It's March -- Time to Catch Up

Yes, please READ BOOKS! Really, it is our only hope. Enough said.

Sitting here at the computer, thinking about how to begin blogging again, I decided to just do it and to mark the beginning of March with a new post. The first day of March has been sweet as a lamb around here. How about where you are?

Where I Left You:

In August I had read some of Thoreau's The Concord and the Merrimack and shared a bit of that with you. I will get back to this one and we will catch up on it soon. It was about this time that I had a health setback and decided to take a break from blogging. I am still dealing with some things and will have surgery in late April. Nothing life threatening, just a nuisance. After a winter of laying low, I am back. Am still not sure how the blog will develop, perhaps it will find its own way. I feel the need to write so we will see how it goes.

BBC Radio 4:

A sweet little thing happened yesterday. I was cooking and listening to "A Good Read" on BBC Radio 4. Each 30 minute program has two guests and the interviewer. They discuss three books, one chosen by each person. It is kind of like belonging to a book club in a very passive way. This is one of my favorite programs on BBC Radio 4. My very favorite is "The Archers", but I will save that for another post. Most of the time the books discussed are ones I have heard about before, sometimes have read, most of the time not. Well, I listened to two programs while making dinner and it turns out I own three of the featured books! Here they are along with links to the programs. If you have not listened to "A Good Read" before, you are in for a treat.

Memoirs of Hadrian, Good-Bye to All That, Song of Solomon 

All three are now in my To Be Read (TBR) stack. I have started the Morrison before, but cannot remember why I did not finish it. As I read these, I will let you know how they go.

BBC Radio 4 "A Good Read" Links:

Graves and Morrison, Goodbye to All That, Song of Solomon

Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

My Italian Year:

2017 is my "Italy" year. This is why:

Frances Mayes Bramasole Olive Oil

Bramasole Oil

We gave our family and friends cans of this oil for Christmas gifts this year. It is really quite good. Actually, it is pure nectar! One of our friends said she has to keep it hidden from her husband because he will drink it. It is surprising the difference between the "real deal" and oils available here; even the "good" ones do not come close. Here is what we did when our shipment arrived:

Oh My...

We have had it on practically everything except Sunday morning waffles.

To pay homage to Frances Mayes and her excellent oil, I decided to read about Italy in 2017 and to learn to cook the real Italian way.  I will share some of my reading and cooking with you as time goes by. The Vegetable Lasagne recipe in Frances Mayes' "Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life" is superb.

2017 Reading So Far...

Sweetwater Creek, Anne Rivers Siddon

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

The Patience of the Spider, Andrea Camilleri

Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje

The Girl of My Dreams, Donna Leon

Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope

The Fall of Troy, Peter Acroyd

Rumpole and the Primrose Path, John Mortimer

The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller (5 stars, the best so far!)

The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan

The Birth of Venus, Sarah Dunant

Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life, Frances Mayes

Most of these have been audio books. I have needed to zone out a bit this winter. Quiet days, resting, knitting, and listening.

That's it for now, see you soon.

Cookbooks Cookbooks Cookbooks!

I have been busy logging books into LibraryThing and am nearly finished with the books in my study. It so happens that cookbooks upon cookbooks are stored in here for lack of shelf space in the kitchen. I have a lovely walk-in pantry full of shelves, but they are mostly taken up with food, not books! I keep a dozen or so cookbooks in there for quick access, and change them out quite often as the calendar seasons change and as my internal seasons change. Except there are three books that never leave the kitchen.

The first is this one, a wedding present from my mother in, ahem, 1968. I rarely use it these days but it does not feel right for it to be hidden away on a dusty shelf in the corner of my study.  A well-worn, well-loved old-fashioned cookbook.

The next two books are not "loggable" into LibraryThing because they are my own kitchen notebooks. See the beautiful cookbook holder "Lonestar" (my husband) made for me? He is quite clever that way. The red notebook is for recipes we use all the time. Lonestar especially likes the recipe for waffles and biscuits because he is the breakfast chef around here!

The sunflower notebook is for menus and menu ideas. It is organized by calendar seasons. Summer is full of outdoor dining menus, with lots of Provencal-style meals. I began this notebook after returning from a summer visit to Provence so it is a kind of love letter to my favorite place on the planet (after home, of course!).

However, you might notice some poetry on the inside cover pages. I tend to copy down poetry in random places (like this notebook) and leave little notes such as I found in the Summer section:

"Lavender is the fragrance of half-forgotten things." Yes, it is!

So, if you are at all interested, here are the rest of the cookbooks I have logged in today.

Plats du Jour is a real fragile first edition, published in 1957. The Chamberlain Calendar of French Cooking is another fragile oldie.  It is for 1958!  Every so often the current calendar coincides with 1958 and I keep it out and follow along through the year with wonderful pictures of old France and make some of the suggested seasonal recipes. Very fun! I bought this one at a garage sale in Sierra Madre, California, a small hill town overlooking the LA basin. I suspect this was a gift to someone in Hollywood because the first few weeks of the calendar have notations for appointments with agents and photographers in the LA area. Wish I knew who it was...

I just love it when books provide their own custom bookmarks! This last one is a very special cookbook. I bought it in a bookstore in Uzes, a small town in the south of France near Nimes and the Pont du Gard. It is written in Provencal, the old language of the area. I had the bright idea to use a French-to-English dictionary to translate it! I still think it is possible because Provencal and French are very similar, but I gave up on the project after a few pages. Hmmm...maybe I could do it one recipe at a time?  What do you think?

That about does it for cookbooks.  I still have books about wine and gardening to log in, but those can wait for another post.  We will continue on the real Reading Road Map journey next week.  I am excited to tell you about our trip to Africa to see The Mountains of the Moon.

Finally, I really love comments.  If you visit, please let me know you stopped by.

Provence, 1970

Well, I finished  Provence, 1970 by MFK Fisher's nephew, Luke Barr.  It is a satisfying "easy" stroll through a bit of food writing history.  I introduced this book here:  Friday in Provence.

Coincidentally food writers MFK Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, Simone Beck, Richard Olney and the editor Judith Jones found themselves in the south of France in December, 1970.  They were all known to each other, and in some cases were good friends and collaborators on various projects.

The very American Julia Child and the very French Simone Beck ("Simca") met in Paris in 1949.  Over many years they worked together and co-authored Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vols. I and II. The wonderful 2009 movie Julie and Julia tells part of this story.  Each had country houses in Provence, near Cannes.  Child's "La Pitchoune" was located on Beck's estate. They were both there with their husbands for the holidays in December, 1970.  Fisher, Beard, Jones, and Olney were also in the area.  Olney lived year around near Toulon, about two hours west of Cannes.

La Pitchoune

From the back cover blurb:

Provence, 1970 is about a singular historic moment when six iconic culinary figures -- including Julia Child, James Beard, and M.F.K. Fisher -- found themselves together in the South of France.  They cooked and ate and talked late into the night about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery.  Drawing in large part from M.F.K. Fisher's detailed journals and letters, her grandnephew Luke Barr has recreated what was in retrospect a key turning point -- when the democratization of cooking and taste became part of the national conversation in America.  His dramatic retelling of those weeks in the scenic hills above the Cote d'Azur traces the beginnings of a modern American food culture and how, without quite realizing it, these players changed the course of culinary history to reshape the way we eat now."

Soon after, a new figure in American food culture appeared, Alice Waters.

"...Waters and her generation of cooks had found a new idiom, an entirely original continuation of the legacy of the winter of 1970, a modern art of American eating.

It made a certain, perfect sense that Waters had embraced both Olney and M.F., as different as they were.  For Waters, avatar of the new American cooking, was rooted both immediately as a cook in Olney's bohemian purism, and culturally in M.F.'s groundbreaking literary sensuality.  Cooking was for Waters about more than food, it was a philosophy..."

And, as we all know, the rest is history.  Fresh organic produce from local farmer's markets, home cooking from scratch, growing our own food and making our own bread have become the norm for many many
Americans.  What started as a glimmer in the eye of those six Americans in Provence in 1970 has become a new way of life all over this country.

Thank you very much.

Cooling Trend

Finally, a break in the weather.  The rain clouds are just flirting with us this morning, but it is cool.  The possibility of something under 90 degrees in the kitchen inspired me to take a look at Richard Olney's well-regarded cookbook, Simple French Food.

Good Recipes Inside

In Provence, 1970, Luke Barr writes about the meal Richard Olney served to M.F.K. Fisher and friends in November, 1970 at his home in Provence.  Oh my.

"RICHARD OLNEY WAS PREPARING A FEAST.

He sat at the kitchen table with a small, pointy knife, painstakingly piercing each large piece of beef stew meat and inserting small strips of pork fat into the incisions.  The strips of pork belly had been covered with a paste of chopped parsley and garlic, and would add flavor to the meat from the inside out.  He put the larded meat in a bowl, poured a bit of olive oil and cognac and then a bottle of dry white wine over it, and left it all to marinate.

This was the beginning of his 'daube a la provencale'...

It was late November and raining outside.  He was alone in the kitchen.  He was happiest at moments like this."

Although Barr gives the impression that M.F.K. Fisher grew to consider some of Olney's attitudes to French cooking and wine with disdain, she had a very good time as his guest on that cold wet November night.

Richard Olney was an American ex-pat who lived in the south of France, in an old farmhouse on a steep hill overlooking the Provencal countryside.  He refurbished the house, hand-dug a wine cave into the hillside, and made Provence his home for nearly forty years.   Much has been written about Olney and I will have more to write as I learn more about him.  His connection to M.F.K. Fisher is how we ended up talking about him here.

And that is why I am taking a stroll through Simple French Food today.  There will be no  'daube a la provencale' for dinner tonight, but there will be one in a few months, perhaps on a cold wet November evening.

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous and Back Again

My last post left you here:

SUBLIME

Source

I have returned home and it is HOT and DRY here today, and apparently will be so for the near future.  So, I am hunkered down indoors with the AC, my iced tea spiked with blackberries (one of the perks of summer around here!) and busy adding books to my LibraryThing database.

Stack 1

Today I am working on my cookbook shelf in the study.  It is too much hot work to haul them into the room with the photo chair so I am just stacking them up next to my computer here in the study.  I just took a break and see that the thermometer says 99 degrees!  The forecast is for 104 degrees today.  RIDICULOUS!

Stack 2

If you notice a distinct slant to French cooking, you would not be wrong.  I like to try recipes from around the world, but I definitely LOVE French cooking, especially cooking from the South of France.  More about that some other time.

Finally, I mentioned the awful heat wave we are having.  Here is a bit of beauty mixed into the RIDICULOUS!

SUBLIME

Menu Planning

I love to cook.  At least, I used to love to cook. For many, many years I spent an hour or so every Saturday morning planning the menu for the coming week.  I made a grocery list based on the required ingredients for various dishes on the week's menu and then I went shopping.  I always tried to incorporate at least one or two new dishes to keep my family (and me) interested in meal time.  I began collecting cookbooks for inspiration.

My collection of cookbooks grew over the years to include not only books but cooking magazines, especially old issues of Gourmet and Saveur magazines.  I wrote about Gourmet here:

Old Gourmet Magazines

Nowadays, with just the two of us, and time on my hands, one would think I would be spending a lot of creative time in the kitchen.  Sadly, I seem to have lost my kitchen "mojo". Cooking sometimes feels like a "chore".  So maybe I need to get back into the menu-planning habit.

I am going to take a little trip through these magazines looking for inspiration today.  I keep my cooking magazines stored by season.

They look a little ratty, but truly for someone who enjoys cooking this row of magazines is a treasure trove.  The missing box is "July-Aug" and is where I found these:

Gourmet magazines were about so much more than food.  Gourmet really was "The Magazine of Good Living".  I am sad it is no longer published, but honestly, after about 1990 it had become a shadow of its old self.  The articles were shorter, the recipes were focused more on bistro-style food rather than elegant dining.  And, travel articles were like abridged versions of the old ones. Sigh.

So today, I will plan our menu for the week.  We might visit a hotel in England's Garden and Lake District if I choose "Herbed Cheese and Chicken Terrine Miller Howe".

A Lake District Hotel in Windermere

Or, if it is hot, we might enjoy Lemon and Basil Poached Chicken Breasts with a Smoked Mozzarella and Tomato Salad and Sesame Ginger Toasts for a cool kitchen meal.

The danger for me is getting sidetracked while menu planning with Gourmet.  It is quite likely I will spend a lot of time in Austria while reading "Austria's Narrow-Gauge Railways", an 11-page article with recipes in the August 1984 issue. But it will not be time wasted.  There is a wonderful recipe for Poppy Seed Cake on page 128.

England's Lake District

Narrow Gauge Railway in Austria