It was the Gert Loveday review of Rancid Pansies (it’s an anagram) that set me off to read James Hamilton-Paterson’s trilogy of comic novels that chronicles the outlandish misadventures of Gerald Samper. Part Henry Wilt and part Bertie Wooster with a touch of the growing pains of Adrian Mole, Gerald Samper – of the Shropshire Sampers – is his own…
It’s London in wartime, in the blackout before the Blitz and the streets of Soho are full of characters straight out of central casting. Our protagonist is Scotland Yard’s Detective Inspector Patrick Aloysius McCarthy, a hard-boiled cop with an Irish father and a Neopolitan mother and all the stereotypical traits of both. He’s prone to hunches and the luck of…
With May being coronation month and all, the NYTimes Cooking section has a selection of dishes it deems British, and suitable for the occasion. I’ve made a few of these recipes and can recommend the Vegetarian Shepherd’s Pie, Bacon-Wrapped Dates, and the Orange Marmalade Cake. The Cider-Spiked Fish Pie was OK. Classic Scones are always good but best eaten in…
A recent NYTimes Cooking newsletter from Melissa Clark drew my attention to the article about Raghavan Iyer by Kim Severson Mr. Iyer’s debilitating cancer treatment gave him the idea for the Revival Project, a searchable database of comfort-food recipes, with the goal of nourishing patients with dishes suited to their specific origins, preferences and medical conditions. The recipes are organized by…
Long before everyone aspired to be a gourmet chef and cooking programs were all the rage, it wasn’t so easy to get good advice about what to cook and how to do it. Of course, the posh papers had their Sunday supplements with glossy accounts of exotic meals first tasted in far-off places like Mykonos, Sicily, and the South of…
This is a shout-out to all the farmers, staff, and administration at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project (PFP). Thank you for all the great produce this year and for making the weekly pick-up of veggies the highlight of the hunkered week!. COVID-19 be damned. Veggies A to Z: A Shadorma Chain for the PFP Acorn squash and baby bok choy, cilantro…
I enjoy reading the daily newsletter from the cooking crew at the NY Times. Always some interesting new ideas and recipes to try out. From today there’s Melissa Clark’s new sheet-pan dinner of roast chicken, plums and red onions. Sam Sifton comments: “She came up with it as a dish appropriate to Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which begins…
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.– Gertrude Stein As you know from my earlier post I have recently been chatting with Gertrude Stein about her life and particularly aspects of her work Tender Buttons (1914). This was all facilitated by my early acquaintance with…
Knowing that as far as our Federal Government is concerned I am – along with pretty much everyone else – expendable, I am committed to avoiding contracting COVID-19. So that means not going shopping. And it means arranging for deliveries. Almost a full time occupation in itself. And that means someone else taking the risks on my behalf because they…
Amazing how hard it sometimes can be to find things on the intertubes. There was a poem I remembered from my London teaching days and I tried every which way to find it. It was about fruit piled up in a market so I tried all kinds of variations on a search theme and came up with nothing. I even…
Novelists and film makers often struggle to find the right period details to anchor their work in a particular era. And when it’s a much mined time and place – London in WW2 for example – it often results in rolling out the same set of shorthand cliches. You know the drill – the air raid siren, a gas mask…
Do you remember what you were doing on the 22nd of June at 9.00am? I do – at least for the year 1964 because that was the date of the University of London GCE “O” level exam in Biology. I am seated in a single desk in one of many rows in a packed but silent school assembly hall. I…
Rhubarb, Rhubarb Words A definition of rhubarb – the noun – is meaningless background noise. This meaning is attributed to the mid 19th century practice of the theater company of Charles Kean at the Princess Theater, London. In crowd scenes actors repeated the word “rhubarb” to mimic the sound of indistinct conversation. Rhubarb was chosen because it has no harsh-sounding…
I don’t think I peeled a clove of garlic until I was at least 21. It wasn’t because I didn’t prepare my own food. I cooked through most of college and acquired all kinds of ingenious, makeshift cooking skills using a gas-ring fueled by a penny meter in a narrow kitchen with no oven, no fridge and that I shared…
Here then, as promised is the indulgence of blackberry poems. (For any very young readers confused by Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackberry please know that the Blackberry was a communication device from the early C21st introduced sometime after the era of cocoa tins connected with string.) So many blackberry poems. It’s almost as if all the poets had…