I keep a detailed diary, and have done for the last four years — it is perhaps the practice I am most proud of, and the one I would most excitedly recommend. To begin the New Year I thought I would share extracts describing some of my favourite meals.
My final meal of 2022, steak cooked perfectly with asparagus and potatoes by my friend Danny, deserves mention but could not be written about with adequate verve because I was very unlucky and had to leave halfway through the meal because I was very unwell. Sorry Danny and sorry for leaving food on my plate, this was no reflection on your craft. Because of this the first thing I ate this year was the sort of chicken and rice one makes for a sick dog, the recipe for which you’ll find below.
January 1 2022, London
I try to buy Afghan bread from the Turkish shop. They have none, I buy Ararat instead and pita — the brand of pita they’re carrying has changed to Pita Village. Walk a little around Forest Gate and see nothing, feel dreadful. Home and I cook two eggs from Louis Watson’s chickens, bought from Devon by R., with Riverford bacon, along with Ararat bread, tahini, sambol, ketchup and cucumber. I feel terrible as I eat, unsure if I’m nourishing myself or not. The first meal of the new year.
7 January 2022, Devon
The night of our special Orthodox Christmas: F. makes pelmeni and blinis, we have smoked salmon, and salmon and herring caviar — the herring caviar is especially wonderful, tiny and mild, the closest thing to beluga (and, in my mind, equally good) and we drink a great deal of Bollinger and my grandmother reads
While Titian was mixing rose madder
His model reclined on a ladder.
The position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he ran up the ladder and had ’er.
and as guests we have Catherine, of the antique shop in Ashburton, and her lovely husband, and the evening is soft and happy and has a general feeling of warmth and well-to-do-ness.
1 February 2022, Stanstead
I watch a fat man eat sausages, beans and chips in the Stanstead Weatherspoons, silhouetted against the beautiful pink sunset. I drink Corona in which a small lime floats, sad, and wait for Lo’ to get makeup from duty free. England was beautiful today and odd too— outside Harlow (I think) I saw a wooden fortification, with stone towers, on which men in chainmail sat, watchful.
2 February 2022, Barcelona
Everywhere we wanted to go in Poble Sec was closed so we strolled across Parallel, found more places were shut, wandered a little more, then F. said “oh actually let’s go to this old man bar”. So we trot inside — bright lights and tiles and innumerable bottles of cava stored upside down on the ceiling. Beer, vermut, then we are pointed to a table beside the gigantic fridge. I love the metal and wood fridges here, big cold cupboards. M. comes in with Yara (the dog) and she slides her slinky galgoness under the table. We are given a menu in Catalan, with boxes to tick and number — very clever, I’ve never seen this before — and another in English. None in Castilliano, says the waiter. Quickly F. and M. realise that the English menu bears only passing resemblance to its Catalan counterpart so they trundle through that. We order trotters, deep fried artichokes (whole), pescaditos, Russian salad, one of each croquet, a plate of cheese, and a stuffed aubergine. Everything save the aubergine is exquisite. The aubergine, however, tastes like a microwave lasagna — of course we eat it all, because it is sweet and naughty and childish. Afterwards frozen tiramisu and something else, both terrible, then we finish our wine at the bar and a table of old Catalans come up to us, sweet as little boys, wanting to pet Yara. I can think of nowhere I would have rather gone for my first meal.
5 February 2022, Barcelona
The Tiberi order — it is quite a meal — we start splitting two sandwiches in pan di coca, the Catalan version of ciabatta — one with calamari, one with ham and cheese — then chickpeas with sausage, cava, an omelette with ham and truffles — grated atop, adding almost nothing — sweetbreads, which are excellent, tripe and a xuixos, a kind of deep fried pastry filled with cream. During the meal R. says “I can’t understand people who have affairs, how do they have time?” “Perhaps they are just greedy?” R. eats like a dancer, smooth and calm movements. I love these people, they are so excited by food and so sweet. The bill comes to about £25 a head, a shockingly small amount I feel, for the amount of food and the expensive bottle of wine (which is, of course, only €30 rather than the £60 it would’ve been in England). We all walk back into the centre, joined by A., R.’s boyfriend, an architect, with whom I talk about our shared experience of having gone to odd, progressive schools. R. tells me about the play he’s about to direct — “it’s very dark, lots of scenes of a man having destructive, violent sex with other men”. I turn into Raval, where I go to the art shop, which is full of confused English and American people.
8 February, Barcelona
After the performance R. says, “what now? Shall we go for a beer?” The sun is out and everyone says yes. Then to Teta de Monja — Nun’s Tits — on a nice square. Admire how low the buildings in this part of Sants are, how the passages feel as if one is in the country, almost, or at least no longer in big Barcelona. I feel so wonderful here, with so many friends. A. introduces himself — he is so warm and sweet, tall, with a gold hoop in each ear. The toilets — cistern, pipe, basin, are painted as a priest and a nun according to gender. Good Catalan anti-clericalism. Then to —. “This place is a little rough.” says R., grinning. It is lovely, a long bar and a cabinet full of chess trophies. Talking to A. he says, “it’s nice, unspoilt, all locals” and I say, “well, because we are saying that, we are not locals”. Sure, his family are from Sants, but he nods. “The smell of gentrification.” We order eight beers and snacks — little baccala and flour balls, anchovies, cured tuna, cured beef, geldas, artichoke hearts, bombas, masquerading as pattisserie with their swirls of aioli — another, then another beer, and are there a couple of hours, chatting, leaning, grinning. L. is very funny, small and energetic, and when she speaks Spanish it is at great speed with amazing flourishes, so I feel bad that she must then speak English to us and sad too because missing out. We walk to another terrace in the sun and there drink cava and eat pan amb tomàquet, Catalan cannelloni with a truffle-sauce and a sort of stringy beef ragu inside, and then, a real wonder, a plate of diced fillet steak upon which a stick of rosemary rests, aflame. A gimmick, I think, quite clever but silly — but no, the smoke of the herb has infused the meat with a savoury smokiness that borders excitingly on the horrible. After more cava we are cold and go inside — there, ice cream sandwiched in brioche, tiramisu with ice cream in it, cheese cake — and big glasses of muscatel. After seven tables, we walk back to Placa Espana, embrace, and return home. At home I roast a chicken as L. and A. are coming for dinner. Life tumbles on itself.
14 February, Barcelona
In the afternoon I meet A. while I’m walking the Yara. I tell her I want to go to a bakery to buy a cake for Lo’ as a Valentine’s gift, Valentine’s is silly, and yet every chance to do something nice ought to be taken up. I say this to A. and say, “I just like nice things.” As does she and everyone else. Every now and then someone walks past carrying flowers or chocolates. A. tells me the bakery I’d chosen is the wrong one and takes me to Pastisseria Fàbrega where her family buy their birthday cakes. I spent my seventh birthday in Spain, somewhere in the south in a big marbly house with apricot trees in the garden, and remember the heavy sweet smell of the bakery where we bought my birthday cake. Unlike anything I had tried before, it had a thick red glaze, almost too sweet cream, a sponge so soft it seemed artificial… I was disgusted and entranced and the young girl in the bakery, smelling of sugar and perfume, pinched my cheek. The smell of Fàbrega is similar, less intense, though the bakery selling Andalusian treats in Poble Sec does smell the same. I choose, first, a round cake filled with cream: baroque, it could be clothing, a ruff of a cake. But as the baker is about to tie it up, I spot the fish. The fish! I point. An exchange is made. The fish! What more romantic animal? When Lo and I eat it, tail first, then head, we find the cream is sweet, the cake lemony, that there is lemon curd, that it iist.
26 Febr, 2022
At nine I meet R., R., A. and about ten other Barcelonans, including R. and C., who I met three years ago. More people come in, we are in a bright white restaurant on three marble tables pushed together. “This place isn’t so good, but their sandwiches are. And they had space.” First I sit beside R. — I really love her monkeyishness — and A. on the other side, and feel a bit dull, not terribly good at communicating and my mind is elsewhere, in Ukraine. I drink Moritz, a little later have a sandwich — it is delicious, botifarra, the salty sweetish sausage here, with onions and beneath a sharpish blue cheese. It comes looking like something brash and obscene and American, fair-groundish, more evidence of the Catalan and Iberian more generally, love of tacky food.
3 March 2022, Barcelona
A girl smiles at me and I smile back and she’s smiling at her friend behind me. A fluttery embarrassment, I veer off down a little street, then another, chilly here, streets meant to provide relief seven months of the year are damp now. A little steamed up window with a del dia sign outside, €9.90, hesitate — it’s awfully glum in there, lit with strip lighting. On entering the Señora gives a hearty hola! and smiles very warmly. She’s Sino-Catalan, as are many people who run little working class restaurants and bars in Barcelona. Here the menu is entirely Iberian, but it’s not unusual to find bars serving bocadillo, eggs, ham, chips etc alongside noodles and dim sum. Two old Catalan men chat her up at the bar, trying to make her laugh. I choose a table beneath the TV, which is blaring out a Spanish soap. It sounds like someone is being killed over and over. I order paella since its Thursday, and botifarra with white beans, and try to understand the conversation the builders opposite are having over their post-lunch brandies. The paella is excellent, the perfect soft-hardness, spoon-food, and when the sausage and beans come I’m full but soldier on, because they’re delicious too, and I can’t waste food or insult a good host. By the time I’ve finished, everyone’s cleared out so the Señora’s watching the television above my head, though it feels as if she’s watching me. Half the bottle with lunch and coffee solo after. Excellent food but a bit gloomy, I think as I walk to the toilet, finding myself in the bar’s second room which is flooded in bright clean sunshine. As is life. Walk an hour home, slightly dazed, see these smoked salmon cakes in Sants Market.
10 March 2022, Barcelona
Friends to dinner and the unwavering little hosty mania. Walked back after coffee at the café of the Palau Musica, big, airy, spongy, flowery-walled, a café not quite wanting to be a café… the tables too spread out, ceilings too wide, and therefore wonderful. Stop at Pastisseria Fàbrega on the way back for a cake, walking back and forth past it as the legend on its sign reads Pastisseria Bomboneria and in foggy-English-brainedness I take the very obvious second word (which I hadn’t read, really) as its name, and when I’d been before I’d been with A. and must have been walking around looking at the ground. It looked bigger, too. D. picks a cake, then to San Antoni, buy cured tuna, bread, Oporto from a barrel, then two big heads of fennel from I.. “Aha, fennel! Always fennel! It is very English?” At home cook chickpeas very softly in good oil and garlic, a squeezed orange, then artichokes cooked in the liquor from the chickpeas on top. White wine in the freezer, bread slice for pa am tomaquet, pickles. I dyed the table cloth pink in error, so it is pink, but a light pink. I pop jamon into my mouth, buttery, the cake sits snug in its box, very proud. It turns out to be lemon, singing a little on the tongue. L. brings another L., an American. When L. speaks about Catalonia she goes very upright as if she might sing. We discuss toasting or not toasting bread, toasting is better but can one be bothered? The garlic does not take so well if you don’t toast, but I rub it on the crust. Guests leave, door closes softly. Walk the dog and she meets a friend.
19 March 2022, Barcelona
A touch hungover, struggle out of bed and take F. for a walk on Mont Juic. Jean Miro, take a coffee at the kiosk, around to the cactus garden and a look at the port, then to the farmer’s market where we have a grand time stopping at stalls and buying good things. Sobrasada (it’s like nduja, F.), cured sausage, chunks of pork, goat’s cheese, soft & sweet, a bottle of (natural) wine with a fig on it. F. complains he has no knife to have a snack of sausage on the walk home, so eats some sobrasada with his finger. Rumbling bellies we also buy bread and jamon — actually that was the purpose of the market, but there was none there. Up the stairs we bound and Lo’ asks, “where have we been silly boys?” And, because we haven’t eaten and shall have to walk to lunch, we lay out our wares on the table. The ham is sweet like honey. Pear with cheese, the sausage is texturally wonderful — a little gritty — the wine is really light and flavoursome and novel. We are leisurely in eating, saving space, there is no rush. Pop a morsel into one’s mouth, a spoonful of sobrasada. We look at the bottle and see only a glass remains in it, and are non-plussed, since Lo’s been having white and we were just having one glass with breakfast, but wine is so slippery sometimes. We finish the bottle and shaking ourselves we stand, putting our jackets on for lunch, happily and secretly drunk.
Walking to lunch we are jocular and jostling. Lo’ sighs — two drunk boys become two little boys and are irrepressible in joy and jokes in poor taste. There is skipping too — we get to our destination, which I thought did a del dia on Saturdays — it’s the sort of place — but find it resplendent in brunch, and not spoon food Catalan brunch, but avocados, smoothies. No! I had tried to check, I protest, and we wander around the corner to another place — with a dark window, and inside dark too, where families from Barcelona’s bourgeoisie are sitting — grandparents down to grandchildren — eating very delicious-looking food from good china, comfortable and secure. Pushing my way through the crowd, past the bar, I am behind a Spanish woman who asks the host (why is he at the back?) if he has space for two. Slowly he looks up from his ledger, gigantic and leather-bound, like a church Bible, and shakes his head. I run outside feeling I’ve trespassed and let F. take us to a restaurant he’d seen a block away — it’s so nice to be able to pass on one’s hostly responsibility when a little disheartened. Inside our new place it’s a little less crowded and sunlight is allowed inside. Tables are laid with soft old linen and an old waiter — the sort of old waiter the Mediterranean specialises in — leads us upstairs, to a corner table, grumbling a little. We are not famished and had planned to lunch lightly but… there is a big veal steak and F. wants a plate of fried artichokes too. So we order just these, and beers, and the man looks at us, a little askance, and says “very little?” He is pro greed, for when we’d ordered the steak — which when it came would be as big as a human head — he had asked if we wanted one each. A. told me recently that lunch is more important here. The artichokes are crisp and crunchy and the steak bloody and tender. We have more beer. We lean back. We have been successful. We have lunched. Later, in the afternoon, we’ll feel a little hungover but now everything is in equilibrium.
20 March 2022, Barcelona
A grumpy sky, so F. & I jumped in a cab. Not too many out El X and we wave to L.. “No Lowena?” “She’s sleeping.” “Clever girl.” It begins to rain, two Greek girls come behind us and ask if the food’s good. “Best in the city.” One of the girls holds her umbrella over F., he moves, she gets wet. It’s snowing in Athens. “Boys, you want a drink?” L. brings us vermut, points us to the barrel table outside, F. splashes his hand on the table, “like a wet fish.” Splash splash. Vermut in little glasses, super chic, olives with anchovies in them. Tomorrow F. tells me of his shock. “Waiter, waiter, there’s a fish in my drink!” L. pops her head out, “I’ll bring you some cockles!” They come, little neat commas all together with a little lemon and pepper, and they taste like truffles. It’s not the oil either, it’s these odd creatures. Inside, a good table and the special planning of ordering, L. popping up now and then to say, “get clams”, then, “are you sure you want clams?”, then, “when I marry I want to stay on a boat and only eat clams.” I’ve never really met with tinned fish culture, not properly, where they bring the tin to your table and you have a look, like it’s a bottle of wine. F. declares he’ll draw everything we eat. Oh I am happy and hungover and damp here, drinking wine chosen by the boss. We have clams, big creatures, and with the plate a glass is bought — for the juice — and oh they are good and oh the juice sings of the sea. Then butter soft chickpeas with cod tripe — meltier than any other tripe, not fishy at all, caressing — and mussels cooked simply in oil, a little smokey, wonderful, chickpeas with pancetta, forever my favourite dish, pork with peppers (the best pork loin I’ve eaten?) and when we are too full L. brings us a little plate of copa, as a treat. After, chocolates, biscuits, sweet wine, coffee, and we roll ourselves home, walking first the wrong way. Restaurants are not simply the food they serve but theatre too, the best exhibit an ability to straddle the line between familial comfort and excitement, they produce art not with oddness or originality but honesty. Why are there nature poets, love poets, nationalist poets, animal poets, sports poets but no food poets? Why no sonnets to the chickpeas at El X?”
A Sick Dog’s Chicken and Rice
Fry an onion, roughly diced, with carrots chopped into small pieces, two cloves of crushed garlic, the stems of two bunches of coriander, chopped finely, until the onion is quite soft. Meanwhile, butcher a chicken as desired and fry with the vegetables for a couple of minutes, now add a tin of whole tomatoes, blitzed, a litre of light chicken stock and a generous glass of white wine. Combine, then add three cups of rice — I prefer brown rice for its nuttiness, but perhaps the most effective would be bomba rice — and bring to the boil. Now place in an oven at 180c for an hour and a half, until the rice and chicken is very softly cooked. If the person isn’t sick this is nice with a salsa verde, but then it would be nice with many other flavoursome things the patient is not allowed.
This is ever so delightful, all of it
I need to know more about this play that R directed