in the soil

With nothing particularly urgent to do at the allotment and with meetings and things taking up my time I come in later in the week than usual and, it turns out, on an especially wet and miserable day; the piles of pruned blackberry and raspberry waiting to be burned just sit there getting wetter. It has been so warm this week despite the rain and January seemed to go on for so long that I catch myself half-expecting to see some signs of spring, some new growth on the nettles in the hedgerow perhaps, a few tiny leaves of wild garlic, even a spear of asparagus pushing through the soil but of course it is far too early. At the top of my plot the first stalks of rhubarb are showing themselves bright pink against the grass and the weeds, the artichokes further down are growing well, and everywhere at the edges there are blankets of cleavers coming up, the first shoots of goosegrass / sticky-weed / sticky willy that are one of the first plants of the year to cleave through the soil and which are supposed to be very good for you in some way or another (the lymphatic system??) if you infuse them in water overnight; a chef I used to work with made a liqueur with some once which tasted, I think, rather like pondweed. I pick a handful and stuff them into a jar of rainwater collected from a bucket on my mother’s plot to ferment and make into a film developer, at some point in the future.

in the kitchen

We get a weekly veg bag from the community gardens which means, at this time of the year, that we get a lot of root vegetables that need using, hopefully not just in an endless succession of soups. They grow lovely daikon which I ferment; I refuse to have anything to do with parsnips but my wife grates them into a sort of baked fritter / savoury cake thing which I have to admit is perfectly pleasant; neither of us is particularly enthusiastic about cooked beetroot, especially since it takes so long to do, and so they tend to accumulate at the bottom of the fridge. Remembering Tamar Adler’s advice in An Everlasting Meal to make it as easy as possible for yourself to cook and eat well I spend an afternoon washing them carefully and then baking them, skins on, with a splash of vinegar and water, a bay leaf, some peppercorns and coriander seeds and a clove of garlic, as tightly covered as I can manage given there is no foil in the house, for a couple of hours, until it is easy to get the blade of the little bird-beaked knife through the largest one. Then when they are cool enough to handle I rub the skins off and they are ready to cook again with potato and onion and turned into a thick soup to have with toasted cheese or blitzed into a dip with twarog and oil and I don’t know what else and in the end I wish there were more of them to dress in yoghurt and have as a salad with smoked mackerel fishcakes.

on the page

Feeling rather stuck in a rut of reading non-fiction in the name of research and unwilling for the time being to acquire any more books I scour my shelves for a novel I haven’t read and come across a book I have no recollection of buying or being given, The Cheffe by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump. I think I had vaguely assumed from the spelling that this was a historical novel about an olde cheffe in some court or manor but in fact it is cheffe as the feminine of chef, about a chef and restaurateur in modern-day France who is referred to by her title throughout the book, narrated as it is by a protege of hers. As most of the power of the book comes through its hypnotic, obsessive prose there is no point in describing it much here except to note that is one of the few novels about cooking that I have read which hasn’t been in some way annoying, jolting me out of the story with some silly technical mistake or vile-sounding combination of ingredients; in fact the descriptions of the chef’s elegant, understated cuisine had me nodding along and wishing briefly to be back at the stove.