Family – Page 3 – the heart thrills

SALT AND SWEET

Bangkok, 5 February, 2015

A few weeks ago, I visited a couple of electric arc furnaces which were recycling scrap steel. It was a very interesting visit, the first time I had seen this type of furnace in action.

They are a nice example of a vital step in what the Chinese call a “circular economy”, an economy in which the materials we use do not simply get thrown away after we’ve finished with them, but are collected, recovered, and reused.

But actually, what I want to focus on in this post is the dinner we were served during the visit, or rather on one course of that dinner. I should explain that since these furnaces work on electricity and since electricity is expensive in Thailand during the day, the furnaces are run at night. So the visit of the furnaces started at 8 o’clock in the evening, and the first company we visited kindly offered us dinner to fortify us for the hot and dusty visit which awaited us. Since this was a Chinese-owned company, we were served a Chinese-style dinner which, after my five years spent in China, brought a nostalgic mist to my eye. As is usual in China, the dinner ended with fresh fruit. But this fruit course had an interesting twist. We were served fresh pineapple with a soy sauce dip. Soy sauce! That is not something I had ever thought of combining with pineapple. But actually it was delicious.

This is the only photo I could find on the (English-language) web which in any way resembled what we found before us at dessert time, but even this is for a recipe where the pineapple is fried, which explains the presence in the photo of the coriander (to be used as a final garnish). I take this lack of photos to be an indicator that I may be one of the few in the English-speaking world who has tried this particular combination of sweet and salt. But readers are free to disabuse me of my belief.

In any event, as I let my taste buds deal with this interesting sweet-salt combination, I remembered a conversation we had had around the Christmas lunch table about precisely this issue: the mixing of salt and sweet. Our son had maintained that it was not natural to mix sweet and salt, and more generally that different flavours should be kept separate. Our daughter maintained that there were many dishes where salt and sweet were combined, which suggested that actually it was quite natural to mix sweet and salt. I was torn. As my long-suffering wife knows only too well, I object to mixing things on my plate: the vegetables are to be kept neatly separated from the meat and from each other, the dressing from the salad should not be allowed to leak over to the meat, etc. So on these grounds, I also feel that sweet and salt should not mix. Yet I have to acknowledge that there are dishes where the sweet and salt combination is exceedingly pleasing. After the pineapple and soy sauce dip experience, I resolved to do some research (a.k.a. web browsing) on the topic.

I’ve now done the research and am ready to report back, although I must confess to not having much to report. All agree that “common sense” suggests that salt and sweet do not mix, yet all agree that actually many of us do like to mix the two. Why is this? As far as I can make out, no-one has really figured it out. One possible answer is biochemical. The sodium ions of salt somehow enhance all taste buds: “there’s evidence that applying a sodium-channel blocker (TTX) can dramatically inhibit the activity of all taste receptors, suggesting that sodium plays a key role in the cellular detection of every taste (and not just the taste of salty things) … This would explain why food without any salt is so hopelessly boring: it might be literally harder for our various taste receptors to get excited.” So mixing salt with sweet enhances sweet because of a biochemical pathway we are born with. Just to make the whole discussion sound even more scientific, I throw in here a close-up of a taste bud on a tongue, which is what sodium ions seem to be enhancing.

But why would we have evolved to have that biochemical pathway? One possible answer is that because we humans are omnivores, we’re wired to desire many different foods and tastes. It’s bad for us to eat just one thing, so our sense of taste has evolved to give us greater gratification if we mix tastes. My wife will be very pleased to hear that there is a scientific underpinning to her insistence on mixing foods and tastes.

Let me celebrate this new understanding on my part of my biological processes by sharing with readers some of the wonderful sweet-salt dishes which I have stumbled across in my life. Where to start? Well, at the beginning, I guess, with the first such dish I ever remember trying, lamb with mint sauce. My English grandmother had taken me to visit an uncle and aunt and assorted cousins, and my aunt served us lamb with mint sauce for lunch.

She served it with two veg, as is de rigeur for any English meat dish. In this case, I remember distinctly that the veg in question were that most English of combinations, peas and potatoes (she also made a magnificent apple crumble, by the way; no apple crumble I have ever eaten since has tasted so good).

Mint sauce is really easy to make, by the way, about as easy as lamb chops. I give an executive-summary recipe at the end of the post for those readers who are interested. What I think is important to point out here is that the recipe calls for a mix of sugar and vinegar. In my humble opinion the best combination is actually sweet, salt, and acid or tartness. To my mind, that’s what made the pineapple and soy sauce so good, the fact that the pineapple is also tart. Dragon fruit, a much milder fruit, was being served along with the pineapple. When I asked if that too should be dipped in the soy sauce, our hosts pursed their lips and gave it as their considered opinion that it wouldn’t work.

Lamb with mint sauce is incredibly English (and I mean English. I don’t think the Scots or the Welsh eat it). It is so English that the French made fun of Les Anglais because of it – the French consider the use of mint sauce to be beyond the cooking pale. Our friends Goscinny and Uderzo, who wrote the Asterix and Obelix stories, had mint sauce play a major role in our heroes’ adventures in Britain, with the governor of province at one point shouting that if his men did not find the pair (who had just disappeared from prison) he would have his commanders boiled and served with mint sauce to the lions. To which the commanders commented how horrible that would be – for the lions.

The French loved it, lapping up the fun being poked at English cuisine. But I will ignore the smirking French and concentrate on another great example of English cuisine which is also a sweet-salt dish, roast pork and apple sauce. I first had this delicious dish as a boy scout. It was summer, the end of the school year, that time in the calendar when England can often be bathed in golden light rather than be grey and sodden. For our last outing of the year, the scout master had the brilliant idea of buying a whole pig and roasting it on a spit in the woods. I have this crystal clear memory of sitting around the spit, listening to the fat crackle, breathing in the smell of cooking meat, watching the scout master sharpen the large carving knife, while the sunlight dappled the ground all around us. It’s the closest I have ever felt to being a Cro-Magnon man.

And then there was the discovery of the exquisite taste of roast pork and apple sauce, a large dollop of which was dumped onto our metal field plates along with a big slab of pork meat and crackling.

Those readers interested in knowing how to make this sauce should scroll down to the end of the post. I just want to note that cooking apples should be used. They are tarter than eating apples. It’s the tartness thing again. One can also add lemon zest, presumably to add yet more tartness.

Of course, the English do not have a monopoly in Europe on sweet-salt dishes. Allow me to introduce here a dish I discovered and came to love when we moved to Vienna: Tafelspitz. There is a venerable ritual to cooking Tafelspitz, but when you reduce it to its essentials it is beef meat (topside or top round) boiled slowly over many hours with a medley of root vegetables – carrot, celeriac, parsnip and the like – and a piece of marrow bone. It is normally served like this:

You can start with a cup of the broth which is engendered by the boiling of the meat, just to whet your appetite. You can then turn your attention to the meat proper, which you will eat with the vegetables, possibly some fried grated potatoes, and – to spice up what is otherwise a rather bland dish – two types of sauce, a cream-based chive sauce and apple-horseradish sauce.

My earnest suggestion is that you ignore the chive sauce in the front of the photo and go with the apple-horseradish sauce behind it. It is just a variant of the apple sauce I described earlier; you simply add grated horseradish. If you make this sauce at home, my further suggestion is to be generous with the amount of horseradish you add. The best Tafelspitz I ever had was served with an apple-horseradish sauce that made my eyes water slightly. I don’t want to sound like a broken record, endlessly repeating myself, but tartness really helps appreciation of the sweet-salt taste.

Both the French and the Italians have a similar dish of boiled meat, pot-au-feu in the first case and bollito misto in the second. My French grandmother made an excellent pot-au-feu and I am very fond of it, but since it is normally eaten with mustard I will drop it from this discussion. We shall focus instead on bollito misto, a dish which is very popular in northern Italy and (as the name suggests) consists of a variety of boiled meats: cuts of beef and veal, cotechino (a pork-based sausage), and sections of hen or capon.

My wife reminisces from time to time that her father was very fond of bollito misto, eating it like most northern Italians do with a sauce called mostarda – actually, mostarda di Cremona. In a country known for the fierce independence of its cities, it will come as no surprise to the readers that probably every city in northern Italy has its own variety of mostarda. Despite its name, the sauce has only a little to do with mustard. It is really a mix of candied fruit which is given a kick by the addition of mustard powder (that tartness thing again…). Those slices of fruit in the photo above are the mostarda, but I give here a more direct picture.

My wife confesses to never having liked mostarda; she can’t even stand the smell. Personally, I have never tried it, but a number of sites do support my wife’s assertion, mentioning that the taste of mostarda is an “acquired taste”. This is normally code for saying that something tastes revolting the first several/many times you try it. In any event, if my wife says it’s not nice, then that’s good enough for me! No spoonful of it shall ever pass my lips. For those readers who will ignore these warnings and wish to try it, though, I give a brief recipe at the end of the post.

I feel that I cannot move away from mostarda without mentioning the somewhat similar chutney sauce one finds in the UK, or at least one found when I was a boy. Although “chutney” as a word has Indian roots, what I ate as a boy was several removes from things Indian. The most popular brand back then was a mango chutney which went by the name of Major Grey’s Chutney and was sold by Crosse & Blackwell. The story went that a certain Major Grey, a British officer in India, had surveyed the local Indian chutneys and then invented his own, more British, chutney, which he proceeded to bring back to the motherland when he retired, to remind him of the Good Old Days. When I was a boy I rather imagined this Major Grey to look like this

fighting heroically against savage natives on the Northwest frontier and getting a VC for his –quite literal – pains. But alas! this appears to be pure legend. It seems that something similar to mostarda, some sort of fruit conserve, existed already in the UK and the Brits in India took the idea with them and adapted it to local ingredients. So what this chutney will usually have as ingredients is mangoes, raisins, vinegar, onions, sugar, and spices. Crosse & Blackwell also include lime juice and tamarind juice. As you can imagine from the ingredients, this chutney is both sweet and tart. Again, for heroic readers who want to make this sauce from scratch, scroll to the end of the post.

I haven’t eaten this kind of chutney in many decades, but when I was young my favourite way of eating it was with slices of cold meat (the chutney is in the round bowl to the left of the photo below).

This was an especially popular dish in pubs, where this photo was taken. Sitting here in Thailand, I feel a sudden nostalgia for the English country pubs whose bars I propped up in my youth, so I am moved to throw in a photo of a nice country pub.

Like Superman, I now vault over to the US and alight somewhere in the open ranges of the Midwest, for no better reason than having this feeling that my next salt-sweet sauce – barbecue sauce – was invented around there somewhere. That being said, my wife and I didn’t try it there. We were just discussing this point and we reckon that it was somewhere between Boston and Washington in the early 1980s. Wherever it was, we stared open-mouthed at these large racks of ribs smothered in this dark reddish brown sauce.

But very soon we were closing our mouths over those ribs. Ah, that sauce! … But I should say: those sauces. In this little research I’ve done I have discovered that there are dozens of different barbecue sauces. I thought the Italian quarrels about where the best mostarda is made were fierce, but boy! the arguments about what place in the US makes the best barbecue sauce are right up there. I’m going to keep my head low without backing any particular sauce. I’m merely going to say that wherever the sauces are made they all seem to have sugar (preferably brown), tomato ketchup, vinegar, and some salt, to which various spices are added in varying levels and in different combinations (Worcestershire sauce, pepper, paprika, mustard, chili, cayenne, and on and on). That combination of sweet and tart again, to challenge the salt of the meat. Readers can look at the end of a post for condensed recipe of an excellent sauce from Kansas City (but don’t tell anyone I said it).

Deary me, I seem to have gone on for quite a while here, and I’m sure I haven’t covered one-hundredth of the sweet-salt dishes enjoyed around the world. On top of it, I’ve only mentioned meat dishes; it makes me sound a total carnivore, red in tooth and claw. But there was that fish dish in Shanghai … and there are all those sweet salad sauces to pour on vegetables … But I have to stop. I’ll just add two final combinations of salt and sweet which show that meat (or fish) is not the only food the delight of which is heightened by the salt-sweet experience: one which probably every person on the planet has enjoyed by now, what with the prevalence of fast food joints, french fries and ketchup

and one which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, chocolate and French baguette

Mmm, so good!

So give your taste buds a whirl and douse them with sugar and salt – and a dash of vinegar, or horseradish, or something tart. Enjoy!

-o0o-

Mint sauce: Strip the leaves off a bunch of mint, sprinkle them with a pinch of salt, and chop finely. Place the result in a bowl, add 1 level tablespoon of caster sugar and pour over the mix 4 tablespoons of boiling water. Stir and leave to cool. Stir in 4 tablespoons of vinegar. Add more water or vinegar to suit your taste.

Apple sauce: Take a number of cooking apples, peel them, core them, and chop them up. Put the apples in a saucepan and add water. Once can also add lemon zest. Cover and cook over a low heat until the apples have gone soft and mushy. At which point take off the heat and beat in a knob of butter and a teaspoon of sugar. Cool.

Mostarda di Cremona: Begin by washing the various fruit: pears, quinces, cherries, apricots, figs, and peaches (although I’m sure you can vary the fruit as you wish). Cut the apricots and peaches into halves or quarters (depending on their size) and remove their stones, peel. Core and quarter the pears and quinces. Dry all the fruit after preparation. Add the sugar – a lot of sugar! half a kilo for every kilo of fruit, more if you want your mostarda sweet (but for reasons suggested above, I would go easy on the sweetness and maybe go heavier on the mustard powder). Pour some squeezed orange juice over it. Let the whole rest for 24 hours, gently turning the pieces a couple of times. By the end of this time the sugar will have dissolved. Drain the fruit well – without losing the syrup! Bring the syrup slowly to a boil, and let it boil gently until its volume is reduced by half. Pour the remaining syrup back over the fruit. The sugar in the now-concentrated syrup will extract more moisture from the fruit, which will begin to shrink and firm up. Concentrate the syrup again and steep the fruit in it overnight again. Dissolve several tablespoons of mustard powder in some white wine vinegar. Bring the mixture gently to a boil and let it bubble for a few minutes. In the meantime, drain the fruit again, and concentrate the syrup again. Put the candied fruit into jars, add the mustard powder infusion, and then add the hot syrup. The amount of infusion you add will determine of course how much of a kick your mostarda will have. Cover the jars and put them on a cool dark shelf. The mostarda will be ready to eat in two weeks’ time.

Major Grey’s chutney: (this is one of many recipes for this kind of chutney) Combine 4 cups of 5-6 medium-sized chopped mangoes, 1 cup of brown sugar, half a cup of molasses, 1 cup of vinegar, 1 cup of coarsely chopped onions, three-quarters of a cup of golden raisins, half a cup of seeded and chopped limes, half a cup of peeled, seeded and chopped orange, a quarter of a cup of peeled, seeded and chopped lemon, and finally a bunch of spices: half a cup of grated ginger root , 3 cloves of minced garlic, 1 tablespoon of mustard seed, 1 tablespoon of dried red pepper flakes. Cook for about 30 minutes, stirring often. Add 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro, 1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon, a quarter of a teaspoon of ground cloves, a quarter of a teaspoon of ground allspice. Cook for another 10 minutes or so, until chutney starts to thicken. Ladle chutney into a jar and close it air-tight.

Barbecue sauce: (from Kansas City) In a saucepan over medium heat, stir together ½ cup of ketchup, 2 tablespoons of brown sugar, 1 tablespoon of cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, ¼ teaspoon of salt, ¼ teaspoon of mustard powder, 1 teaspoon of garlic powder, and a dash of hot pepper sauce. Bring to a simmer, then remove from heat and allow to cool.

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MY SWEET LITTLE BIKE

Beijing, 21 August 2015

When I was young (“so much younger than today” as the Beatles sang so long ago), I was a fanatic of the bike. Well, at least during the summer holidays I was. I would spend them at my grandmother’s house in France, where there were always a bunch of bicycles, big and small, old and new, lying around and ready to be grabbed and ridden. My cousins spent the summer next door, so we would spend endless afternoons bicycling around the Beaujolais countryside which surrounded us – I’ve already written about this in a previous post.

When I was 10 or 11, my parents decided that it was time for me to have my own bike. They took me down to the main bicycle shop in the nearby market town. After a certain amount of negotiation, we agreed on a Peugeot bike. How I loved that bike! It was an exquisite light green colour, with a real leather saddle, four gears, silver mudguards, white-walled tyres, a little satchel hanging behind the saddle with all the equipment needed to mend a puncture, a pump hooked to the crossbar, lights that worked with a dynamo which clicked into place on the front wheel and which purred as I flew down the darkened lanes at night… As you can see, that bike has been etched deeply into my memory. I spent many a happy moment cleaning it, burnishing it, oiling it, pumping its tyres. Whenever I arrived for a holiday, after a hasty peck on my grandmother’s cheek, it was to my bike that I rushed, to give it a loving wipe and the first whirl of the holidays down the lanes.

Well, I grew up and moved on. The bike stayed mournfully propped against the garage wall, while I graduated to motorized transport – the moped first, then the car. I would give it a pat from time to time, and then nephews and nieces began to use it, then I stopped going to my grandmother’s house, then one day it was gone.

It’s not as if I betrayed my bike with another. Apart from a year or two when my wife and I were living near Lake Maggiore and did everything by bike – going to work of course, but also the shopping, the post office, the cleaning, and simply touring around – I just stopped riding bikes. It’s difficult to ride a bike in cities, you know, and then the kids came along, and then, and then … Even in China, empire of the bicycle (well, fast becoming the empire of the car), I never rode a bicycle.

Until now.

I won’t go into the details, suffice to say that by pure happenstance I’ve been given the use of a bike, and I have a place to park it safely, both at work and at home. So now every day, I ride to and from work. On this sweet little thing.

OK, it’s not a cool racing bike like this one

or this one

or even this one (whose green rather reminds me of the green of my Peugeot bicycle)

And it doesn’t give me an excuse to dress up in this unutterably cool way

Nor does it allow me to go around in this intriguing way

or this extraordinary way (apparently this bike works on water too)

But that’s OK, it allows me to reconnect with the bike. And it gives my thighs a really good work-out! My daughter will be very pleased to hear that. She’s always telling me and my wife to do more exercise.

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the sweet bike: my pic
Racing bike-1: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-V3gpmEz-om0/UxP8LMHKuCI/AAAAAAAAACI/rDNuF4gP888/s1600/Imageu.jpg [in http://nurhayara.blogspot.com/%5D
Racing bike-2: http://www.conceptbook.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/bicicletta-aria-marco-mainardi.jpg [in http://www.conceptbook.org/aria-marco-mainardi/%5D
Futuristic bike-1: http://cfs16.tistory.com/image/5/tistory/2011/01/11/11/41/4d2bc34ce7c68 [in http://myblueday.tistory.com/6676%5D
Racer: http://cyclingnz.com/profiles/a497_DSC_3075.JPG [in http://cyclingnz.com/cnz5_profiles.php?n=54%5D
Racer-horizontal: http://proporzionedivina.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/day9buatois1web1.jpg [in http://proporzionedivina.wordpress.com/2011/01/%5D
Futuristic bike-2: http://images.lainformacion.com/cms/bicicleta-anfibia/2012_10_29_PHOTO-ff2bca1b09886ed6447d13ad8dbedb0b-1351511060-9.jpg?width=995&height=650&type=height&id=HejqmIQJgDeHTw3t1hrgo1&time=1351512206&project=lainformacion [in http://noticias.lainformacion.com/economia-negocios-y-finanzas/diseno-e-ingenieria/las-bicicletas-del-futuro_oe04bAJ4zY9qK4YrwN4UX1/%5D

CHEESE, GLORIOUS CHEESE!

Beijing, 24 June 2014

My wife and I were having our usual chat with our daughter via FaceTime when she announced that she and her flat mate had been discussing the vital question of why cheeses were different from each other.

Well! That was more than enough bait for a nerd like myself to rise to. With eyes a-shinin’ and lips a-lickin’, I started to research the topic. It was actually a question I had also often posed myself: how on earth did you get so many different-tasting products out of the same rather bland starting material, milk?

I am proud to announce the results of my research. The answer is …. “The most important agents include the four following elements: rennet, starter bacteria and associated enzymes, milk enzymes, second starter bacteria and associated enzymes, and non-starter bacteria”. OK, that’s not very clear, so let me expand a little.

The first step in cheese making is curdling. In fresh, unpasteurized milk, curdling happens naturally. Attack by bacteria floating around in the air and settling on the milk leads to the formation of lactic acid, and it is heightened acidity that causes milk to curdle, separating out into solid curds and liquid whey. But we humans have learned to help the process along. Rennet, which is a complex of enzymes, seems to have been an early favourite for inducing curdling. An interesting theory I read is that our ancestors discovered the milk-curdling properties of rennet when they used animal stomachs as storage vessels for milk. FYI, mammalian stomachs naturally contain rennet as an evolutionary response to milk drinking (which is what makes a mammal a mammal rather than, say, a bird or a reptile). It allows young mammals to digest their mothers’ milk.

Or you can use acids. Given that you want to eat the result, you probably don’t want to use sulphuric acid or hydrochloric acid, even though I’m sure they would do the trick. Naturally-occurring (and edible) acids like vinegar and lemon juice will do nicely.

Or you don’t wait for some random bacteria floating around to attack the milk. Instead, you deliberately inoculate milk with so-called starter bacteria (often adding rennet in a second step). Presumably from previous trials and errors which occurred who knows how many centuries ago in monastery cellars or elsewhere

these various strains of bacteria are known to give specific tastes to the final cheese. They will chemically attack the milk, and later the curds, in differing ways, giving rise to chemical products with different tastes.

In any event, one way or the other you will end up with curds

and whey

Like little Miss Muffet who sat on a tuffet, you can already eat the curds and whey if you so wish, preferably before a spider turns up and spoils your appetite.

That is basically what cottage cheese is, loose curds

while after a period when whey was considered only good for poor peasants, whey-based drinks are gaining a certain popularity with the health conscious.

Alternatively, you can take the curds and start pressing them to get rid of liquid. Depending on how much you press them and process them thereafter, you’ll get a whole series of fresh cheeses: pot cheese, farmer’s cheese, hoop cheese, sour milk cheese, curd cheese, cream cheese, and a thousand others made in non-English cultures. I will mention three of these, the Italian mozzarella (where the curds are actually stretched and kneaded), the French fromage blanc, and the Austrian topfen: mozzarella, because it has to be the best cheese in the world; fromage blanc, because my French grandmother used to serve it when I was young and I always have it when I go back to France; topfen, because I discovered this cheese in the form of the dish topfenstrudel when we moved to Vienna. I will let this photo of farmer’s cheese stand for the whole class of fresh cheeses.

Let me also mention boursin cheese, because (a) my daughter, who set me off on this posting, likes it, (b) it is a good example of the mixing of other ingredients – in this case garlic and fines herbes – with fresh cheese to make a new product (walnuts is another popular ingredient in this category) and (c) when I was young it had a really cool advertising line, “Du pain, du vin, du boursin”

Fresh cheese is just that, fresh. If you don’t process it further, it will spoil. The most basic preserver of cheese is salt, which has been used for millennia to preserve all sorts of food (salt also firms up the texture of cheese, by the way). So as a salute to salt, let me first deal with brined cheeses, which are cheeses that are matured in a brine solution. This is the main type of cheese produced in the Middle East and the Mediterranean areas: Greek feta, Cypriot halloumi, South-Eastern European sirene, Romanian telemea, Middle Eastern akkawi, Egyptian mish (which is also pickled), …. I will let a photo of feta cheese stand in for the class of brined cheeses.

In other cases, … well, the pressed curds seem to be processed in a bewilderingly different number of ways. They will always be salted (to put off spoilage). Some will be heated (which will kill off some, but not all, bacteria). Others will be washed (getting rid of acid and so making them milder to eat). Some are gently set in moulds (soft cheeses), others have the curds ruthlessly crumbled before being subject to moulding (hard cheeses). Then the cheeses are left to ripen for anything from three weeks to several years. But they aren’t left alone, oh no! Many are regularly washed, which helps to form the rinds and keep the cheese moist and no doubt to impart specific tastes. Brine is a common washing solution. In some cases, just to complicate things, the brine is aromatized with herbs. Alcoholic beverages are also popular rinses: wine, cider, beer, and just about any other alcoholic drink known to man. Or the cheeses are sprayed or injected with molds, or smeared with bacteria or molds or yeasts. Or some are smoked. And after all of this, cheese makers still keep fiddling: with humidity levels, with temperature, and with I don’t know what else. All of which gives rise to a dizzying variety of cheeses: they can be soft, or semi-soft, or medium-firm, or firm, or hard; their texture can be brittle, chalky, chewy, creamy, crumbly, flaky, grainy, runny, sticky; they can taste ammoniated, buttery, clean, complex, fermented, herbal, mild, musty, nutty, ripe, robust, salty, smoky, sour, spicy, sweet, tangy, tart, yeasty.

And I haven’t mentioned the effect on taste and texture of what is really the very, very first step in cheese-making, the choice of milk. I think you can make cheese from any mammalian milk (some clever fellows have even made cheese from human milk), but in practice cow’s milk dominates. Goat’s milk is also popular in many parts of the world, while sheep’s milk gets an honourable mention. Water buffalo’s milk is a must for mozzarella. Yak’s milk is used by the Mongolians and Tibetans. The Mongolians also use horse mare’s milk, while Afghanis and Pakistanis use camel’s milk. The Finns use reindeer’s milk, while Serbians have a tradition of making cheese with donkey’s milk. As anyone knows who has eaten goat’s cheese, for instance, the choice of milk sure changes the taste of the cheese. And of course milk isn’t just milk! There are those who insist that what the animals ate – hay versus grass versus any old crap – will affect the milk and therefore the taste of the cheese, so there are cheeses where – it is claimed – only milk from cows eating grass is used. And the time of the year in which the milk is produced, others say, affects its biochemical makeup, so there are cheeses which, I read, should only be made in March, or October, or …

All of this is enough to give one a strong headache …

Out of all of this seeming chaos, I have managed to extract a few categories of ripened cheeses to describe in more detail. Let me start with those cheeses which have molds sprayed onto them, principally of the penicillin family, and which give rise to rinds with white blooms on them. The best known of these has to be the French Camembert, whose surface is sprayed with a mold that is so linked to the cheese that it is named after it, Penicillium camemberti.

After years of eating it too, I feel I should also mention the French Brie.

Then there are the cheeses where the mold is injected into them. The French Roquefort and English Stilton fall into this category, although I will have a picture of the Italian Gorgonzola stand in for this group

for the completely trivial reason that when I drove through the village of Gorgonzola (which is near Milan) for the first time, I belatedly realized that actually the cheese was named after a real place.

Then there are the cheeses whose rinses encourage the growth on the rinds of another bacterium, Brevibacterium linens, which gives these cheeses their characteristic pinkish-reddish tint. This bacterium is ubiquitous on the human skin, so no prizes for guessing how it ended up on the cheeses. It is also why our feet smell when sweaty, which no doubt explains why the cheeses in this category tend to stink (it looks like we weren’t so wrong when as boys at school we accused each other of having socks which smelled of old cheese). There are some well-known cheeses in this category like Munster, Limburger, and Port-du-Salut, but I will use as a stand-in for this group a cheese that sadly no longer seems to exists but was a family favourite when I was young: crotte du diable, devil’s droppings (I have mentioned this cheese in a previous post).

The cheese was very aptly named, having an incredibly foul-smelling rind, so foul that you had to wash your hands very thoroughly after eating it. But the cheese itself was wonderfully smooth.

I have to mention another cheese in this category, the Swiss Raclette. My wife introduced me to this cheese. She had got to know it well during her skiing days in the Alps. During our time in Paris, in the early 1980s, we discovered a little restaurant just off the Champs Elysées where you could get a glorious raclette, served just the way it should be, scraped (raclé) onto your plate and served with gherkins, pickled onions, and potatoes in their jacket.

When we went back to Paris many years later, we homed in on the place for lunch like bees for their hive. Alas! the restaurant was gone. Glumly, we wandered into a nearby restaurant and had ourselves a totally non-descript lunch. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I can’t think what other categories to extract from this mass of cheeses (over 700 of them according to www.cheese.com). So I’ll just salute a few cheeses which I personally consider deserve special mention:

The great, the glorious, the incomparable, Parmigiano Reggiano

not to be grated onto some anonymous pasta, and not to be shaved onto some anonymous salad, but to be eaten alone, flake by grainy flake, slowly and with hushed reverence. When, a few years ago, my wife and I saw that a rare earthquake in Emilia Romagna had wrecked a couple of Parmigiano Reggiano storehouses, we briefly toyed with the idea of jumping onto the first airplane back to Italy and picking up some slightly damaged wheels of the cheese on the cheap. Good sense eventually prevailed.

Emmental

which for me somehow is my youth (my mother was a generous purchaser of the cheese), and whose holes (which I have just learned are called “eyes” in the trade) fascinated me. With old age, I have become boringly scientific and now know that the eyes are caused by the use in the starter bacteria of the bacterium Propionibacterium freudenreichii, which consumes lactic acid and excretes CO₂; the latter creates bubbles, which we see as eyes (if you get my drift). In the old days, these eyes were considered defects to be avoided, but no doubt after seeing how the eyes made the cheese popular with children and therefore with their parents, emmental makers began to encourage their presence.

Then I pass on to scamorza affumicata, which is not that well-known outside of Italy. Like mozzarella, it’s a stretched curd cheese which is then allowed to ripen. Makers form a ball and then tie a string around it to hang up in the store room, which explains its “strangled” shape.

It looks like this inside.

It is best when smoked, and best eaten grilled on bread. It was one of the Italian foodstuffs which my wife introduced me to when we first met.

And finally, goat’s cheese. Not those fussy little rolls you find in upscale shops, often covered in herbs or pepper or some other thing. No, I mean the goat’s cheese which I would eat at my grandmother’s house in France, which looked like this

The ones I ate were made by the farmer’s wife down the road. When we needed some, my mother or grandmother would give me the money, I would hop on my Solex and speed over to the farm, and after a little chit-chat – “how are you? how are the children?’ – she would take me out to the yard, where in an old bird cage sat a number of goat cheeses of differing ages. After some thoughtful discussion, I would choose a few, ranging from the fresh to the somewhat aged. Ah, those cheeses were soooo good!

I cannot end without a mention of Fondue, even though it’s a cheese dish rather than a cheese, because it’s just so … damned … good. It can be made from quite a number of cheeses, often mixed together, produced in the Alps or in the nearby Jura mountains: the Swiss Gruyère, Emmental, Vacherin, Sbrinz, and Appenzeller; the French Comté, Beaufort, and Reblochon; or the Italian Fontina. The key, of course, is the white wine. Here’s how you prepare a fondue: (1) Rub the inside of the pot with garlic. (2) Lightly heat the white wine with cornstarch (used to prevent separation of wine and cheese). (3) Add the grated cheese or cheeses and stir until it is all melted. (4) Top off with a bit of kirsch. Start eating, dipping chunks of bread into the pot.

Fondue has become so linked with Switzerland that Astérix, that bellwether of popular European culture, has fondue playing a prominent part in the album Astérix chez les Hélvètes. But in a bout of creative delirium the writer, Goscinny, and the illustrator, Uderzo, laced this most Swiss of traditions with debauchery borrowed from Federico Fellini’s much-discussed film Satyricon, which came out a year before the Asterix album was published and scandalized many. Satyricon included a series of Roman orgies, full of painted faces, feelings of ennui, mechanical gorging of elaborate food, and sado-masochistic punishments. So the fondue parties organized by Goscinny-Uderzo’s Roman governor of Helvetia take the form of orgies – although, to the governor’s great irritation, they are much too clean; this is Switzerland, after all.

The scenes pick up on a tradition that if you lose your bread in the fondue pot, you are punished in some way: for instance, a man has to buy a round of drinks, while a woman has to kiss her neighbours. In the case of Asterix, the young fool is thrown into Lake Geneva with weights attached to his feet, another nod to the casual brutality which filled Satyricon.

Anyway, these are my choices. I’m sure each one of my readers has his or her own list of favourites. I earnestly suggest that they immediately rush out, buy one or more of their favourites, and gorge themselves in a wild bout of cheese-eating.

And I hope I’ve answered my daughter’s question about how cheese is made.

_________________________

Monks in a cellar: http://p9.storage.canalblog.com/95/74/180464/28709536.jpg [in http://toutinfrimage.canalblog.com/archives/2008/08/07/10163569.html%5D
Curds: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-e_yg4m7wR4g/Toy0E_DhaOI/AAAAAAAAChs/Qmjyg7II6Gw/s1600/salting_curds.jpg [in http://cooking-from-scratch.blogspot.com/2011/10/cottage-cheese.html
Whey: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-n-UC59ZGNzg/T7sTeo1GtWI/AAAAAAAABCM/9qzvn0wQ3U0/s1600/Whey.jpg [in http://www.hybridrastamama.com/2012/05/making-whey-protein-and-cream-cheese-try-these-unique-food-products.html%5D
Little Miss Muffet: http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/nwitimes.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/b6/eb652bda-d380-5344-a681-06a4de4af8d6/52e7fed631b22.preview-699.jpg [in http://www.nwitimes.com/lifestyles/food-and-cooking/from-the-farm-reader-looking-for-healthy-blender-drink-recipe/article_e8c2a9b9-4658-54a3-9d24-8f00640a8484.html%5D
Cottage cheese: http://uptownmagazine.com/files/2014/05/uptown-kraft-cottage-cheese-recall.jpe [in http://uptownmagazine.com/2014/05/kraft-recall-cottage-cheese/%5D
Whey-based drink: http://www.ebperformance.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/proteinjuice-bottles.png [in http://www.ebperformance.com/products/protein-drinks/%5D
Farmer’s cheese: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_a-oLImtGrzM/S_Mpn-DOErI/AAAAAAAAAr0/ivqGKz6av4s/s1600/Blog+Raw+Milk+Farmer+Cheese+8.jpg [in http://artistta.blogspot.com/2010/05/homemade-raw-milk-farmer-cheese.html%5D
Feta cheese: http://www.yiannislucacos.gr/sites/default/files/ingredient318_feta2.jpg [in http://www.yiannislucacos.gr/en/ingredient/2404/feta-cheese%5D
Boursin publicity: http://www.boursin.ch/uploads/pics/Indexbild_ganze_Breite_2011_01.jpg [in http://www.boursin.ch/%5D
Camembert: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Camembert.JPG [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camembert%5D
Gorgonzola: http://blog.fairwaymarket.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/GorgonzolaCheese.jpg [in http://blog.fairwaymarket.com/2011/10/blue-cheese-moldy-cheese-day/%5D
Crotte du diable: http://p1.storage.canalblog.com/18/34/180464/7469035.jpg [in http://toutinfrimage.canalblog.com/archives/2006/10/15/2911082.html
Raclette: http://www.gentlemansgazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Traditional-Raclette.jpg [in http://www.gentlemansgazette.com/dinner-party-ideas-how-to-host/%5D
Parmigiano Reggiano: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Parmigiano_reggiano_piece.jpg [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmigiano-Reggiano%5D
Emmental: http://cheesecrafters.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/full_Emmental.jpg [in http://cheesecrafters.ca/products/emmental/%5D
Scamorza affumicata: http://www.lascelta.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/700×477/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/f/o/for022aff.jpg [in http://www.lascelta.com/formaggi/semi-stagionati/scamorza-bianca-1.html%5D
Scamorza-inside: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Scamorza.jpg [in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scamorza%5D
Goat’s cheese: http://www.fromagerie-martin.com/photos/crottindechevre_23071.jpg [in http://www.fromagerie-martin.com/fiche_produit.php?id=23071%5D
Fondue: http://postfiles15.naver.net/20140430_30/cheesemarket_1398825823552cruRM_JPEG/%C6%FE%B5%E04.JPG?type=w2 [in http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=cheesemarket&logNo=90194981830&categoryNo=0&parentCategoryNo=21&viewDate=&currentPage=1&postListTopCurrentPage=1%5D
Asterix and fondue: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-94znst74TRI/TwEM1x4890I/AAAAAAAAPzA/OoSEUFiQkN0/s1600/asterix+chez+les+helvetes.jpg [in http://heavenlypalate.blogspot.com/2012/01/cheese-fondue-great-cheesy-meal-during.html%5D

ROOTLESS IN BEIJING

London, 4 May 2014

I like George Orwell. His novels are good, no doubt about it – some of them, like 1984 and Animal Farm, are classics – but it is really his non-fiction work that I appreciate the most. When I was young and going to school in the UK, I particularly liked those books of his like Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier in which he excoriated the smug, self-satisfied, class-ridden Britain of the 1930s, a Britain which still existed, albeit in a milder form, when I was going to school.

Orwell had a particular animus against colonialism, in part no doubt because of his first-hand experience with it as an officer in the Burmese police. But he still showed a certain compassion for the colonial administrators. I particularly remember his description of one of his superiors who had spent his whole working life in the colonies, who by necessity believed he had a deep connection with the Mother Country (wasn’t he out there on His Majesty’s Service?), but who in his rare visits home would sit friendless and familyless in his Club in London, looking out at a country he no longer recognized or felt part of, nursing a gin and tonic while waiting for the boat to carry him back.

I am not a colonial administrator but I have been out of the UK for nigh on forty years. I didn’t mean it to be so. When I left after University I was quite expecting to come back, but you know how it is, life just takes over. And now, on one of my rare visits back to the UK, I too, like that colonial administrator of long ago, no longer feel any connection to the country. I too sit there, not participating in the social, economic and political life going on around me, but merely observing it. Even my own language is becoming foreign to me. I don’t get many of the jokes any more, referring as they do to situations I am not familiar with. Much of today’s slang is a closed book to me. I’m even beginning to experience difficulties in understanding some of the stronger British accents!

This alienation from Britain sometimes fills me with melancholy, as it did today walking around the streets of London. Where do I belong? I am just a stone rolling around the world gathering no moss. I am Rootless in Beijing today, I will be Rootless in some other city tomorrow.

It’s not as if I can even mourn the loss of British roots, because I’ve never really had any. My parents left the UK before I was born and I only went to school there. When I tell people I’m British, they normally ask me where I’m from in Britain. I just say London. Everyone has heard of London and I did spend some time there with my grandmother. But I’m no real Londoner.

To make it all worse, I’m only half British, with my other half being French. At school, they sometimes called me froggie in that way children have of unerringly picking up differences and using them to pick on you. The fact is, I did feel different from most of my schoolmates. They were so much more English than I was! But my French side gave me no comfort. I was even less French than I was English. I just spent summer holidays there.

When I was younger, I didn’t mind my rootlessness. In fact, I was quite proud to be a citizen of the world, of belonging nowhere and everywhere, and I quite liked the fact that I could often ignore the social conventions of the places I lived in because I was foreign and not expected to conform.

But with age, I feel ever more urgently a need for roots. I want to have a place where I can say, “here, I will lay down my head; here, I will lay my bones to rest”. Luckily, my wife has given me strong roots in Italy. That is where I will finally come to rest when my tour of duty in Beijing is finished.

Goodness me, what is all this maundering self-pity? Time to pour myself another gin and tonic and discuss with my wife what we shall do tomorrow.

WISTERIA

Beijing, 13 April 2014

My French grandmother’s house was … old-fashioned, shall we say. Among its many quirks was the fact that it did not have a flush-toilet. Instead, you eased yourself into this small, cluttered space, and you parked your derriere (your backside) on this beautiful wooden seat to do your besoins (your needs), as the French delicately put it. Once finished, you pulled a lever to open a trap door at the bottom of the porcelain bowl and off went your besoins, helped along with a generous portion of water you poured in from a large enameled metal jug. The exhalations emanating from the opened trap door were sometimes eye-wateringly powerful, and there was always a generally musty smell in the loo. However, the olfactory downsides were more than offset by the beautiful view from the window, framed as it was by the bright green leaves of a wisteria vine which snaked up the outside wall and onto the roof. The view was that much more beautiful in spring when clusters of the wisteria’s light purple flowers thrust themselves at the window. When my mother inherited the house, one of the first things she did was to install a flush toilet. But the wisteria remained. In fact, after my parents retired there my mother encouraged it to spread to other walls nearby, which made it a rare pleasure to go and visit my parents in spring. This is not a photo of the house, but it gives an idea of what would greet my wife and I, with children in tow, after a long drive up from Italy in May.

Since those moments in my grandmother’s loo, I have always had a weak spot for wisteria. At the right moment of the year, I keep an eager lookout for a sudden froth of light purple flowers popping up over a wall or in the corner of a garden. I have a particularly powerful memory of a bike trip which my wife and I made many years ago along the Loire valley, where between one Renaissance chateau

and another

we would run into cascades of wisteria – every garden seemed to have a wisteria.

And just last year, when we were in Philadelphia, we stumbled onto a pergola covered by a thick coat of white wisteria, which was a first for me (I’ve mentioned this in an earlier post but I repeat the photo)

And the neighbours to our rooftop garden in our last apartment in Vienna had planted a wisteria, which coiled and twisted its way onto our side, an intrusion we gladly accepted since it rendered so pleasant those first days in spring when my wife (with a very little help from me) toiled at her garden tubs, planting and repotting, after the long sleep of winter. In fact, jealous at their success, I purchased a modest wisteria plant for our side, with dreams of it eventually smothering our balcony. Alas, it perished miserably that summer while we were away for our holidays.

So you can understand my pleasure when I saw that the wisteria across the road from our apartment in Beijing had flowered

although I mentally castigated the management of the building for not doing a little pruning.

For the first time in my life, I read up a bit on wisteria. And the first thing I discovered is that wisteria is Chinese! Well, there’s also a Japanese wisteria. And two American wisterias. But no European wisteria! So once again, like the weeping willow which I wrote about in my last post and the magnolia which I wrote about a few posts earlier, Europeans have borrowed a plant from China, or maybe in this case from Japan (but not from the US; American wisteria don’t seem to be gardeners’ favourites, even in the US itself, since their flowers are of more modest size, bloom for less time, and are scentless). When you read these cases, you begin to understand why the poorer countries complain about pharmaceutical and other companies from the richer countries coming and “borrowing” their flora and making a fortune selling them, or their chemical components, back home.

But now I’m left with a tricky question: was the wisteria at my grandmother’s house Chinese or Japanese? The literature tells me that the flower-clusters (racemes in the horticultural lingo) of the Japanese wisteria are longer than those of the Chinese wisteria, but I’m buggered if I remember the length of those racemes nodding at the loo window. And anyway, I’m sure raceme lengths are all averages, so I don’t think this would be a good way for an uneducated plant man like me to distinguish a Chinese wisteria from its Japanese cousin. A far more powerful way of distinguishing the two seems to be the direction of twining which the vine adopts. Chinese wisteria twine clockwise, while Japanese wisteria twine counter-clockwise! (I love it; isn’t that a great way of figuring out where a plant comes from? But why would one twine one way and the other the other? The mysteries of genetics). I must remember to send my sister an email (she inherited the house, did further massive works, but kept the wisteria) and ask her which way the wisteria twines. This will no doubt be the moment she concludes that I have finally lost it …

______________

Wisteria on the house: http://img.over-blog-kiwi.com/0/53/56/12/201305/ob_bbf5590f142c0c0c464830009f54793b_img-8686.JPG [in http://mounic.over-blog.com/lieu-saint-de-provence%5D
Château d’Amboise : http://www.chateau-amboise.com/oktThemes/p-c094-01/images/chateau_amboise_accueil.jpg [in http://www.chateau-amboise.com/en/%5D
Château de Blois : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Loire_Cher_Blois1_tango7174.jpg [in ] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Blois
Wisteria along the road-1: http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/22548315.jpg [in http://www.panoramio.com/user/701296/tags/Season%20Spring?photo_page=2%5D
Wisteria along the road-2: http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/34926262.jpg [in http://www.panoramio.com/user/701296/tags/Season%20Spring?photo_page=2%5D
Wisteria in Philadalphia: my photo
Wisteria in Beijing: my photo

TOMB SWEEPING DAY

Beijing, 6 April 2014

I think it must be a universal characteristic of human beings to want to remember their dead. Perhaps it’s part of a refusal, deep down in our psyche, to accept that we die, so remembering the dead is a way to declare defiantly that we too, when we will be among the dead, will not really be dead. Whatever it is, and I’m certainly not competent to explore this side of our collective consciousness, we do have ritual days in our calendars when we are called upon to remember our dearly departed. For us in Western Europe, it’s All Souls’ Day, November 2nd.

For those following the Christian Orthodox tradition, it’s the Saturday of Souls, commemorated some time in Spring

For the Chinese, it’s the Qingming Festival, or tomb sweeping day. It falls on the 15th day following the Spring equinox, which this year turned out to be yesterday. The pious Beijingers flocked to the tombs of their loved ones, while the rest of us, who don’t have any tombs to sweep in the immediate vicinity, took the day off. My wife and I fall into the latter category, our parents and grandparents lying in peace (I hope) in Italy, France and the UK. Nevertheless, we thought it would be interesting to observe this Chinese festival at first-hand. So we visited a cemetery in the farther reaches of the city, arriving there after a long journey by bus and under the curious stares of the locals.

The cemetery was indeed full of people

and it was fascinating to watch what they did. They burned incense

As well as leaving normal flowers, they garlanded the graves with paper flowers (I suppose cheaper than real flowers, and certainly a good deal more colourful)

They left food on the graves

They left money (fake, alas, as we determined after surreptitiously picking up a few notes under the suspicious gaze of one of the gardeners)

They paid their respects

And even in one case we heard an old woman talking to her husband (I presume), I suppose updating him on what had been happening since she had last visited. The loneliness of old age can indeed be hard …

Well, the flowers we could relate to. After all, we do that in Europe too on All Souls Day – although the garlands of fake flowers was new to us.

We could also sort of understand the incense – I remember piles of incense being burned in the churches of my youth, although I never saw it used on tombs.

But the food and the money we found really strange. Especially the food. There was something almost animistic about this. It was like the ancient Egyptians who buried their dead with food for the afterlife.

Mind you, it’s not as if we don’t have our own strange cemetery habits. For instance, what I missed were the little candles which we leave on our graves in Europe

But if a Chinese were to ask me what those candles signify I would have to confess to not knowing. To keep away the bad spirits? To help God remember that they are there? To light up the darkness in which they lie?

Something else I missed was the statuary. The tombs we saw were very sober affairs.

Compare this to the almost baroque constructions I’m familiar with, especially in Italy. Here are a few examples from the cemetery where my wife’s parents are buried

From the style of these examples you might think that this was a habit of the past, but one of the tombs near my father-in-law’s has a life-size statue of a fisherman standing on it.

I presume the tomb’s incumbent loved fishing. Another close by, sadder to contemplate, is the statue of the young man buried there, whose life was tragically cut short.

My father-in-law’s tomb itself has a beautiful statuary group of angels singing in the heavenly choir.

We are going back to Milan in a few weeks to recuperate it after cremating his remains. My father-in-law has had thirty-five years of peaceful repose and now it is the turn of someone else to lie there: the iron law of increasing populations and decreasing real estate in which to rest the dead. But we’ll have the singing angels by which to remember him – and my mother-in-law, who chose the statuary’s theme. They had a common love of music. We will try to have his ashes relocated next to hers, so that after a separation of thirty-five years they can be together in death as they had been in life.

I wish I could say the same for my parents. Deaths ten years apart and the same real-estate forces which I just alluded to has meant that, after a life together, they were buried in different places. It fills me with melancholy and makes me think of Thomas Hardy’s poem In Death Divided

I shall rot here, with those whom in their day
You never knew,
And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay,
Met not my view,
Will in your distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower,
While earth endures,
Will fall on my mound and within the hour
Steal on to yours;
One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

Some organ may resound on Sunday noons
By where you lie,
Some other thrill the panes with other tunes
Where moulder I;
No selfsame chords compose our common lullaby.

The simply-cut memorial at my head
Perhaps may take
A Gothic form, and that above your bed
Be Greek in make;
No linking symbol show thereon for our tale’s sake.

And in the monotonous moils of strained, hard-run Humanity,
The eternal tie which binds us twain in one
No eye will see
Stretching across the miles that sever you from me.

I hope that, one day, I can bring them together so that finally one robin can haunt their two green covertures.

___________________________

All Souls Day Germany: http://images.fotocommunity.de/bilder/architektur/friedhoefe/allerheiligen-auf-dem-gratweiner-friedhof-1cf8be4b-d04b-430a-93e0-b3685f0f992f.jpg [in http://www.fotocommunity.de/pc/pc/display/14858389%5D
Greek Orthodox Saturday of souls: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Co-zt3nzWXs/T1EaVmrfyRI/AAAAAAAAAVA/M9gA4b1_m2I/s1600/%CF%83%CE%AC%CF%81%CF%89%CF%83%CE%B70003.jpg [in http://fiestaperpetua.blogspot.com/2012/03/blog-post.html%5D
Tomb sweeping day-1: http://www.wildchina.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/pb-120404-qingming-da.photoblog900.jpeg [in http://www.wildchina.com/blog/tag/tomb-sweeping-day/%5D
Tomb sweeping day-2: http://www.fashion-bop.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Tomb-Sweeping-Day.jpg [in http://www.fashion-bop.com/fashion-bop-things-about-us/tomb-sweeping-day/%5D
Tomb sweeping day-3: our picture
Tomb sweeping day-4: our picture
Tomb sweeping day-5: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5193/7044748643_b7415e94a9.jpg [in http://easternjourney.com/2012/04/tomb-sweeping-day-2012/%5D
Tomb sweeping day-6: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01864/Bowing_1864893i.jpg [in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/8429441/The-Qingming-festival-The-Chinese-honour-their-ancestors-by-sweeping-their-tombs.html%5D
All Souls Day Austria-flowered graves: http://www.mariazellerland-blog.at/wp-content/gallery/allerheiligen/allerheiligen-mariazell_1501.jpg [in http://www.mariazellerland-blog.at/allerheiligen-und-allerseelen-in-mariazell/allgemein/3588/%5D
Bringing food to the dead in Egypt: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/10/11/1286794872587/Extra-British-Museum-Book-006.jpg [in http://www.theguardian.com/extra/2010/oct/11/extra-event-british-museum-book-of-the-dead%5D
All Souls Day Germany-night lights: http://images.fotocommunity.de/bilder/specials/mystische-orte/allerheiligen-am-friedhof-1436be22-b4bf-4a77-aba9-500ebdb2f3e7.jpg [in http://www.fotocommunity.de/pc/pc/display/19329266%5D
General view of Chinese cemetery: our photo
Statues cemetery Milan-1: http://www.milanospia.it/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Giorno-dei-morti.jpg [in http://www.milanospia.it/2011/10/31/ponte-di-ognissanti-al-cimitero-di-milano-diventa-un-business/%5D
Statues cemetery Milan-2: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7141/6655629153_17775801fa_o.jpg [in http://italia-ru.com/blog/ankh/2012/01/25/cimitero-monumentale-di-milano%5D
Statues cemetery Milan-3: http://milanosotto.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/cimitero-monumentale-scorcio.jpg [in http://milanosotto.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/il-cimitero-monumentale-di-milano-tra-storia-leggende-e-simboli-massonici/%5D
Statues cemetery Milan-4, 5 & 6: our photo

SNOWY MOUNTAINS

Beijing, 8 February 2014

It was snowing when we got up yesterday, the first snowfall of the season – in fact, the first time there has been any precipitation, rain or snow, in the last four months in Beijing. The city was still quiet after the Chinese New Year, so it was with pleasure that I crunched my way to work through the deserted streets and along my piece of canal, with the small, grainy snowflakes floating down around me.

And dimly through the flakes and mist, I perceived a man on the other bank of the canal slowly going through the balletic moves of tai-chi. Magic …

It kept snowing fitfully all day and into the evening, becoming greyer and foggier by the hour. So I just hurried home after work, looking forward to a welcoming wife, a cheerfully lit apartment, a glass of wine, and a plate of pasta. We closed out the world and enjoyed two French detective thrillers before retiring to bed.

This morning, the clouds had been chased away along with the fog, and the sun shone down brightly. How different the world looked! There is nothing like a coating of snow under a bright sun and a clear blue sky to make even the most squalid cityscape look inviting. On our way to morning coffee and lunch, I took a couple of photos of the canal to record the event.

OK, let’s not get carried away here. Quite soon, all that fresh snow will turn into muddy slush, making a misery for us pedestrians as we pick our way round large puddles, warily avoid being splashed by passing cars, and stay ever alert for a hidden piece of ice under our feet . And even when the snow is still fresh, the view simply cannot beat a snowscape in the mountains. My wife is a good and enthusiastic skier, and when the children were young she liked to take them skiing in the Alps. I, on the other hand, dislike skiing, so it was always with a certain grouchiness that I accompanied them on these skiing expeditions. The traffic jams to get there! The crowds at the shop to hire the gear! The astronomic cost of the ski passes! The kilometric lines to get on the ski lifts! All those peacocks parading their latest ski gear! The morons who skied far too fast down the crowded slopes! The icy wind turning my face into a piece of numb codfish! But even grouchy old me could not avoid a smile when suddenly confronted at the turning of a path with vistas of virgin white snow softly pillowing rocky hill and dale and gathering protectively around the pine trees, while the mountains glittered behind against a backdrop of a deep blue sky.

The only artist I know who has ever captured the beauty of mountains in the winter is the Austrian painter Alfons Walde. Walde was from Kitzbühel in the Tyrol, so he knew the Alps well. From the mid 1920s onwards, he painted a series of pictures of the Tyrolian Alps during winter. I show here a selection, starting with the first of his paintings I ever came across, in the form of a poster advertising a show of his works in Vienna. I still have that poster somewhere. It is his “Ascent of the Skiers”, 1931

Here we have “Steinbergkogel”, 1926

And here his “Meadows under Snow”, 1926

Walde also liked to paint the inhabitants of the Tyrolian villages. They still wore their traditional costumes back then. There’s still a faint echo of this in Austria’s traditional jackets for men and the dirndls the women wear. This is his “Auracher Church”, 1927-30

And this is his “Meeting”, about 1924

I will be frank. I wouldn’t mind owning one of Walde’s paintings. But I’m not a millionaire. The best I’ve managed is a print by another Austrian artist

But hope springs eternal. You never know, I may find a Walde in my attic one day.

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pix in Beijing: mine
“Ascent of the Skiers”: Alfons Walde- Der Aufstieg der Schifahrer-1931: http://shop.alfonswalde.com/WebRoot/Store/Shops/es268867/50B4/8486/F7AD/8B37/3A2E/50ED/8962/9095/Aufstieg_der_Schifahrer_1080.jpg [in http://shop.alfonswalde.com/epages/es268867.sf/de_DE/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es268867/Products/PLW35%5D
“Steinbergkogel”: http://shop.alfonswalde.com/WebRoot/Store/Shops/es268867/50B4/CA47/6775/F975/A744/50ED/8962/CB5B/PLWT36-Steinbergkogel_1080.jpg [in http://shop.alfonswalde.com/epages/es268867.sf/de_DE/?ObjectPath=/Shops/es268867/Products/PLW36%5D
“Meadows under Snow”: Alfons Walde- Almen im Schnee: https://myartmap.com/sites/default/files/walde_2.png [in https://myartmap.com/user/5189/shop%5D
“Aucherl Church”: Alfons Walder-Auracher Kircherl-1927-30: http://www.austrianfineart.at/images/largeorig/Walde-Auracher%20Kircherl-Kat.%202001.jpg [in http://www.austrianfineart.at/detailtest.php?cid=297&lang=%5D
“Meeting”: Alfons Walde-begegnung: http://alfonswalde.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/begegnung_1080_WZ.jpg [in http://alfonswalde.com/cms/?cat=16%5D
pic of the barn in the snow: mine

THE BASQUE BERET

Beijing, 2 February 2014

It’s quiet at the moment in Beijing. The Chinese New Year has just passed and the city is still deserted, with the locals staying at home and the migrants off in their home towns or villages. So when we went out for our usual Sunday afternoon coffee to The Place, a mall whose main claim to fame is that it hosts a ginormous TV screen, it was singularly empty. We decided to eschew our usual coffee houses such as Starbucks and Costa Coffee, both of which grace The Place, and took our coffee instead at a branch of (the South Korean-based) Paris Baguette.

As the name suggests, this chain of stores offers a vaguely French eating experience, the most obvious of which being the sale of baguettes – they’re not bad, although the Vietnamese, after their bout of colonization by the French, bake better ones. The stores also sell French pastries: croissants, of course, madeleines, and various others (they also sell a lot of pastries which my French grandmother would never have recognized as French in any way). And, as I discovered today, the staff wear berets basques

At least, I think that is what they are meant to be wearing. They are certainly modeled on the beret basque, although they look more like the floppy hats that popular and upwardly mobile painters sported in the 19th Century.

As everyone knows, the beret basque is as French as … well, the baguette

or the gauloise cigarette and glass of red wine …

… or onions and garlic. I remember when I was young coming across the last gasps of an old tradition: Frenchmen bicycling around the UK selling onions. Lord knows why this tradition started, but as every Englishman knows the French eat a lot of onions – and garlic – so maybe the English thought that French onions purchased from a Frenchman were better than onions grown in the UK. So legions of canny Frenchmen set out every summer to bicycle door-to-British door and sell French onions. And of course branding rules required them to wear a beret basque.

The funny thing is, only once in my life do I ever remember seeing a Frenchman actually wear a beret basque, and that was the driver of a car who, just north of Dunkerque, ran smack into the right-hand side of the deux-chevaux which my English friend was driving.

Since, as everyone knows, the deux-chevaux is as French as the beret basque, the baguette, and the gauloise

the driver presumably thought that my friend knew the typically French road rule of “priorité à droite”, priority to the right: a car coming from the right always has priority unless otherwise specified. Unfortunately, my friend knew the much more sensible English road rule that a car on a big road has priority over a car on a little one, and since our road was a least three times as wide as his road, she thought … The resulting clash of cultures left a very big dent in her car door.

In any event, the only place I ever really saw the beret basque being worn regularly was in northern Italy, and that was only in the early years of my going there, some 30-plus years ago. Quite quickly, the younger generation abandoned the beret, as well as any other head coverage, presumably for one or more of the reasons which I listed in an earlier post. But I am very fond of a couple of photos lying around our apartment in Milan. In one, my father-in-law is wearing his basco (as it is called in Italy) and smiling into the camera. In another, we see him sporting the beret and holding my wife, just a small girl at the time, by the hand. Whenever we come across them, my wife smiles and begins to reminisce. They were on holidays, it was the mid-sixties, times were good then in Italy, there was optimism in the air. The Good Old Days …

What about the region which gave its name to the beret? Do they wear it? Alas, as these photos suggest, it’s only the older folk who wear it any more:

Hmm, we still have my father-in-law’s beret, in some corner of a cupboard. Maybe when I’m nearing the end of my road, I’ll start wearing it.

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Paris Baguette, inside and out: my pics
Basque beret and baguette: http://www.labellemeche.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/b%C3%A9ret.jpg [in http://www.labellemeche.com/blog/page/3/%5D
Basque beret, gauloises and red wine: http://wshiell.net/vintage_ads2/original/gauloises.png [in http://wshiell.net/vintage_ads2/original/gauloises.html%5D
Basque beret-onion sellers: http://blog.privateislandparty.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Onion-Johnnies.jpg [in http://blog.privateislandparty.com/beret-origins-of-style/%5D
Citroën 2CV: http://classics.honestjohn.co.uk/imagecache/file/fit/730×700/media/5716157/Citroen%202CV%20%281%29.jpg [in http://classics.honestjohn.co.uk/reviews/citroen/2cv/%5D
Basques with berets-1: http://www.dkimages.com/discover/Projects/AT876/previews/446914.JPG [in http://www.dkimages.com/discover/Home/Geography/Europe/France/Southwest-France/Pyrenees/Towns-and-Villages/St-Jean-de-Luz/Basque-Men/Basque-Men-1.html%5D
Basques with berets-2: http://www.blog.giuseppelupo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/d1_louis_the_basque.jpg [in http://www.blog.giuseppelupo.eu/?cat=159%5D
Basques with berets-3: http://www.cephas.com/ImageThumbs/1205630/3/1205630_Men_in_traditional_Basque_dress_Seissan_Gers___France.jpg [in http://theobamadiary.com/2012/03/15/so-whos-tuning-in-tonight/%5D
Basques with berets-4: http://www.concierge.com/images/destinations/destinationguide/europe/spain/bilbao/bilbao_013p.jpg [in http://www.concierge.com/travelguide/bilbao/photos/photoview/61474?sort=-createDate%5D
Basques with berets-5: http://nimgs3.s3.amazonaws.com/others/original700/2008-8-4-3-45-25-35af8c3c35d345aea2744a44c6cf7937-35af8c3c35d345aea2744a44c6cf7937-2.jpg [in http://newshopper.sulekha.com/an-old-man-wearing-the-typical-basque-beret-passes-a-poster-reading-in-basque-inaki-de-juana-welcome-after-21-years-ago-in-pr_photo_246070.htm%5D

RATATOUILLE

Beijing, 20 October 2013

For several months now, I have been going around with an article from the Financial Times carefully folded and tucked away in the back of my wallet. The article describes a recipe for the French dish ratatouille, and is there ready to be whipped out at a moment’s notice in a supermarket so that I can purchase the necessary ingredients.

Truth to tell, I should have whipped it out in the days immediately after the article’s appearance back in mid-August, when the vegetables which form the core of this dish were still in season. But sloth and general laziness got in the way, so now I have to wait until next summer to try out the recipe, by which time the article will, I fear, be frayed and tattered.

After the release back in 2006 of the animated film of the same name

it seems hard to believe that there should be anyone on this planet who doesn’t know the dish, but just in case there are a few dinosaurs out there who, like me, have never seen the film and, unlike me, have never had the pleasure of eating ratatouille, let me quickly explain what this dish consists of. It is a stew of five vegetables:

onion

sweet pepper

aubergines (eggplants to some)

courgettes (zucchine to my wife and 60 million other Italians)

and tomatoes.

Voilà!

Ratatouille connoisseurs will immediately roll their eyes and cry out oh, la, la, it is not voilà, there is much more to it than that! They are right of course. For instance, you cannot just mix all the vegetables together and stew them, non, non! Each vegetable must be cooked separately, and then put together – in a certain order, messieurs-dames! – to stew gently. And not just any oil can be used to cook them, it must be olive oil. And the stewing must be gentle and long, to impart a creamy texture to the vegetables and an intensity to the sauce. And we have not even started talking about the minor ingredients: the garlic, the basil, the thyme, the saffron …. Yes, yes, all of this is true. But still, when all is said and done, it is a vegetable stew – or a ragout, if you prefer to remain French.

My wife asks me what I see in ratatouille. It’s OK, she says, but after all it’s just – well, a vegetable stew (or ragout). It’s the tomatoes, I reply, and some of my readers may immediately understand this. In previous posts, I have unveiled an unfeigned passion for this vegetable (and even for its wastes). OK, she responds, but in Italy we have a very similar dish, capponata, and I’ve never heard you going on about that. She’s absolutely right, of course (as she always is), and indeed to complete the catalogue several Mediterranean countries have similar dishes: the Spaniards have the Catalan samfaina, the Majorcan tombet, the Castilian-Manchego pisto; the Maltese have kapunata; the Greeks have briám and tourloú; the Turks also have türlü as well as şakşuka (just the names make me lust to try them). Then the South-Eastern European countries have similar dishes. Even the Philippines has a similar dish!

So I have to confess to a deeper reason for my being fond of ratatouille. I was introduced to the dish when I was a young boy spending my summer holidays with my French grandmother. I still remember with great clarity one lunch where a steaming bowl of ratatouille was put before us with great fanfare and to much ooh, la, la around the table. For this was not a dish from my part of Burgundian France. It hails from Provence, and more specifically from Nice. Its presence on the table reflected my mother’s childhood history. In the mid 1920’s, and in short order, my grandfather’s business went bust and he contracted tuberculosis. The family was destitute and without a bread-winner. In this moment of desperation, my grandmother managed to get a job as secretary to a rich English friend of hers, who with her husband spent the winters in Menton (a stone’s throw away from Nice). The whole coast of Provence pullulated with rich English during this period. It’s not for nothing that Cannes’s main boulevard along the sea – the one the film stars walk along during the festival – is called “Promenade des Anglais”

Coming back to the English lady, I suspect it was an act of kindness on her part to hire my grandmother; she had no real need of a secretary. In any event, it meant that until the Second World War the whole family would move south to Provence for the winter and return to Burgundy for the summer when the English lady and her husband went home to England (the family got smaller during the early 1930’s when my grandfather finally died of his tuberculosis). At some moment during these stays in the south my grandmother picked up the recipe for ratatouille. So for me, every forkful of ratatouille reconnects me with my mother’s family history.

I have to thank the kind, rich English lady for more than just ratatouille; I have to thank her for being of this world! When my mother was 18, my grandmother packed her off to stay with the English lady for a couple of months to polish up her English (she was studying English Literature). It was in the lady’s house that she met my father, aged 19, who was studying at the University down the road. The rest, as they say, is (my) history.

_______________

Movie poster: http://www.look.yeah1.com/albums/userpics/234993/poster1.jpg [in http://photo.yeah1.com/showthread.php/39632-My-RatatouilleChuot-Can-Cook-2007.html%5D
Red onions: http://p21chong.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/red_onions.jpg [in http://paulchong.net/2010/05/16/the-magic-healing-power-of-onions/%5D
Sweet pepper: http://www.greeneryuk.com/images/products-feature/920pepper.jpg [in http://www.greeneryuk.com/productsdetails.php?key=p%5D
Aubergines: http://nuestrasfrutasyverduras.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/b/e/berenjena_3_2.jpg [in http://nuestrasfrutasyverduras.com/berenjena%5D
Zucchini: http://www.amyroose.com/wp-content/uploads/zucchini.jpg [in http://www.amyroose.com/tag/zucchini/%5D
Tomato: http://atlantablackstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/tomato.jpg [in http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/10/10/tomatoes-may-help-lower-stroke-risk/%5D
Ratatouille: http://www.bonappetit.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/grilled-ratatouille-salad-646.jpeg [in http://www.bonappetit.com/drinks/wine/article/the-5-best-wine-pairings-for-tomato-dishes-from-caprese-to-ratatouille-to-blt%5D
Promenade des anglais: http://tonton84.t.o.pic.centerblog.net/do3uxg9p.jpg [in http://tonton84.centerblog.net/rub-CARTES-POSTALES-anciennes-region-PACA–8.html%5D

THE TRACTOR

Beijing, 14 September 2013

In the trip to Xinjiang which I mentioned in my previous post, we were also taken to see a tractor manufacturer. Row upon row of bright new tractors greeted us as we walked into the factory’s yard

but we ignored these, headed as we were for the shed where they assembled the tractors.

It was with some relief that we exchanged the heat and light of the yard for the cool darkness of the shed interior. There, we were introduced to the plant manager, and after a hearty shaking of hands all round he launched into his exposé of all the wonderful things his factory was doing. I let his voice wash over me as I took in a yellow tractor, newly assembled, standing proud and tall before me.

And suddenly I was 14 or 15 again, standing, on a beautiful summer’s day, by the side of a tractor. I was out on the plains of Manitoba, an hour or so’s drive from Winnipeg, on a farm owned by the parents of a friend of my sister’s. The farmer was asking me if I wanted to try ploughing a field and I was saying yes. Why not? Everything is possible when you are 14 or 15.

So he gave me a quick lesson in tractor driving and ploughing, and sent me off to a distant field. And off I went, my hat cocked at a jaunty angle as I surveyed the surroundings, Lord of everything I beheld. After 10 minutes, I arrived at the field – the North American plains are very big and tractors are very slow – and there I found myself faced with an unexpected choice: there were actually two fields, one to the left and one to the right, and no fences. Which one? I hesitated, trying to remember my instructions – no mobile phones in those days, no way to check back – and eventually plumped for the field to the right.

So I started ploughing, starting as instructed at the field’s edge and going round in ever-decreasing circles until the middle was reached. By the end of the first circle, I noticed a man standing on the edge of the field. By the end of the second circle, he had walked over and signaled me to stop. He asked me politely what I was doing. Well, I was ploughing the field, I replied lamely. Yes, he responded patiently, but on whose instructions. Well, I said, and here I named my farmer host. Ah, he said, but the fact was that I was ploughing HIS field. Not that he minded, he added quickly, the field was fallow (thank God! I screamed inside of me) and no doubt it would benefit from an extra plough, but still … He pleasantly instructed me to stay still while he phoned his neighbour.

I sat there, on the tractor, with my hat at not quite such a cocky angle now, with a sense of impending doom. And indeed my farmer host came scorching over like a bat out of hell. He covered in 10 seconds in his battered old car what had taken me 10 minutes with the tractor. He bounced out, glared at me, and excused himself profusely with his neighbour, but the offended party was very gracious about it all and the situation resolved itself pleasantly.

My farmer host next turned to me and in that very deliberate and slow tone one reserves for the village idiot told me that I was meant to be ploughing the LEFT field. And to make sure that the village idiot had understood he pointed very insistently at the field in question. Suitably chastened, with my hat drooping about my ears, I headed for said field, and started again.

So there I was, circling the field, spiraling slowly – EVER so slowly; the field was very big – towards its middle. I have to tell you, ploughing is pretty boring. After about the fourth circle the novelty of it all had worn off and I was wondering how to pass the time. I tried singing, but the noise of the engine drowned out even the lustiest of my songs. I tried driving with one hand, but that palled after 2 minutes. I tried driving with one leg up on the dashboard, but that was uncomfortable. In a moment of desperation, I even thought of trying to drive sitting backwards but luckily good sense prevailed. So I was reduced to just driving, driving, driving in ever decreasing circles as the sun slowly dropped to the horizon of the endless Manitoban plains.

Ploughing the plains may be boring but the plains themselves have a strange beauty. As a boy brought up in undulating landscapes, used to cresting land-waves and finding hills rising up before me, I initially found the plains disorienting. Whenever my parents took us out for drives I never knew which way to look. But after a while I began to appreciate the way the sky was so close to the land, seeming to press down on it and you, and how you could really enjoy cloud formations in the vast, uncluttered sky of the plains. I could never get over those fields of wheat stretching off as far as the eye could see, registering on their waving surface every meander of the passing breeze …

I was nudged, the plant manager had finished his peroration. I came out of my reverie with a smile playing on my lips, which no doubt delighted the man, reinforcing his conviction that what he did was incredibly interesting. With another round of hearty handshakes, we emerged blinking into the strong sunlight and headed for the car and the next factory.

______________________________

tractors inside and outside: GUO Li
tractor and the sunset: http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4045/4482416778_f1fc6db355_z.jpg
wheat fields: https://farm5[dot]staticflickr.com/4127/4975335245_a2e33916c3_z.jpg