Category Archives: Food – Uses and Misuses

An alternative Napoleon

27 October 2017

Naposmile

 

In our universe, Genoa ceded the island of Corsica to France in 1768. Napoleone Buonaparte was thus born in 1769 as a subject of the King of France. (Later he changed his name to Napoleon Bonaparte to make it sound more French). Napoleon was sent to a French military academy, graduated as an artillery officer and then became a general, a consul and an emperor. He won many battles. But perhaps Napoleon’s most lasting legacy was the Code Napoléon, the French code of civil law, one of the few documents, it has been said, which has influenced the whole world.

In a parallel universe, Genoa never ceded Corsica to France.

Thus Napoleone Buonaparte, as a citizen of Genoa, never changed his name. He didn’t go to a military academy but studied cookery in Genoa.

He began his career as a pastry chef. It was immediately obvious to those around him that he was phenomenally talented. Determined to make a name for himself,  he toured Northern Italy (in what he later called his “Italian Campaign”) exhibiting his cakes and distributing free slices. He seems to have invented a new cake in every place he visited, often breaking with the most hallowed traditions. Those which achieved lasting fame were probably his lemon-flavoured Marengo Cake (Torta Marengo in Italian) and the Lodi Cake (Torta Lodi – cherries and walnuts). Read more…

Recipe no. 1 – Sweet and sour rememboree

26 July 2015

(A poem with instructions on how to cook memories)



(Listen to the poem here)


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Rue

Start with the and.
Select a photograph of someone you have
lost or crossed,
shared days then parted ways with
and watch it softly
(think of a gaze on tip-toes),
five minutes for each side,
first at the picture, then
at the picture gone,
turning slowly, clockwise,
like time itself
until you have
a good emulsion in your mind.

Read more…

Baristi d’Italia

28 October 2012

(listen to the poem here)




Sometimes arriving time-zonked, tweedle-kneed and nearly dumb
in Frankfurt or in London or in some other airport
where people seem to have been stranded many
months ago on strangely molten furniture,
I stumble into a counter which claims that it provides
espresso. As I go grimly inching up the North Face
of my jet lag I pay for one and then I grimace
through the blizzard in my head for two or three
hundred seconds until I come upon a patch of clearish-
mindedness  from where I see  them frownandfumbling
with the filter basket  and realize my coffee is
beyond the rocks, beyond the trees, beyond  the hairpin bends,
beyond the chiming of regret, among those rainy clouds,
still miles along the path to the slippery future.
Back home in Rome, any barista worth his sugar Read more…

Reciprocating Soup – The Tantalising Cuisine of Google Translate

1 October 2012
Squashes

They seem harmless but look out for avalanches

The last time I went to Istanbul I had supper at Çiya Sofrasi, a restaurant which is by now famous (a long article about it appeared in the New Yorker and it has also been mentioned by the New York Times). It serves traditional food from distant Turkish provinces which  is so different from the standard fare of Istanbul that the locals I was with couldn’t figure out what we were eating.

The day before I went I consulted the restaurant’s website, which had a huge list of dishes but, unfortunately, only in Turkish. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to use Google Translate to find out what was being served. What I found instead was that I was transported across a mental ocean into a new world of uncharted cuisine.  Read more…

If vegetables be the food of music

7 February 2010

I had bought lots of vegetables to make minestrone tonight but then I came across this video:

So now I have got my tools out and am making my own orchestra. One can always cook the vegetables afterwards (and maybe the soup will taste better after you have played some Haydn or Mozart – that’s just an idea. I am not sure who the tastiest musicians are yet). Read more…

Recipe no. 2: Sumida River Empty Cake

17 December 2008

(Listen to the poem here)




First buy a ring cake,

which you will not eat.

A chance to buy a flavour you don’t like.

Cut out the middle hole, be small

and try to take forever. Think that

a mouse is lapping up Sumida river.

Discard the cake, carry the hole,

use all your fifty fingers, carefully,

within the skein there can be dreams. Read more…

Music for eating peaches to (and papayas and mangosteens as well)

31 August 2008

mangosteenUnfortunately, I know next to nothing about Vietnam and even less about Vietnamese music, but I have been wanting to share my appreciation of Huong Thanh ever since I heard her cd Mangustao. In it she blends Vietnamese music with jazz in a way which
joins hands surprisingly. There is a lilt in her singing which reminds me of some of the creatures which you see in an aquarium which suddenly flick their tails to move along unexpectedly or else makes me think that the line of music is walking along a plank or springboard which suddenly bounces back up when you reach the end of it. Here is a sample of her singing (From “Fragile Beauty”, another beautiful record.)

And here is her web page (not easy to navigate, you have to click on that little rectangle in the middle to open up the menu) which plays another piece of music. As I listened to this second piece of music I went to get myself a peach and sat down to peel and eat it. After a while I realised that I was cutting and eating with special attention and enjoyment. I had always known there was music for marching and there is music I put on which makes cleaning easier and there is music which helps to wind down and clear your mind and music to give you drive, but I had never realised there was music for eating fruit. It put me in mind of the Vietnamese film the scent of the Green Papaya where cutting fruit and vegetables always seems to be an ecstatic experience. I was so caught up by the peach and the sound that I didn’t realise that the music was a
loop which went round and round in circles. Luckily it was a peach and not a water melon and it only took me ten minutes to finish it and come out of my dream.

Engineered Food

22 August 2008

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The Polish science-fiction writer Stanislav Lem once set a story in a world in which the energy of children running about and playing was harnessed for power production.

As I walk round in Rome in Summer, I think about that whenever I am  knocked off the pavement by blasts of hot air issuing from air-conditioned buildings. I suppose that super-heating pedestrians is good for the economy since it stimulates cold drink consumption, but it also seems obvious that there must be something more useful we can do with this hot air than pumping it out into the streets. Couldn’t we set up little welding shops or or have mini pineapple plantations there ?  And think of all the heat jet engines produce, we should at the very least be able to make use of that to iron everybody’s clothes before they land and dispel that jaded transcontinental look which makes baggage carousels so depressing even when you do get your baggage. Read more…

Stalin’s socks and Goethe’s thistles

19 July 2008

6a00e5502c099d883400e553a9ed798833-800wi(NOTE – The International Year of the Potato was in 2008)

I know several people who are constantly being reminded that this year we are all supposed to be celebrating  the International Year of the Potato (Peru’s gift to the world). The Colorado Potato Beetle (Colorado’s gift to the world), the most serious insect potato pest, is also celebrating.

Very few people, however,  are aware that this is Global Artichoke Week (because it isn’t) and in view of this I have decided to post Pablo Neruda’s Ode to the Artichoke.

This poem is one of his Elementary Odes. He wrote three books of Elementary Odes, which number almost 180 in total, covering such themes as the birds of Chile, conger eel soup, thread, numbers, laziness, a watch in the night, barbed wire, his socks, the liver, soap, the smell of firewood, bicycles, a large tuna in the market,   a ship in a bottle,  a village cinema, the colour green, the migration of birds, clouds, stones, scissors and tomatoes, maize, lemons and lots of other plants and foods.  My favourite of his vegetable odes is actually the Ode to the Onion, from which I recite every time I chop one:

y al cortarte
el cuchillo en la cocina
sube la única lágrima
sin pena.
Nos hiciste llorar sin afligirnos

(And when we cut you/with our knifes in the kitchen/it prompts the only tear/devoid of sorrow/You made us cry without distressing us)

Read more…