August 16th, 2010
Over the last few days I attended a writer’s conference interstate. The taxi driver who drove me to the airport yesterday afternoon asked me what I’d been up to. I told him and he shyly confessed to me that he was writing a book. He was tertiary educated, presented as very intelligent, outlined the story he was writing but revealed that he could not overcome his own fears regarding his ability as a writer and was stuck gathering research material for the book rather than writing, editing and submitting. I’d hazard a guess and say that his manuscript probably had much to recommend it. The story certainly appealed to me – a family saga starting in Poland and moving to Australia. But he couldn’t get over his fears and thus was unable to complete the book and move on to the submission stage.
I understood immediately what he was feeling. I know several sensitive and wildly talented writers and artists who do not have the inner resources (or external support) to overcome these crippling anxieties. Their work remains undone or obscured by those who can cope with the emotional demands of creative work. A great pity.
I understood what he was telling me because I’ve felt those fears as well. I’m toughening up every day, but when you are starting out as a writer the self censoring, the constant self doubt and worry that you are just wasting your time and will be humiliated if you show someone your work can be crippling. But you cannot move forward unless you let go of the fear. You cannot develop unless you open yourself up for constructive criticism, as my friend Pete Morin says in his blog. You cannot drag the same manuscript around for ten years, tinkering here and there but refusing to submit. Burn it or shred it or dig a hole in the garden and leave it there wrapped in plastic for a few years, but let it go and write something else.
Or stop writing and do other things. Draw a line under that part of your life and move on, because hanging around when the magic has gone is a living death.
The decision to move onto something else is not an easy one, but nor does it signify failure. You have to ask yourself do I want to do this – with all the attendant agony, or do I not. Because if you do, you must find ways of dealing with the angst so it doesn’t hold you back. If you don’t want or need that pain in your life, let it go. Walk away and find a more soothing and rewarding occupation.
I walked away from the stress of the art world – and if you fear public humiliation and exposure as a talentless wannabee do not venture into that world - into a private world of growing vegetables and cooking. I got very good at the cooking; I made all sorts of Italian preserves, pasta, gelato, and foods from all around the Mediterranean – French, Lebanese, Spanish. I read their cultural histories and the history of food and ingredients, I grew heritage seedlings, scoured seed catalogues, haunted growers markets and French cheese shops, and it was a very soothing and creative period in my life. Constantly praised for my cooking skills, no one ever said ‘re do that bit’ or ‘cut that chapter’ or rejected what I offered. When I felt it wasn’t enough anymore, I decided to try writing. Now I just throw meals together because I’m consumed with what I do now. It’s probably the antitheses of the speedy modern life but that fallow period of almost ten years was vital to my journey back to public creative work.
I need the intensity and challenge of a creative mountain to climb. If I don’t have it I build that mountain in my head, and as anybody knows, it’s painful having a mountain inside a human skull. If I could walk away from it all and be happy I would, but I know it’s not possible for me. It is for some others and sometimes walking away is the healthiest thing to do.
So my taxi driving friend, what do you think?
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May 1st, 2010
So, you’ve read The Book of Love. Now what do you do with yourself? The sequel, The Fragment of Dreams, won’t be released until next April. So how to kill time until then?
I suggest you turn to the end papers of The Book of Love, to the Blood
Orange and Amaro Marmalade recipe. The best place for the marmalade is on toast, as an accompaniment to your morning cup of tea. This is not a marmalade that improves with age, so hop in and eat it as soon as you can. The bitterness that cuts through the sugar fades over time, in a similar fashion to memories of sleepless nights with infants – you only remember the sweetness of their breath, and not the fact that you wanted to leave the bawling infant with the circus.
Should you be sated with toast and marmalade I offer this recipe …
This dessert, like tiramisu, is assembled, rather than cooked and uses savoiardi (ladyfingers) as a sort of building block. It’s a Neapolitan dish from one of my favourite books, Naples At Table by Arthur Schwartz, (HarperCollins). If you’ve lived in Naples or Campania, holidayed there or are lucky enough to know people who were born there and really enjoy cooking, then you’ll recognise many of the recipes in this book. These are the everyday cook’s recipes, many of which I’ve seen made by locals or eaten in Campanian homes, simple recipes yet full of cultural history and mythical associations.
I’ve fiddled with this recipe to suit my tastes – it is an American book, and we do things differently when it comes to food – so if you want another version of it, track down the book.
Delizia Di Marmellata
500g fresh ricotta
2 tablespoons heavy cream
2 tablespoons caster sugar
½ cup of marmalade
¼ cup Amaro or Grand Marnier
¼ cup water
18 savoiardi
Beat the sugar into the ricotta until the sugar is dissolved. Blend the cream into the ricotta so it is spreadable but not runny. Melt the marmalade a little – maybe 15 seconds in a microwave. Pour the water and liqueur into a shallow dish and choose a flat plate on which to assemble the dessert.
Dip the savoiardi in the liqueur and water, rolling quickly and arrange six of them snugly together on the plate. Spread this layer with some of the ricotta mixture and drizzle with the marmalade, repeat the layers finishing with the savoiardi which you glaze with the marmalade. Refrigerate for three to four hours and serve with candied orange peel as a garnish.
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April 1st, 2010
Because it’s Easter and because Lily and William spent Easter together in Italy I’m reblogging the recipe for this delicious traditional Southern Italian tart.
Pastiera Napoletana
I make this tart every Easter, and only at Easter, despite pleas to make an exception “just this once”. I think it tastes better if eaten only at Easter.
Some people would say turkey always tastes better at Christmas, but nothing, to my mind, could make turkey taste better – other than exchanging it for duck.
The pastiera is made in Naples and throughout the region of Campania. Families may make up to five or six to share with visitors over the Easter period and to take on picnics on the Pasqua, or ‘little Easter’ celebrated on Easter Monday.
I make only one, and it’s usually devoured by Easter Sunday.
Georgio Locatelli says of the tart …
‘The combination of ingredients may seem strange but they are associated with ancient Roman celebrations of the rite of spring; flowers, eggs for new life, ricotta from the ewes, wheat and flour from the land…One of the many legends associated with the dish involves the siren Partenope…she lived in the Gulf of Naples and to celebrate the arrival of spring she would come and sing to the inhabitants.
One year, to say thank you for her songs, they offered her local gifts – ricotta, flour, eggs, wheat, perfumed orange flowers and spices. She was so delighted she took them to her kingdom under the sea where the Gods mixed them together into a cake.’
I give Locatelli’s recipe which I have modified.
I use pearl barley instead of wheat as the particular sort of wheat required is only sold in some Italian shops, and only at this time of year, and I am not a purist.
I use a twenty-six centimetre flan tin and I buy the sweet shortcrust pastry.
Line tin, bake blind and cool.
Preheat your oven to around 160 degrees (fan forced)
75 g pearl barley, boiled until tender
500 g fresh sweet ricotta
4 tsp orange flower water
½ tsp grated lemon rind
200 g caster sugar
50 g chopped candied citron (or orange peel)
4 egg yolks
4 egg whites whisked until stiff but not dry
Drain off as much of the liquid from the ricotta as you can. Mix it with the orange flower water, grated lemon rind, sugar, candied citron and four egg yokes. Add the drained barley and mix. Fold in the beaten egg whites.
Fill the pastry flan shell. Use left over pastry to make a lattice over the ricotta mixture. Bake for about an hour or until coloured. If a skewer comes out clean, take it out of the oven, cool in the tin, serve dusted with icing sugar with a strong Italian coffee on the side and a thank you to Partenope.
Georgio Locatelli, Made in Italy: Food and Stories, Fourth Estate, London, 2006
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February 26th, 2010
While loving the antlers and hunter-gatherer look of the pictures in my previous post, ‘Styled by a Sianach’, I felt a little sorry for the girls modelling the clothes. Willow-the-wisp bodies and unhappy, hungry faces, as if there hadn’t been enough woolly mammoth caught that season or they’d been living on moss and the occasional tadpole.
I had to address the scrawn factor with pictures of the glorious, womanly American model Crystal Renn. She reminds me of why it is I, like many other women, like vintage clothes. Before sportswear became everyday wear, breasts and bellies, thighs and rumps were factored into design. Tailoring and structure accentuated and flattered women’s natural body shape– okay, so they wore corsets, – but curves were accentuated not eliminated. Yes, I know it’s a generalisation, but this is a blog and I get to make generalisations here. All I’m saying is women didn’t eat moss, and were not expected to either.
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February 13th, 2010
Eggplant, melanzane or aubergine – all the same and all beloved by me. If I were allowed two vegetables only for the next year, one of them would be eggplant. It’s a vegetable favoured all throughout the Mediterranean and particularly in Italy. There’s a huge variety, within Italian regions and between, in the preparation and cooking of the eggplant, but the region I am most familiar with is Campania and Naples.
Non Italians sometimes make the mistake of assuming the cooking of the south of Italy IS Italian cooking. It’s not; it is the cuisine the poor Italian migrants took with them when they fled the poverty of the south. Countries like Australia and the US adopted pasta and pizza and now turn out abominations under the label ‘Italian.’ That’s because these foods, particularly pizza, are cheap to make and lend themselves to the modern notion of ‘fast food’. You rarely see eggplant in these pizza/pasta establishments because people go, ‘Eww, what’s that?’ and won’t eat it, preferring vast amounts of cheese and processed ‘meat’.
Eggplant doesn’t yield its beautiful nature quickly, it’s not fast, you need to take time with it. However, if you move up one level from the pasta/pizza cuisine you might find the Eggplant Parmigiana, but you are more likely to find it’s easier cousin the ubiquitous (in Australian pubs, at least), Schnitzel Parma-jarma. This consists of a deep fried piece of beef schnitzel, plonked on a plate and covered in tomato sauce and cheese and whacked under the griller, served with chips and a sad piece of iceberg lettuce. And BIG, half the plate usually.
Again, this is a dish favoured by endlessly hungry young males, although I saw it on a menu at the Parndana Hotel on Kangaroo Island, listed next to their special – the one kilo steak. Yes, a one kilo steak. The publican told me nobody had ever managed to finish one of these, even during shearing season when blokes around twenty, who’d been shearing since six am and had worked up a mighty hunger, came in, sank a few ales, got a bit cocky and ordered this orgy of meat.
But back to the original Eggplant Parmigiana. Its name does not come from the variety of cheese used, as Mary Taylor Simetti explains – ‘Sicilians have a word, palmigiana, that means ‘shutter’ and that stems from the resemblance between the overlapping louvres of a shutter.’* The overlapping eggplant slices resemble the shutters and hence the name. She says Sicilians cannot produce ‘L’ and ‘palmigiana’ became ‘parmigiana’. I love this sort of useless information.
I was taught to make Eggplant Parmigiana by an elderly Campanian woman and the way she prepared it literally took all day – eliminating it from the fast food realm. Her method is a classic example of the cuisine of poverty – take a few cheap, plentiful ingredients and work them hard. She knew about hard work - after raising three of her five children in a one-room house and doing her washing at midnight in a stream at the bottom of the hill. This was a woman who never took her washing machine for granted.
I’ve been around other Italian women, some of that generation, some younger, who butcher pigs and use everything – days of unbelievably hard yakka, grow and bottle their own tomatoes – not as quaint and colourful as the movies would have us believe, and rise before dawn to strip an orchard of olives to take to the local olive press. I’ve been at an olive pick and after half an hour in the sun and wind, wanted to say, ‘Why don’t we just go down to the shop and buy the oil?’ I’d wanted a quaint, rustic experience among the olive trees - a basket on my hip, bare feet, swishing red skirt and smouldering looks exchanged beneath trees ripe with fruit. You know, just like in the movies. But the best thing about picking olives is stopping.
To make the Eggplant Parmigiana, my Campanian friend sliced the eggplant into centimetre thick slices, sprinkled them with salt and left them while the bitter juices were drawn out. Then she’d dry them, place them on racks in the sun for most of the day until a little bit leathery. The next step was to dredge them in egg and flour and fry until golden, making sure there was no excess oil left on the slices. Then she’d layer them alternately with regato cheese and her incomparable tomato and basil sauce, bake in the oven for half an hour then serve. The next day small squares would be served cold as part of an antipasti. It’s a huge effort, one that few people have the time for anymore, but it’s an effort that results, eaten with salad, good bread and wine, in a memorable meal – if you have any energy left to eat.
Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food, Mary Taylor Simetti, Ecco Press, 1989
For more of an insight into life in Southern Italy until relatively recently, I recommend these books – particularly Ann Cornelisen’s two books for her moving accounts of the women’s lives
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi
Torregreca; Life Death and Miracles in a Southern Italian Village, Ann Cornelisen
Women of the Shadows; Wives and Mothers of Southern Italy, Ann Cornelisen
Old Calabria, Norman Douglas
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January 31st, 2010
There possibly isn’t a woman in this country who does not have a difficult relationship with food. Flick through the women’s mags and you can see a dozen conflicting messages about women, their bodies, their role as mothers and provider of meals, their sex appeal, their health and their role as consumers. After spending serious hairdresser time with these mags I stagger out into the light looking groomed, but my mind is reeling. Of all the evils women must be on alert for at all times the number one is carbohydrates. This may change next decade, but for the moment carbs are as unwelcome as an ancient, incontinent dog on the carpet.
But Italy, Bella Italia, the vessel holding our holiday dreams and desires, is the land of carbohydrate – pasta, bread, gelati, and wine just to name a few. I don’t know the stats on this but from observation visiting Italy, (in villages and non tourist areas), you don’t see many fat people. The descendents of the twentieth century Italian Diaspora living here in Australia and eleswhere are far more likely to be carrying too much flesh. Partly because it was mostly famine plagued Southern Italians who migrated. And for them food had become not only important to live but was invested with huge symbolic significances that were hard to leave behind.
In many Italian communities visiting relatives is the main social occupation, there are protocols to this pastime and if you don’t know them it can become tricky. One is to eat everything you are given if you are a guest – it’s the host’s way of saying ‘you are a valued visitor and I am well off enough to stuff you to the eyeballs’. And if you are the host you must have on hand, at all times, enough food to show you are doing well and can participate in this social exchange. It’s a status thing and all cultures have a variation on the theme. Food is no longer in short supply in Italy, although some areas are still marked by struggle, nor in the US or Australia, but the customs continue, and if you take it all seriously, and wish to maintain a link to the homeland, you feed – and you eat everything offered to you.
So this is one reason for the extra heft, the others are best left to the health planners, but I would offer another reason. One is the size of the serves. Italians in Italy eat small amounts of good food, like the French. In the south they eat masses of vegetables and grains, and pasta is reserved for Sunday or for a small first course before the meat or fish and vegetable course. And by small I mean maybe one and a half cups or less of cooked pasta. They drink wine with the meal – not before and not after. The younger ones might use other mind-altering substances but binge drinking is mainly the preserve of Northern European cultures and their once colonial outposts.
Having a strong culturally determined relationship with food means the forces of modern marketing and industrial food companies have found it hard to get a foothold in Italy. They will inevitably get in there and upsize everything, but the modest amounts eaten at meal times means that a gelati can be eaten and enjoyed in the heat for the evening without lashing ones self with a birch twig and drinking only sprout juice the next day
I like pasta, bread and wine, but my favourite carbohydrate of all is gelati. I don’t like ice cream, it tastes greasy and rich. But gelati, which is milk or fruit based, is lighter and more refreshing. If it’s made with cream it’s not gelati – don’t be fooled. In Italy you can have a dollop of cream on your gelati but why you would do this I’m not sure. And in some cities you can have your gelati between two thick slabs of sweetened bread. This has to be eaten quickly I imagine and I’ve only ever seen young men eating this combination. These blokes are probably perpetually hungry, no matter how much they eat.
A famous American ice cream brand has recently opened its first shop on a beachfront in Sydney. I queued with a friend to taste this new and exotic substance but was sadly disappointed. It was just ice cream with a funky name, huge serves and a big advertising budget. It wasn’t one of those rare moments when you taste something and you know you’ll remember that moment forever. My first taste of the Fiore de Latte flavoured gelati from a small gelataria in the back lanes of Rome was one of those moments. And all ice cream and gelato subsequently will be found wanting – the price you pay for cavorting in carbohydrate Eden.
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December 1st, 2009
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October 14th, 2009
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked, sitting at the table.
‘Haven’t you ever been served a pancake before? They have to be hot.’
Lily slid one on to his plate, returned to the kitchen and called out, ‘Hasn’t one of those passionate vixens you’ve been embroiled with ever cooked for you?’ She came back in with another pancake, ‘Or have you been too busy quoting Pushkin and shagging mindlessly.’
Laughing at her, he said, ‘My women friends have always preferred not to cook, lest they be exploited. And as for poetry, a nice British piece of rhyming doggerel has always gone down well.’ *
There’s something about feeding another person - cooking and placing your offering in front of them, that is so laden with love, giving and simple humanity at its most fundamental. I’m not thinking of ceremonial feasts, or five star chefs, or television cooking races or glossy food mags or expensive ingredient shops - but of something more primal. I’m thinking of the last scene in The Grapes of Wrath - that sort of primal.
I like to cook and I like offering my food to those I love. I find it very hard to prepare food for people I don’t like. Very hard. Fortunately I don’t have to do it often.
Food is fundamental to life, and like all fundamentals in human life it is heavily invested with symbolism. So if you eat at my place and I give you some scrag end of a pork chop you’ll know how I feel about you.
Feeding people is such a communal and communing act. I remember the wonderful Gay Bilson, some years ago at an arts festival, holding an ‘event’ by a river, where people purchased a small earthenware bowl and she filled it with bread and fish. I thought it the most elegant simplification of a beautiful act that a celebrated chef could make. Not making television cooking programs, selling glossy books or slipping into cult celebrity chef status. Nothing wrong with those activities, I must add, but I like the way Bilson cut through the layers and went straight to the core.
‘
I know many people like to read about food in fiction, what the character ate and why and where. Particularly women, or anybody with whose job it is to provide meals each day, because it so dominates our daily existence. As an art student I spent some time hanging out with an older woman in her forties and she told me if she wasn’t thinking about her sculpture she was thinking about food. I didn’t get it then. I do now - children and animals all turn to me with their little beaks open. I’m constantly one meal ahead of them, but only just. I have a special cluster of cells in my brain devoted exclusively to how much feed is left for the chooks.
As a writer and reader I’m not as interested in food as colour or backdrop to a story, but more as a symbolic ‘thickener’ if you like. I loved the use of lamb in Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, Marele Day’s Lambs of God and Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair. One of my favourite books is Miriam’s Kitchen by Elizabeth Erlich, whose journey back to Judaism starts and moves through her making her kitchen kosher. I wasn’t so keen on Chocolat by Joanne Harris, but I could see what she was getting at.
And who could forget the horse’s head seething with eels washed ashore on Good Friday in Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum. And the terrible symbolism of guilt at her adultery that Agnes goes through when she eats herself to death with eels and other oily fish.
My character Lily is passionate about jam, about creating the most interesting and delicious flavours she can think of. This takes her out on a limb sometimes, leading to disaster occasionally, but you have to get out on that branch sometimes if you like to create. Good jams these days are plentiful and supplies of quality fruit too expensive to justify jam making as an act of preserving. But if you ferret out the best ingredients you can find, and make the jam carefully and bottle it up and give it those you care about, it becomes an act of love.
(*)Extract from the Book of Love by Phillipa Fioretti, published by Hachette Australia, 2010
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August 5th, 2009
I’ve had hens I could have a conversation with. Not complex conversations, I grant you that, perhaps even mutually unintelligible, but no more so than other everyday conversations I have with my own species.
Some of my gals have been real characters who stood out from the lumpen poultry. But even though I am a solitary writer, my life is not so bereft of humans that I need hens to fulfil my companionship needs. No, they are there for practical reasons. Their droppings go in the compost, which goes on the vegetable garden. The vegetables fail to thrive - because of water restrictions, not enough compost and dwindling enthusiasm - and so they are pulled and fed to the chickens. And so the cycle continues.
And the eggs. They keep on coming … a deluge some season. More than can be eaten by reasonable omnivores. I have been known to cook up the excess eggs and feed them back to the bloated courtesans of cuisine who live in Castello dei Polli. This won’t lead to Mad Chook Disease, because the perverse creatures will happily eat their own eggs if they discover how tasty they are – and once that happens it’s a case of dead chooks walking, because nothing can cure them of this foul and benighted vice. Their little piranha brains are drawn to fresh blood too, so a hen with an injury better know how to fight back or she will go down. The sisters will make sure of it.
Henworld is a fascinating place, but it also means keeping every egg recipe that comes your way, lest you slide into that avian solipsistic cycle of keeping hens so you can feed them their eggs so you can keep hens and so on. And I am going to share my top three recipes with my reader(s?) just because I feel like it.
Let me say here before you get in a muddle…..….all measurements are Australian
Vanilla vine
Vanilla Gelati
You need five egg yolks, two cups of full fat milk, half a cup of caster sugar and one vanilla bean split in two.
Scrape the tiny seeds out of the bean and into the milk. All of them. No stinginess, if you are going to have vanilla, have vanilla.
Bring milk and vanilla to simmering point. Whisk egg yolks and sugar until light and fluffy, and then whisk in the warm milk. Return to the saucepan and stir with a wooden spoon – continuously – until the mixture thickens. Cool and churn in an ice cream maker.
This is best eaten the next day. It doesn’t keep long as it has no preservatives – therein lies its beauty. It is, to me, delicious with Frangelico, or a walnut liqueur like Nocello, poured over it and with a small black espresso on the side. Not on top like an affogato, which is nice but you miss that evil slap from the coffee.
So what about the egg whites? Meringue perhaps, or these biscuits…
Almond Flake Biscuits
Three cups of almond meal, three egg whites, one cup of caster sugar, one cup of flaked almonds, three drops almond essence and, if you like, a splash of Strega.
Mix everything but the almond flakes together and form into small logs. Roll in the flaked almonds and bake at 180 C for fifteen minutes.
Or the meringue option. This is a good solid choice for an Australian. We can slop all our delicious fresh fruit on top and before you know it you have a dish people are clamouring for. But there is an Italian option that I like more and more these days…
Torta di Nocciole Meringa…
Three large eggwhites, one hundred and seventy five grams caster sugar, three hundred ml fresh cream- whipped, three hundred and fifty grams of fresh raspberries, and here the recipe says fifty five grams of hazelnuts but being of an extravagant nature I use one hundred, and some icing sugar.
Preheat oven to 140 C. Line two baking trays with baking paper and draw a twenty cm circle on each.
Whisk eggwhites until stiff; add sugar gradually whisking all the time until the mixture is stiff and shiny. Carefully fold in the chopped hazelnuts. Divide the mixture between the two baking trays and bake for one and a half hours. Then let them cool in the oven.
Take one round and smother it with the cream, lavish the raspberries all over the cream and place the other meringue round on top. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve as soon as possible. The moisture in the cream and raspberries will make your meringue a sad, flabby shadow of what it once was.
This is my current, best ever, never-want-to-eat-anything-else dessert dish. And nothing this delicious can be served without an espresso hovering in the wings.
And a thank you for my flock of hard working princesses?
Of course. A bundle of dandelion greens, a corncob and a natter at dusk once the guests have gone home.
The Torta di Nocciole Meringa is from Ursula Ferrigno’s book, Trattoria, Mitchell Beazley, 2004
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The Black Demon on the Writer’s Shoulder - flick him off or not?
for a good feed ...
