mussels

My dad took me for a hot chocolate after school, in a café inside a church. The owner was short-staffed for the evening and asked if I had ever waited tables. I got my first proper job, to start that same day. My first salary in a professional kitchen.

Or, my parents were friends with the owner of a local café. I didn’t need a job at fourteen. Did I still receive pocket money? Or did they just pay for everything I needed?

Or, I grew up in a professional kitchen. My mother was a cooking teacher, and she gave classes in our home. Our kitchen had dozens of tart tins, a drawerful of electric mixers, more than one oven. My brother and I washed up some Saturdays for pocket money.

My dad had the time and the money to drive me into town on Saturdays to earn £4/hour for four hours. Because we lived in the countryside with a very irregular bus route. Because we lived in a big house in the countryside and didn’t need to rely on public transport. Because we had a garden and two cars.

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This was supposed to be about time and love and I started in the wrong place –

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I cleared tables on the mezzanine in the nave. I carefully balanced the heavy trays on the way down the curving staircase and put the dishes through the dishwasher. I listened to the Georgian baker humming as he shaped flat, olive oil rolls for the sandwiches. I refilled the cutlery and paper napkins. I wiped the tables facing the pews. I checked the toilets and washed my hands. I sat for a fifteen minute break: a drink and walnut brownie or a flapjack. I counted every other quarter hour as £1 each, £16 to spend in Tammy Girl afterwards.

At sixteen, I was allowed a longer shift, and a longer break. A whole lunch, whatever I liked. A slice of quiche and rosemary roast potatoes. Now I served the customers, would you like salad or rosemary roast potatoes with that? Sometimes the quiche also had potatoes in it. I graduated to basic sandwich making, to pouring a batch of brownies into large sheet pans. Even when I was the one to remove the tins from the oven, and place them in the cooling racks, I still tried to pick them up minutes later with my bare hands.

Hot things are hot, I reminded myself, as a way of saying, you idiot. My little brother was old enough to clear the tables now. Hot things are hot, I told him, as a way of telling myself. As if I was wise now. I still burned myself a lot. We were in a rush to get through lunch, to sit down one by one, for our own breaks. Or, the rush and bustle of lunchtime in the small café made us feel important. We knew the food was delicious, and looked forward to eating it ourselves. 

I stopped working there when I went to university. When I was lucky enough to go to university and not worry about money. Or, I returned for a few shifts over the winter holidays after the first term, until my mother gently suggested I take more time at home, since my dad was in bed, sick. He didn’t come downstairs for Christmas. Our lunch was subdued enough to hear his movements in the bedroom overheard. He died after the New Year. I didn’t go back to work, nor to college for a week. My brother went in for his usual Saturday shift, because that was what made sense to him. 

There was rosemary at the funeral. For remembrance. Or, there was rosemary at my grandmother’s funeral years later. She picked her plot next to his on that day, which made sense to her. No gravestones. They are both trees now.

–

This was the beginning of my story which was supposed to be about learning to cook, about mussels. Or, this was the beginning of adulthood. Or, I didn’t know then how precious it was to reach 19 years old and only then have to grow up –

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I worked in a kitchen again after I arrived in Paris to live. Or, when I arrived here the third time, without a deadline. Once for a month in a chocolate shop, twice for an internship in a museum. The third time after university, to pay rent with my own money.

Or, I paid rent for a year on an English teacher’s salary. Then I wanted to do a pâtisserie course, and I could choose between nine months at a prestigious school for the cost of two English Master’s degrees, or a state school and apprenticeship that would pay me two thirds of the minimum wage. I chose the latter, and asked my mother if she would pay my rent just for a year, €600 a month, and my two thirds would cover the rest of my life. I thought I was very grown up.

I burned myself a lot as part of my apprenticeship. I took pride in it. I remember the triangle scar on my forearm from trays of chocolate sponge, and the moon-sliver from a cauldron of crème pâtissière. Or, I remember writing an essay about those scars, which were light enough then that they have disappeared now, a decade later. There was a hierarchy of morning tasks: the oven was in the middle, mixing creams at the bottom (my job). Icing and decorating the cakes was the most important.

–

I wanted to write about friendship and creativity and time and I would acknowledge money was there in the background, of course, but it seems to be the icing over everything –

–

This weekend I went to see a friend for lunch. A friend, an ex-boyfriend? A friend I thought I was in love with for a year. We never said what it was, until I said that it was over. That I did want to stay friends. I meant it, I didn’t know if it would happen, if he would even stay in Paris. Now it has been so many years that he feels like family.

Or, this weekend I went to see a friend to play pingpong. He said we should walk down to the park at lunchtime, because most of the French would be inside at their tables. It was a glorious sunny Saturday, more October than September. The kind of weather that is a gift if you are open to receive it, the kind of remark that is a slap in the face if you have only the energy in the morning to wake up and put one foot in front of the other.

One of the three tables in the park was open. It had a speckled granite surface and a metal barrier as a net, and the line down the middle was chipped enough to make the ball bounce off at an angle. We had never played any sport with or against each other in all this time. (‘Sport.’) I had asked him if he was competitive, but there is no good answer in the abstract. It can only be shown over time and familiarity. It is intoxicating on first dates to ask those kinds of questions, how do you define yourself. I’m a Noun, I have always been Adjective. My flaws are numerous but here are three curated ones for your appraisal.

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Pingpong is free to play outside, if you have the racquets and balls and the rent money to even be in the city – 

–

We played for an hour. My friend flexed his hand and stretched his forearm between rallies. Two weeks before he had spilled a whole kettle of boiling water over it. There wasn’t an angry scar so much as splotches of white skin within his tan. I asked if it hurt, if the skin was too tight. He said no, that the new skin was more sensitive to the sun than the rest, the sun that was too warm for October. He also said that for a serious burn, you need to hold it under running, tepid water for 15 minutes. 15°C, 15cm from the skin, 15 minutes. (Time that I do not have on a morning bakery shift.) The pharmacist said that covering it in olive oil was not in fact the best choice – did I mention, my friend is Italian? – but it did protect him from the air until he could buy the pharmaceutical cream. 

We walked home along the canal de l’Ourcq, past the poissonnier. He bought a kilo of mussels in their shells for the two of us, one tomato and some salad leaves. I had never made mussels before. For me, they were in the category of bistro food: delicious and time consuming and just about affordable to get someone else to do the prep. Also in that category: steak-frites, bearnaise sauce, crème brûlée. What a luxury to live in a city where middle of the road restaurants still exist. Not chains. Not a fast food / fine dining binary. The French love a bistro burger. I do too. 

The mussels were already quite clean from the fishmonger, so we rinsed them under cold water and my friend showed me how to chip off any tiny barnacles with a small knife. I pulled at the threads between the halves, their little beards, until they snapped, and threw away any cracked shells. He heated some olive oil in a wide, flat pan with garlic and a bayleaf (fresh would have been better, he said) and some thyme. While I diced the tomato, he poured half a cardboard juicebox of white wine into the pan. The hot oil hissed and spat and a drop landed on the ghost of his burn. In went the mussels and the tomato, until the shells opened on their hinges. 

Then we ate several bowlfuls each, dipped bread from my bakery into the sauce. Did you add salt? I asked. No, that is just the taste of the mussels. I drank the rest at the bottom of the bowl. We had coffee, and walnut liqueur from his aunt. I asked him about the time when I came to visit his family in Italy, questions I was too shy to ask then, and he reshaped my memories for me. Then I realised I was High Fidelitying him, worse, that I had reread the book only a week before. I asked him about his dad’s recipes, to bring him back to life as well.

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I thought this would be about time but not necessarily the numbers of it. I was thinking about the vast abstract nature of time, how it is undefinable but finite. And now I am counting it forwards and backwards, 13 years since, four more years until –

–

I had been feeling for a while, for six months, for most of my adult life, that I didn’t have enough time to go to work, to go to school part-time, to be alone, to be sociable. To maintain all the threads of connection. And to leave space for new discoveries. The most recent solution was to live a pretend village life in the city for my one day off a week, to walk to the market and say hello to the crepe man, who is so friendly to everyone that it doesn’t matter if he recognises me or not. And if I was very lucky, people I knew would join me in my limited circumference, for a coffee in the flea market, for a beer in my favourite bar.

So I made loose plans to bump into some new neighbour friends, a couple, at a local vide-grenier, a secondhand street sale. We wandered and looked at old shoes and DVDs and a suitcase full of postcards. The walk became coffee, or, it’s lunchtime actually, are you hungry? And we sat at a perfectly ordinary local bistro. The table next to us received steaming saucepans full of mussels, but they were the last ones. I had fish and chips instead. I discovered that the couple had met twice over, and that there were enough threads of connection that it was curious we were not all already friends. Two of us had taught English for the same company, we had friends in the UK in common – 

–

I wanted to write about time and love and –

Here my pen runs dry. Not a metaphor, it runs out of ink. It was the Muji pen that my favourite cousin loves, that reminds me of her. In the time it takes to find a boring biro, I remember that just recently I have been writing and talking to other cousins, who have become grown up friends, more than family. That now I have more than one favourite. And, some of my friends have crossed over into family without my noticing where the line was drawn. 

I wanted to write about time and love and creativity and the beginning point was those mussels, because they were so new and delicious I knew they would be a clear future memory, because this was not the beginning of the friendship, because our conversation over the mussels sparked more conversations with more people –

–

I realised today, cycling under the sun, something that felt as stupid and important as, hot things are hot. There are so many things to say and do and create, and there is never enough time. And sometimes that feels like guilt and pressure and an unacknowledged fear of death. And equally, not enough time to say and do everything is the biggest luxury of them all. If the only barrier is our own mortality, our own finite time between birth and death and working for a house and food, then we are lucky. 

Time is money, money is time. Or, is it? Infinite money will not buy infinite time. So they are not equal. 

You only need some money. (Only. I tried to leave this bit out but to do so is definitely cheating. I don’t pay rent any more. My family gave me enough money – an inheritance, a gift – for a deposit on a studio flat. Now I pay a mortgage that is sustainable on a baker’s salary. Which is to say, not possible for most bakers.)

If I didn’t have to work, I would have more time in my week, and I still couldn’t read all of the books in the world. I could buy them all. I would still have to choose only a few to read. But I can already read a book, and swap it with someone I love, and talk about it later. Or have them narrate plots for books I will never read, and that still counts as creativity and connection and warmth. 

Substitute books for whatever else you like in the metaphor: how lucky if the only thing to get in the way is time. Or death. To love someone so much that you will never be able to tell them everything over a lifetime, yours or theirs. To die with more to say. To wish for just a bit more time. Because if time is finite, if there is never enough, then the love itself is infinite. 

So I thought about this on my bike, still in the curious sunshine – too warm, a warning, another deadline – and I felt lucky. Or, I felt silly, like a teenager, realising important things as she burns her fingers on a spliff. Hot things are hot. Time is finite and love is boundless.

Or, I had a nice weekend with nice people, and sunlight is good for the brain. Vitamin D. And I never smoked as a teenager, I wasn’t cool enough –

–

This new skin feeling, too sensitive to the sun, is impossible to notice continuously, because work and money and other people get in the way –

Or, sometimes you want other people to get in the way. Sometimes you need to forget, and get burned, and remind yourself again –

Or, it is a luxury to have a web of connections, to want to hold all the threads. And it is a privilege to have the means to try. Like the bistro meal, it is just about affordable: a phone call, a stamp, a walk, a message to say, I dreamed of you last night –

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This was inspired by:

We Are Watching Eliza Bright by A.E. Owens, a novel written in the first person plural, with the word Or as infinite possibilities, and full stops optional

The film Mothering Sunday, and more importantly, the conversation with Nafkote about it afterwards.

Mussels with Paolo.

Brandon Taylor on tennis and writing.

Anne Helen Petersen on community and showing up. 

This is not a newsletter. This is not a new beginning, or a promise to write more. My last two posts were in two different Octobers, which means I may have accidentally shifted onto an annual rhythm. This is a blog with pictures, which overlaps almost exactly with my Paris timeline. But there is an email signup link if you like, somewhere here on the right –

fig jam

At the house in the south, there is a cupboard full of jam, dating back to 2012. Some of the jars have gone black but not mouldy, some have lost their labels. Sometimes the sugar crystallises, the size and shape of forget-me-nots, floating white in the dark.

~~

The figs were small and green and tight even after a week of scorching heat and a series of storms. And then they ripened all at once, blushed purple.

The sweetest ones were too delicate to pick, their skin tearing at the stalk, staining my fingerprints. Stretch marks drew lines down from the point, a hint at the red flesh within. There were only two days left, not long enough to get sick of figs: a handful for breakfast, wrapped in ham for lunch, over salad and blue cheese for supper. So, I spent a last afternoon making jam. To pretend the summer was not over, to try to bottle a sunset or fluffy clouds in a blue sky. To stamp a memory while it was still fresh, at the risk of spoiling it, smudging its outline in the printing. Jam is delicious, but it is not the same as fresh fruit.

The row of jars were supposed to keep the panic at bay. Here is a shelf of summers. Here is colour and sweetness for winter breakfasts, a spoonful every morning in yoghurt, on a slice of bread.

~~

I wrote down, opening a homemade jar of jam is like celebrating a birthday rather than letting it go unremarked.

Jam is an existential crisis when you model yourself on a cartoon badger, is a real note I took that day. (See the children’s book ‘Bread and Jam for Frances,’ about which I am sure I have written before but I refuse to check.)

I spent a lot of my summer thinking about memory. I made a Time Capsule Project, in which friends posted me one memory of the two of us. I pitched it as primary school Proust. It was strange to receive a dozen envelopes addressed in my own handwriting, stranger not to open them. The collection fits in a blue biscuit tin, and I will read the cards in ten years’ time. In the meantime I have the winter to return the favour and send back a sealed memory to each person. Maybe we will write down the same one.

I take notes and make lists in my head because what if this is the last time? What if I forget, what if the other person is no longer there one day? As if there were an if in that equation?

~~

The kitchen window overlooked the garden and the shorn fields and the fig tree on the border between. The grass had dried to straw at this point, under crackled brown chestnut leaves that fell too early. In the pan, figs collapsed into petals in a speckled red liquid. Like distilling a bouquet.

I made one batch with half a pot of espresso as the base, and another with the juice of a lemon, its empty halves thrown in with the figs to steep.

The basic formula is 1 kilo of fruit, 100ml (10%) water or other liquid, cook until the fruit softens. (Optional: at this point, blend half with a stick blender for a thicker consistency.) Add 750g (or 75%) sugar and bring to a boil. Let it bubble until it sounds like lava, and drips slowly from a spoon.

I read a book with one hand as I mixed it slowly. I waited for the sound and size of the bubbles to tell me the exact moment when summer was fixed in amber, when to fill the jars and turn them upside down and wait again. One version was slightly more tawny, one a brighter red. Both tasted of sugar first, then figs, and behind, the ghost of something else. I gave some of the jars away. I haven’t opened mine yet.

~~

In my courtyard at home, a small fig tree is growing in a pot. It is now as high as my hip. It sprouted from the original and I carried it back on the train three years ago. The first winter it shed all of its leaves and I thought it was dead. The week that it was warm enough for a morning coffee outside, its buds appeared, paint brushes dipped in green ink.

~~

I missed writing, and drawing. Figs are laughably obscene to draw, impossible to copy the soft suede outside and red cilia within. But I enjoyed trying, and then eating my life models.

comfort market food

I re-read Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal over the holidays. (I also re-read at least 16 detective novels, of which I had forgotten the endings, and started to see the world in Dalziel and Pascoe tropes.) When I returned to Paris, the leaves outside my window had crinkled and crisped around the edges, like a good lasagna, and the light had a misty quality that breathes spring or autumn, filtered through a haze of pollution.

To celebrate being back in the city, I planned to go to an exhibition with some friends. There was a 45 minute queue, of course, not because it was opening or closing day, but because Paris. Instead of waiting, we sat in green chairs in the Luxembourg gardens, absorbing the last of the sun. I introduced my friends to another cultural activity in the quartier: Pierre Hermé’s shop, which has the reverent atmosphere of a museum. And I discovered that if you ask nicely at the Café de la Mairie on the place St Sulpice – something I never dared in the last ten years – they will let you eat Hermé’s pastries with your coffee, and the people at the next table will stare with envy at the individual boxes, and the cakes within that shine like polished marble.

The next day, I took a basket to the market, and filled it with vegetables, and even if the men at the stand only pretended to recognise me, it felt like I belonged. They threw in a bunch of coriander for free, and more smiles than the usual Parisian quota. At home, with the help of another friend, I Tamar-Adlered all the produce, which means: fill up the sink, put a pot of water on to boil, and heat the oven. Wash everything, stick the halved fennel and the butternut and some shallots in the oven to bake, and start trimming the beans and leeks for their turn in the boiling water. Blend the herbs into a too-hot garlicky paste with chili and oil and lemon. Cook a couple of eggs in the now-green hot water for exactly seven minutes, and toss the cooked beans and leeks in oil and salt and mustard. Leave the fennel in the turned-off oven so that even its hard centre relaxes into caramel.

In half an hour or so, there were vegetables ready for half a dozen future meals: the butternut and herb sauce would become a puree, with crunchy toasted seeds, and then turn into a lasagna; the fennel and leeks would go on top of goat’s cheese tartines. An Everlasting Meal is all about circular cooking, being inventive with leftovers, and leaving scraps like writing prompts to begin again the next day.

For lunch, we had an assiette du marché: an array of greens and oranges around a soft egg sprinkled with salt, and a brief feeling of everything where it should be.

of witches and madeleines

I wrote about madeleines and Hansel and Gretel and Chihiro and Cheburashka, and the witches in the background, in a story for Longreads. Above is a draft of one of the illustrations, one of my favourites.

On the recommendation of a friend, I have also been listening to a series on historical and literary sorcières (for francophones) while I make cakes and poach eggs at work.

(Double double toil and trouble, waiting for my water to bubble. Etc.)

rye bread, brown butter, honey ice cream, or glace à la tartine de miel

“You’re saying you made the rye bread first, and then made it into ice cream? So it’s homemade homemade rye bread ice cream?” said one friend. He thought I was showing off. I was, a little.

“It’s a glace à la tartine de miel,” said the other friend. A slice of bread and butter and honey, but in a scoop. She was the one that had asked me for ice cream au pain d’épices, similar to a gingerbread flavour. I had digressed from the original idea, but she seemed happy I left my experiment in her freezer.

They agreed on a glass of rye whiskey to sip alongside it. I had mine plain, but it wasn’t plain. It was stars-in-your-eyes wonderful. All of my desert island foods at once.

If the idea sounds like magic to you as well, it will be. Nutty and rich and a little bitter. If it sounds weird, I won’t try to convince you. (A bit like a review of a Wes Anderson film: if you like him, go see it. If not, don’t bother.)

That way there is more left for me.

~~

Rye bread, brown butter, honey ice cream

I was very proud to have made this flavour up all by myself, BUT the base quantities come from Dana Cree’s Hello My Name is Ice Cream. She taught me everything I know about the science of it all. Now I always finish with cornstarch – or tapioca flour if I remember to buy it – for a smoother, more scoopable texture.

For the rye bread, use a very dark, dense, seeded loaf for the most flavour. The square Scandinavian-style ones. You don’t have to make your own.

100g unsalted butter

100g rye bread stale or fresh

600g whole milk

+up to 300g whole milk

70g honey

100g sugar

100g egg yolks (about 5 large eggs)

5g / 1 tsp cornstarch

20g milk

In a medium saucepan, melt the butter then bring it to a boil. It will foam and hiss and eventually subside, leaving brown granules where the milk solids have caramelised. Scrape it out of the pan into a large bowl. Place a sieve over the top.

Without washing out the pan, heat 600g milk and the rye bread, crumbled into pieces, until it starts to simmer. Turn off the heat, cover and leave for 1 hour.

The rye bread will have absorbed a lot of the milk, forming a kind of porridge. Pour it through the sieve onto the browned butter, pressed gently with a spoon to get as much liquid out as possible. Discard the rye porridge.

Place the saucepan on the scales, and weigh the butter+milk mixture in it (still no need to wash). Add more milk to make a total of 700g. Add honey+sugar. Bring this to a simmer again. Meanwhile, in the large bowl, measure the egg yolks. In a small bowl, mix cornstarch and 20g milk.

When the milk simmers, pour half into the egg yolks, whisking as you go. Pour all back into the pan and cook on a low heat, stirring constantly, to 80-82C, for a crème anglaise. Remove from the heat, add cornstarch mix and stir well again.

Pour finished custard into a clean bowl or container, (if it is lumpy, sieve it first) and place in an ice bath to cool quickly. Refrigerate for 8 hours / overnight. Churn according to machine instructions.

[Rye flour recipe, number 3 out of 3]

overnight rye bread

When I visited San Francisco, I was on a bread kick, sourdough in particular. It began with the Tartine book, and was fuelled by the The Toast Story which I have linked to before:

When I called Josey Baker, the — yes — baker behind The Mill’s toast, he was a little mystified by the dustup over his product while also a bit taken aback at how popular it had become. “On a busy Saturday or Sunday we’ll make 350 to 400 pieces of toast,” he told me. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

But Baker assured me that he was not the Chuck Berry of fancy toast. He was its Elvis: he had merely caught the trend on its upswing. The place I was looking for, he and others told me, was a coffee shop in the city’s Outer Sunset neighborhood — a little spot called Trouble.

On my second day, still hazy with jet lag, I took the tram all the way to Outer Sunset, within sight of the ocean, and ordered the special at Trouble. Filter coffee, a slab of cinnamon toast, and a young coconut, with its fresh juice and soft insides. I sat at the driftwood bar and watched the locals come and go, and took notes. The breakfast was an odd combination, but it worked because of the story behind it. Food tends to be more satisfying with a side of story.

The toast was good: sweet, airy, plenty of butter and cinnamon. The bread wasn’t really the point of the experience. It was fluffy and white, a vehicle for the topping. Like the Japanese version of toast as dessert, with ice cream on top. A novelty, not for every day. I walked down to the beach and fell asleep, toes dug into the sand.

Later in the week I went to the Mill, closer to the centre of town. An enormous white space, racks of artisan bread and ceramics on the wall. I ordered cream cheese on rye and watched the shimmer of heat rising from the line of toasters. It seemed there was a Toast Master, one guy assigned to grill, butter and serve the squares of homemade bread. Behind him, a team of bakers tipped dough out of plastic tubs and shaped it into balls, relaxed, dexterous. They were wearing jeans, shorts, bandanas, the antithesis of the French brigade. The rye was dark and chewy, with a slight bitter edge that balanced the cream cheese perfectly. It was stuffed with seeds and grains. I think I had another piece straightaway. I definitely went back later on, and worked up the courage to ask the baker, Josey Baker, if he accepted interns come from across the Atlantic. He did, he could squeeze me in for a day.

I mentally revised my work uniform, rejected the white jacket and check trousers I brought with me, considered buying an old band T-shirt from the many vintage shops along Valencia. I allowed myself to be intimidated unnecessarily. The staff at the Mill were open, generous, sharing recipes and tips. They seemed to be constantly experimenting with new flours, different hydrations. We had a late breakfast in the garden, porridge, toast, a frittata cooked in one of the empty decks of the oven. Late in the afternoon, after the early shift had gone home, I helped the girl in charge of the rye.

‘It ferments quite fast, so we just let it sit in the mixer for an hour or so.’ After that we scooped it straight into greased loaf tins, patting it out with wet hands. She rattled off bread puns as I sprinkled cornmeal and she scored the tops with criss-cross lines. She would bake them in a few hours, at the end of her shift, by which point the loaves should have risen to the edge of the tins. I was done for the day, and left with my leggings covered in flour, a little high on the newness of it all.

This was three winters ago. I tried some other rye recipes in the meantime – the Hot Bread Kitchen book has a good one – but came back around to this one. If you have an active starter, it doesn’t take much effort at all. Prepare your starter, soak some seeds. Wait. Mix the dough vigorously. Pat into tins, no shaping necessary, and allow to rise. Over an afternoon in a warm kitchen, or overnight in the fridge. When it reaches the top of the tin, it is good to go. Barely any active time, just waiting. Perfect if you are hibernating for the winter. It will last for three or four days without going stale: with butter and jam for breakfast, honey for elevenses, slices of cheese for an evening in with friends. Have it toasted to pretend you are in California.

(Special thanks go to James and Matthieu for bringing me Danish rye flour which is especially dark and gritty. It works with a paler kind, but I love the deep colour.)

 ~~~

Overnight rye bread

makes 1 loaf – adapted from Josey Baker Bread

The rye flour I find in France is called Seigle T130, a semi-whole-grain blend. The Danish rye flour, which I prefer, is darker and grittier. It is possible to use light rye, it just makes for a paler crumb. Sometimes I mix the two to make my imported stuff last longer.

This recipe is based on getting 8 hours sleep, so adjust accordingly! I mix the leaven about midday, start the dough at 10pm and go to bed. Then bake at about 8am. To speed up the rise, if doing this during the daytime, the tin can be left in a warm place (in winter: an oven warmed to 40C, then turned off) for 4-5 hours.

quantities are for 1 or 2 small loaf tins, 10x26cm – all measurements in grams:

 

In the morning, mix levain in a small jar, and soak seeds in a large bowl. In the evening, about an hour before bed, mix everything in the large bowl: the seeds, levain, flour, water and salt. Use a stiff spatula and give it a good stir to combine. It will have the texture of cement.

Grease a loaf tin with olive oil and press the mixture into it. With wet hands, smooth out the surface of the loaf. Sprinkle with 1 tbsp extra cornmeal, shaking pan so it covers the surface. With a sharp knife, cut criss-cross slashes, about 5mm deep, to form a diamond pattern. Wrap loaf tin in a tea towel and leave in the fridge overnight.

The next morning:

The dough should have risen a little (but not like a traditional wheat bread) about 1.3 to 1.5 times in volume, up to the top of the tin. If not, let it sit out at room temperature for a couple of hours. Preheat oven to 250C. When the loaf goes in, throw a handful of ice cubes or a cup of hot water onto the floor of the oven to make steam. Bake for 10 minutes at 250C, then lower heat to 210C for 40 minutes. Allow to cool for 10 minutes then remove from tin and let cool on a wire rack.

Optional extra, if well prepared: cook 50g of whole rye grains/berries in plenty of simmering water until they are al dente. 30 minutes to one hour. Drain and allow to cool. It is best to do this when preparing leaven and soaking seeds. Mix into dough with rest of ingredients.

[Rye flour recipe, number 2 out of 3]

knäckebrot, or cinema crackers

What do chefs eat after work? David Lebovitz says it is popcorn and tortilla chips. When I worked at a bakery, I took home the leftovers, ate half a raspberry-chocolate mousse cake and fell asleep at 8pm.

Now I tend to go for: the beef satay pho from the place on the corner, which can have it ready in four minutes flat. Or: spaghetti with miso and butter. Or: frozen gyoza and frozen edamame reheated in the time it takes to boil a kettle.

Or if I am lucky, my past self filled up the tin of seeded crackers and I can eat those with Comté and sliced fennel. They taste like the really expensive crackers in the organic food aisle – not like the dry, diet ones that are basically cardboard. Good with cheese of course, or with jam for breakfast, or crumbled over savoury dishes for extra crackle.

Best of all, the crackers only take two minutes to mix up, and an hour to bake. They are mostly seeds, held together with a bit of flour and some oats. There is no rolling involved, so it doesn’t feel like work. And they can last forever, or for a fortnight, depending on how many you made and if your flatmate looks in the tin.

Or, since at the end of a long day I don’t always want to cook, talk to anyone or think about anything: I go to the movies by myself, with a paper bag of these seeded crackers, and eat them during the noisy parts.

~~

Knäckebrot, or cinema crackers

recipe from my aunt Patricia

The quantity below is enough for one standard oven tray of 40x25cm – I recommend making as many trays as will fit in the oven at once as the crackers keep for months (ha) but disappear much fast than that. (See the spreadsheet version underneath.) Use a mix of whatever seeds you have around, and up to 10% of spices, like caraway, cumin or fennel.

50g rye flour (T130) or wholewheat flour (T150)

50g rolled oats

85g mixed seeds (any of sesame, pumpkin, sunflower, flax, nigella – and up to 10% spices like caraway, cumin, fennel seeds)

2.5g / 1/2 tsp salt

175g water

5g / 1 tsp olive oil

Heat oven to 130C. Mix everything in a large bowl for a texture like porridge. Line your oven trays with paper or silpats, and weigh 360g onto each. Spread out with a spatula over the whole tray, as thinly and evenly as possible. Pop trays in the oven for 15 minutes. Remove trays one by one and carefully cut the now set mixture into squares, or whatever you want your crackers to look like. Put back in the oven for 1 hour. If they are still a little soft, turn the oven off and leave them inside to dry out. Store in a tin.

Spreadsheet version, all in grams:

[Rye flour recipe, number 1 out of 3]

next door

Five years as a pastry chef and I never learned how to poach an egg properly. It never came up. I liked crispy-fried eggs for my breakfast, when I wasn’t eating croissants at work.

And then I landed in a new place, a mixture of happenstance and good friends, and poached eggs were on the menu. On everything. My failure rate was high, in the beginning. I looked at every ‘easiest / best poached egg technique’ on the internet and I ate the disastrous ones for breakfast and lunch and snacks. I felt like Frances the badger when she is ‘Tired…of…jam.‘ And finally a friend, a French-trained chef, walked me through it. I had everything backwards. It was supposed to be the deepest pot in the kitchen, whole cups of vinegar and a light smattering of bubbles, like expensive fizzy water. The finished egg should feel like the fleshy part at the crease of a bent elbow. The chasm between reading about something and experiencing it is vast.

In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the sushi chef’s apprentice explains that it was ten years of prep work, massaging the octopus to make it tender, before he was allowed to make omelettes. And it was two hundred failed omelettes – failed in that they did not meet Jiro’s high standards – before he made one that was worthy of a nod of approval. The apprentice cried with relief, pride.

I haven’t signed up for any classes this autumn. Last year it was illustration, before that bread, and Japanese. I like the discomfort of the steep slope on a new learning curve. This year I am working on my eggs. I still mess a few up, and still eat those ones for lunch. The rest are good.

And I get the best coffee as a reward.

summer fruit

I haven’t been cooking for myself. I have been buying bags of fruit at the market – cherries and apricots and baby tomatoes –  and eating them straight from the bag. Then I get home, surprised that there are none left.

Lunch today: a few, sad apricots that got squashed under the radishes. Half a baguette, apricots, pickled red onion slices (always useful to have in the fridge) and a too-ripe camembert. Grilled to melt the cheese into total surrender.

Hope June is treating you well.

xx

happy new year

Please accept this very un-seasonal framboisier to put this year to bed. The French like to send cards in January rather than December, which is much easier in the calm after all the parties. Bonne année to all – may the next be full of hopes and adventures.