Summer reading and a Perfectly Written Recipe
It’s the 14th July–Bastille Day.
Anniversary of the storming of the Bastille Prison in 1789–the start of the French Revolution.
In Paris, the Presidents of France and the US are also commemorating another momentous event–America’s entry into the First World War in 1917.
There’ll be military parades and firework displays all over France; there were fireworks in Lautrec last night.
It’s busy, busy–out there.
Here in a quieter corner of Southwest France, it’s simply summer and the living is easy; the mornings are cool and the cats are lying around.
The first figs–les figues fleurs–are dropping and making a mess in the courtyard.
Time to slow down and count one’s blessings.
Time to plan a lunch for the Garlic Festival–in the first week of August.
Time to consult the multitude of cookbooks on the shelves in the larder.
Cookbooks are perched on tables and chairs and falling off dressers.
Experiments are under way in the kitchen–and food is spilling out of the fridge.
Some cookery books one buys on a whim and after the initial thumb-through, sit unused, gathering dust.
Until moments of calm like this–when a glance at the shelves finds books that I had forgotten were there.
Honey from a Weed is one such.
Written in the 1980s by Patience Gray, it is one of those “old fashioned” cookbooks–no photos, just beautiful sketches telling everyday stories–discursive, setting the recipes against a backdrop of place and personal experience.
This wonderful book is the story of the artist/writer’s life in three Mediterranean locations over years living with her “mystery” partner, simply referred to as “The Sculptor“.
The locations are all in places where marble is quarried.
In Catalonia, in Spain, on the Greek island of Naxos and most famously in Carrarra in Tuscany–where Michelangelo once quarried his stone.
I am reading her cookbook with relish this summer.
For me, here’s a perfect example of how to write a recipe.
In a few lines it manages to tell us the what and the how–and finish nicely describing the natural emergence of a sauce that makes the mouth water.
(Ask the fishmonger to do the middle paragraph!).
Filed under: Food, other sides to this life, Recipes
