Love Apples

Conserva.

I've long placed Paul Bertolli on my list of people I'd marry without much further thought. His Cooking by Hand has been to me, as to all who read it with eyes open, a revelation. That anyone could pay attention to this extent. That anyone could see through the layers of an ingredient to read its core.

My 2003 copy has lost its dust jacket--something I mind a little, and don't. I miss his floured hands, even as I love the austere pebble-coloured expanses I have now. I have lent it many times, feeling unusually trepidatious over potential loss. My worry stone.

Comes this year, and I've developed a whole new level of swooning love for him: making Conserva. It is Bertolli's version of southern Italy's estratto--tomatoes made into paste--dried into intensity on planks in the sun.

Our Conserva was almost not to be. We though we had run out of summer. The tomatoes had been watery. Getting to the core of them would surely only reveal rain. I didn't have enthusiasm for Quixoticsim when there was so much to do still in the kitchen. But then a few weeks later than one would have expected, some San Marzano tomatoes took in the last of the sun. I couldn't leave them at the market even as I didn't need more sauce. Suddenly, Conserva was back on the horizon.

No plank. No sun. But four days and nights in a very low oven until it was the colour of brick, turned over countless times, to achieve 90% reduction in weight. My heart just lurches thinking about it.

The Trauma! The Hope! The Books! -- A Cookery Revolution at my House.

The process of organising books is, for me, one of the most tortured. It hasn't helped that I've historically made no small mistakes in terms of What to keep, What to give, What will fit. And then there's the tearing of the duelling values--aesthetics vs. intellectual integrity in how to display silkbound reading copies, next to dog-eared broken-spined marked-up university copies.

But this was altogether a different magnitude. This felt a revolt more than a reshuffling.

The cookbooks in my house had been stored in the kitchen, but this was always inadequate space. As a result, various places around the house--the den, the study--the bedroom started fostering piles of them. I don't know how I didn't hold cookery, otherwise at the centre of my days, to be deserving, but I thought their place was the periphery.

This meant a lot of sprinting up and down.

In the middle of a dash upstairs, at what was surely the seventh step, I had an epiphany that told me that -running was wrong -that the bookshelves needed to look more like my life, the reallife middle.

So: Deep deep breath. To elsewhere, beloved but dusty sleepy denizens. I now have food writing, alive with yeast and blotches, and in constant use on shelves with my comfy chair beside them. Oh. I see my future.

Eating Eating for England.

I've recently read Nigel Slater's Eating for England: The Delighs & Eccentrecities of the British at Table (2007).

It is sometimes personal, sometimes witty, sometimes laugh-aloud funny, sometimes less-so collection of snippets on many aspects of quirky Birtish food habits.

The reason it's stayed with me most is that I had, until this point in my life, thought I had something of a clue about how much Brits liked their sweets and biscuits. But I've been now walking around in a state of shock since reading the depth and breadth of their love affair.

A shortlist (!) of sweets and biscuits covered in the book: Sherbet Lemons, KitKats, Everton Mints, Acid Drops, Gibbs After-Dinner Mints, Bourbon Biscuits, Mint Cracknel, Liquorice Sticks, Toblerone, the Digestive, Golden Mint Humbugs, After Eight Mints, Muray Mints, Jellie Babies, Werther's Originals, Fruit and Nut Bars, Toffees, Jaffa Cake, Chocolate Digestives, Fudge, Barley Sugar, Pink Wafters, Anise Balls, Pear Drops, Custard Creams.

And for Slater, each of them elicit a Proustian falling through time.

The only commercial treats to which I have any such strong associations are Smarties. (Erm, to me real Smarties are the Canadian/U.K. Smarties, not the U.S. ones I think of as misnamed Rockets.) They tinted your fingers. You used the stain to "polish" your nails. They were small, and kid-sized. They were chocolate. You could shake the box and know how many you had left. One boxful went on and on. They had the word "smart" in them. And pink ones tasted best, even as you knew they all tasted the same. How better?

I've today worn my Smarties shirt in honour. Not that I'm absolutely certain the fancy Parisian shirtmaker who produced it knew that's what he'd made.

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved for photos and text.

Of Julia & Paris, Beurre blanc & Copper.

I've always had a thing for Paris in the first half of the last century. I don't often think "I might have been happy there, then," but I think I might've.

I don't see why, in that case, I felt so unsure about reading Julia Child's My Life in France (Knopf, 2006). I bought it, but, as often, I thought I liked the idea of it better than I would like the reading. I'm blessed with a solution for these things: my mother reads so much, and so much more than I do, I get to read vicariously through her. Yet somehow on holiday, it felt right--comfy cozy--to pick it up again.

There's plenty about the book that has me impatient: It's under-edited. It leaves a lot of emotional dot dot dots where one of the things that makes me feel heavy is the holding of unsorted emotional baggage. This was especially true for me in Child's relationship with Simone Beck (was it ever ok again?). It also has little control of pace, something that's to me a near epidemic in contemporary publishing: where it starts very rich in the joys of the minute, it ends in a mad crush.

There's nonetheless much I'm taken by, starting with how much of Child's self in the cadence and feel of the prose--and what's there not to love? She knows herself well, body and soul. A woman well loved. A woman who loves intensely. Stubborn, even intransigent, but in the way I've often seen the genius mind to be, where total focus on a few realities is the only path to invention.

A few days ago I was walking and thinking about the thing I'm most grateful for in reading My Life in France: How it steeped me in this era of food when so much was new. A great deal of the memoir is about what's new to Julia, and how she brought her discoveries to the U.S. public. But then what actually stops me in my tracks is reading that this was a time where beurre blanc was merely a regional reality, one that Child was the first to formalise in print. Reading this small bit to be so makes me aware of time before our own in terms a food, and so momentous did I find this that it gave me a sense of time before time.

While thinking some of these things, I came across the storefront above, filled with all manner of copper that Child valued so well. All so new and sparkly, and full of promise somehow.