2 April 2022
When we get to H.’s I feel, for a while, rather tongue-tied and awkward having not been to a party in a while, or not one without a Spanish person looking after me. H. and her friend P. and roommate M. are all wearing flouncy 18thc dresses, “a blacker, better Bridgeton” someone says. The house is nice, there is a suckling pig on the side board and a table laid with jelly and cake and butter and so on, which I am shown indulgently, each thing pointed out. I compliment the pig and ask H. if my recipe was useful and she says “it was a poem, but not incredibly helpful.”
14 April, London
I buy Constance Spry’s cookbook — it seems to me to represent a certain sort of cooking in England before the refreshing brush of Elizabeth David etc. One of my favourite techniques in the book is smoothing butter and flower together between thumb and forefinger to thicken a dish that has gone past the stage for a roux.
16 April, Venice
Unimaginable happiness when the manager says “Hey! My friend! You’re back!” and we shake hands and grin. We eat simply — half a litre of prosecco, some cicchetti of speck, half an egg with an anchovy, a scallop and we share a plate of gnocchi which comes on two plates because this is a lovely place. After, Amaro Lucca and I find I’m a bit pissed, overexcited, a city-consuming urge coming over me. My friend lends me his ID card to use the cigarette machine round the corner. Life is friendly. We walk toward where we think P. will be and run into them with a tall young woman, and together walk across the city which is so quiet now. Falling asleep I think today I’ve been in a car, on a plane, two kinds of boat, a train, a bus.
24 April, London
F. emerges from upstairs in her dressing gown and glasses, looking so funny and cute, and we chat in the kitchen as I put the lamb together to go in the Aga. It’s a bit hot. F. says her cheeks sweat now she’s old and I laugh. I drink beer, everything feels soft and dreamlike. Lo’ arrives a little later, very cute in a Kenzo suit. A girl called M. (“works at Dover Street”) and her boyfrend B. (“a model”) are coming and I think, oh no, not a model and a fashion girl, but they are both utterly and completely lovely and I am sure we will be firm friends. She tells me the routines of Christmas in her big-sounding house. After dinner when we’re all drunk we go to the playground and spin on the roundabout until we are dizzy and sick. Home sort of 9ish, happy, sleepy, Sunday-lunched.
4 May, London
Ph. is talking to Fadhi when I arrive and we are introduced, chat briefly. His hands are like a bear’s, a very gentle bear’s. He places them together beneath his chin, index fingers up and all others down in a sort of watchful supplication. A surprise is that we are a table of six, that Ph.’s boyfriend, mother, mother’s friend and godmother will be dining with us. Fine! I adjust my mood and smile, stand when the ladies arrive, speak and speak, sing for my supper. I like Ph.’s mother — we are speaking about the first lockdown, and how my mother felt when everyone left after staying in Devon. I say I think she was quite sad, it was difficult. Ph.’s mother considers for a moment and asks, as if she is prying, how the dogs felt. I am a little confused, but she is dead serious. Fadhi explains that the Ka'ak Al Quds ought not be called a beigel, not for political reasons — well, some little political reasons — but mostly because beigels are boiled and Ka’ak are cooked in an oven. We eat: a hummus we make ourselves, mashing with our forks. Unsalted. A salad of wilted dandelions. Very yummy. A stuffed artichoke cooked in beef consommé. Two delicious king prawns. Lamb. An orange full of ice cream. I drink far too much.
11 May, London
Realise we are really broke in the morning. Am supposed to meet H. for lunch and say let’s go somewhere cheap, but she offers to pay. It is raining, filthy weather and we arrive early to Mangal 2. They won’t let us in because they’re going to mop the floor, so we go to a greasy spoon next door — I drink Diet Coke, very tiny sips hardly touching the can, and H. has a coffee. I have a runny nose and the discomfort means I don’t concentrate for fifteen or so minutes, until I blow it — small things. Then we are in the restaurant, how lovely she says: our conversation ranges wonderfully and it feels very nice and grown up to be meeting a close woman friend for lunch during the week, having only two glasses of wine, though at her wish it is very expensive orange wine. “I got a job raise, I’m just desperate to spend money.” We talk about the recent Sinn Fein victory. We talk about her wishing to leave Northern Ireland. I adore talking to H., we have such funny clever free-flowing conversations. The food is very good but the portions have a certain meanness about them, a lack of welcome which feels especially pronounced as the food is a play on Turkish food which is a cuisine of generosity and plentitude.
2 June, London
A. is living in a beautiful house on Blackheath rise, his girlfriend parents’ house, though they live in Spain and are rarely here — the mother is an environmental lawyer. The house has a stone staircase, a nice garden, a bright and airy kitchen. A house one feels very sweetly safe in, in the parental house. No wolf at the door here. I like people who land on their feet, which A. has a habit of doing, he of rich girlfriends. We drink prosecco and limoncello, which tastes like sherbert lemons, goes down quickly. I. arrives, then G. and A. arrive, then M. and F. and we are talking in the garden when I see H. come in — I run into the house and embrace her — I had not known she’d be coming. Her presence as always is everywhere and though she is quiet and speaks little, she sucks everything to her. She has just arrived from Somerset, where she had stayed in a very isolated house. C. had walked to a chicken farm to rent a car, had made a tortilla with eggs — the best he’d had — from a service station. The table is richly and simply set — a beautiful loaf of bread, the size of a baby, salads of bright grinning tomatoes and mozzarella, slinky little fish, ragu with fresh pasta.
8 July, Devon
With mother to buy fish from Ashburton — sea trout, very expensive and very rare, and mackerel — cheap and common. Then to Thurlston, a beautiful, rocky beach in C.’s car — the sea is actually warm and it is nice to feel young and not neurotic near it. A pair of C.’s friends are going scuba diving for the wreck of an Indian merchant ship from the Second World War. We cook sausages on a little fire and drink lots of beer. Collect F. from the station on the way home and he is on the phone for a lot of the evening, until dinner, trying to fix his business. Dinner, which we eat outside, is delicious, fish on the barbecue, potato salad, singed vegetables. The sky smiles down.
9 July, Devon
F. and I bone and stuff a chicken, rolling it, roasting it and then finishing it on the barbecue.
10 July, Devon
Make a rough salsa verde, stuff the salmon with lemon slices and the stalks of coriander and parsley from the salsa, placing little squares of butter atop the fish before wrapping it in foil. I would be tempted to add some sage — not a fishy herb generally, but I like it — but cannot as my father can no longer stand it, or any fragrant herbs, since getting covid. I believe I cooked the fish for an hour or so on 180c but, really, it depends on the size. If I had more time or an oven that didn’t need to be hot I would have cooked it twice as long at 120c. Slice the carrots lengthways, begin drinking beer, boil them till still quite firm, cool, and toss in lemon, a little oil and salt. Make mayonnaise, boil the potatoes — the table is filling up, staging ground for the table outside. All the while Lo’ is in the corner sewing a sunhat.
Guests arrive, and my grandmother, who sits a while in the corner of the kitchen drinking white, a table is moved beneath the crabapple tree, laid with white cloth (how do you remove the stains, mother? She says she does nothing special which I can’t believe but maybe she is a witch). Put the radio in the undergrowth playing Gould’s later Goldberg Variations, soft conversation, lots of jokes or exclamations about being in an Italian villa or complaints against the heat, the dog sleeping on the lawn yawning now and then. After lunch I lie in the hammock and doze, then on a wooden bench and fall fast asleep and then, waking with a start, feel compelled to look again at the church.
27 July, London
Reading Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen by Elizabeth David, one of her later books when she went crazy into English cooking. Very good introduction beginning, “For some two thousand years, English cookery has been extremely spice-conscious”
, further asserting that “the English have a natural taste for highly seasoned food.” True. One need only discover that any brand which sells spicy food across Europe — Old el Paso for instance - and adjusts the intensity for local taste has England as the most spicy. And then there’s Coleman’s Mustard.
An English Summer Minestra
Cook white beans in a broth with lots of fennel, and the normal amount of carrot tops, black pepper, garlic, salt, and an onion, halved and peeled. Boil the beans until soft and the broth milky, an hour or so if the beans have been soaked before. In another pan cut a punnet of cherry tomatoes — these bought from Staverton — and fry them in olive oil, until they begin to release their juices and soften. Now add two cloves of crushed garlic, mix in, then raise the heat and cook until most of the juices have gone. Now add a courgette, chopped thin and small and a generous pinch of chilly and stir in. Now pour the liquor from the beans and as many beans as you want into the mixture, lid, and bring to the boil, then add two handfuls of brown rice and cook, lidded, until the rice is soft, adding more water if necessary.
I love what the friend says about the suckling pig recipe ‘a poem but not very helpful’