Two families & their pasta

My boys are very keen on four-cheese pasta, just about the only ready-made food I still buy: tortelloni with a mixture of cheeses. Waitrose has sold an own-brand version for years, and that is what I've always bought them. Until this week, when it had vanished from the shelves, in its place a branded version made by Del'Ugo.

On the back of the unfamiliar new pack I found a letter from the owner of the business, Paul Ugo, about its history. And I realised that Paul's grandfather was the man my grandfather bought pasta from for three decades. Let me re-wind a little here.

My grandparents met in 1915 in Italy, both members of a Red Cross unit led by the historian GM Trevelyan which served the Italian armies fighting the vicious mountaineering war on the Isonzo front. My grandmother was a VAD nurse, my grandfather the unit administrator. Amongst other legacies of that terrible time, my grandparents were left with a lifelong love of Italy and Italian food (also the ability to talk in fast and fluent Italian when they didn't want us to know what they were saying).

Luigi Ugo arrived in London in 1921 aged 14, and began making fresh pasta by hand for restaurants. He opened a shop in Gerrard Street in 1929, which soon expanded so that he was able to import machinery from Italy to establish a small fresh pasta factory.

And so on Saturdays, my grandfather, on his way home from work at the British Museum, where he was Keeper of Incunabula, would walk to Soho to Luigi Ugo's shop to buy fresh pasta. When they moved to Oxford, they missed Luigi's shop - I remember them pining for it. Instead, they befriended the Italian proprietors of the Luna Caprese in North Parade - but that's another story of family connections, discovered at the school gate when my younger daughter was five years old.


PS the photograph shows my grandfather arriving at our wedding on the arm of my uncle, who is now about the same age as my grandfather was when the picture was taken

This wonderful, pagan knocker is on the door of Durham Cathedral.

In the Middle Ages, the cathedral could be used as a place of sanctuary by fugitives. If you'd committed a serious offence, you could claim sanctuary by knocking at the door (the knocker is very high). You then had 37 days to organise your affairs, and either stand trial, or leave the country by the nearest port.



















I took my reluctant boys to the cathedral yesterday morning as we were passing, and it's very close to the motorway. There's a chapel for the Durham Light Infantry, my grandfather's regiment, and I was glad to be there the day before the anniversary of his death in 1941. He served in the DLI in the first world war; in the second world war he served in the Royal Artillery, so his name is not in the DLI roll of honour in the Cathedral. But it was good during this hectic season to have a quiet moment's reflection about a man I love but never met.

A story for Armistice Day

My grandfather was born in 1899. Just right to serve in two world wars. He was a talented sportsman (played international rugger in the 1920s), and saw many of the best members of his school XV go straight from school into the army, and on to the endless casualty lists. When he left school in the summer of 1917, he went straight into the Durham Light Infantry, and by Armistice Day he was a German prisoner of war.

For years, I thought that the photograph above was taken when he was in his mid 20s. It is only very recently that I discovered he was 18 when it was taken; he had just left school, just swapped his Marlborough uniform for that of the Durham Light Infantry. My younger son goes to the same school, plays rugger on the same pitches, and is also a fly half. I cannot imagine - I have tried, but I cannot cannot - what it can have felt like to be at school, watching the older boys enlist and be killed, week by week, month by month, year by year, knowing that soon it would be your turn. One family lost three sons in quick succession; my grandfather played games in the same team as two of them - these were boys he knew well.

During the second world war, my grandfather joined the Royal Artillery, and just before Christmas 1941 died on active service in Wandsworth, where he ran a searchlight battery. Not very glamorous. This morning I visited his memorial at Mortlake Cemetery, where I was unexpectedly overcome with an intense feeling of grief for a man I've never met, but whose birthday I share.


















This afternoon, I was at Twickenham, home of England rugby, and home of the Harlequins at the time my grandfather played for that great club. There I found a team photograph taken before my grandfather's first match for England, against Wales at Cardiff Arms Park in 1922. He looked strangely vulnerable - a mixture of apprehension and excitement. The photograph below was probably taken during that match. V.G. Davies - my grandfather - is on the left. Heaven knows what treatment the spongeman is giving his unfortunate team-mate!

Links: diet, spam, and the Roman Invasion

I subscribe to a BBC news roundup email, giving headlines in particular areas that interest me. There were four stories I want share - and I'll start with two interesting stories from the health section:

The first is a report on an eight year study of the Mediterranean diet, which shows that very small changes to the diet (a little more olive oil, OR perhaps a little less red meat) give protection from certain types of cancers. It sounds like stuff we already know, but here we have some proof.

The second is about the effect of junk food eaten by pregnant rats on their offspring. Predictably terrifying.

The computer security firm McAfee ran an experiment to see what happened when fifty people around the world surfed for a month without any sort of protection for their computer. Doesn't bear thinking about. BUT ... fascinating national differences.

Finally - well I'm a historian, so please forgive me. The headline said there was doubt over the date of Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain. Not 55BC??? Actually, it turns out that we are talking about whether it was the beginning or the end of one week in August 55BC. Wonderful stuff.


PS if you get to the fourth link, you'll see that my photo of the White Cliffs of Dover is courtesy of the BBC

The first strawberries

Ridiculous Mrs Elton, chattering her stream of consciousness at Mr Knightley's strawberry-picking party (I'm re-reading Jane Austen's Emma) ... she brought me up short this morning.

The best fruit in England - everybody's favourite - always wholesome. -These the finest beds and finest sorts. -Delightful to gather for one's self - the only way of really enjoying them. -Morning decidedly the best time - never tired - every sort good - hautboy infinitely superior - no comparison - the others hardly eatable - hautboys very scarce - Chili preferred ???!? Chili preferred ?!!!? - white wood finest flavour of all - price of strawberries in London - abundance about Bristol - Maple Grove - cultivation - beds when to be renewed - gardeners never to be put out of their way - delicious fruit - only too rich to be eaten much of - inferior to cherries - currants more refreshing - only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping - glaring sun - tired to death - could bear it no longer - must go and sit in the shade.

It turns out that until the mid-18th century, there were two sorts of strawberries, both wild: Chili and Virginian, and that these were accidentally crossed in France, the first genetic modification for what was ultimately to become the large modern strawberry. The process was clearly well under way by the early 19th century - Mrs E has several to choose from.

The ones I ate outside in the sunshine for breakfast were large, sweet and juicy, and grown in the next county. Obviously under a sea of plastic, but - well, who could resist them? The best fruit in England.

Best not to mock, even those who seem foolish.


















Related posts

Eton Mess
Sir Walter Raleigh's strawberry vodka cordial
Innocent's strawberry smoothie recipe
Strawberry sponge

Links to strawberries on other blogs

Strawberry panzanella - 101 Cookbooks
Strawberry watermelon agua fresca
Strawberry sour cream bread - Closet Cooking

Quaking pudding

On Friday we went out for Lucius's office dinner in this lovely upstairs dining room at the Hind's Head at Bray, Heston Blumenthal's pub (not to be confused with his restaurant, the Fat Duck, a couple of doors down the High Street). Good food - thrice-cooked chips, that sort of thing.

I had a dandelion salad, bitter and wintery, with a little bacon and a quail's egg. Moules to follow, and then, for pudding (something I don't often eat), quaking pudding - a delicious modern take on a 17th century English baked cream which is turned out of a mould like a jelly ... and quakes just like a jelly shakes. Blumenthal's version is flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg - masses of it - rather than the traditional English custard flavourings which would be more likely saffron or lemon zest, perhaps orange blossom water.

Elizabeth Raffald gives two versions in her book, The Experienced English Housekeeper for the use and ease of Ladies, Housekeepers, Cooks, &c, written purely from practice published in 1814:

To make a Quaking Pudding.

Boil a quart of cream, and let it stand till almost cold, then beat four eggs a full quarter of an hour, with a spoonful and a half of flour, then mix them with your cream, add sugar and nutmeg to your palate, tie it close up in a cloth well buttered, and let it boil an hour, and turn it carefully out.

To make a Quaking Pudding a second way.

Take a pint of good cream, the yolks of ten eggs and six whites, beat them very well, and run them through a fine sieve; then take two heaped spoonfuls of flour, and a spoonful or two of cream, beat it with the flour till it is smooth, and mix all together, and tie it close up in a dish or bason (sic) well rubbed with butter and dredged with flour; the water must boil when you put in the pudding. One hour will boil it; serve it up with wine sauce in a boat.

Pretty tricky in a modern kitchen, whichever recipe you go for. Heston Blumenthal, that extraordinary perfectionist, says he tried 50 versions before getting it right - part of that must have been playing with the flavourings, but I dare say it took quite a few goes to get the texture right, too.

Heston Blumenthal's definitive Quaking Pudding

100ml whole milk
400ml whipping cream
65g caster sugar
4 egg yolks
1 whole egg
35g brioche crumbs
a dusting of cinnamon and nutmeg (1g of each, if you want to be particular)
butter and flour to line the moulds.

Using your fingers, rub the moulds with softened butter. Place a coffee spoon of flour in each, then tap the mould, rotating it as you go. Once lined with flour, tip out the excess. Repeat with the other moulds. The butter and flour lining stops them sticking.

Preheat the oven to 100C. Warm the milk and cream with the nutmeg and cinnamon. Whisk together the egg yolks, whole egg and sugar for about five minutes. Pour the warm milk over the egg/sugar mix, tip into the moulds and cook in a bain marie until 90C — this should take about 45 minutes.


When you're served this delicious concoction at the Hind's Head, it comes with a little card giving an explanation of the dish:

The word pudding historically refers to a food that is contained in animal gut to hold it when cooking, like "Black Pudding" of sausages. In the 17th Century, cooks realised that they could make puddings by containing food in cloth bags or bowls; this meant that more sweet puddings could be made than before. One of the sweet puddings that was invented then was the "Quaking Pudding"; a light sweet, gently flavoured dish that gained its name due to the fact that it quakes and shakes like a jelly when it is served. Quaking Pudding was a staple in recipe books throughout the 17th, 18th and early 19th Centuries when it began to disappear from recipe collections.

It deserves to be better known.

Ground elder salad

Ground elder is the bane of my gardening life. It's everywhere in this garden. I don't use chemicals (although Lucius puts them on his croquet lawn), so we either have to mow it to destruction, or pull it by hand, which means getting every last little bit of white root, or else it springs to life again in a depressingly vigorous manner. It is, as any British gardener will tell you, a losing battle.

However, on the principle that a weed is merely a plant in the wrong place, I have learnt to love ground elder, just a little, so that I don't fall into despair. And these are the reasons: the Romans introduced it into England because of its pretty ornamental leaf (yes, it IS pretty, but so invasive that that's easy to forget); Wikipedia says you can use it to treat gout and arthritis; and because it is good in a salad.

Yes, salad. You should look for young leaves, and add them to your salad (cheaper than one of those expensive supermarket pillow packs, and even more ubiqitous). It has an interesting taste - a little like dandelion without the sharpness; on the way to sorrel without the lemony-ness, and so responds well to a dressing made with lemon juice. It wilts pretty quickly, but I find that is true of almost all the soft salad leaves that grow in this garden.

There's just one thing you should know, particularly at this time of year. According to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, it becomes strongly laxative once it has flowered. But, as I say, you need to look for fresh young growth to put in your salad bowl.

I'm ashamed to say that some of mine has been in the ground so long that it has just come into flower, rather a pretty and delicate white flower. So now I'm going to pick it and see what sort of vase life it has. Who knows, I may start really loving it!


This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this time by Astrid at Paulchen's Food Blog

Quidony

Do you ever do that little word puzzle on the back of the Times, by the crossword? The one where you have three definitions for an obscure word, and you have to guess which one's right?

Yesterday, one of the words was quiddany. Does it mean, a) whosoever, b) fruit jelly, c) a suspect? I so wanted it to be fruit jelly, please let it be fruit jelly ... and it was: Quiddany, a thick fruit-syrup or jelly. Originally, and properly, one made from quinces. Adaptation of the Latin cydonia. 1695: "Sloes in the form of a Quiddany, or Marmalade."

Well, it's not mentioned in Elizabeth Raffald's cookery book published in 1814, even though she gives two recipes for quince, one boiled whole, the other for what she calls quince marmalade (& not a hint of another name). So I turned to the Oxford Companion to Food, where Alan Davidson gives several different spellings, none of them the same as in that little puzzle.

Cydonia turns out to be the Latin for Kydonia, a region of Crete where a strain of quince was grown, superior to the common strythion. This must be the one we grow, because the botanical name for quince is cydonia oblonga.

Davidson says that the various names for quince paste all come from ancient classical languages: In ancient Greece, quinces were known as apples of Cydonia, mela Kudonia. The French contignac, Italian cotognata, and Greek kidonopasto along with the 17th century English words quidony or quidoniac, can be traced back to this Greek origin. The Portuguese word marmelada (from which the English word marmalade is taken) and the Spanish membrillo derive from Latin melimelum (honey apple ..).

Davidson goes on to say that all these recipes preserved the quince in honey, sometimes with the addition of vinegar and spices. The same method was also used for other fruit and - wait for it - turnips. They were all put into the honey raw, and, after long storage, softened enough to eat. Only the quinces didn't soften, they just carried on being hard, so they were cooked to a solid gel (the first use of pectin). But it was a long time before other fruits were cooked ... actually, you can see that it's a lot less trouble just putting them into the honey and waiting for them to soften. I suspect the invention of jam came when two things were discovered: that (stored) cooked fruit is more delicious than raw, and that fruit stores more reliably cooked than raw - Davidson hints at this.

It's not the quince time of year here until late summer, although our quince tree has set plenty of fruit. Claudia Roden says in Arabesque that you can buy quinces all year round in Cypriot shops, but I'd have to go to London for that (and then there'd be a lot of agonising about whether or not they'd been air-freighted). I think they must be a year-round crop in Turkey, too, because, when we were there last spring for the total solar eclipse, I ate fresh poached quince every day for breakfast. Great start to the day.

Our quince tree is getting pretty ancient, and we need to replant ... can anybody recommend any particular cultivar? There seem to be quite a few, and I don't know how to set about choosing the best.

Shakespeare and St George

Today is Shakespeare's birthday, and also St George's Day. St George was a real person, but he never visited England, and probably didn't slay a dragon either. He's said to have slain the dragon on a spectacular tabletop hill in an ancient Oxfordshire landscape in the Vale of the White Horse. When my children were small, we re-enacted the scene in situ, amid much hilarity. I can't remember who played the part of the dragon. Probably me.






This picture came off Wikipedia, and shows the bronze age White Horse cut into the hillside on the right, and Dragon Hill in the rising up in middle (you'll probably need a magnifying glass). It's hard to do justice to such a magical place in any photograph - if you're ever anywhere near, it's worth a visit, particularly if you take a picnic (this suggestion may be as close as we get to food today!).

Until the middle ages, England's patron saint was the rather dour St Edmund. But crusaders brought home stories of St George, and at some point a swap was made. (Don't ask me, I'm not a medievalist!) By the time Shakespeare wrote Henry V, George was well established as England's patron saint: "Cry God for Harry, England and St George!" is the rallying cry before the battle of Agincourt. In the autumn we visited the battlefield with our two youngest children, but they - alas - are now too grown-up for in situ re-enactments of dubious historical accuracy (although this one would have been spot on after our visit to the excellent museum at Azincourt).

The whole thing is rather puzzling: what exactly is a patron saint expected to do? Particularly one with strong links to a multiplicity of other places: Palestine, Lebanon, Georgia, Bulgaria, Portugal, Majorca, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Greece, Brazil, India, Moscow, Reggio Calabria (not to mention his links with the freemasons and American boy scouts) - and that's just the basic Wikipedia list. Here's something I read, amazingly, this morning, in Honey from a Weed:

St George, the equestrian knight, was particularly loved by the Venetians, people who valued above everything the horse, and who, in the old days, were quick to translate passion into action. He remains, in spite of the Vatican, the embodiment of a principle close to English hearts, and to the Catalans, the Greeks and the Dalmatians whose patron saint he has long been. The Veneto is the place to ponder his significance: not only in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice where Carpaccio painted his exploits for the Dalmatian community, but also in San Zeno in Verona where he was depicted by an unknown painter in a beautiful 13th century fresco. The wonder of this active saint must have dawned on the Venetians during their dominion over Dalmatia, Corfu, the Peloponnese and the Cyclades, lasting four centuries, and only brought to an end in Byron's time, by the Turks.

The reference to the Vatican seems to be that successive popes demoted him (third class saint at the lowest point - what on earth does that mean?), but he's back up there with his own special day in the Roman Catholic calendar, and one can only hope that that day is today!

But the key point about George, for me, is that he was a man who stood up to be counted. He was a Christian from Cappadocia, rose to high rank in the Roman army, but refused orders to take part in the persecution of Christians. When he followed this up with criticism of the emporer, Diocletian ordered torture (on a wheel of swords) and execution (beheaded). Brave indeed.


Oh, and there's one other thing about 23rd April - it's DD's birthday. She's my oldest friend, we were at nursery school together decades ago, then both crashed our A levels together. She introduced me to Lucius, and is Eleanor's godmother. Many happy returns of the day - I hope the weather's better in Crete than here!

HotM: a cure for depression

I'm not very good at pudding, dessert, call it what you will. It's a hit or miss affair in this house, usually forgotten in the rush to get dinner on the table. There's always fruit, often a square of dark chocolate. And this is the reason I haven't done much posting this week: I wanted to post some more pudding ideas for the second Heart of the Matter event, but found myself strangely devoid of them ... so no posts, & not much "proper" cooking either.

I'm reading a wonderful book at the moment, Honey from a Weed, by Patience Gray. This morning it struck me that PG wasn't keen on pudding either. In a hefty book (380pps), there's only one chapter on puddings, entitled A few sweets. Seven, actually. The few conserves are all savoury (several ways of preserving tomatoes, lots of ways to conserve a variety of vegetables in oil). There's a lovely chapter on jams which I'll definitely be using later this summer - figs, peaches, green walnuts. But overall this is not a book for the sweet-toothed.

I'm always easily distracted, and this week's distraction from pudding posts was finding PG's reference to Virgil's sauce for cauliflower. It's a sort of mayonnaise, with garlic, anchovies, capers, breadcrumbs. PG claims that "even Provencal cooks" agree that Virgil invented aioli. This seems to me so incredible that I spent several hours looking into it, with huge lack of success, partly because in the US there's a brand of barbecue sauce called Virgil's sauce which clutters up any search, no matter how cleverly worded.

"The origin of aioli is often attributed to Virgil, even by Provencal cooks. According to the story, one day, having lost his appetite, he was advised to restore it by crushing some cloves of garlic and mixing the resulting paste with breadcrumbs. It had the desired effect, as anyone in a similar condition can prove - providing they have a pestle and mortar. Pounding fragrant things - particularly garlic, basil, parsley - is a tremendous antidote to depression. But it applies also to juniper berries, coriander seeds and the grilled fruits of the chilli pepper. Pounding these things produces an alteration in one's being - from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated. Virgil's appetite was probably improved equally by pounding garlic as by eating it."

Well, the Virgil bit seems to me to be fanciful, but the rest, the pounding, seems to me to be true. The very best cup of coffee I ever had was in the Eritrean highlands (where coffee originated), pounded in a mortar with a wooden pestle by a nomad woman with the most enormous smile, even though we were in a war zone and her life was undoubtedly materially affected by the war.

I once read that the two most intimidating cookery terms are bain marie and pestle and mortar. Well, a bain marie is just a dish of water, and a pestle and mortar is what we gave up using when we got food processors. The only thing I use mine for is crushing pepper and other spices, when I want them to be chunky. Clearly it's time to make Virgil sauce in the traditional manner. Watch this space.

We've come a long way from pudding. I've been sent lots of wonderful ideas which I'll post next week in the round-up. Please send more ... as you can see, my family and friends are deprived (and many of them kindly bring their own when they come - notably Anna, who made four of the best-ever tarts for Easter: lemon, almond with prune, chocolate with pear, and white chocolate with raspberries).

The Heart of the Matter deadline is this Sunday, 22nd April - send them to joannacary AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk, with the permalink for the round-up next week, which you'll find here, and also at the Heart of the Matter website.

The secret of cooking is the release of fragrance ...

"The secret of cooking is the release of fragrance and the art of imparting it. Fragrance: the bay laurel, Laurus nobilis, a sacred tree, how brightly, how fiercely it burns. Gather its dark-leaved branches in summer if you can. Sweet the influence of rosemary, its ungainly shrubby stems bursting with pale lilac flowers. Pungent the mint trodden underfoot on the way to the orchard. Peppery and sweet the scent of wild marjoram, origano, self-drying in July on droughty limestone hillsides; lemon-scented the clumps of wild savory, poor man's pepper, producing its minute snapdragon flowers in August, picked by quarrymen on their way down from the quarry. Irresistible the bunches of herbs sold in the market place by an old man who bothers to gather them, shrubby sprigs of thyme nibbled by hares in high pastures and green-leaved sage, and clary. Holy the Byzantine perfume of coriander leaves and seeds, recalling the smell of incense burning in a Greek chapel perched on the spine of a bare mountain. Passer-by, grasp the invitation proffered by fennel flowers and seeds on brittle stalks leaning out from the hillside. Savour the strange sweet taste of juniper berries, blue-black, picked in September on a chalk down where nothing much else will grow. Wander through the maquis in spring when shrubby sages, thyme, rosemary, cistus, lentisk and myrtle are in flower. Inhale the fragrance of the wilderness.

"I would like to transport you to the house of Maurin Bacciagulupo, the guardian of the temple of Diana at Luni. In front of his door on the plain of Luni stands the skeleton of the Roman temple. Maurin's threshing floor is divided from it only by the twisted branches of an immeasurably old vine. Looking west you see the great extent of Tyrrhenian Sea at a distance and the long line of hills which terminates in the promontory, the Punta Bianca. Looking eastwards, are the high Apuanian mountains, in springtime still capped with snow, behind which barrier lurk the mysterious backlands of the Lunigiana. On the lower slopes the mountain villages adhere to their mountain background like lumps of coral.

"Maurin used to keep seven bulls. He was a bachelor as befits the guardian of this temple. In his house was a spacious kitchen with red brick floor, the high ceiling made of beams, whitewashed. There was a big hearth, a bottle gas stove, a table, chairs, a settle. Behind the settle was an array of copper and aluminium pans suspended from a wooden framework on the wall. At the window was a stone sink, the drinking water kept in a large terracotta Tuscan bowl with a glaze of green marbling inside. The water was drawn from the well outside. The cheese was kept in the kitchen drawer out of the way of the cats, and the bread in the bread chest. The cantina across the passage was well stocked with wine, both white and red.

"This man had always lived on the farm within sight of the sea and in touch with the sea breeze. The house was exposed to the moon's rise and the sun's set. He had the lilting speech of the Genoese. He had reduced his diet to a very few things because he refused to touch anything that was not genuine. This eliminated bread baked in an electric oven, industrially confected sausages and salami, cheese which had been artifically matured, wine which had been tampered with.

"He prepared the meal with deliberate movements and a certain solemnity. The pasta was cooked in an enormous aluminium cauldron in a great quantity of boiling water, salted of course with sea salt. When it was al dente he strained it through an impressive colander at the sink, and then placing an ample white china bowl on the kitchen table, at which we were already sipping his delicious white wine, he poured in the pasta, then the sauce, and with great deliberation, turned the spaghetti about with two forks to distribute the sauce. The fragrance of this sauce, whether it was a pesto or made of fresh tomatoes slowly simmered with garlic and herbs, was not only communicated to the pasta but to his guests. Beato te! Maurin."

This is taken from Honey from a Weed, an extraordinary book I am reading at the moment, by Patience Gray. It was published in 1986, and describes her life and the food she cooked and ate in various Mediterranean locations from the early 1960s. I was originally going to give you only the first paragraph, but this passage is so entirely whole, so closely argued, that I wanted to share the whole chapter with you. Food for thought, and of the highest quality. No wonder it's never been out of print.

Borodinsky bread

In Waitrose the other day, I bought a loaf of Russian bread made by the Village Bakery, founded in the Lake District in 1976, by Andrew Whitley. This rye loaf, flavoured with coriander, is about the best shop-bought loaf I've ever tasted. It disappeared in no time.

On the packaging (shame it's a plastic bag, not a nice brown paper one), there's a story about how the Borodinsky loaf got it's name. I don't believe a word of it, but that's a historian for you, always fighting against folklore - and spoiling a good story!

It is said that in 1812, to raise the morale of Russian soldiers before the crucial battle of Borodino, a general's wife baked some special sweet rye loaves. Thus fortified the Russians overcame Napoleon - and the bread was christened Borodinsky.

The problem - one of the problems - is that the Russians didn't really win at Borodino, it was pretty inconclusive, and allowed Napoleon to keep going on to Moscow, where his grande armee starved that terrible winter. In his book Bread Matters (which I was too mean to buy even though it's only £10 in Waterstones), Whitley names the general's wife. But I haven't been able to find any other source for the story, despite wasting several hours on it this week. Nor have I been able to find a recipe for it, other than that given in Whitley's fine book.

The story may be romantic rubbish, but the bread is most emphatically of the highest quality. You should try it even if you think you don't like rye bread.

Pythagoras' food theorem

Talk at breakfast turned to maths. Horatio produced a copy of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, and read us the following, amazing, passage about Pythagoras:

He founded a religion, of which the main tenets were the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans. His religion was embodied in a religious order, which, here and there, acquired control of the State and established a rule of the saints. But the unregenerate hankered after beans, and sooner or later rebelled.

Some of the rules of the Pythagorean order were:

1. to abstain from beans
2. not to pick up what was fallen
3. not to touch a white cock
4. not to break bread
5. not to step over a crossbar
6. not to stir the fire without iron
7. not to eat from a whole loaf
8. not to pluck a garland
9. not to sit on a quart
10. not to eat the heart
11. not to walk on highways
12. not to let swallows share one's roof
13. when the pot is taken off the fire, not to leave the mark of it in the ashes, but to stir them together
14. do not look in a mirror beside a light
15. when you rise from the bedclothes, roll them together and smooth out the impress of the body.


Russell explains the transmigration of souls with a little quotation from Twelfth Night:

Clown: what is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wildfowl?
Malvolio: that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.


On the question of food, it's a little puzzling: no beans, and very difficult to eat bread (essentially, it seems you have to get someone who is not a Pythagorean to give you some), not to mention no offal, difficulty picking salad and herbs, and problems with cooking because of all the rules about fires and cooking pots.

Or do you think he was making a wider point about religion and rational thought?

Old English cookery

My friend DD rang this morning to ask if I could mind her shop for an hour while she popped out. Great - a good chance for a browse, as if I need any more books in this house. But I do ...

First was a paperback copy of Michael Smith's Fine English Cookery for £2. This is a real classic of English cookery, elegant English cookery before all those French cooks fled from revolutionary France and we got the taste for anglicised foreign cuisine. Jane Grigson says in the blurb: "He starts from the reasonable assumption that people who sat on Chippendale chairs in elegant houses were unlikely to be eating filthy food from their Wedgwood dinner services. Therefore what they ate is worth exploring." I can't wait to cook from it.

The second was a real bargain, £10 for an original 1814 copy of Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper, for the use and ease of Ladies, Housekeepers, Cooks &c, written purely from practice; dedicated to the Hon Lady Elizabeth Warburton, whom the Author lately served as Housekeeper; Consisting of several Hundred Original Receipts, most of which never appeared in print Great title, and one of the sources for Smith's book. It was a bit of a bestseller, and this copy (leather-bound and with the original owner's inked notes) is "A new edition, in which are inserted some celebrated receipts by other modern Authors"

It belonged to Elizabeth Cooper of Ox Close House, near Ripon, and when she died in 1859 it was given to her granddaughter Annie Harland. They both obviously used it a great deal, because the binding has been mended, and needs mending again. In the back, Annie has written a detailed instruction to take the stains out of flannel, which begins: rub with yolk of egg before washing.

The book falls open at the recipe "to preserve oranges carved", which turns out to be marmalade (topical, as I'm just making a batch of marmalade now). On the same page is a recipe for preserving quinces which will be useful in the autumn. Some of the recipes have charming names - bride cake for a wedding. Some sound dire but may well be worth pursuing: to make a peas soup for Lent, for which you need "blue boiling peas" - I can only suppose that she means Puy lentils, in which case, absolutely delicious with anchovies, onion, cloves, carrots, parnsips and a bunch of herbs.

And what about this? I'm posting it in its entirety:

To make a catchup to keep seven years. Take two quarts of the oldest strong beer you can get, put to it one quart of red wine, three quarters of a pound of anchovies, three ounces of shalots peeled; half an ounce of mace, the same of nutmegs; a quarter of an ounce of cloves, three large races of ginger cut in slices, boil it all together over a moderate fire till one third is wasted, the next day bottle it for use; it will carry to the East Indies.

Industrial quantities of a wonderfully flavoursome brew - but I suppose you would need them if you were sailing to the Far East with only barrels of rotting food to eat. I might work on reducing the quantities, because it sounds good (although I have no idea how you'd find out what is a race of ginger - trial and error, I suppose).

I am SO looking forward to confounding the idea that English cooking is, at best, dire, and, at worst, doesn't exist.