Snobbery and Frugality

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Dear reader, this is a post which comes with one of those warnings – this is a blog that contains food snobbery in quite large quantities.

There are some recipes I avoid every time I see them – especially anything titled ‘pasta bake’ or ‘vegetable curry’.

Personally, I can’t imagine the day when I am going to look forward to making or, indeed and especially, eating a tuna and broccoli pasta bake even if it ‘comes bubbling from the oven to the table.’

Broccoli is not a suitable partner for pasta. There, that is it, I said it.

(Now I do realise, I am not having to try to get fish and vegetables into resistant children who will, however, eat anything with pasta. 

Either sell your children, or give them fish fingers, peas and spaghetti hoops.)

Chicken and pasta bake – not really. Chicken and pasta don’t go together and certainly not baked in the oven with cheese.

And the idea of brussel sprouts and pumpkin pasta bake makes me want to weep.

I do realise that lasagne and cannelloni are pasta bakes but not as we know the term and tell me, hand on heart, when did you eat a really delicious lasagne outside of Italy – or even in it, for that matter.

The exception I will make is macaroni cheese – up there with cauliflower cheese as one of the very, very good comfort foods.

The pastas I prefer are long strips of varying width – spaghetti, tagliatelle, pappardelle etc – which don’t lend themselves to baking as far as I know.

A recipe for four cheese baked spaghetti is not convincing me that I am wrong, but in case you differ: https://www.foodandwine.com/pasta-noodles/baked-pasta/baked-pasta-dishes?slide=c079c521-8907-4786-a70e-e9fbc1b88b99#c079c521-8907-4786-a70e-e9fbc1b88b99

The long pastas remind me much more of good Italian meals and I am very prepared to spend time thinking of how to ‘dress’ them – crab and lemon zest, artichokes and olives (both from cans I have to say), squid, peas and tomato sauce ( actually very cheap to make), I could go on….

My sister’s friend’s sister apparently makes the most delicious pasta sauces from all sorts of simple ingredients and I always like hearing the stories of what they ate whilst on holiday – mind you any stories of holidays and good food are at a premium these strange days. 

I salute that woman’s cooking but am pretty sure a pasta bake was not included.

Wondering whether the Italians would also sneer at a pasta bake, I Googled about and found indeed there are all sorts of pasta bakes but they are not called that.

It is all a question of language…….but a closer look does not fill me with delight, pasta bakes with a posher name.

Meanwhile, likewise with anything described as a vegetable curry gets a stiff ignoring from me, as the Best Beloved would say.

This is not because I don’t eat or make them – sag aloo is a delight, dal with crispy fried onions, cauliflower masala, mushroom and pea keema ( thank you Meera Sodha for that and other lovely recipes)……

It is because all those recipes you come across have carrots in them, and I am not a big fan of a carrot – and other root vegetables. (Honourable exceptions include potatoes, of course, fennel and the occasional turnip but never found in any of my ‘curries’.)

The idea that you can curry chunks of carrot and parsnips and sweet potatoes is not getting a toe over my threshold.

I am not saying this is not a good vegetable curry for the people who like that sort of thing, but this is not happening in this part of Deepest Sussex, along with, and I am sorry if I offend anyone, beetroot and aubergine curry. I may rest my case at this point.

I am sure that there is an Indian cook out there who could make me sit and eat a meal with carrots in it which I would then describe as delicious. But that cook is not me.

And, finally on this, ‘curry’ is just too a generic term – it signals to me that the recipe is not going to be great.

( I did warn you about snobbery……)

So, I can happily ignore recipes for vegetable curry and flick past them, but as for pasta bakes the search is on.

We have a lot of none strip pasta. 

This is not as a result of panic buying in March or November or now ( the year marked by panic buying outbreaks, who would have thought?) but because too much pasta was brought into the Free Shop and some ‘shoppers’ suggested I could make some pasta bakes for following week – they apparently had a soft spot for a pasta bake.

You can imagine my delight.

As it happens, I am not volunteering there any more so not cooking for it, but am left with a lot of pasta. (Don’t worry, I have not deprived people of pasta, the Free Shop gets more pasta than it can shake a hat at.)

My plan is to find something I can call something other than ‘pasta bake ‘ and which tastes good but is nevertheless baked in the oven. 

There is already the aubergine pie recipe ( see a previous blog) but there must be more out there which will convert me.

I am not falling for Pasta Al Forno which is basically a bolognese sauce baked with pasta. Come on, there must be something better than that…….

So, in yet another lockdown with weather not conducive to gardening, temperament not conducive to nothing more than necessary when it comes to cleaning, upholstery on hold, dog walking not taking up all of the day, BB working on his great thoughts about the Bexit deal, news of record numbers of Coronavirus cases, my project may well be to find/create a ‘decent’ pasta bake.

Standards

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I went delivering Christmas cards the other day – not something I usually do but it was combined with a dog walk, and that is something I have to do, come rain or shine.

This was rain.

I dropped one off at a friend’s.

Jess and I were what could charitably be described as more than bedraggled. ‘Look like you have been pulled through a wet hedge backwards,’ as my grandmother would have said.

My friend however answered the door in a glamorous black jumper, nicely made up, hair looking good, jewellery properly accessorised.

‘Well it is Christmas and it’s worth making an effort,’ she said.

Likewise, I got reprimanded by another friend for having no, not one, Christmas decoration in the house – at least not one visible from the outside ( and, dear reader, there was indeed not one inside.)

So I went up in the loft, went into the garden and got a bit of ivy, and scattered it along with a carrier bag’s worth of decorations around the house.

( Usually, the reprimanding friend decorates our house for our annual Winter Lunch but not this year….)

But, I can’t say that I went home and blowed dried my hair or put on anything glam – brushing the mud off my jeans was as far as that went.

This lockdown, unlike the previous two, has come as a bit of a depressing surprise. 

For those of us with charmed and easy lives (and I do know that is not true of many people), the first lockdown was all gardening, chatting with neighbours over the fence, organising NHS headband-makers, cooking for the village, and zooms.

November was predicted, and to be honest, didn’t feel much like a lockdown as the traffic was ‘roaring’ round the lanes as people nipped into Waitrose for an ‘essential’ or two, fewer zooms, not as scary, not as sociable……

This one has dark mornings and evenings, bad weather, a threat of a more contagious virus, and it is seriously muddy underfoot.

And there is the battle between ‘why bother’ and ‘keeping up some standards’.

As I spent part of this morning doing the ironing, there was a bit of me thinking why do I need an ironed white shirt when I get up every morning put on those (sometimes brushed) jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper to walk the dog. 

Somehow, I can’t bring myself to wear the white shirt, have to wash and iron it again – indeed there are a lot of clothes in my wardrobe that haven’t, and aren’t likely to, be worn in the foreseeable future.

But being an Aspinall, genetic heritage from my mother and grandmother, cooking carries on.

So, to Christmas lunch.

I asked a shooting villager for a brace of pheasants and in return made him and his family and steak and kidney pie.

In the end he gave me a brace of partridge which I failed to cook properly.

So, we had a (nearly) vegetarian Christmas lunch but ,I would like to point out, sauté potatoes, creamed spinach with nutmeg, sprouts with bacon, cider gravy – so some standards don’t slip in this household.

Empty Suitcases

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We, like the rest of the world it seems, loved The Queen’s Gambit but there is a small, but oh so significant in our house, caveat.

Why would Beth would arrive back from one of her many chess triumphs (during which, especially in Paris,) she was wearing some amazing outfits, was she carrying small – and more importantly – empty suitcases.

Inside the House From Netflix's "The Queen's Gambit"

She is not alone, I have to say.

There are empty suitcases being carried by actors in hundreds of films – indeed we rarely watch a film without the Best Beloved harrumphing at a clearly empty suitcase.

Recently, on a wet afternoon diverted from gardening to binge film watching, Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson played about with empty suitcases in As Good As It Gets.

Previously, in To Catch A Thief when a youthful Leonardo di Caprio, who surely could manage to carry a suitcase with a little bit of stuff in it, swung an empty case as he strode along.

And that is to name but two.

(So, our film watching is punctuated by a combination of who can spot the empty suitcase first and name that actor.

‘Oh, that’s the woman who ran the antiques shop in Three Billboards, isn’t it?’

‘He was in that thing we watched, you know that thing with what’s her name from that thing based on JK Rowling’s book, Strike, that’s what it was – what was she called?’ )

It turns out we are not the only people to note empty suitcases – mentioning this to my good friend on a dog walk this morning, she was, well I can only say, enthused, that the BB was the other sensible soul in the universe who got outraged at an empty suitcase.

So, why when film makers expend a great deal of time, energy, effort, thought and money on making something look so real, do they fail to manage to get even a few clothes in a suitcase?

I stated to google about and looked up the role of continuity. I am no film expert but I would have thought this issue might fall into that bag (or case.)

Apparently, I was wrong and if you want to wade through some of the more arcane/academic explanations of continuity you could go here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3208769/ where you can find sentences like this: 

‘These camera shots are often filmed at different times and locations and may have little feature overlap, and as such, flow of information across shots often bears little resemblance to the perceptual flow of information as we interact in the real world.‘

But just in case you don’t, here is a short version, ‘Continuity in filmmaking is the practice of ensuring that details in a shot are consistent from shot to shot within a film scene. When there is continuity between shots, then audiences have a greater suspension of disbelief and will be more engaged in the film.’

Now, the problem with blaming continuity, is that you don’t get a shot with a proper heavy suitcase and the next time you see it, it is as light as a feather – they are always like that.

Presumably can’t be props as they must just supply the suitcases….

So, who knows who is responsible?

I googled ‘empty suitcases in films.’

It turns out I am not alone in trying to find an answer:

From The Guardian in 2013 in a section described as

‘Readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific concepts’

John Benseman, from Auckland, New Zealand asked,

‘Given all the care that film-makers take to make things realistic, why do they never seem to put any weight in the bags and suitcases that actors carry?’

I am really hoping that John Benseman got his answer eventually because no one, not one reader answered his question on The Guardian’s site. 

(And I am tempted to ask him as I found him on Google too but that, dear reader may be going a step too far….)

Likewise Mavieen Rows asked on her blog ,where she described herself as a spending life watching movies,

‘This drives me crazy.  What is so hard about actually putting clothes in them?  Hell, even putting pillows in them would give an extra dimension of “full” that doesn’t exist in a sides-caving-in typical Hollywood suitcase.  I want answers!’

As far as I know, she didn’t.

The rest of that google page search is full of references to a film called Empty Suitcases by Bette Gordon and should you need a review:

The “empty” suitcases can be inferred as letting go of all the unnecessary thoughts and feelings of a person’s past. After the film was over Bette Gordon talked about her desire to work with the empty spaces of the frame and put in items outside of the frame of view.

Mmmm, well it will have to be a very long wet Sunday afternoon before I pick that over a re-run of The Railway Children.

So, dear reader I would love to be able to answer the question of empty suitcases but I have found out nothing.

But here is a nice ending:

Apparently, it is a tradition in Colombia to carry around an empty suitcase on New Year’s Eve in the hope that the next year is full of travel and excitement and that over the year those cases will be filled with precious memories…….

Dilemmas and Bread and Butter Pudding

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There weren’t many moral dilemmas when I was at the Oxfam bookshop. Once you got over the difficulty of throwing away books – and you had to – it all fell into place.

Sell books, make money for a good cause, go home.

The Free Shop turns out to be a minefield of such dilemmas, and Christmas is bringing more and more of them.

The Free Shop was initiated, planned, and runs as an anti-food waste project. So, we get leftover food from local supermarkets, allotment growers, those with too many apples, and we offer them for free to anyone who wants them.

We are not a food bank and we do not ask for anyone to prove they are in need. 

But when I turn up on a Saturday morning with some soup I have made from some of the (rather surprisingly) 20 celeriacs we had donated last week, to find 15 people queuing up in the pouring rain half an hour before we open, you know they are not there to polish their eco credentials.

One of the local pubs, shut obviously, has turned its kitchen over to making food and I have to tell you it looks a whole lot more professional than the savoury bread and butter pudding I have made this week. (But more of that later.)

I am in the shop on a Wednesday afternoon.

Ostensibly, we are open from 2 to 3.30 but often my lovely colleague and I, have ‘sold’ out by 2.45.

So, back to the dilemmas.

If you are anti food waste, can you/should you ration what someone takes?

Do you make judgements about the person who comes in with two really big carrier bags and literally sweeps food into them? 

What do you think of the man who walks three miles to get to us along the main and rather dangerous road? Well, you get the best beloved to print off an ordnance survey map and highlight how to walk off road. When the man says it will be muddy and points to his loafers and you ask what size feet he has so that you can ‘source’ some wellies, and he says he wouldn’t be seen dead in wellies and by the way do you still not have any decent green tea available? Do you laugh and save him the only packet of green tea we get that week. Well that is what I did.

When you have five packs of cornflakes donated one week, and one person takes four of them, do you ask her to just take one as there are other people with kids in the queue, well I did.

Do you get just a bit cynical when people say they are ‘shopping’ for their neighbour as well as themselves. I do. If every person who said that in our ‘shop’ was actually doing that, then there are a lot of well fed neighbours.

Yes, I am not proud of those reactions and I know that I, as an extremely privileged person, can know nothing of what it is like to try and make very thin and far away ends meet.

I am just explaining that, for me, it is very hard not to make judgements.

So, Christmas.

I was charged with making a Christmas happen in the ‘shop.’ 

Being me, I flapped my hands and asked for help and contacted my sewing group ( the people who made a sterling amount of headbands and scrub bags during lockdown – I didn’t sew I need to make clear.)

I asked for those gifts that people have given you and they are perfectly good quality but you are not going to use them.

Anything they fancied making.

I was clear that everything had to be good quality – just because you are poor or you have found yourselves falling from ‘just managing’ to not, or you both worked in hospitality on a zero hours contract and those not longer exit, you shouldn’t be expected to be grateful for a half empty bottle of body lotion.

As ever, I have been so impressed by what I have received. 

Handmade stockings and puddings and teddy bears, a chess set, endless good quality ‘smellies’, candles akimbo, there is Christmas bunting on the way, lavender bags, a pristine Paddington, and so on.

One of ‘my’ sewing group said although she did sew, she was really a potter and would make some porcelain tea light holders. And she has.

And there is more to come.

My dilemma is how to sell/distribute these lovely things.

This is not anti-waste. This is re-distribution of wealth and luck.

Do we ration? Yes. 

How – not sure. 

Should you be interested, I will let you know what we do.

Meanwhile, one thing we are never short of is bread. The local Tesco in particular, is rubbish at the bread baking and ordering so there is always lots and lots and lots.

What can you do with stale bread.

Well you can make savoury bread and butter puddings which seem to be popular and when I do them, they fly off the shelves – all so very gratifying.

So, take some stale bread. Make some garlic butter. Cook some mushrooms, chopped and cook in oil and a knob of butter for quite a long time ( say half an hour).

Add some defrosted spinach or fresh spinach cooked down you fancy it.

Either make a ‘sandwich’ of bread and butter and mushrooms ( spinach maybe) and top with tomatoes. Or do them in upright triangles with mushrooms and tomatoes scattered.

Of course you can add ham, or whatever you fancy.

Mix some milk and eggs together and pour over. Scatter with grated cheese and put in the oven ( 180 degrees) until cheese is bubbling.

Yes I know it is not a proper recipe but for me, it is not full of moral dilemmas.

Pink Priests

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I don’t want to harp on about my holiday in Italy and visiting churches, but hey ho you need to know about the pink priests.

A warning though, the pink priests come at the end.

As I mentioned before, I do like visiting a church.

So, on a recent trip to Italy, (I may have mentioned that before too) there was one church which had a lot of confessional booths. 

When I say a lot, I don’t mean a few, I mean about 20.

Yes really. 

The comedian Zoe Lyons recently said of confession, ‘ You were locked in a wardrobe with a priest, and then you had to tell him what you had done wrong. The irony.’ 

Well, the people of Lucca had clearly got a lot to talk about and they didn’t have the privacy of a locked in wardrobe. No, you had to kneel so that everyone else could see you.

Mind you, you did have a choice of venue booths, as it were.

That same church had a lot of plaques on the ground (I am sure there is a technical church term for them) which had once shown the likeness of the dead person but had been worn smooth.

I’d just like to say at this point that they may have been worn smooth as much by tourists as penitents but when I was there, I was one of the few visitors. ( Yes, I know I shouldn’t have boasted.)

But hey ho.

Anyway, so what was there about the people of Lucca which was so reprehensible that they need so many confessionals?

Well, I don’t know, but I did Google ‘Lucca scandals’ to find out if there had been anything which would have swept the populace into the confessional and came up with something on the Daily Mail online (of course).

“The Italian city of Lucca was today accused of ‘culinary racism’ after it banned new foreign eateries from opening in its historic centre.”

Further ( much further) down the article, there was this comment from the town’s authorities

“A spokesman for Lucca’s town hall defended the new rules, saying they were meant to safeguard the city’s traditional and cultural identity and that it also applied to sex shops, fast food restaurants and take-away pizza parlours.

‘The ban targets McDonald’s as much as kebab restaurants,’ he said.

The town council is also urging foreign restaurants to include on their menus at least one course typical of Lucca, prepared exclusively with local ingredients.”

I am not sure if the confessionals need to be used by people who are not offering sex with a traditional Luccan menu, but you never know.

Looking further back, (courtesy of Wikipedia) it turns out that Lucca had a busy time in history and within that plenty of scope for people to do things they might later regret:

‘In 1408, Lucca hosted the convocation intended to end the schism in the papacy. Occupied by the troops of Louis of Bavaria, the city was sold to a rich Genoese, Gherardino Spinola, then seized by John, king of Bohemia. Pawned to the Rossi of Parma, by them it was ceded to Mastino II della Scala of Verona, sold to the Florentines, surrendered to the Pisans, and then nominally liberated by the emperor Charles IV and governed by his vicar. Lucca managed, at first as a democracy, and after 1628 as an oligarchy, to maintain its independence alongside of Venice and Genoa, and painted the word Libertas on its banner until the French Revolution in 1789.’

Now, you could confess to being one of the people who sold your city to the Genoese, helping John of Bohemia to seize it, being involved in pawning it, selling it to the Florentines and as I am not sure of the dates of all this, your family could have done all of the above.

If you surrendered to the Pisans, you might feel a bit guilty, and if you helped Charles IV you might feel you needed to show to his vicar that you were someone who knew their way into a confessional.

So, who knows why there are so many confessionals but leaving aside food racism and everything from selling your city to wresting it from democracy to oligarchy, there must have been a few adultery, theft, gluttony, sloth, pride ‘issues’ to bring along – and maybe that was just the priests.

Talking of priests,  we have finally dear reader, got to the pink ones.

So, yet another church but this time acting as a gallery for photographic images of the Volto Santo procession.

(The Holy Face of Lucca (Volto Santo di Lucca) is an eight-foot-tall (2.4 m), ancient wooden carving of Christ crucified in Lucca.)

According to medieval legend, Nicodemus, a figure often referred to as a Pharisee and is rumoured have met with Christ, carved from memory the face of Jesus. However, he hesitated to complete his carving for fear of not doing it justice. Exhausted from the work, he fell asleep.  When he awoke, he found the face was finished and claimed it to be the work of an angel. The story then tells us that the Crucifix of the “Holy Face” was buried in a cave for safekeeping, where it remained for centuries. So you may be wondering if it was buried in a cave then how did it get to Lucca?

It was rediscovered by Bishop Gualfredo, who was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when its location was revealed to him in a dream. To allow God to decide where the Crucifix should be kept, the bishop set it adrift on an unmanned boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The Volto Santo arrived on the shores of northern Italy, where the Bishop of Lucca, also prompted by a dream, put it into a wagon with no driver to determine its final location. The two oxen pulling the wagon stopped of their own accord at Lucca in 782.

The story doesn’t stop there, it is also said that the Volto Santo was placed in the Church of San Frediano, but the next morning, it was found  miraculously in another church, that of San Martino. Therefore, San Martino was designated the cathedral of Lucca and the wooden statue was left in a special chapel within the church.) Wikipedia.

So, that is the background story, and the festival is all about people from their districts of Lucca and their priests walking to the meeting point with the populace watching, and there are lots of candles and people crossing themselves and celebrations etc etc.

Now, just before I show you a photo of one ‘set’ of priests setting out on their walk with the Volto Santo, and you might think pink and lace on men might just, just, be thought a little bit gay, and you might want to ponder on the Catechism of the Catholic Church which says:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity (Cf. Genesis 19:1-29; Romans 1:24-27; 1 Corinthians 6:10; 1 Timothy 1:10), tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona humana, 8). They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

Bread and Pheasants

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I have always thought there is a difference between urban and rural poverty – I only know about the rural side.

We lived in a village and we were sometimes broke, rather than always poor.

There were days when bread and eggs were it for an evening meal, my single mother coming in late from her job and the meal up to me and my sister to create. 

There isn’t too much you can do with eggs and bread, but those times taught me how to look in the fridge and make something out of what was there.

And I had been taught by my mother, who loved to cook and my grandmother whose definition of the heart of the home was to have something baking or bubbling.

We didn’t have food waste issues – we couldn’t afford it.

But we did have cooking skills and that made all the difference. If I had been taught to garden as well as I was taught to cook with whatever we could afford, I’d be opening the (currently a lot less than perfect) garden to the public. 

Currently only Steve, our lovely postman sees much of it. I rest my case.

There is a real difference between broke and poor.

If you are broke, it is a temporary situation and the chances are you have some food stocks – and to this day, when I am neither broke or poor, I have a stock of tinned tomatoes on the basis you can always start a meal with a tin of tomatoes.

(Once when I was living in a posh flat overlooking Tower Bridge, my mother came to stay and opened a cupboard to find my tinned tomato stash. Even she, a woman who knew a few things about making ends meet, thought I might have been a bit excessive in my stockpiling.)

If you were rural poor in my youth, you ate a lot of pheasant, apples, runner beans, potatoes.

Pheasants shot by neighbours or friends would be dropped on our step, vegetable gluts were shared around – we weren’t gardeners but looking back, we should have been.

Whilst a roast chicken was a special treat and my mother’s speciality, Viennese Beef, was only for high days and birthdays, pheasant was a regular. 

So, I am now rural and not poor or broke, or just managing, or dealing with loosing may job  but I have held on to my roots, and am now thinking about what to do with stale bread and a pheasant or two.

I have started volunteering at the Free Shop in Petersfield. (You can skip the next bit if you know about it – I have to say I didn’t until recently.

Anyway, we get food from the local supermarkets which is just at its best before date and gluts from gardeners and allotment holders, and people can come in and take what they want/need for free and that means it doesn’t get wasted.)

We get a lot of bread and I have been thinking about what to do with it. 

I made a bread pudding – rather dense and I am not sure that it has received ecstatic reviews but I will re-think the recipe.

This week, I am experimenting with a savoury bread and butter pudding.

Caramelised onions, tomatoes with herbs, bread and butter, eggs, milk, cheese. All layered and baked.

Meanwhile, yesterday, I was on an enjoyable village litter pick up organised by a ‘new’ local, and yes we got stuff out of ditches and hedges – nice rural areas apparently attract people who want to sit in a car, watch the sun go down and throw their empty bottles out of the window.

(Come and sit, chat, watch birds, do other much more exciting things in your car, but can you take your litter home?

Mind you if you did, what would us middle class people have as an excuse to socialise and be outraged at the same time.)

Anyway, I was talking to the man who organised said litter pick and he and his wife are thinking about setting up a project to get the ‘excess’ pheasants to people who needed a helping hand.

Now, I am not sure that the people who come into our Free Food Shop would pick up a pheasant but I bet they would if it was in a pie or a casserole….

So, for that we need a fridge, and I have possibly got to move from hygiene level 2 to 3 – watch this space.

This takes me back to my youth, so I am up for it.

I need to crowd fund a commercial fridge ( £1,000). I need to work it all out but I think it might work.

Anyone know about crowd funding – I’ve never done it before?

And before I forget – urban poverty…

Some years ago, I spent time with the CEO of Lewisham Council. We were talking about nutrition and food.

He told me to think about what it was like to live in a high-rise flat as a single parent, with two young children, to get to the bus stop with them, change buses and get to Tescos with two tetchy kids.

Then you could see that buying in bulk would be cheaper in the long run but you don’t have the money to buy in bulk.

You don’t have the ‘training’ to cook so it is all seriously hard work, and whatever you buy you have to take home on those buses with your kids.

How much easier it is to go to Costcutter and buy a pizza. 

And who could blame that parent.

Did I Tell You About My Holiday?

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I will start with the apology that we were lucky enough to be able to go to Florence and surrounding areas in September.

Now the apology is over, I can tell you some stuff about it.

So, as I was saying, we got to go to Italy when there were few other tourists – well there were some young German professionals who had driven down to Italy – some not so much working from home as working from the terrace of a pleasant agro-tourisma.

I could show off about the places we got to stay which we would never normally be able to afford or book. Shall I ? Oh, you look less than enthusiastic at the prospect of me boasting.

Are you sure you don’t want to see some photos? Really no? OK then, I will move on…

But just let me tell you this. Because there was no queue and not many people, there was space and time to look at some pictures. I won’t go on about the big stuff but look at this. Who’d have thought – Mark Rylance in the Uffizi.

Anyway, moving on, I am an atheist but the Best Beloved and I do like to visit a church. 

And there were some very fine examples in Italy ( did I mention we were there in September?…)

I do like a good fresco and some of them were very fine indeed.

This is the drunkenness of Noah. I didn’t know anything about this biblical story so I looked it up and it turns out there are various interpretations including this one which I find a bit hard to believe:

Another explanation offered is that Noah was after the cognitive powers that could be harnessed through alcohol, wanting to broaden his horizons in the study of Torah.

Now I know that whilst any one of us can believe that we are much more witty and erudite when we have had a drop too much – we would be wrong – but I can’t ever recalling anyone I know thinking that a gallon of wine was going to sharpen their brains to the point where they could study complex theological texts to get never before known insights.

Then there is this explanation:

Noah wasn’t trying to imbibe spirits to lift his own. He also wasn’t looking to drink in moderation to jump-start his brain. Noah’s plan from the beginning was to go all in, to get completely under-the-table, stripped-down-to-the-flesh plastered.

Having witnessed extreme depravity and immorality, and the destruction it left in its wake, Noah had come face to face with the consequences of sin. Noah got drunk (and subsequently disrobed) as an ambitious attempt to return the world to the innocent time before sin. He was trying to undo and reverse the negative effects of Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden.

Really? Let’s get really drunk and drive out all sin. I think you need a stronger drug to be able to convince yourself of that.

Anyway, in the same church there was this lovely fresco marred only by the fact that Jospeh seems to be having his dream whilst covered by a rather cheap and nasty duvet cover. ( Sorry, if it  matches the one you love most.)

Indeed that duvet cover seems to have been all the rage with San Gimignano painters as look, here is another one.

(Job lot at the local Dunelm maybe.)

Now, this one is part of the decoration in a bedroom and the series of frescos  which are the equivalent of a wedding day photo album.

An interesting way to start your wedding day is apparently riding on your new husband’s back and beating him. I make no comment, but clearly the onlookers in the bird hide are somewhat surprised.

I am impressed he keeps his hat on throughout the whole series of events…..

I love this next one because that young man has clearly just remembered he has forgotten his mother’s birthday, or to renew his MOT, or any number of things we have all forgotten with Covid brains.

What exactly he is doing sitting at the bedside of someone who insists on wearing his hat of office in bed, is anyone’s guess.

I used to work for the National Rivers Authority and learned quite a bit about flooding – and the misery a flooded home – so I am interested in San Frediano and his rake.

This ex-Irish prince-come-hermit was appointed the bishop of Lucca.

( I can tell you of a lovely place to stay in Lucca if you wanted some holiday information, just saying.)

Anyway the good people of Lucca came to said bishop and asked if he could do anything about the flooding of the River Serchio and Fred ( as I am sure his friends called him) took a rake to the river’s edge.

The legend goes that he persuaded the river to follow his rake and took it away from the danger zone.

There are all sorts of things I could say about movement of water courses in flood plains and displaced water and canalising rivers and the impact and so on and so on. But I won’t bore you.

What I will say is that by the looks of the strapping lads and the work going on, the bishop was smart enough to get a few more flood resources to hand than just his rake.

And finally, there are times when you need a break from church visiting.

More on Aunt Jessie

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Just a quick re-cap: the Best Beloved and I have an autumn project to find out who Aunt Jessie was, and who painted her.

So, this is a long read and there is only one picture

Two strokes of luck and serendipity have got us this far:

Aunt Jessie was Jessamine Thompson, a dressmaker by profession, born 1874 and who died in a mental hospital in 1943.

She lived as head of the household with her brother James and sister Margaret, in Heaton and then by 1939, she was living alone in Jesmond.

We only ever knew her as Aunt Jessie, and had no other information except that she had come down the female line to my BB, and that his mother’s family were based in and around Newcastle.

Having posted about this, it turns out the BB’s niece was smart enough to ask her grandmother (Joan) about Aunt Jessie and to get her grandmother to write out that bit of the family tree – and was is more, she had kept it. 

This is what Caroline ( aforementioned niece – it may be hard to keep up with all these family links..) knows:

The picture is Jessimane Thompson. She is Joan’s actual Aunt. Sister of Joan’s mother Margaret Thompson. Daughter of James Thompson and Jane Ellen Watson who married in 1868. Jessimane never married. Her sister Elizabeth did and named her daughter Jessimane

Caroline also said her grandmother had said Aunt Jessie was clever and independent, and indeed she has that air about her.

Meanwhile, as they say, I was Googling trying to find out about the art scene in Newcastle in that period when I came across a really interesting leaflet called Artists in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne 1820 -1900.

Click to access 19c-Newcastle-artists.pdf

(We were pretty sure Aunt Jessie had been painted around the turn of the century judging by the clothes she wears – but what do we know…..)

Anyway, it was a really interesting read and as a long shot, I looked up the author, Gill Hedley, and sent her an email asking if she might be able to point me in the direction of research. 

I was thinking she might point me in the direction of an amateur art historian with an interest in the period who might be able to – well, actually I wasn’t sure what.

We have no signature on the painting as far as we have found yet, so identifying the artist and even their relationship is going to require research skills we have yet to discover in ourselves…

The other night, waiting for the kettle to boil as tea in bed with a good book is an essential, I was checking my emails and imagine my delight when I found this:

What a nice email to receive, especially prompted by something I wrote so very many years ago. 

I now write more or less full time, largely biographies, so this sort of research piques my interest. I’ll start by saying that it is a very nice painting. I have no instant idea of the artist but am happy to look a bit further. I have looked up Miss Thompson (what a lovely name, Jessamine) on an ancestry site and find she was a dressmaker born 1874, died 1943. Very sadly, that was in a mental hospital as I expect you know  Forgive me, if you did not. Perhaps she lost someone 1914-18. She lived with a brother and a sister in Heaton as an adult and was the head of the household. Then in 1939, she was on her own in Jesmond, where I grew up;  she was in a street very near where I lived when I wrote that leaflet.

I would guess the portrait was painted before the war, maybe 1910, but why? Did she have a friend who was a professional painter? Maybe the artist was a dressmaking client or his wife was? The artist and the sitter knew each other, clearly. This is not a commission.  Intriguing.

I will look at all the portraits in the Tyne and Wear museums collection to start with. These are all on the wonderful ARTUK website but I have it in print form which makes clicking through a bit easier.

How annoying to have no signature. Is there nothing on the back at all? Nothing to be seen anywhere on the front under a very strong raking light? You are safe to use spit on a soft cloth to enable a closer look in either bottom corner…socially distant, of course!

Anyway, your really long shot has found its aim and I will see what I can do.

 Best wishes

Gill

What a stroke of amazing luck to find someone who has much better things to do, willing to help.

If you have any doubt that Gill Hedley has better things to do than research Aunt Jessie, see here

https://www.gillhedley.co.uk

And I have found an art restorer who says she will have a look at Aunt Jessie and tell us what is needed to fix her up.

She said it was not necessarily all that common to sign a painting especially if the sitter and the painter knew each other well and the painter was not a big name.

So, even when we get the back off, we may be none the wiser.

I sent a photo to a Newcastle auctioneers to see if they can shed any light and got a reply saying portraits weren’t great sellers – if you don’t have any connection with the person, why have it, except to decorate a room in your B&B and who wants to pay much for that…

He said,

An excellent painting that unfortunately, may struggle to find a market.  Portraits are particularly difficult to sell.

Auction value is probably less than £60.  We would accept this for auction but you should consider carefully before proceeding.

I take this as meaning, please don’t put this into an auction ( not that we ever would.)

So, here we are so far.

But who was Elizabeth mentioned by Joan in her family tree conversation as we know that Jessamine had a sister Margaret ( mother of Joan) and a brother James who are in the records.

So, to add mystery. An ancestry site records an Elizabeth Thomson, daughter of James and Jane Ellen ( Jessamine’s parents’ names) and she was christened in September 1874.

Which is the same birth year as Jessamine.

But there is no mention of her except for Caroline’s record that she married and had a daughter which she named Jessamine….

And who painted Aunt Jessie?

Soup

/ aspinalllucy / 2 Comments

The Observer monthly food supplement this week was 20 of the ‘best’ seasonal classics. It happens every year – food publications do an autumn special on comfort food.

Now, I may be a little stuck-in-the-mud, not down-with-the-food-kids, but I cannot see a beetroot and egg salad as autumn comfort food. Nice easy recipe but I am not sure on these darkening evenings, the Best Beloved would see a beetroot salad as anything very comforting.

Neither am I convinced by fish fragrant aubergines  and likewise chickpeas, swiss chard and soft poached eggs – but that maybe because I am not a huge chickpea fan and have never mastered a poached egg.

( I have never doubted that Jeremy Lee has a much more refined palate than me but would love to hear that his real idea of comfort food is spaghetti hoops on toast.)

Risotto yes, dal yes, a really good bolognese yes, but where are the savoury pies, cassroles/stews? I fancy the tomato curry but expecting to get ‘fresh green peppercorns 2 branches’ in Petersfield is as likely as hearing the government say they might have got a few things wrong.

So, onto soup. 

I should point out at this stage that I have taken no photos – artful or otherwise – of the soups I make so recipes come without illustrations. Sorry.

There is a rather interesting soup recipe in the Observer supplement which I might do. 

And hats off to Olia Hercules (partly for having such a good name) but also because she says what all soup cooks know, suggestions on  what you can substitute, and using up stuff from the freezer or fridge.

Soup is a staple in our house not least because the BB has home-made soup with bread and cheese every day for lunch come rain or shine. He likes his smooth, so a stick-blender is great and not much washing up. 

I like variations on a minestrone but as he is soup king, smooth soup commentary comes first and you will have to go to the end to find the chunkier stuff.

Did you know that the word restaurant morphed from restoratif, which was soup sold by street vendors in 16th century Paris. https://soupmakerguide.co.uk/soup-through-the-ages-the-history-of-soup/

I like that, soup is restorative, healthy and comforting and a great way to use those veg found at the back of the fridge or reduced in the supermarket, or a glut of tomatoes or courgettes etc etc.

It also keeps for days and is a good source of the 5 veg a day.

I am no good a writing recipes – no wonder all these chefs and famous cooks have assistants to test and be accurate with quantities, it is not that easy.

But here goes with some soup stuff.

Basically, you need some stock, some veg, meat if you want it, and some thickening agent – potatoes, sweet potatoes, red lentils, squash….. 

If like me you like to get a few meals out of a roast chicken, you can make stock and that adds a real nice depth. Take your carcass and put with a litre of water and some flavourings – peppercorns, herbs or spices as you fancy a bit of salt, a bayleaf or two always helps I think.

Simmer for an hour or so. Take out bones and pick off chicken slivers and put back in. If you want a concentrated flavour then simmer briskly until reduced to half the quantity.

Soup 1 is a combination made from what was left at the back of the fridge more than a decade ago – I realise that sentence could be misread, so a minimum of food hygiene considerations do need to apply.

Soup 1

Chop up a two red peppers and get rid of seeds. Chop up some leeks say three of them. Some sweet potato chopped – one large, or two small say – these are quantity suggestions.

Obviously, the smaller you chop everything the quicker it will cook.

Cook the peppers and leeks in a glug of oil as Jamie Oliver would say, until softening and don’t let the leeks go brown at the edges.

Add in a litre of stock – cube, fresh, I use Marigold Bouillon – and the sweet potato. As well as any herbs/spices you fancy ( I don’t use any in this soup.)

When everything is nicely soft, blend it and taste so that you can add salt or pepper or whatever.

Soup 2

Take some frozen peas – use the same amount as you would a serving of peas per person. 

Peel and chop up some potatoes ( not new potatoes as they don’t mush well.) Use a medium sized potato per two servings.

Add in stock  to cover the potatoes and peas to say two centimetres above the veg. Bear in mind you can always add some stock if you end up with something too thick but it is not easy to take it out…

Cook until potatoes are soft and if you have some fresh mint, add the leaves in just before you think everything is cooked. If you have mint jelly or mint sauce, you can add a dollop after you have blended it. Best in mind that mint sauce is quite vinegary so be careful and taste as you go.

Soup 3

You can never overcook a mushroom – I am sure that is not strictly true but it is always surprising me that recipes suggest that you can cook a mushroom quickly and they are clearly just plain wrong.

Chop some mushrooms and gently fry in the aforementioned oil. Don’t worry if lots of mushroom liquid comes out, just keep going until if is pretty much gone. 

If you are channelling your inner posh cook, you can add a splash of mushroom ketchup ( and yes I can get that in Petersfield).

And you can put some dried mushrooms in hot water whilst this is happening and if the water becomes gritty you can lift out the mushrooms and add to the stock or if there is no grit add the liquid too.

I add some dried tarragon into the cooking mushrooms – a sprinkle.

Bear in mind that like cabbage, cooked mushrooms are a much smaller business than raw ones.

Brown mushrooms make better soup that white ones – but hey ho, let’s not get too picky.

Right, so you have been cooking the mushrooms for say half an hour, gently.

Peel and chop some potatoes/sweet potatoes quite small so say you have half the quantity of potatoes as you have cooked mushrooms.

Add potatoes, mushrooms, stock, etc to a pan and cook until the potatoes are done.

Blend and taste.

If you have a thick soup you can add some milk or cream and that does make it taste rather luxury-ish.

Soup 3

This is made of food from the excellent free shop in Petersfield which is run by volunteers and offers free food ( unsurprisingly) gleaned from people’s allotments, the local supermarkets who give stuff which is coming to its sell by date.

Chop up some courgettes/nearly marrows/marrows. Also chop up some tomatoes or use tinned tomatoes ( the best you can afford.)

Fry the courgettes and when nicely golden add fresh tomatoes and cook until they are a soft.

Meanwhile chop potatoes or sweet potatoes and cook in stock – stock should cover the potatoes with say an extra two centimetres. 

When pretty much cooked, add in courgettes and fresh or tinned tomatoes.

If you like you can add a dollop of pesto after you have blended, and stir around.

If you are feeling luxury-ish then before you blend – let the soup cool a bit – and add in a whole Boursin cheese.

Soup 4

Take whatever veg you have in the fridge – parsnips, carrot, celery, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, swede, garlic. ( Not aubergines – never known a good aubergine in a soup) and put them into a pan with stock and a handful of red lentils. Cook, blend and that will work. You can add herbs and seasonings so taste as you go along. Sprinkle with cheese, brush stale bread with oil and cook in a 180 oven for say ten minutes or put under the grill and chop up into croutons. 

I know that was a bit slapdash as a recipe but hey if you have read so far, you will be a soup making expert.

Soup 5

So, at last a chunkier soup.

And here I steal from the River Cafe so I will just give you the link and say follow that and you will be onto a winner.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/river-cafes-winter-minestrone

However, if you want something that doesn’t require cavalo nero, use a cabbage of any kind.

And here are some other options.

Carrots chopped, celery chopped, onions chopped, leeks chopped, garlic chopped.

Fry carrot and celery gently for quite a long time so that the edges go a bit brown. Add in onions and leeks and garlic. Add in a tin of tomatoes or not as you prefer.

Add in stock and bring to the boil. Add in a handful of pasta – any one will do including broken strips of spaghetti.

Take a tin of beans – any beans will do. Including baked beans but rinse them of their sauce and of course, red kidney beans need a very good rinse.

Add in some chopped chives, some parsley to counteract the garlic, or any herbs you have.

Add in some cooked ham/chicken/whatever you have – or some cooked mushrooms (see above and make sure they are cooked.)

If you want a thicker base, take some of the soup and blend then add back into the soup.

Aunt Jessie – Our Autumn Project

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We have a habit of planning projects when we are on holiday – if you ask me, I can tell you of planning a joint book on the history of the lens planned in a particularly dramatic thunderstorm in Croatia (planned but never realised and there is a story about that thunderstorm but let’s not get distracted…..) – this time, it is to discover who Aunt Jessie was.

Aunt Jessie has been passed down to my Best Beloved from his mother Joan and she was a woman who comprehensively left home – once she was gone, she was gone.

So, the BB has no idea who Aunt Jessie was and why her picture survived in his mother’s affections and belongings.

But she did, and she has been part of our lives.

In Brussels she hung above our fireplace visible from outside, and once someone stopped me as I was leaving the house and told me how much they enjoyed seeing her every day as they walked past our house. ‘She is such a wise woman,’ she said.

Aunt Jessie has moved with us, she hangs in our sitting room and now watches us occasionally clean, watches my BB write his history of Europe, and me and the dog watch Antiques Roadshow.

She needs a bit of cleaning and repairing which we keep meaning to do – but we really want to know who she is.

It is our Autumn/new lockdown project and I am hoping by putting this out into the ether, someone will help us on our way.

Was she really an aunt, or just a family friend who got called auntie by the children – I had lots of people like that in my childhood.

Who painted her, when and why?

We don’t have much to go on.

But here is what we have:

Joan’s parents were Margaret and Harold Tait. Harold was a ‘sea-going engineer’ according to their daughter Joan’s birth certificate.

He was a ship’s engineer on an oil tanker and torpedoed outside Harwich in the first world war.

They lived at 50 Tosson Terrace, Newcastle Upon Tyne when Joan was born in 1918 – she was an only child.

Margaret’s maiden name was Thompson.

Joan’s parents’ names were not uncommon and they were married in 1915.

Harold died on February 13th 1957 at Westgate Road, Wingrove.

Margaret died in June 1964 in Tunbridge Wells – where Joan was living – and she live with the Witney family for a while and then went into a home and died in 1964.

Joan went on to marry Kenneth Percy Witney and gave her address as 76 Simmonside Terrace, Newcastle and her father’s ‘rank or profession’ as marine engineer.

They were married in Kensington in 1947.

She was private secretary to the Scottish Secretary and was commuting between Edinburgh and London where Kenneth was private secretary to the Home Office Minister Ellen Wilkinson. ( And she is worth looking up.)

Kenneth gave his father’s name and profession as Thomas Charles Witney, missionary, but that is another story….

So, that is what we have.

If anyone has any ideas on who she was or how to find out more about Aunt Jessie, thank you.