at least in part on his own life, as the main character is a poet struggling for recognition. No doubt at the live reading, I or someone else will ask him that question.
Meantime, enjoy your haggis and chosen dram and have a poetic browse. Here’s life!
We’ve had a magnificent local, DIY weekend of film viewing – on Friday with our local film club, and then with Steve Gellatly playing for silent movie in a nearby village hall. Steve’s programme was varied and included some magnificent classic silent movie offerings, e.g. Charlie Chaplin and Felix the Cat. His main piece was ‘Drifters‘, directed in 1929 by John Grierson.
The Newburgh Film Club chose ‘News of the World‘, a 2020 Tom Hanks film directed by Paul Greengrass. They billed it as a Western, and served it up with a meal of ‘Cowboy Beans’. I felt as if I hadn’t made enough effort in that I was one of the few not sporting a cowboy hat. However it was an excellent night, and by coincidence, the two films – a documentary and a major feature film – overlapped in theme.
‘News of the World’ tells of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travelling alone by horse and cart around Texas in 1870, reading selections of the newspapers in the towns and villages. Locals drop coins in a tin to pay for the news update, and the pleasure of the occasion – reading at that time still being a minority skill. And the Captain is an entertaining reader. Early in the film he comes across the body of a native Indian who had been hanged and left to die; and hiding nearby, the man’s furious daughter, aged perhaps nine or ten – Johanna, played with great insight by Helena Zengel. The rest of the film tells the story of Kidd’s attempts to find the girl’s family, protect her from would-be child rapists, and eventually come to realise that her home is with him. It’s a poignant, at times frightening tale, with the kind of ending we love from Tom Hanks.
‘Drifters’ explores the North Sea herring fishing industry, in retrospect. It’s a silent movie making use of montage film techniques, which Grierson had learned from his work with the soviet film-maker Eisenstein on his classic ‘The Battleship Potemkin’. The opening shot explains that
So we get to view a crew of fishermen heading out to sea on their drifter, battling through the rise and swell of the waves to bring home their catch. My major learning point was that they paid out two miles of net, arm by arm; and then several hours later had to haul it all in again, fully laden with herring – and eels and dogfish. Only the fittest, strongest and nimblest of men (women, in those days, in that work? I don’t think so) could have hoped to survive – and there must have been many casualties. There’s a certain repetitive brooding at times in the film, emphasising the patience and resilience of the fishermen – and the film crew. And then the lively contrast at the end, in harbour, the herring girls lined up and gutting like fury, the auctioneers driving up the prices.
Where is the overlap between these two very different films? I saw it in two aspects. First, the hostile environments through which the main characters had to pass in order to achieve their goals. The wilds of Texas (though the film was shot in New Mexico) and the North Sea provide equally terrifying challenges and I wouldn’t last a day in either of them.
Secondly, both films told their stories wonderfully, shining clear and sober light on the perilous, determined struggles against harsh land or seascapes. I suppose all films seek to tell stories; but I was reminded of Tom Hanks’ own great storytelling efforts. His short stories, collected in ‘Uncommon Type’ tell a great range of tales connected loosely by old-fashioned typewriters.
The Troubadour was intrigued to notice, in ‘Drifters’, that many of the ships in the herring fleet had the initials LT painted on their bows; announcing its home port, which we believe to be Lowestoft. When we got home he checked his little model Tri-ang Drifter, gifted to him in 1954, and discovered that it too was marked ‘LT’. The experience of the film inspired him to paint its little funnel and make a new mizzen sail. The restoration is not quite complete; there should be a little lifeboat sitting on the stern. He remembers playing with the Drifter in the kitchen sink as a child – the plug was pulled – and eeek! the lifeboat went down the plughole. So now he’s looking out for a little lifeboat to complete the job. Do get in touch if you have one.
Finally – a huge thank you to all the members of the Newburgh Film Club committee for putting on such an enjoyable and absorbing evening’s entertainment; and to Steve Gellatly for his wonderful musicianship and finesse in bringing the silent movie era home for us.
This is what a kilo of flour looks like in my kitchen when it’s made into bread dough and really stretched out. Much bigger than I remembered! Or maybe last time I didn’t roll so persuasively.
At Hogmanay I decided to revisit an old recipe which I’d written up in my book ‘A Life in Mouthfuls’. I called it Courtship Loaf because, ahem! I baked a BIG one and took it with me the first time the Troubadour invited me and a friend to tea. You spread a layer of chutney down the middle and sprinkle it with grated cheese; then you cut diagonal slits on either side, and fold them to the centre all the way down. This gives you a plaited loaf which you can wash with egg, sprinkle with seeds, and bake for about 35mins at 220 deg.
On this occasion I cut the dough in two because my oven wasn’t big enough for the full-sized version. Even so, my loaves were quite big and made a nice party contribution. They tasted great. I think next time I’m going to try not rolling out so much, and go for a fatter loaf.
Back in 2019 when I published the book, I had an alternative title for the loaf – ‘Maya Angelou’ Loaf – referring to her poem, ‘And Still I Rise’. This Christmas we were given two packs of Radical History playing cards – with various luminaries from history celebrated in clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades. I’m delighted to report that Maya Angelou is the Queen of Diamonds. A perfect match – her poem is about surviving and thriving in the face of adversity, and in one of her verses, she asks:
…Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?
All of a sudden it’s cool to be thrifty. I grew up with this notion, but it was never what you call sexy. I can’t tell you how glad it makes me to read Nigella’s comments about waste in her book ‘Cook, Eat, Repeat’. Despite her luxurious and (many times repeated) unapologetic delight in food, she cannot bear to throw things out. Sometimes you read this and you think, yeah, yeah, here’s somebody who has never wanted for anything in all his/her life. But the detail Nigella offered, the one that persuaded me beyond doubt, was the thing about butter papers.
Even buying a block of butter wrapped in paper is an adventure nowadays, since it all comes handily spreadable in a tub. And much of the paper on blocks of butter is of course a lining for a foil wrapper. Back in the sixties I remember there was always a pile of neatly folded butter wrappers sitting around the kitchen somewhere (we didn’t have a fridge till I was fourteen). Then whenever there were scones or buns or a cake to be made, the butter papers would be used to grease the tins. Simple! And Nigella still does it! Or at least she says she does, and why would I disbelieve her? It’s not the kind of detail you would know about unless you’d lived it. Thank you, Nigella.
There’s a risk of sounding smug when you say things like ‘waste not, want not’. The personal is also political of course, and I’m patiently waiting (and voting) for governments to find a way of addressing poverty. But nevertheless, you have to do your best with what you’ve got and I applaud all those food writers – the truly famous ones like Nigella and Nigel Slater and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver – who enthusiastically publicise sensible ways of making ends meet. They’re our role models after all. And I honour all the hard-working, hard-up parents (mainly but not exclusively women, in my era at least) who taught us what we need to know about survival and satisfaction. Here’s to a day when we can all eat well. Cheers.
With all this talk of Elizabeth Sponge and whatnot, I would like to reassert the place of the magnificent gingerbread in the home kitchen repertoire.
Gingerbread is the one they make cottages out of (they, not I – I’ve tried. Mine fall apart. The glorious James Morton solved this problem a number of seasons ago on the Great British Bake Off by creating a rustic old gingerbread barn, held together with boiled sugar strands. Pure genius).
Gingerbread is the cottage where abides an allegedly evil old witch, watching out to lure your innocent children into her hot oven. (Although there are some great new adaptations of this story featuring a poor, starving old granny and two precocious little brats…) and a wonderful illustrated tale by Simon Armitage, entitled ‘Hansel and Gretel: A Nightmare in Eight Scenes’.
Gingerbread is pure Charles Dickens, hot, sweet and spicy to warm the fingers and tummies of the little workhouse orphans. Tuppence iced, penny plain.
And best of all, it’s easy to make. I have several recipes and they all taste great. As for the way they look – well, I invented the Jackson Pollock look (above) quite by accident last week to hand in to my former colleagues (ahem – I’ve retired from distillery tour guiding) and I haven’t heard of any fatalities.
Yesterday I tried a recipe from a new book, ‘Oats in the North, Wheat in the South’ by Regula Ysewijn. Yet another cookery book? This one enticed me because it’s full of historic recipes with a bit of context. From three or four gingerbread recipes, I chose one that would make little buns as a change from something you have to slice. It’s an 18th century recipe, quite intriguing. Even better, the instructions start with the magic words, ‘prepare the day before’. So on Tuesday, all I had to do was a bit of weighing and melting and mixing. It got left in the fridge overnight and by yesterday morning had taken on a lovely plasticine consistency, perfect for moulding into little balls. The fragrance is amazing – ginger of course, but threaded through with caraway and coriander and cloves. (They look a bit like a sweetie shop confection of my youth – Lucky Tatties – I suppose you could recreate that effect by burying a plastic toy inside but you might choke a child.)
In the hand, they’re quite heavy and on the outside, they’re firm and a little glossy. In the middle, though, they’re soft and chewy. One is barely enough.
I can’t take much credit for my homegrown tomatoes. Every year my octogenarian friend Judith comes and sorts them out for me, bringing plants from her own cultivation. The Troubadour does most of the early morning watering while I’m still in bed. I lend the odd hand, mainly post-harvest, in the kitchen.
This year I actually got down on my hands and knees to plant them myself, because I foolishly hadn’t anticipated the need for a new bag of compost when Judith came calling. That was a tricky and painful manoeuvre, requiring help to get back up again, so I reckon I won’t be repeating it until I get my new hip (ha! sometime in the next decade, I trust.) But no doubt the tomatoes will taste all the sweeter for my herculean efforts.
From left to right we have red, gold and black. Moneymaker, Sungold, and Black Russian I am told. There’s a beautiful tomato salad formulating in my brain right now. Do you like the milk carton watering can? I saw it on the Beechgrove Garden – a green-fingered mum teaching her kids to look after outdoor plants. You punch little holes in the lid. I thought it would be a useful feeder for diluting a smidgeon of Tomorite to feed my pansies. And eventually the tomatoes when they come on a bit, Judith will keep me right. Thank you Judith.
A Drawerful of Porridge 