jane brocket

feeling the cold

The old-fashioned British attitude to the cold weather still baffles me. Why on earth did/do we struggle on in unheated houses and flats when even the poor Russians in the nineteenth century knew how to keep their wooden houses warm, and a visit to a Scandinavian country in winter makes you realise that it's not absolutely necessary to suffer in winter?

We live in a draughty house (it was built in 1929) and we do our best to keep it warm. But yesterday I went to an amazing location in London for a photoshoot for my book, and it made our house feel like an overheated sauna. It was beautiful, atmospheric, layered with history, full of original features (it was built in the early eighteenth century) and bloody freezing. There were draughts that were more like Arctic winds, and a chilliness that felt like the inside of a fridge. It was authentically cold; poeple lived here for several centuries and didn't bother to install any form of heating other than small, open fires that had to be lit every morning.

In the first room we used there was a copy of the book I am reading, and it couldn't have been more apposite. This house was in Spitalfields, one of the parts of London Dickens wrote about, and it's recently been used as a location for the TV adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the film version of Great Expectations and, a while ago, for the BBC's Bleak House. Dickens is just as good on feeling the cold as he is on the jolly warmth of the hearth, but I'm still wondering how any of the characters who lived in similar places (and the actors playing them in this house) could speak without their teeth chattering permanently. 

[By coincidence, this morning I saw this beautiful shawl knitted by Suse. Clearly this is what I need to be knitting to combat the cold.]

sensory overload

I've just been to the Hockney exhibition. The colours are brilliant. The canvases are enormous. The exhibition is enormous. The crowds are thick. It's everything they say it is in the reviews. It's great. It's limited. It's full of meaning. It's empty of meaning. It's all about looking. It's repetitive. Its repetitiveness is its strength. It's shallow. It's deep. It's a joy to behold.

I loved being immersed in that much colour, wandering through a gloriously bright landscape. And at some point I began to wonder just how much oil paint Hockney used to paint the pictures here. Does he order his supplies by the tube, by the tin, by the bucket, or does he have oil paints delivered by his own personal paint pipeline? When he turns on the taps in the studio, do gallons of emerald green and shocking pink, lemon and turquoise, scarlet and viridian pour out? How does he write his shopping lists? Does he have Cadmium Yellow, Prussian Blue, Sap Green and Magenta where we have bread, milk, and baked beans? Because I tell you, there are acres of Yorkshire in there, all painted in huge, fluid, exuberant, confident brush strokes which probably each use up a little tube at a time, and it's not just a celebration of landscape, it's a celebration of a spectacularly rich and expressive medium.

[colour charts for Old Holland oil paints, although Hockney - and Howard Hodgkin who is also very generous with paint - has been known to use Michael Harding's paints]

sensory balance

Ever since reading DH Lawrence's novels in my teens, I've been confused about the difference between 'sensual' and 'sensuous'. I've now given up trying to remember, as I think both are pretty good, quite like the mix of the two anyway, and am always keen to keep up levels of one or the other or both in my life. However, much as I enjoy a good dose of sensory overload from time to time (I'm going to the Hockney exhibition next week for precisely that), I like to keep some semblance of sensory balance. Looking back over the last week or so, I find it's been pretty much evenly spread out, ready for the scales to be tipped by Hockney. So here are the ingredients to be weighed:

Sight

:: Seeing The Artist made me realise how little we 'read' the cinema screen these days. With so many fast, noisy, spectacular films that blast your senses, it's no longer necessary to keep your eyes fixed on the picture, and it's too easy to let your attention wander without losing the plot. But this film demands that you look for, and take notice of, every detail, expression, background prop for visual clues, hints, jokes, and silent narrative devices. Look down or away, and you could miss something very important. It's beautiful, clever, creative, and as demanding as reading a book.

:: I couldn't go any amount of time without using my eyes to read words. The Pickwick Papers (with the bonus of illustrations by Seymour, Buss, and Phiz) requires very good use of my 'optics' as they say in the book. Much as I like the idea of audio-books, I prefer to read Dickens on my own and in silence as his characters seem to bring out the worst tendencies in so many otherwise good actors/readers.

:: Alain de Botton's latest book also requires much focussing of eyes and brain on words and pictures. I'm not so sure this is a keenly thought-out as some of his previous books, and begs as many questions as it asks. But maybe that's the point.

Sound

:: The Artist: not silent at all, with sound used to great effect.

:: Me, laughing at Mr Pickwick, Mr Jingle, and the Fat Boy.

:: Alain de Botton speaking to a packed Conway Hall, where you could have heard a pin drop if there had been any pauses in his fast, fluent, articulate Sunday 'sermon'. And listening to him again on Night Waves on Radio 3.

:: Silence - while I read (see above).

Smell

:: Another batch of hyacinths, this time in a cracked jug that I bought years ago and have filled with bulbs each winter ever since.

:: Grated nutmeg - the smell of wobbly custard puddings, rock buns, and childhood. Just grating one makes make me think of Peggotty in David Copperfield when David describes her finger as being 'roughened by needlework, like a pocket nutmeg-grater'. Perfect. It would be very useful to have such a finger of one's own as it would save on the washing-up. It could also be used for zesting lemons, another smell in the kitchen this week (and every week).

Touch

:: Whole smooth nutmegs, waxy lemons, and thoughts of Peggoty's personal nutmeg grater (see Touch, above).

:: Soft, nubbly, vintage linen waiting to be turned into something and stitched with smooth cotton perlé threads. I have pretty much abandoned quilting cottons in favour of more textured threads. If I am taking the time to hand-sew, I want to be able to see and feel the stitches.

:: Hand-stitching on old tablecloths.

Taste

:: Nutmeg cake (see above).

:: Spicy, aromatic noodles with ginger, chilli, lime, lemongrass, coriander, and the quite disgusting but essential Thai fish sauce nam pla (see also Smell above) made to a family-favourite Nigel Slater recipe in Appetite. Comfort food, guaranteed to get everyone sitting round the table and talking (see Sound, above).

:: Port to go with Pickwick. It should of course be Mr Pickwick's Particular Port [sic] made by Saltram (a company I used to work with years ago - Pickwick was one of the particular perks of the job). But I make do with Graham's LBV. Everyone in The Pickwick Papers drinks so much it would be rude not to join them.

Result

All things weighed, quite a satisfactory balance, I think.

delicate little flower

Whenever I hear someone (or myself) describing a person as a 'delicate little flower', it always makes me smile because more often than not it's a phrase that's used ironically. And these species irises (iris reticulata 'Cantab') bear this out. They look very much like delicate little flowers, yet they are remarkably undelicate in constitution, and flower outside in horribly cold conditions that would deter all but the hardiest plants.

Ironically, it's when you force them and bring them indoors, that they turn into delicate little flowers. They are sensitive to the high temperatures so they burst open, quickly lose all their energy, and go over in two or three days.

In comparison to these small, sturdy irises, I feel very delicate, like a large hothouse plant that can't bear draughts and icy winds and freezing mornings. But I like bringing them indoors because, as a very nesh* northener, I know that it's the only way I'll be able to contemplate their shapes, colours, and markings for any length of time.

*nesh: northern term of mild abuse when growing up if you didn't want to go outside when it was brass monkey weather.

[Bulbs from Peter Nyssen, planted in bowls in multi-purpose compost in mid-November, kept in a cold, dark garage, brought into the warmth about a week ago.]

the plate's mine oyster*

Simon likes oysters. He really, really likes them; while others dither and squirm, he's busy shucking and slurping. His perfect holiday destination is the Ile de Ré where he can combine cycling and shellfish, and buy oysters which get cheaper and cheaper the more dozens you buy.

Just before Christmas I bought him an oyster plate for a couple of quid. We haven't yet eaten any oysters from it, but it turns out to be a brilliant plate for keeping lemons and ideal for ripening avocados.

The closest we have come to anything in a shell are shell-shaped madeleines, so now it's also a cake serving plate.

I knew nothing about oyster plates until I started writing this post. My plate is unmarked and no doubt worthless, but there are some very beautiful antique oyster plates which can set you back £600 or £700. They are made by companies such as Minton, Wedgwood, Gien, and Limoges and like all well-designed practical objects, they combine function with beauty (and wit and colour).

[Minton]

[Minton, $4,300]

[Minton]

[majolica]

[hand-painted]

There's even a book on the subject. I should have known. I could become an oyster plate collector and ripen a whole Chilean valley's-worth of avocados on my windowsill, because I certainly wouldn't be able to afford the oysters as well as the plates.

*Apologies to Shakespeare and The Merry Wives of Windsor Act II, scene ii

 

economies of scale

 

Through empirical research I have discovered that it needn't take a lifetime to make a hand-stitched hexagon quilt top. No indeed, it can be done in four weeks, and this top is proof of the matter.

It's not that I have super-fast stitching skills, or a little Rumpelstiltskin tucked away somewhere busily turning fabric into hexagons while I sleep, or even all the time in the world.

It's much simpler than that: I used large hexagons.

I don't know why small hexagons are the norm in patchwork when they clearly send people round the bend with their size and fiddliness and slow rate of growth. Why not just blow them up, think big, and work on a scale that gives economies of scale and time?

I printed off the largest hexagons I could fit, two at a time, onto A4 sheets of paper - a single hexagon per sheet would have been possible, but I needed some sort of economy of paper, even though I printed on the back of used sheets.

I aimed to make a daisy a day, ie cutting out, pinning, basting then stitching together seven hexagons into a simple flower shape. Then I had three or four evenings of sewing the whole lot together to make the top. My only problem now is that I really like it with the papers left in; it gives the top a certain stiffness, and a sound that is really appealing.

Plus I am tempted to leave in the pieces of the old OS map I used for one of the flowers, as it's there that I saw the solution to the hexagon problem stitched into the top itself.

 

overwintering

Twisted, gothic trees that wouldn't look out of place on Pendle Hill or Haworth Moor.

Prairie grasses with a winter crew cut.

Red-hot dogwood.

Merry berry holly.

Crinkly, wrinkly, frosty spinach.

It's amazing how much natural activity there is, how many plants simply, silently, spectacularly keep going all winter.

more than just a doughnut

We made more doughnuts yesterday. Phoebe is chief fryer (I told her she should include this valuable experience in her CV - it could stand her in good stead when looking for summer jobs in holiday resorts) and I am chief kitchen ventilator and monitor of oil temperature (see post below).

We made mini rings, large rings, and more jam-filled round doughnuts. We have a lot left over today, but they have lost their freshness (they lose it very quickly) and aren't nice to eat. But I can't bear to throw them out immediately, not when they still look so very appealing and misleadingly fresh.

But I have discovered that there are things that you can do with day-old doughnuts besides wishing they were fresh enough to eat.

You can make them into vases to hold single stems.

You can give them to a girl who likes rings on her fingers and bells on her toes.

You can use one to propose to or marry someone.

And you can use one as a sticky pincushion.

Then you can use them as food for birds to get sleek and fat on.

jan bos

Hyacinth introduced in 1927. Deep rose colour. Very fragrant, reliable, compact. Stunning at any time of the year, but quite magical in January.

flaubert's macaroon

{not Flaubert's}

Gustave Flaubert was a perfectionist. His attention to detail and his search for 'le mot juste' in every sentence are legendary. He agonised over his work, often completing just a few lines per day, or a single page in a week. I thought about his perfectionism today as I was making macaroons (macarons) at home for the first time. I've made them once before, but never tried chez moi because I have been put off by the enormous amount of detailed instructions and finger-wagging dos and don'ts that I have come across while looking for a simple, practical, doable recipe.

I feel Flaubert would be in his element making macaroons.* He could age his egg whites correctly, weigh them out to the nearest gram, debate whether or not to oven-dry his almonds before grinding (he would never buy ready-ground). Then he could enervate himself by fussing over the ideal bowl (spotless stainless steel), the doubling up of baking trays, the optimum oven temperature. He could debate the merits of baking parchment vs silicon sheets, reusable vs disposable (preferably hand-rolled) piping bags, 1/2" nozzle vs 3/8" nozzle, and even whether the weather is right (he would know all about the potentially deleterious effects of humidity on macaroons). And this is without stressing over batter consistency, how long to leave the piped macaroons to dry before baking, how to avoid macaroon disasters such as hollow shells, cracked shells, pointy shells, warped shells, bumpy shells, and burst or substandard 'feet'. Even when he'd made his macaroons, he wouldn't be free of anxiety; he'd still have to worry about how long to keep them before filling (and, of course, he'd have to decide on the best filling), at what temperature they should then be stored, and where best to store them, .

And finally, after all that, he would have to choose the ideal moment to eat them. By which time he might very well be lying down with a cold compress on his forehead, with a single perfect macaroon on a little table next to him, having thrown away the rest for failing to meet his criteria. The macaroon would be the baking equivalent of Madame Bovary: exquisite, subtle, elegant, layered, and textured. But he wouldn't be able to contemplate another macaroon or novel for a few years.

Or he could take a deep breath and decide that any home-made macaroons, no matter how imperfect or bumpy, lumpy, footloose and fancy-free, would be better than no macaroons at all. Which is the approach I took.

I picked two different recipes, shut down the blogs with fabulous-looking macaroons embedded in about thirty pages of instructions, and had a go. The shells are plain - no flavouring, but I couldn't pass up a chance to get out the food colouring - and filled with white chocolate ganache. One recipe made rather flat macaroons (top) and the other created puffy, grainy little semi-spheres which would fail the Flaubert test. But when I take off my glasses they look fine, and if I eat one, I know that there's a lot more to a macaroon than good looks.

* He does mention macarons in L'Education Sentimentale.