English Villages and Independent Women

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was a best-seller in 1926 when it was published -- it has the distinction of being the first-ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Stormy Petrel, the last novel by Mary Stewart (1916-2014) was maybe less well known than some of her best selling books, but still has a distinguished reputation. I just happened to read them one after the other, and found some interesting similarities. While I liked Lolly Willowes much better, both books are fun — good vacation reading.

The central characters of the two books are single women, who at some point escape to an English village to find some sort of solitude or independence. This of course happens over and over in English novels, but I found some things, like the cozy village foods the women ate, amusingly similar:

“There are some things—mushrooms, for instance, or toasted cheese—which can only be satisfactorily cooked by the eater.”  (Lolly Willowes, p. 110)

 “After that Laura was given every evening a glass of home-made wine: dandelion, cowslip, elderberry, ashley, or mangold.” (p. 119)

“Inside that stout little tent was a very efficient camping-gas burner, complete with kettle, billycan, matches, tea bags and powdered milk. And investigating Neil’s stores I found baked beans, sardines, a couple of small tins of ham, and some crispbread. Like the Swiss Family Robinson, I had very little to complain about.” (Stormy Petrel, p. 147)

 The descriptions of the villages and way they related to the people around them also have amusing parallels, coming as they do half a century apart, as well as being separated by a major war and other events.

“As far as I could see, there were some eight or nine cottages strung out on a narrow road which circled the bay. The building nearest the jetty was the post office-cum-shop. A home-made notice informed me that it was kept by M. McDougall, who also did bed and breakfasts. Some fifty yards away was a white-washed building surrounded by a stretch of asphalt; the village school, I was to discover, where on alternate Sundays the minister from Tobermory came over to hold a service. A narrow river, little more than a stream, lapsed gently over its stones past the post office. It was spanned by a narrow humpbacked bridge of the picturesque variety that is guaranteed to damage any car that uses it. But, as I had been warned, there were no cars.” (Stormy Petrel, p. 14)

“Moving about her small cold bedroom she suddenly noticed that the wind had fallen, and that it was no longer raining. She pushed aside a corner of the blind and opened the window. The night air was cold and sweet, and the full moon shone high overhead. The sky was cloudless, lovely, and serene; a few stars glistened there like drops of water about to fall. For the first time she was looking at the intricate landscape of rounded hills and scooped valleys which she had chosen for learning by heart. Dark and compact, the beech-woods lay upon the hills. Alighting as noiselessly as an owl, a white cat sprang up on to the garden fence. It glanced from side to side, ran for a yard or two along the top of the fence and jumped off again, going secretly on its way. Laura sighed for happiness. She had no thoughts; her mind was swept as clean and empty as the heavens. For a long time she continued to lean out of the window, forgetting where she was and how she had come there, so unearthly was her contentment.” (Lolly Willowes, p. 111)

The main thing is that the modern woman in the 1992 book Stormy Petrel is already her own woman, with a career and success as a writer. In contrast, Lolly Willowes, center of the 1926 book, has 47 years of being utterly dominated by her family — first her father, then her brother, before she escapes to her village refuge and makes an astonishing discovery about becoming her own woman, which I’ll skip revealing, but which clearly explains why the book is still so famous. I don’t want to belabor this similarity, and the two books have extremely different plots within the similar atmospheres. As I say — nice vacation reading!

This blog post copyright © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

Airplane Food, Diner Food

We flew home from Florida last night. Lucky us — we were upgraded to first class seats, which include actual food. Meatballs in tomato sauce, ricotta cheese, and buttered toast with parmesan. Not bad.

We had a nice breakfast, too, at a diner near the hotel instead of the
hotel breakfast which was predictably mediocre at best.

Between breakfast and dinner, we had a lovely walk in the Morikami Gardens near Delray Beach.

This post and all photos copyright © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com. If you read it elsewhere you have found a stolen version.

Lemongrass Asian Bistro, Boynton Beach

Our last evening in Florida — we enjoyed dinner with Ellen, Carol, Dustin, and Ruby at the Lemongrass Asian Bistro.

A large chalkboard was part of the decor that made the restaurant have a wonderful casual atmosphere.

The menu included a wide variety of Asian noodle dishes, sushi, stir-fries, and more.

This blog post and all photos copyright © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

If you are reading this at another site it’s been pirated.

Florida Wildlife

Raccoon, birds, iguanas and beautiful landscapes at Wakodahatchee Wetlands near Boynton Beach, Florida. All photos copyright © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

Happy 100th Birthday, Jack!

Jean and Jack at Jack’s 100th Birthday lunch.
Boynton Beach, Florida. January 9, 2020.

Joe, Ruby, Jean, and Len. 

100th Birthday Cake.

Before and after the party, we managed to look at a few birds ...
 

Blog post copyright © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com

If you read this elsewhere it’s been pirated.

Happy Birthday, Jean

Boynton Beach, Florida. Jean’s birthday at her favorite Chinese restaurant. Tomorrow: Jack’s birthday.

Between parties, we are birding. This is Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. Bird photos later!

"Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ugwu, a boy from an Igbo village in Nigeria, is one of many fascinating characters in Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. At the very start of the book, as a boy, Ugwu comes to work for a professor at the University of Nsukka in Nigeria. His auntie, leading him to the site of his new job, says: "As long as you work well, you will eat well. You will even eat meat every day." (p. 3).  Ugwu begins by eating chicken and bread from the master's refrigerator; he marvels "at the magic of the running water and the chicken and bread that lay balmy in his stomach." (p. 7).

Ugwu's job includes all kitchen duties including cooking many local dishes. His service discloses a great deal about him. "He had spent many evenings watching his mother cook. He had started the fire for her, or fanned the embers when it started to die out. He had peeled and pounded yams and cassava, blown out the husks in rice, picked out the weevils from beans, peeled onions, and ground peppers." (pp. 14-15). He created foods like "a perfect meal, a savory jollof rice or his special stew with arigbe," (p. 29) or a pot of pepper soup in which "The oily broth swirled, the hot spices wafted up and tickled his nose, and the pieces of meat and tripe floated from side to side." (p. 114).

There's much more going on, but the details of food preparation and the cuisine of this family give the reader a grasp of the circumstances in which all the characters are living. There's even a contrasting houseboy in another family, who foolishly insists on preparing what he believes to be European or English food, such as beet salad or chocolate cake -- which he never gets right.

For the first half of the book, which takes place during the early 1960s, the reader shares the life of Ugwu, his master, his master's girl friend and then wife, their circle of friends and colleagues, their families and social status, and the entire atmosphere of their lives, their politics, and their thoughts. Although they belong to an ethnic group called the Igbo, they have many associates who belong to the other ethnic groups of Nigeria: they discuss the meaning of these associations and clearly expect that their differences will not be damaging.

The foods that Ugwu cooks are one of many details that anchor the book in the prosperous and in a way complacent life of these intellectuals. Nigerian ethnic unity is clearly worse than an illusion: riots begin to break out, and these murderous riots target Igbo people living throughout the country. Their world collapses, and the family flees to the Igbo territory which secedes from Nigeria as the new country of Biafra.

Anyone who was reading the news between 1967 and 1970 surely can't forget the story of the Biafran war. Newspapers showed the images of near-skeletal, dying children, whom the international community could not or would not rescue from their tormentors. I just looked at some of these unforgettable images online, and again found it unbearable to contemplate the horrible suffering of the starving children. I thought I would include one of these photos but can't bring myself to do it.

Three million people died, most of them children, mainly suffering from the disease kwashiorkor. This severe protein malnutrition among almost the entire population resulted because Nigeria instituted a near-complete blockade of all food and supplies to Biafra. Three million people starving is not something you can imagine, but Adichie makes it real through her presentation of the experiences of Ugwu and his employers, who become more and more his family. The declining circumstances of their lives are shown as they move first to a much poorer house than their University residence, then to a single room with filthy bath and kitchen shared with many people, and as they are affected by refugee camps much worse than their own circumstances. More and more people die or disappear without a trace.

At the end, the desperation of the people becomes vivid through Ugwu's witness of people who begin to eat lizards. "A hawker walked into the compound with an enamel tray covered in newspapers, holding up a browned lizard on a stick." He tells the child of the family: "If you eat one, all the ants the lizard ate will crawl around inside your stomach and bite you." (p. 442).

Eventually, he has to give in, and eventually he records his experience in his journals:

"[Ugwu] wrote about the children of the refugee camp, how diligently they chased after lizards, how four boys had chased a quick lizard up a mango tree and one of them climbed up after it and the lizard leaped off the tree and into the outstretched hand of one of the other three surrounding the tree. 'The lizards have become smarter. They run faster now and hide under blocks of cement,' the boy who had climbed told Ugwu. They roasted and shared the lizard, shooing other children away. Later, the boy offered Ugwu a tiny bit of his stringy share." (p. 498).

Since its publication in 2006, the novel Half of a Yellow Sun has been reviewed or rated by thousands of readers -- over 1,100 at amazon.com, over 7,000 reviews and 85,000 ratings at Goodreads, all the major book review sites, and so on. It's also a movie. Finally, I managed to read it, though I've always been afraid to.  I doubt that I can possibly say anything that hasn't been repeated many times, but I've tried here nevertheless.

I expected that Half of a Yellow Sun would be an amazing and courageous book. Still, I can't imagine how the author had the strength to describe the experiences of the victims of the Biafran genocide. The author achieved amazing clarity in her portrayal of the desperation of individual characters in the context of the destruction of an entire people. As always, I found the use of food as an indicator of society and social relationships to be extremely fascinating, more in this book than in most.

Trying my New Asian Noodle Book

Asian Noodles by Maki Watenabe is my latest cookbook. I plan to go to the Japanese supermarket for the ingredients to make some of the dishes just as they are written, or at least close. However, I did have quite a few appropriate ingredients on hand, so I did the following improvisation.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all. We welcomed the New Year at home with dinner and an old movie.. First, a traditional good-luck plate of herring, a tradition that goes back to fishermen in the Baltic who were reminded of silver coins when they saw the silver skins of the fish. Then we had roast duck with rice pilaf, cherries (a very out-of-season treat), and lingonberry preserves. 

Post and all photos © 2020, mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

A Decade in My Kitchen

Today marks the end of the month, the end of the year, and the end of the 20-teens. Throughout this decade, I've been writing blog posts about what's in my kitchen and on many other topics. Besides the kitchen, I've written about food I've eaten at home and elsewhere, about travel to many places, and about books I have read, especially about food in books.

For the last few years, I've been wrapping up each month with a shared post for the blog party "In My Kitchen," currently hosted at Sherry's blog (http://sherryspickings.blogspot.com/ ). For a little change of focus, this In My Kitchen Post includes one kitchen photo from each of the last 10 years, with a link to the original post. I've tried to pick photos that vary as much as possible.

Wishing everyone who participates and reads my blog a very happy New Year, and a great time in the twenties. The roaring twenties? Maybe, who knows?

2010: For the first time in many years, I found green peppercorns and made several favorites like greenpeppercorn steak (link).

2011: A favorite fall item: farmers' market tomatoes. (link)
In this photo they are ready to be roasted with herbs and frozen for winter.

2012: Quiche for pi day. (link)

2013: My old coffee press on a new dish mat. Both have now been replaced.
(link)

2014: My Breville toaster oven, just purchased, next to my very old one.
The new oven has proved to be truly useful for many tasks. (link)

2015: Peach sauce in the fridge: another fall market favorite. Nearby: a locally grown cantaloupe. (link)

2016: A goose for Christmas. Len was the chief cook and also did the carving.
(link)

2017: Our new toaster for eating breakfast in the kitchen.
(link)

2018: Our new kitchen torch. For a while,
we zapped everything from marshmallows
to oatmeal. We need to get it out again! (link)

2019: The ridged surface of a banneton impresses a pattern on loaves of bread
as they rise. One of a number of items for Len's very successful bread baking.
Another great item: the thermometer next to the banneton. (link)

What's in my kitchen now?

Actually, there's not that much new stuff here, as we've been traveling and hosting visitors quite a bit in December. Thus we've been staying with more familiar food and tools. I recently purchased an Asian noodle book which I hope will inspire me to do some interesting cooking in the New Year.

Finally, for Christmas, I received a s'mores maker for microwave use, which is really amusing and fun, making very gooey classic s'mores.

S'mores: You fill a little reservoir with water and assemble the graham crackers,
Hershey bar sections, and marshmallows under two little hands.

In the microwave oven, the chocolate and marshmallows melt.
I'm not sure why there's a water reservoir, but I suspect it absorbs some of the
microwave energy to avoid overwhelming the chocolate and marshmallows.

Note: All photos copyright © 2010-2019 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

If you read this elsewhere, it's been pirated!

Another Istanbul Novel by Elif Shafak

"Istanbul was an illusion. A magician’s trick gone wrong. Istanbul was a dream that existed solely in the minds of hashish eaters. In truth, there was no Istanbul. There were multiple Istanbuls – struggling, competing, clashing, each perceiving that, in the end, only one could survive." 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Kindle Locations 3100-3103). 

Aromas and flavors are the essence of memory. In this unusual novel, each segment of the narrator's reveries begins with a smell or taste memory. One strange thing among the many strange things in the novel, is that the narrator, named Leila, has just died, and her brain has only this brief time remaining of its lifetime of consciousness. The reader learns this at the very beginning:

"No, she would insist on the present tense – even though she now realized with a sinking feeling that her heart had just stopped beating, and her breathing had abruptly ceased, and whichever way she looked at her situation there was no denying that she was dead." (Kindle Locations 71-73). 

Elif Shafak's novels, which I have enjoyed, always use aromas, flavors, and food descriptions in an original way, and this is no exception. Rather than summarize more about the plot and the very colorful characters who populate the book, I'll just quote a few of the food and aroma descriptions:

"Two minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila’s mind recalled two contrasting tastes: lemon and sugar." (Kindle Locations 487-488).

"Three minutes had passed since Leila’s heart had stopped, and now she remembered cardamom coffee – strong, intense, dark. A taste forever associated in her mind with the street of brothels in Istanbul. ... The area around the port was always so crowded that pedestrians had to move sideways like crabs. Young women in miniskirts walked arm in arm; drivers catcalled out of car windows; apprentices from coffeehouses scurried back and forth, carrying tea trays loaded with small glasses; tourists bent under the weight of their backpacks gazed around as if newly awake; shoe-shine boys rattled their brushes against their brass boxes, decorated with photos of actresses – modest ones on the front, nudes on the back. Vendors peeled salted cucumbers, squeezed fresh pickle juice, roasted chickpeas and yelled over one another while motorists blasted their horns for no reason at all. Smells of tobacco, sweat, perfume, fried food and an occasional reefer – albeit illegal – mingled with the briny sea air." (Kindle Locations 724-726). 

"Five minutes after her heart had stopped beating, Leila recalled her brother’s birth. A memory that carried with it the taste and smell of spiced goat stew – cumin, fennel seeds, cloves, onions, tomatoes, tail fat and goat’s meat." (Kindle Locations 1192-1193).

"In the ninth minute, Leila’s memory simultaneously slowed down and spun out of control as fragments of her past whirled inside her head in an ecstatic dance, like passing bees. She now remembered D/ Ali, and the thought of him brought along the taste of chocolate bonbons with surprise fillings inside – caramel, cherry paste, hazelnut praline." (Kindle Locations 2079-2081). 

"As time ticked away, Leila’s mind happily recollected the taste of her favourite street food: deep-fried mussels – flour, egg yolks, bicarbonate of soda, pepper, salt, and mussels fresh from the Black Sea." (Kindle Locations 2302-2304) 

"He wanted to know other things about her – what did breakfasts taste like when she was a child in Van, what were the aromas that she remembered most vividly from winters long gone, and if she were to give every city a scent, what would be the scent of Istanbul? If ‘freedom’ were a type of food, he wondered, how did she think she would experience it on the tongue? And how about ‘fatherland’? D/ Ali seemed to perceive the world through flavours and scents, even the abstract things in life, such as love and happiness. Over time it became a game they played together, a currency of their own: they took memories and moments, and converted them into tastes and smells." (Kindle Locations 2228-2233).

"The last thing Leila remembered was the taste of home-made strawberry cake. ... On what was to be her last birthday, her friends had settled on a rich menu: lamb stew with aubergine puree, börek with spinach and feta cheese, kidney beans with spicy pastrami, stuffed green peppers and a little jar of fresh caviar. The cake was a surprise, supposedly, but Leila had overheard them discussing it; the walls in the flat were thinner than the slices of pastrami, and, after decades of heavy smoking and even heavier drinking, Nalan rasped when she whispered, her voice husky like sandpaper scraping on metal. Strawberry cream with fluffy, fairy-tale-pink icing." (Kindle Locations 2815-2835). 

In my opinion, Shafak is one of the most skillful novelists weaving the senses of smell and taste into works of fiction. I very much recommend her books to anyone who loves this type writing.

This blog post is copyright © 2019 by mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

Dining with Friends at Home and in Exotic Places

Throughout the year, we've enjoyed many meals with friends and family both at home and on our travels. Here's a selection of a few memorable occasions, looking back on the year.

San José, Costa Rica, Marriott Hotel Peruvian Restaurant with Abby, our
fellow traveler to Costa Rica. December, 2019.

Chili and cornbread for dinner the night before Thanksgiving, 2019. With Tom, Evelyn, Aparna, Delia, Joel, Len, Miriam, and Alice.

Reunion with friends we met in France immediately after we all graduated from college. October, 2019.

Our birding tour at Perko's diner in Sonora, California, one of many diners where we ate. September, 2019.

Dinner in the backyard with family. August, 2019.
Adam, Jason, Kaywin, Nat, Carol, and Ruby.

Ann Arbor Culinary Historians summer potluck. July, 2019.

Dining on the deck of the National Geographic Orion during our cruise in French Polynesia. May, 2019.

Lunch from a food truck in Washington, D.C. April, 2019.

South Carolina with Arny, Tracy, Elaine, and Larry. January, 2019.