A casual reading (or should I say ‘reading’) of a Catalan cook book has borne strange fruit today.
Reading a cookery book in English is akin to bluffing you way through a foreign language; not only for the number of terms in French with which our cookery is littered, but also for the unwritten assumptions of knowledge that link the steps from one point in a recipe to another.
Many times in a recipe I have stumbled against a hidden assumption that makes achieving the next step impossible – though guess work has sometimes produced interesting concoctions. And edible too!
The problems with cook books are exacerbated when the language is generally incomprehensible: even linking my little French and less Spanish doesn’t prepare one for the vocabulary of meat and veg. that is necessary for understanding even fairly simple lists of ingredients.
However, I stumbled my way through convincing myself that I had understood enough to evaluate the recipes and discard them. I had bought a tray of mushrooms earlier in the day and I was looking for a way to cook them with chicken.
Eventually I decided on a lemon marinade and using the mushrooms in a sort of paella base for the meat. Except, as I soon discovered, all the lemons had been thrown out as looking “not right” so the marinade was adjusted accordingly. In case anyone is wondering, that simply means that the marinade was made exactly as per recipe except for the lemons.
Lunch was a little late but the end result was more than palatable.
Of course this cooking was merely displacement activity for my proposed second attempt at Festive Welsh Cakes. I was hoping that success at the savoury would prompt activity in the sweet area.
I now deviated from the Carys recipe and amalgamated knowledge from other sites. The relative proportions of ingredients were subtly altered, new ones were added and I was ready for the off.
This time I kept the mixed flour and butter as ‘breadcrumbs’ and mixed full cane sugar with fruit and nuts. The resultant mixture when I added the egg looked and felt different and it reminded me immediately of the cakes of my mother and the treat of being allowed to scrape the bowl to get the last remaining remains of the mixture – which I loved!
The heat this time was reduced from ‘burning fiery furnace’ to merely ‘too hot to touch’. The resultant smell also reminded me compellingly of my mother’s kitchen and was welcome rather than yesterday’s acrid pungency and an open window.
The cooking process was leisurely, but I did manage to obtain the ‘caramel’ colour which is the sign of success rather than the . . . well, you can guess.
Tomorrow in my Spanish lesson they will be revealed as the typical cake without which no Welsh home could possibly celebrate the festive season! May I be forgiven!
Talking of food: I also have to eat humble pie. A couple of days ago I made a slighting and cynical reference to Barack Obama’s first volume of memoirs called ‘Dreams from my father.’ I now formally retract the main thrust of my cynicism and admit that the book is compelling.
What I was expecting was some sort of pompous pseudo religious screed linking hardship to fated progress and mealy mouthed platitudinous bunkum. Well, it wasn’t.
Obama’s style is intensely readable and he fashions his life into a satisfying narrative. He structures his experiences with all the urgency of a novel and uses the spaciousness of his prose to produce passages of descriptive beauty.
This is not a memoir of complacency based on rock sure faith; it is more a questioning of identity and a deeply uneasy relationship with religion.
Obama’s background is culturally diverse and he makes the most of the opportunities and frustrations that come with his family history. He is (as far as one can tell) open and disconcertingly frank about difficulties and tensions in his developing life, but he is always capable of making his discoveries something which has significance for all his readers.
At one point when his mother is relating the story of her first meeting with Obama’s father she laughs and Obama writes, “In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up – their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.” A fine description of some sort of rite of passage that we surely all go through, though possibly not articulated quite as well!
Yes, this memoir is self indulgent and written by a young man. He sometimes strives just a little too hard to pin down the significance of some incidents and his via dolorosa is sometimes a little too wordy and fluent. But this is a fine book which presents a journey of discovery which I was delighted to follow.
From the evidence of this book we are going to have an intelligent, literate and questioning man in the White House. That can only be good.
Can’t it?
Reading a cookery book in English is akin to bluffing you way through a foreign language; not only for the number of terms in French with which our cookery is littered, but also for the unwritten assumptions of knowledge that link the steps from one point in a recipe to another.
Many times in a recipe I have stumbled against a hidden assumption that makes achieving the next step impossible – though guess work has sometimes produced interesting concoctions. And edible too!
The problems with cook books are exacerbated when the language is generally incomprehensible: even linking my little French and less Spanish doesn’t prepare one for the vocabulary of meat and veg. that is necessary for understanding even fairly simple lists of ingredients.
However, I stumbled my way through convincing myself that I had understood enough to evaluate the recipes and discard them. I had bought a tray of mushrooms earlier in the day and I was looking for a way to cook them with chicken.
Eventually I decided on a lemon marinade and using the mushrooms in a sort of paella base for the meat. Except, as I soon discovered, all the lemons had been thrown out as looking “not right” so the marinade was adjusted accordingly. In case anyone is wondering, that simply means that the marinade was made exactly as per recipe except for the lemons.
Lunch was a little late but the end result was more than palatable.
Of course this cooking was merely displacement activity for my proposed second attempt at Festive Welsh Cakes. I was hoping that success at the savoury would prompt activity in the sweet area.
I now deviated from the Carys recipe and amalgamated knowledge from other sites. The relative proportions of ingredients were subtly altered, new ones were added and I was ready for the off.
This time I kept the mixed flour and butter as ‘breadcrumbs’ and mixed full cane sugar with fruit and nuts. The resultant mixture when I added the egg looked and felt different and it reminded me immediately of the cakes of my mother and the treat of being allowed to scrape the bowl to get the last remaining remains of the mixture – which I loved!
The heat this time was reduced from ‘burning fiery furnace’ to merely ‘too hot to touch’. The resultant smell also reminded me compellingly of my mother’s kitchen and was welcome rather than yesterday’s acrid pungency and an open window.
The cooking process was leisurely, but I did manage to obtain the ‘caramel’ colour which is the sign of success rather than the . . . well, you can guess.
Tomorrow in my Spanish lesson they will be revealed as the typical cake without which no Welsh home could possibly celebrate the festive season! May I be forgiven!
Talking of food: I also have to eat humble pie. A couple of days ago I made a slighting and cynical reference to Barack Obama’s first volume of memoirs called ‘Dreams from my father.’ I now formally retract the main thrust of my cynicism and admit that the book is compelling.
What I was expecting was some sort of pompous pseudo religious screed linking hardship to fated progress and mealy mouthed platitudinous bunkum. Well, it wasn’t.
Obama’s style is intensely readable and he fashions his life into a satisfying narrative. He structures his experiences with all the urgency of a novel and uses the spaciousness of his prose to produce passages of descriptive beauty.
This is not a memoir of complacency based on rock sure faith; it is more a questioning of identity and a deeply uneasy relationship with religion.
Obama’s background is culturally diverse and he makes the most of the opportunities and frustrations that come with his family history. He is (as far as one can tell) open and disconcertingly frank about difficulties and tensions in his developing life, but he is always capable of making his discoveries something which has significance for all his readers.
At one point when his mother is relating the story of her first meeting with Obama’s father she laughs and Obama writes, “In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up – their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances.” A fine description of some sort of rite of passage that we surely all go through, though possibly not articulated quite as well!
Yes, this memoir is self indulgent and written by a young man. He sometimes strives just a little too hard to pin down the significance of some incidents and his via dolorosa is sometimes a little too wordy and fluent. But this is a fine book which presents a journey of discovery which I was delighted to follow.
From the evidence of this book we are going to have an intelligent, literate and questioning man in the White House. That can only be good.
Can’t it?
No comments:
Post a Comment