How can I say I thank you for the mixed bag of emotions which I will call Love for want of a better word – which I learned at your knee whilst having no inkling of even being schooled…
Love is nurturing – on a physical level of feeding at least and on the mental level of stimulation with books and ideas and even a trip around the world
Love is safety and love is the absence of danger which is not necessarily the same thing
Love is consistency which can go a long way towards making up for other deficiencies
Love is giving a sense of who you are and what your place is in the wider world – it is not sufficient to teach you to talk to anyone from a tramp to the Queen if you don’t know what you want to say.
Imposter syndrome is as transferrable as a gene for diabetes and like that disease it will be a long time before you even figure out you have it – and what “It” is there is no gene sequencer for emotional baggage…
We learn to love like layers of an onion and so much depends on the fertility of the soil which is that original family and however crooked the plant grows – be glad if you at least had a family.
Love starts with a teat your mother’s if you are lucky or perhaps a bottle freely given on demand
Love expands too if you are lucky enough to have siblings – you add another layer to your personal culture when you go to school when you expand your horizons to town, country and however much of the world you are lucky enough to encounter
If you are not lucky and your bulb grows amongst stones, is not fed good food and stimulation for the mind – if you encounter trauma by loss, violence or abuse your multilayered onion will reflect its origins…
Eventually you may break away from the family home, home town and learn of other loves but your affinity has already set by earlier lessons learned This one is never secure That one is self-centred This one is restless and That one puts up with rather than taking care of themselves
Love is as varied as the human beings who practise it and the combinations in couples as varied as the genes they may mesh together in the lottery of life
But lucky or unlucky everybody needs to know what they learned of love and work out what works for them and those they love…
Sometimes knowledge comes in the strangest, most roundabout way…
This morning I started my day with my usual routine – that means flicking through my social media and emails before settling down to read “Letter from an American” from the incomparable political historian Heather Cox Richardson who writes daily on current political affairs in America seen through the lens of the history of that country. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and Ms Richardson chose to take the day off and spend it with her husband Buddy who is a fisherman and instead of – as she sometimes does on such a holiday – posting a photograph, she re-posted what she tells us is her favourite ever post – a very sad Valentine’s Day tale about Theodore Roosevelt. You can find Richardson’s posts either on Facebook or on Substack where she has 1.4 million subscribers and if you join them, then you can, like me, get her posts delivered to your inbox every morning. At present, she is experimenting with podcasting so that you can hear her reading this particular piece here.
The tale she tells is of how on Valentine’s Day 1884, Theodore Roosevelt lost both his mother, to typhoid and his wife to what was probably a strep infection within hours of each other. His beloved wife Alice, had delivered a daughter, their first child, just two days before. Theodore was so bereft that he never spoke or allowed anyone to speak of Alice again, and though his daughter bore her mother’s name was known as Baby Lee rather than Alice. Theodore was already a reformer by nature, but the death of his mother and wife to diseases of the poor – rife in the overcrowded conditions of the time and at odds with the riches of The Gilded Age which was then in full swing – confirmed Theodore’s determination to bring about change – but not before escaping to Dakota Territory to try ranching as a way of burying his grief over Alice. Following a disastrously cold winter in 1886-7, Theodore returned to politics with new determination, and the rest, as they say, is history.
What Ms Richardson did not mention, however, was what became of Alice aka Baby Lee. So curiosity piqued, I turned to Wikipedia who had a satisfyingly comprehensive article on Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Roosevelt eventually married for a second time and gave Alice five half-brothers and sisters and whilst her initial reaction to her stepmother was not the easiest as is so often the case with Step-relations, Alice eventually came to hold her in great respect.
Alice grew up to be a socialite, renowned wit and a bit of a clothes horse, which as the daughter of the now President, she could afford to indulge. So much so that the song “My Alice Blue Gown” was written about her. Now I confess to being a sucker for what we Brits call Victorian and Edwardian Parlour Songs but which for Americans would be Parlour songs from The Gilded Age and “My Alice Blue Gown” is a favourite as rendered by The McGarrigle Sisters.
So there you go, a connection that I never expected to find…
And if you are American or indeed anyone worried about the prospect of a second term of Trump, you can find some very qualified hope in Letter from American. I imagine that in choosing this title for her blog, Heather Cox Richardson might have been paying homage to Alastair Cooke’s Letter from America and if she was, then I for one name her a worthy successor…
For goodness sake grant me the bucket-list wish of a boat any boat will do a picayune pram to potter on a large pond better still a proper rowboat on a large lake to drift down the wind lanes a dry fly bobbing alluringly on the ripple, gently retrieving with the dream of a trout rising
A daysailer – better still ducking the boom on a dinghy is dodgy at my age so day trips on a Summer suitable sea would fit the bill delightfully sailing out and back with the sea breeze sometimes sleeping in the cabin after stargazing at anchor in some sheltering bay
And in the Winter I would cherish my little vessel drawn up on the shore cleaning and caulking and laying on varnish let me leave alliteration behind and voyage forth on real wavy waters – so for goodness sake one day grant me a boat
Half my sister’s ashes sit on my bookshelf the thought flashes regularly that I must fulfil her wishes and bury her with our parents let her out of the camel-shaped teapot my favourite of her collection and which bore her back from Ireland disguising the grey substance which is, unbelievably, half of her remains.
I think it is the distance to Dorset which has held me back from letting the once genial out of the teapot. The teapot will remain ornamentally on my bookshelf to use my sister’s sometime sepulchre to make tea might be a step too far for a brother though it would have made his sister laugh like a drain…
There was no father gorilla to take his part scratch out the gardener’s insides toss the dairymaid into a tree wrench off Sir John’s head crack the keeper’s skull with his teeth as if a coconut
Tom did not remember ever having a father
He might hide in a bush swarm up a tree had he not known it a very different place boughs laid hold of his legs poked his face and stomach birches birched him soundly as if a nobleman at Eton lawyers tripped him up as if they had shark’s teeth which lawyers likely have
A cunning little fellow but ten years old lived longer than most stags had more wits to start with
The old grouse came back to his wife and family the end of the world is not quite come it is coming the day after tomorrow
This is a found poem with words derived from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. The title – Evolution, is because Kingsley was a naturalist around the exciting time when the work of Wallage and Darwin were revolutionising the worlds of science, geology and biology and there will be found poems that reference this aspect of the tale. But so far, the finding of poems has been more like the method for refining poems since Kingsley writes very lyrical passages anyway… The image is derived in Midjourney. This series was inspired by my friend Misky over at It’s Still Life who has been producing a series of Found Poems…
Frequently the wood sare pink wrote Emily Dickinson, fairly described as transcendental romantic, I think was she referencing blossom-time when gaudy pinks and whites to win the bees attention fight that time when we remember trees are but giant flowering plants dependent on the tiny pollinator to close life’s circle with their aerial dance flowers followed in short order by the clichéd thousand shades of green my own favourite time to see the thin veil delicately drawn across the Winter-wakened trees and as the leaves thicken and take on Summer shades each tree can be read from a distance picked out from its companions in the glade
But wait – in Winter too a palette of subtle colours also distinguish each species one from another colours hard to pin down from mauves and greys to blues and nearly brown and never black except in solitary silhouette and frequently the woods are pink
Six Degrees of Separation is an excuse to peruse six favourite books linked to an initial offering by our host KateW and eventually link them back to the beginning. Kate W offers us big themes in her choices and since I have been participating, these have included – being adrift in Time, Friendship, Memory, and Romance. This month we have the autobiographical exposé of the world of chefs, restaurants and bad boys generally – Anthony Bourdin’s Kitchen Confidential…
Full disclosure – I once, briefly but gloriously, ran my own restaurant so this month’s 6 Degrees starter book was one I could really get my teeth into! (There will be lots of food metaphors!) Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” is a Chef’s story from a writer who self evidently writes, but counts himself first, foremost, and still practising – as a Chef. As he puts it – “If I need a favour at four o’clock in the morning, whether it’s a quick loan, a shoulder to cry on, a sleeping pill, bail money, or just someone to pick me up in a car in a bad neighbourhood in the driving rain, I’m definitely not calling up a fellow writer. I’m calling my sous-chef, or my saucier, someone I have worked with over the last twenty-plus years…” He writes about how a fairly obnoxious youth found his way into a profession where eccentricity, excess and general misdemeaning is mixed with skill, sweat and long hours in kitchens that come in many varieties, much like the seven circles of hell. He has a chapter in which he asks what possesses a man in mid-life to want to open a restaurant and whilst I was not quite as ignorant, inexperienced and deluded as the dentist Bourdin gives as an example, there were things I could identify with, although I enjoyed every minute of it and I now know, as Bourdin puts it “what it feels like to attain a childhood dream of running one’s own pirate crew…”. Anthony Bourdin writes clearly and entertainingly and for once I would agree with the blurb on the cover which states “More gripping than a Stephen King novel”
So in this month’s 6 Degrees, I am linking the books that made me a cook, a foodie and eventually, however briefly, a chef… When I left home to go to university, my parents bought me a Sabatier, high carbon-steel, flexible boning knife- something which Bourdin talks about in his chapter on essential equipment. They also bought me two paperback cookery books “The Pauper’s Cookbook” by Jocasta Innes, and “Cooking in a Bedsit” by the journalist Katherine Whitehorn.
Not one of my six but I had to sneak it in…
I should say, that heretofore, my mother had always refused to teach me to cook – unlike my sisters, who “would one day be married and therefore need to cook for their husbands” from which you may deduce that I grew up in the pre-liberation 1970’s – or at least Women’s Lib had not then reached our house! Not that I hadn’t kept my eyes and ears open and picked up some culinary skills just from watching my mother – and not just cooking meals, but bottling fruit, freezing vegetables and making jam. Nevertheless – the two books of recipes (or for any Americans – receipts) were intended to fill the gap in my education and fit the kind of cooking which my parents imagined would be the limit of what my student lifestyle would require. Incidentally, of myself and my two sisters, I was the only one who cooked professionally… What I chiefly remember about “Cooking in a Bedsit”, was not the recipes themselves which were sensible culinary cheats for the impecunious, but the structure of the book whose first section was entitled “Cooking on One Ring” followed by two rings and lastly, for those lucky enough to have access to one – cooking on a stove. There were also, entertainingly, short pieces on “For him Asking Her Round to Eat” and vice versa – the latter including the sage advice to make sure and remove all your drying knickers from the radiators before he gets there… This gave a hint as to the fact that food is not merely fuel, but a part of life and culture and this is also strongly themed in Kitchen Confidential. Jocasta Innes would return in a completely different field, later in my life, with her book Paint Magic which diverted me slightly from my career as a Signwriter to specialist paint finishes such as wood graining and marbling. And as for the Sabatier, well I have used it almost every day of my life since, including at least four food businesses and it has been worn down accordingly…
The thing is, I was slightly insulted by my parent’s offerings, implying that my culinary horizons would rise no higher than pauperdom and that once I had left bedsitter land, I would find a nice wife to do the cooking for me! So I set about building my now extensive collection of cookery and food books (three shelves in the bookcase now) by adding first Elizabeth David’s seminal “Mediterranean Food” closely followed by “The Joy of Chinese Cooking” by Doreen Yen Hung Feng and for international variety – the Penguin book of “Indian Cookery” by Dharamjit Singh. I did practise recipes from all these books, but I soon realised that on my cookery journey, reading recipe books and imbibing the essence of their method, ingredients and presentation, is more important than becoming an Indian, Chinese or Mediterranean cook per se – I was an early adopter of Fusion!
The beautiful Elizabeth David…
Elizabeth David was credited with revitalising British cuisine after the Second World War by both drawing attention to foreign food traditions but also, then researching and drawing out the best of British food traditions, subjects which had been, respectively, ignored and forgotten. She was also, a bit of a gal – as Wikipedia informs us “Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day. In the 1930s she studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Italy, where their boat was confiscated.” I can only urge you to delve into Elizabeth David, both her books and her life story. Below is an example of her recipe for Tapenade and you will see that this is grownup recipe writing – she gives quantities for the main ingredients – capers and anchovies, but there is no spoon-feeding by detailing everything precisely – if you are a cook, you will understand and use your judgement. Also on these pages, is the recipe for Skordaliá which has remained my go-to dish when catering for mixed vegetarian and carnivores where I want to demonstrate that vegetarian food is far tastier and more interesting than a piece of meat and two veg…
“The Joy of Chinese Cooking” taught me how to think about putting dishes together in a considered way – the uninitiated way many groups at a Chinese restaurant assemble their order by each picking a favourite dish, whilst familiar to Chinese chefs and waiters the world over, must nevertheless fill them with horror every time. A Chinese meal should contain some whole elements such as a fish perhaps, some chopped and stir-fried and some dishes which are “assembled” – meaning elements cooked by different methods and then brought together in one dish. There should be a balance in red and white meat, fish and vegetable dishes – the whole meal being a balanced and considered effort. This book, first published I think, in 1950 (I am writing away from home so I can’t check my copy) has taught many people to cook Chinese home-style food and whilst some might find the recipes a little heavy by today’s standards and health consciousness, that is perhaps the nature of home cooking everywhere… Below is an example of the cultural differences expounded in the book.
If Elizabeth David paints evocative word pictures of the dishes she encountered on her travels, Doreen Yen Hung Feng gives us a description of a whole food culture, sometimes anecdotally, as above, but also with some simple line drawings. Compared to today’s full-page colour photographs which present the recipes in impossible-to-equal perfection (no doubt with the aid of a food stylist and expert food photographer) Doreen’s illustrations are sparse, but her descriptions more than compensate and you will never be left feeling a failure when comparing your attempt with that in the photograph. The Penguin book of “Indian Cookery” is much the same – no pictures but a solid recipe book which has lasted through many editions as you would expect from Penguin the publisher
With “Indian Cookery” by Dharamjit Singh, I entered the pungent world of spices with their complex history and usage. Despite going to university in Birmingham (the city that gave us the diaspora invented Balti – a dish as unknown in India as Chop suey is unknown in China), I did not really go out for Indian meals until I lived in London, post-university and now I live and work in Bradford – Curry Capital of England! However, I did begin to dip my wooden spoon into yet another food culture and my ingredient shelf blossomed with yet more exotic substances. This is a source of friction between my partner and myself, as she is over-faced by the multiplicity of items she has no idea about in our kitchen and it is also a problem because unless you constantly use up your spices, they will stale.
My love affair with ingredients was developed by my next book choice – Tom Stobart’s “Herbs, Spices and Flavourings” which graced my bedside table for many years after university and many’s the time I read a few items of this splendid encyclopaedia of flavour before going to sleep. What I admired was that the author did not merely list the spices and herbs themselves, but delved into the nature of taste itself, the basic areas of taste detected by the tongue before the high notes which are detected in the nose (which is why food tastes of nothing much when our nose is blocked by a cold).
Tom Stobart also includes flavoursome items such as Marmite – that British food item which people famously “love or hate” – and in doing so, he legitimises the use of anything which has flavour for use as an ingredient which for a fusion foodie, encouraged cross-fertilisation of flavours from the different food cultures represented on my compendious ingredient shelf… In the extract above, you can see that below Marmite, Mastic the original chewing gum, is given its botanical name as well as the names by which it is known in various languages – what more could you ask for from an encyclopaedia?
I was torn about my final choice of book because one of the weightiest tomes on my culinary bookshelves is also an encyclopaedia of enormous import which my partner bought for me one Christmas “McGee on Food and Cooking”. It is the bible of the scientific approach to cookery and is credited with inspiring so-called “molecular” chefs such as Heston Blumenthal. For me though, it is simply the go-to book when you need to understand why something works the way it does in cooking, such as how “No Knead” bread works when everyone knows that kneading bread is what develops the gluten that traps bubbles of carbon dioxide (given off by the yeast) and causes bread to rise. Cookery may be an Art or as the Greeks would have it, a Craft but understanding the Science does not destroy the Art anymore than understanding the science of why a sunset is red should take away our appreciation of the beauty of a sunset – quite the opposite! However, if this has not counted as sneaking in a seventh book, I eventually chose Nigel Slater’s “Toast” as my sixth link since it better closes the circle back to “Kitchen Confidential”.
Nigel Slater recounts in a manner so entertaining that the book was dramatized for TV and the stage, how he became a chef – hence the link back to Anthony Bourdin. His mother was (now) famously, a terrible cook – so terrible that her long-suffering husband and only son, had, often, to ditch her burnt offerings in the bin and resort to the titular toast… After his mother died early, Nigel’s father remarried his cleaning lady, played, fruitily, in the TV drama by Helena Bonham-Carter who was at school in a class between my two sisters – how’s that for degrees of separation! The stepmother was a most excellent cook – in fact, that was part of the attraction for Nigel’s father and it meant that in Nigel’s perception, he found himself in a battle to win his father’s love and attention. The site of the battle was the kitchen as Nigel forced his way into domestic science (cookery) classes which in those days were usually reserved for girls and battle commenced – eventually equipping Nigel Slater to become not only a chef, but a celebrity chef, and like Anthony Bourdin, a chef who writes – both recipe books and his autobiography… So there you have my six (and a bit) choices all of which made me the reasonable cook/ sometime chef/ failed restauranteur I am today. My restaurant was not the first restaurant in which I cooked (I will not say Chef-ed) – that would be The Good Food Shop formerly of Lambs Conduit Street, London, where I blagged my way into cooking at weekends, became a manager/cook and learned a great deal about cooking, business and life – so I was not completely inexperienced when many years later, I opened my own restaurant “Frewin’s” (my middle name). Why did it fail? The obvious answer – not enough customers – was it the food, or the concept ( Café in the daytime, Bistro at night) – I like to think not. That summer it rained non-stop, so no walkers, no tourists and the people of the village went to the big newly revamped gastro pub (with café and massive umbrellas outside) and with copious car parking (of which I had none) and these things cannot always be seen in advance and so I lost my inheritance but as I said before, I enjoyed every moment of it. I hope you can also see why I enjoyed “Kitchen Confidential” so much…
