are my feet in the way: May 2011

Monday, May 30, 2011

Great Journeys: Elizabeth David wants an omelette and a glass of wine

I'm not sure you can do justice to the eclecticism of Elizabeth David's food/travel writing, or its mild disdain of all manner of poor taste, without simply collecting some of her prose ingredients. The following are all taken from her collection of newspaper and magazine articles gathered under the title An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

August rain swishes down on the leaves of the wild jungly tree which grows, rootless apparently, in the twelve inch strip of gravel outside my London kitchen. I am assured by a gardener that the plant originated in Kamchatka, but now it looks more like something transplanted from the Orinoco. Staring out at it, hunched into her bumble-bee-in-a-black-mood attitude, my cat suddenly jumps up, presses her face to the window, doesn't like what she sees, comes back, wheels around, washes her face, re-settles herself on her blanket, stares out again. I feel restless too. ("Summer Holidays", 1962)

*

Cherished in our dreams, held close to our hearts in deathless legend is the humble French restaurant, the unpretentious petit coin pas cher where one may drop in at any time and be sure always of a friendly welcome, a well-cooked omelette, a good salad, a glass of honest wine. ("Secrets", 1963)

*

What on earth comes over wine waiters when they take the orders of a woman entertaining another woman in a restaurant? ("Ladies' Haves", 1962)

*

Once upon a time there was a celebrated restaurant called the Hôtel de la Tête d'Or on the Mont-St-Michel just off the coast of Normandy. The reputation of this house was built upon one single menu which was served day in day out for year after year. It consisted of an omelette, ham, a fried sole, pré-salé lamb cutlets with potatoes, a roast chicken and salad, and a dessert. Cider and butter were put upon the table and were thrown in with the price of the meal, which was two francs fifty in pre-1914 currency.

...

As to the omelette itself, it seems to me to be a confection which demands the most straightforward approach. What one wants is the taste of fresh eggs and the fresh butter and, visually, a soft bright golden roll plump and spilling out a little at the edges. It should not be a busy, important urban dish but something gentle and pastoral, with the clean scent of the dairy, the kitchen garden, the basket of early morning mushrooms or the sharp tang of freshly picked herbs, sorrel, chives, tarragon. ("An Omelette and a Glass of Wine", 1959)

Lists, of course, are a central feature of food writing, but to work as good writing they must seem as fresh as the best ingredients. Elizabeth David's lists are, because they are intelligent and crisp, but also long enough to make you realize that this is a person who constructs the world out of its elements, out of small dishes. You sense, too, that this outlook extends to people and places.

Rose Barattero is the euphonious name of the proprietress of the Hôtel du Midi at Lamastre in the Ardèche. Slim, elegant, her pretty grey hair in tight curls all over her head, the miniscule red ribbon of the Legion of Honour on her grey dress, Madame Barattero is an impressive little figure as she stands on the terrace of her hotel welcoming her guests as they drive into the main square of the small provincial town whose name she has made famous throughout France. ("Chez Barattero", 1958)

*

When lunchtime approaches, the question is are we near a river or a lake? If so, shall we be able to reach its banks? For the ideal picnic there has to be water, and from that point of view, France is wonderful picnic country, so rich in magnificent rivers, waterfalls, reservoirs, that it is rare not to be able to find some delicious spot where you can sit by the water, watch dragonflies and listen to the birds or to the beguiling sounds of a fast-flowing stream. As you drink wine from a tumbler, sprinkle your bread with olive oil and salt, and eat it with ripe tomatoes or rough country sausage you feel better off than in even the most perfect restaurant. ("Eating out in Provincial France 1965-1977", 1980)

Notice how the features of the French landscape are played off the ingredients of the perfect Provincial picnic. I don't suppose my sentence structure will ever be as assured as David's, or that white wine and ripe tomatoes will help all that much. But of course I am willing to try.

The collection: Elizabeth David, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (edited by Jill Norman, Penguin, 1986).

Monday, May 23, 2011

Letter from a pagan place, by Kim Wilkins

One of the perks of being a writer is tax deductible field work. For the last three years, I have been working on a 140 000 word novel, the first in a series (I also published a novella in the series in 2010) that draws its inspiration from Anglo-Saxon English history, literature, and culture. The novel is historical fantasy, so as well as the facts about daily life, I have been gathering vast amounts of material about the pagan and magical beliefs of England. The story, whose working title is "The Garden of the Mad King", is set over one spring in the middle of the eighth century in an alternate version of England called Thyrsland. I've spent a lot of time in England during autumn and winter, but none at all in spring since I was a very young child. So I organised a quick research trip over Easter and May day, to soak up some of the feel of England as it bursts back to life after the long winter sleep. My goal was to seek out things that were earthy and pagan, places that were marked by what Jimmy Page once called "power, mystery, and the hammer of the gods".

My travelling companion and I drove into the Dorset village of Cerne Abbas on a warm spring afternoon. My feet were out the window of the car, sun on my soles, wind between my toes. It felt a suitably pagan way to start my research. Wildflowers bloomed everywhere. I soon learned all their names: meadowsweet and monkshood, cowslips and soapwort. The hawthorne hedges were covered in snowy flowers, and the chestnut trees were bristling with creamy catkins. The narrow B roads resembled tunnels of green: sycamore and ash and chestnut and oaks just budding. Cerne Abbas is probably best known for the giant chalk figure carved on the hillside above the village, with an enormous club and an enormous doodle at full tumescence. Some think he's a pagan fertility figure, some think he's a much more recent prank, but he certainly is impressive. I climbed to the top of the hill that he's carved on, and breathed in the incredible views of fields and woodlands. White fluffy seeds floated on the air, and bumble bees buzzed about. The next day I drove to nearby Glastonbury Tor and made the steep climb to the top.

The stories go that Glastonbury is Avalon: only a thin membrane separates the two. I lay in the sunshine for two hours seeing if I could feel the ancient hum of the magic that's supposed to be in the earth there. Another time I took a morning to make my way out to Breamore, to see the pre-conquest Saxon church there, and contemplate in awe the enormous ancient yew tree in the graveyard. I made daisy chains in the spring sunshine, walked through the woods on Beltane eve, and was woken on May day by a procession of Morris dancers that Herne the great hunter was leading down the street below my B&B window. My imagination was full of robins and blackbirds, horse gods and green men; my blood beat with the rhythm of the changing season. To be in England in spring is to understand how the numinous possibilities of magic, and the mundane realities of agriculture have always been understood together. I went through my manuscript and marked over one hundred annotations for the next draft so I can infuse it with that sweet ache of pagan woodlandsy magic. So when I'm longing to be back in the English springtime again, I can simply open up my story and be there once again. Only with swords and dragons.

Yew Tree

Kim Wilkins has published numerous novels of gothic, romance and YA fiction. She lectures at the University of Queensland.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Ideas, man

Today I presented a paper at the Brisbane Ideas Festival entitled, "Returning to Iceland: Is there a geography of happiness and does it bring you home?" The presentation was filmed and is available for download here.

Presenting at the Brisbane Ideas Festival

My talk centred on the complex nature of home, and the various ways we come to define it. I spoke at length about my book The Promise of Iceland and travel, which often makes us aware of the distinctive features of the place we're from - interestingly, Australians and Icelanders, both island dwellers, seem to share the need to leave at some stage of their lives. It's as though leaving permits you to see yourself afresh, and suddenly to be freed of an established version of yourself that your friends and relatives may think of as fixed.

Another way to define home is through the process of returning after a long time away: the feeling of belonging and familiarity that hits you when you get back is a kind of definition. It's a feeling that reminds you that the pleasures of travel, and the intoxicating novelties of movement, are limited, temporary; while home, the place you come back to, has more enduring qualities.

But I think home is also defined by the tension between one's need for change and the satisfaction we draw from stability. Home pulls you back, but I think it also, in very positive ways, pushes you out.

With Rod Welford

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Desert Brevity: Wilfred Thesiger in the Empty Quarter

I had intended to write a long post about Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands (1959), but on more than one occasion he demonstrates that brevity is often the best form of description. For example,

I crossed the border into French Somaliland and stayed with Capitaine Bernard in the fort which he commanded at Dikil. He and most of his men were to die a few months later when they were ambushed by a raiding force from Aussa. From Dikil I travelled across the lava desert to Tajura on the coast. So far it had been the tribes that had threatened us, now it was the land itself. It was without life or vegetation, a chaos of twisted riven rock, the debris of successive cataclysms, spewed forth molten to scald the surface of the earth. This dead landscape seemed to presage the final desolation of a dead world. For twelve days we struggled over the sharp rocks, across mountains, through gorges, past craters. We skirted the Assal basin four hundred feet below sea-level. The blue-black waters of the lake were surrounded by a great plain of salt, while and level as an icefield, from which the mountains rose in crowded tiers, the lava on their slopes black and rusty red. We were lucky. Some rain had fallen recently and filled the water-holes, but fourteen of my eighteen camels died of starvation before we reached Tajura.

There's enough material in this paragraph for at least a chapter: the visit to the doomed fort, Tajura and the coast, threats by local tribes, the dead world of the Assal basin, starvation. But poor Capitaine Bernard and the fourteen camels are merely brackets of a paragraph that leaves its victims behind and swirls deeper and deeper into the landscape.

It produces a striking, desert effect: the remorseless brevity that witnesses the most terrible parts of a difficult journey.

Monday, May 2, 2011

Drawing to Write: Thingvellir

Thingvellir is the site of Iceland's first national assembly, and one of the most beautiful expressions of the island's constant state of rupture. The dividing line between the Continental plates is revealed in gorges and ridges that encircle the lake. Constantly divided, it may seem an unusual place for a symbol of national unity. But I like the tension of history and landscape: strangely, the very present sense of a violent geological past deepens your awareness of the unities in our lives.

You come off a high heath to the national park. This is the first glimpse of Thingvallavatn, the deepest lake in Iceland.

The national park is only 40 minutes' drive outside Reykjavík. Here a 2001 study of the waterfall that tips into the gorge.

My good friend Kári Bergsson took this photograph of me drawing at Thingvellir. It's quite an old picture, and I no longer have the long hair. It received its end when, in 2003, I celebrated submitting my PhD on the Icelandic sagas, so many of which have scenes at Thingvellir, with a drastic but overdue haircut.