24 May 1930: Amy Johnson reaches Australia

'Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not knows no release from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings....''


From 'Courage' by Amelia Erhart (1897-1937)

Just a little bit north of Bridlington in Yorkshire is Sewerby Hall which has a beautiful garden, a little animal park and a room dedicated to the memory of the great British aviatrix Amy Johnson.  Amy’s reputation is often eclipsed by that other great woman flyer, the American Amelia Erhart, and like her, a passion for flying lead to an untimely death.  Amy Johnson died in 1941 and her greatest achievement had been her single-handed flight to Australia eleven years before.

On the 24^th May 1930 Amy Johnson touched down her little Gypsy Moth aeroplane in Darwin in the Northern Territories. She was twenty six and she had just flown alone from Britain with a thermos flask and a packet of sandwiches. It took nineteen days to fly 11,000 miles in a tiny plane made of wood and canvas. She had no proper maps except what she had been able to buy from Stanfords, the map shop in Covent Garden, and no arrangements to be met on the ground when she needed to refuel.

Johnson had hoped to beat the world record for flight time to Australia but she failed and had to be content to be the first woman to make the flight.  Johnson had to buy the Gyspy Moth herself and only after much effort did she manage to get Lord Wakefield the founder of Castrol Oil to sponsor some of the cost. Fortunately she did win £10,000 from the Daily Mail for completing the flight. Not bad for a middle class girl from Hull who had only been flying for two years.

On the journey to Australia, Amy nearly crashed into a rock face in the Taurus Mountains, and she did crash into a playing field in Rangoon and tore the canvas wings of the plane on bamboo shoots in Java, she went missing over the shark infested waters around Bali and hit an ant hill in Atamboea. It was a miracle she arrived at all. Amy Johnson set off as an unknown legal secretary with a passion for planes and thanks to Pathe News arrived in Australia a celebrity.

Amy was risky and racy, awkward, brooding and driven. But she was a pioneer and like all pioneers she didn’t give a tinker’s damn what people thought of her. A play written about her recently describes her as a 'rambler, hockey player, mechanic, lover and celebrity..... as much of our time as she was for her own.'

There were other solo and joint flights after Australia, and like her short marriage to fellow aviator Jim Mollinson not all were successful.  Then in 1940 she was asked to join the A.T.A. - the Air Transport Auxilliary.  During the Second World War this civilian unit delivered military planes from factories and airfields to their operational aerodromes.

In January 1941, in thick cloud, Amy Johnson flew an Airspeed Oxford plane from Blackpool for delivery to Oxfordshire.  When she ran out of fuel over the Thames estuary - miles off course, she ditched the plane in the water and jumped out.  She was hit by the propeller of a rescue boat and her body was never found. When her flight bag was recovered at the scene, the officers of the rescue boat realised to their horror who had died. The bag is now in the little museum in Sewerby Hall. She was only thirty eight.

Amy's daring flight to Australia was an important psychological boost for a colony that normally could only reached after months at sea.  In his book ‘Spitfire Women', Giles Whittell says ‘Australia adored her. It was for having shrunk the world more vividly and definitively than a strutting male action hero could ever have. Here was the girl next door, (sunburned and overtired, it was true) whose next door was Hull.'

Not posh, definitely pushy, and the very sort of heroine a pioneering young country and a depressed old one wanted as a pin up.

So I've been thinking about what to cook. If you read Neville Shute's book 'A Town Like Alice'; Australian food in the 1930s and 40s seemed to consist mainly of huge steaks served with a fried egg on top, washed down with copious quantities of beer.

The most prominent Australian cookery book of the early twentieth century was the 'Theory of Cookery' by Amy Schauer which went into 12 editions. Amy Schauer taught cookery at the Brisbane Technical College and during the 1914-18 war gave courses in basic field, camp and invalid cookery. She became an outstanding influence on the education of Queensland girls and I daresay contributed to the staunch baking tradition which still persists in Australia.

In all the hospitality she received in Australia Amy Johnson must have been treated to some of the other Amy’s recipes, so here are her date scones.

Date scones

250g self raising flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

Pinch of salt

2 teaspoons sugar

1 tablespoon butter

70g chopped dates

1 small egg, beaten

150ml milk

 Oven  200c

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into a food processor, add the butter and blitz until mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Turn into a bowl and stir in the chopped dates.

Mix the egg and milk together and stir into the flour mixture to make a soft sticky dough.  Turn this out onto a lightly floured surface, it's very sticky so I pressed it flat with floury fingers. Cut the dough into about 8 squares or 12 rounds, brush tops with a little milk and place on a baking tray. Bake about 10-15 minutes or until golden.

'Death is a matter of mathematics.

It screeches down at you from dirtywhite nothingness

And your life is a question of velocity and altitude

With allowances for wind and the quick, relentless pull

Of gravity....'

From 'Death is a Matter of Mathematics' by Barry Amiel (dates unknown)

17 May: Ascension Day in Venice

…She was a maiden City, bright and free;
No guile seduced, no force could violate;
And, when she took unto herself a Mate,
She must espouse the everlasting Sea…

From: ‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’ by William Wordsworth (1770- 1850)

Every Ascension Day for over a thousand years, the city of Venice -‘La Serenissima’ has renewed her wedding vows with the sea. The famous ceremony when the Doge sailed out in his golden barge 'The Bucintoro' and cast a wedding ring into the Adriatic was called ‘La Sensa’ and began in 997AD following the Venetian conquest of Dalmatia which brought the whole of the Adriatic under Venetian control.  The ceremony was symbolic of Venice’s dependence on and dominance of the seas.

 'Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day' by Giovanni Antonio Canal known as Canaletto, 1730.

The ceremony still happens every Ascension Day and takes the form of a water procession from the Basilica of St. Mark to the Church of San Nicolò on the Lido. The Patriarch of Venice blesses a golden ring, which is then tossed into the sea by the Mayor.  The ceremonial boat leads a procession of little ships and gondolas out of the city and onto the glittering Adriatic and for an hour or two Venice remembers her glory days.

I cried the first time I saw Venice. One blazing August day we parked in an ugly multi-storey car park at Piazzale Roma, went a few yards down a short flight of stone steps and suddenly - I was in the middle of a Canaletto painting. The Grand Canal curved away from me, edged by fabulous palaces, bobbing boats and the striped mooring poles called ‘palo da ormeggio’.  To time travel from the twentieth century back to the sixteenth in a few seconds was all too much and I found tears rolling down my cheeks at the sheer beauty of it all.

It is a city like no other, and it’s the place that the expression ‘shabby chic’ was designed for.  Through the window of a faded palace you catch a glimpse of rooms gilded and emblazoned with paintings and chandeliers. The sound of someone practicing the violin drifts from an attic window, a cat slinks past, a woman calls across the narrow fondamente to her neighbour a few feet away, the garbage boat chugs along the canal. There is the smell of water, diesel, coffee and Italian cigarettes. I love it, I just love it.

Of course Venice is heavy with tourists, but head away from the Rialto and St Marks Square (once you’ve had your Bellini at Florians), scuttle away down a side canal and you can be quite alone and in the ‘real’ Venice just a few streets away from the day trippers. Seek out the Venetian Ghetto or the Arsenale where only the more adventurous tourists venture. Lose yourself in the narrow alleyways, drink coffee, sit on steps (you’ll be hard pressed to find a public bench in Venice), open the heavy creaking door of an old church and look through the incense scented gloom at smoke stained altar pieces. Sit at the back in the cool air and think of – nothing - just be in the moment. It can refresh your spirit for a lifetime.

One of my favourite places in Venice is the fish market on the Campo della Pescheria near the Rialto. Here’s Elizabeth David in her book ‘Italian Food’

‘The light of a Venetian dawn is so limpid and so still that it makes every separate vegetable and fish luminous with a life of its own, with unnaturally heightened colours and clear stencilled outlines…..In other markets, on other shores, the unfamiliar fishes may be vivid, mysterious, repellent, fascinating, and bright with splendid colour; only in Venice do they look good enough to eat. In Venice even ordinary sole and ugly great skate are striped with delicate lilac lights, the sardines shine like newly-minted silver coins, pink Venetian scampi are fat and fresh, infinitely enticing in the early dawn.’

Alongside the Grand Canal the embankment wall of the Campo is fourteenth century and although the covered open sided market was built five hundred years later, its cheerful red awnings and elegant balcony make it blend seamlessly with the older buildings around it.

So Venice is a magical place, read Donna Leon or James Morris or Ruskin or Thomas Mann or Henry James or Byron or Truman Capote or Shakespeare….but actually nothing prepares you for the reality.  Although Mary Shelley said it best….

'There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave... all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.'

This is based on a scallop salad from ‘The Harry’s Bar Cook Book’ by Arrigo Cipriani. I’ve deleted mushrooms and added polenta croutons.

Scallop and rocket salad with polenta croutons


3 fat scallops per person – with coral
1 ripe tomato per person deseeded and cut into thin slices
Half packet of ready made polenta or make your won with 50g polenta meal and 200ml water
5 tablespoons olive oil.
3 tablespoons good balsamic vinegar
Rocket – or a bag of rocket, watercress and spinach salad
Handful of finely chopped flat leaved parsley or tarragon
Salt and pepper.

Put the sliced tomato, vinegar and parsley or tarragon into one bowl and season well and keep ready. Cut rounds of polenta with a small circular cutter a bit smaller than the scallops. Fry in olive oil until golden, set aside for a moment. In the same hot pan very quickly sear the scallops over a high heat - but go carefully you don’t want hockey pucks, turn them over. After no more than two minutes tip the tomato mixture on top of the scallops and combine well. Dress the leaves and put onto your plates, tip the scallops and tomatoes over them, add the polenta croutons.

Serve instantly.

My only Venice - this is breath!
Thy breeze
Thine Adrian sea-breeze, how it fans my face!
Thy very winds feel native to my veins,

And cool them into calmness!


 From ‘The Two Foscari’  by  George Gordon Lord Byron (1788 -1824)


 Remember you can listen too - and download!


Podcast Ascension Day in Venice mp3

Edward Lear: 12 May 1812 - 29 January 1888

Hot news! 'Feasts and Festivals' is now obtainable as a podcast so you can listen to it here - and if you wish to you can also download it from SoundCloud. I’ll put a link with every post – so just hit it to hear my dulcet tones. As I can never stick to a script there’s bound to be a few extras on the sound version. 
If you enjoy the podcast please leave a comment on the blog or on Sound Cloud....the link is at the bottom.
Lots of love from Liz

'How pleasant to know Mr. Lear, 
Who has written such volumes of stuff. 
Some think him ill-tempered and queer, 
But a few find him pleasant enough….'

If you ask a child to tell you a poem that they know by heart, there’s a good chance that they'll start ‘The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat’.  Dear Edward Lear, I do hope that in some blissful nonsensical afterlife he knows how loved he still is, and I hope he dances by the light of the moon - just like the owl - who is of course the bespectacled Lear himself.

It is Lear the creator of nonsense verse that most people think of, but during his lifetime Lear was also a well known painter of landscapes. He painted the exotic places the Victorians wanted to see, but without the palaver of actually going there.

I’d always assumed he came from a well to do family but he didn’t. He was the twentieth child (!) of an unsuccessful stockbroker and his terminally exhausted wife.  Lear’s mother made little or no attempt at all to care for him and from an early age he lived with a spinster sister twenty years his senior.  There was a dark secret too, because Lear was seriously epileptic.  He had about twenty episodes of grand mal every month and almost no one knew.  The aura that presaged the fit meant that Lear had time to remove himself from company and undergo the horrible attack quite alone. How isolating and how tragic.

Lear was a hard working jobbing artist, he needed patronage and determination to keep him going and he was always worried about money. He started painting for a living in his teens and his first serious work was a beautiful set of parrots in London Zoo.

From his early twenties Lear was either travelling or living in Greece or Italy, returning to London to sell and exhibit his work and then heading off every winter to a warmer climate. He had a weak chest and terrible eyesight and he hated spending time in foggy cold Victorian London. Often in his hundreds of letters to his friends and his sister, Lear wishes he had a best-beloved to share his life, but of course it was not to be.  His emotional attachments, such as they were, were to pretty or unattainable young women or rather dense and uptight young men.

For years Lear wanted to propose marriage to Gussie Bethell the daughter of a friend. He wrote in his diary ‘dear little Gussie who is absolutely good & sweet & delightful - BOTHER’. But marriage would have meant revealing the epilepsy and Lear knew it was hereditary and he might pass it on to his children, so he hesitated – who wouldn’t? Eventually Gussie got tired of waiting, and married a man not dissimilar to Lear – many years older and invalidish. Years later when she was widowed, like the owl - Lear still tarried, and then it was too late.  In the poem (written the year after he first failed to propose) the problem is solved because the pussy (- rhymes with Gussie) reverses convention and proposes to the owl. Unfortunately for Lear, Gussie didn’t.

There is a strong suggestion from a diary entry he made, that Lear was abused as a child, and when you know how unhappy his emotional life was and realize the degree of his self-loathing then ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear’ becomes almost unbearably sad.  In his old age Lear said, 'Life is an ill fitting shoe’; but what humour! After a nasty attack of pleurisy he wrote; ‘As for my ‘elth, it ain’t elth particularly – but rather pheebleness and now I can hardly doddlewaddle as far as the pestilential po-stoffis’
So for Lear, the nonsense verse was both a defence and a smoke screen and as well as charming millions of children and adults it has been amazingly influential on later poets. T.S. Eliot and W.H Auden were both fans.

So what to cook? Well it has to be the owl and the pussycat’s honeymoon feast. ‘They dined on mince and slices of quince which they ate with a runcible spoon….’


At the risk of rambling too much, there is a dish of mince and quince paste, it's a type of kibbeh from Syria called kibbeh safarjaliyye. I wonder if Lear ate it on one of his journeys in the Middle East? I wouldn't be at all surprised. Anyway quinces are there none in May, so we'll have to make do with quince paste...

The Owl and the Pussycat's Honeymoon Tart

This is loosely based on something called paradise slice my Mum used to make ( I think from the Be-Ro book) with a dash of Moro thrown in.

You will need a pre-baked sweet pastry shell and I baked mine in a square flan tin - an 8" round one would be fine ( or you could just buy one - why not?)

130g of membrillo - quince paste
1 tbsp water, 1 tbsp lemon juice

80g ground almonds
150g desiccated coconut
finely grated zest of half an orange and half a lemon
40ml Marsala or sweet sherry
115g soft butter
100g golden caster sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp baking powder.

Icing sugar to decorate

Oven 180c

Over a low heat melt the membrillo with the water and lemon juice and set aside. Put the almonds, lemon and orange peel, BP and Marsala in a bowl and leave to stand whilst you beat the butter and sugar together and add the eggs, the mixture will split but don't worry. Tip in the coconut mixture and fold together with a metal spoon.

Put the melted quince paste  into the bottom of the tart shell and spread out thinly. Cover with the coconut mixture and spread out evenly. Bake for 30-40 minutes, cover with a pice of parchment if the pastry shows signs of getting too brown.

Leave to cool then decorate with icing sugar, I cut a stencil of a paradise desert island but the old paper doily trick would be pretty as well.

/continued...


His mind is concrete and fastidious, 

His nose is remarkably big; 
His visage is more or less hideous, 

His beard it resembles a wig. 



He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
(Leastways if you reckon two thumbs); 

He used to be one of the singers, 
But now he is one of the dumbs. 


He sits in a beautiful parlour, 

With hundreds of books on the wall; 

He drinks a great deal of marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all. 


He has many friends, lay and clerical, 
Old Foss is the name of his cat; 
His body is perfectly spherical, 

He weareth a runcible hat. 


When he walks in waterproof white, 
The children run after him so! 
Calling out, "He's gone out in his night- 

Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!" 




He weeps by the side of the ocean, 

He weeps on the top of the hill; 

He purchases pancakes and lotion, 
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.


He reads, but cannot speak, Spanish, 
He cannot abide ginger beer; 

Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish, 
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!


http://soundcloud.com/liz-woods-1/feasts-and-festivals-edward

8 May: Helston Flora Day

‘And soon I heard such a bustling and prancing,
And then I saw the whole village were dancing,
In and out of the houses they came,
Old folk, young folk, all the same,
In that quaint old Cornish town’

‘The Floral Dance’ by Katie Moss (1881-1947)
Like the Padstow ‘obby ‘oss procession earlier this month, Flora Day remains one of the most traditional of Cornish Festivals with an unbroken tradition going back many hundreds of years.

Flora Day was probably originally a May Day celebration but at some point was appropriated by the church to the 8th May which is the Feast of St Michael the Archangel, the Patron Saint of Helston who miraculously appeared over St Michael’s Mount in A.D 495. The popular derivation of the name Helston is from the legend that St Michael fought Satan in the sky and Satan dropped a fiery boulder – Hell’s Stone where the town was established. Angel Yard in Helston marks the spot and the dance celebrates the town’s survival – well – maybe.

Helston is ‘en fete’ today; the streets are decorated with greenery, bluebells and branches. Bunches of lily of the valley are placed in windows and everyone dresses in their best. Needless the place thrums with people and with music, bands play and dances take place through the streets and in an out of the yards to the familiar tune of the Furry Dance.

The word ‘furry’ is usually reckoned to come from an old Celtic word ‘feur’ meaning festivity, but actually it might have more to do with the Cornish word ‘gwyr’ meaning grass, and by association ‘green’. There were once other dances and days of this type elsewhere in Cornwall and no doubt in the rest of the British Isles, but only the Helston Flora survives, its beginnings now completely obscure.

One of the major features of the day is the Hal-an-tow pageant, which was banned as too raucous by the Victorians but revived in the 1930s. This involves the cutting of sycamore branches to celebrate the spring and the singing of the Hal-an-tow song ‘For Summer is a come O, and the Winter is a Gone O’. People dress in the clothes of the greenwood and process through the streets singing. The tradition of dressing as Robin Hood and his followers used to be well established throughout England and harks by to the earliest records relating to ‘Robin Hoode’ in the thirteenth century.

I love Flora Day despite the crowds and all the pushing and pressing to get a good view. The main dance of the day with the ladies in their evening gowns and the men all smartened up is just lovely, and it’s real, ‘really real’ if you see what I mean. It’s done for tradition and community and fun, and not for tourists, although tourists there are in plenty. It’s not self consciously reinvented, it just is. Go if you get the chance,

And there’s food a‘plenty in Helston today. The Horse and Jockey bakery will sell hundreds of their delicious pasties; people will munch on saffron cakes, drink pints of stingo from The Blue Anchor and no doubt consume lots of less traditional fare too.

So what to cook? Heava or Heavy Cake is a traditional Cornish treat (sometimes it’s also called ‘Fuggan’). Heava is derived from the cry of the ‘huers’ who waiting on cliff tops and watched for the pilchard shoals off shore. The cry of ‘hevva! hevva!’ signified it was time to rush down to the boats and put to sea. The net pattern on the top of the cake is very traditional. There are lots of variations; this one is derived from the recipes in ‘Cornish Recipes: Ancient and Modern’ published by The Cornwall Women’s’ Institute in 1929, and from the recollections of a number of Newlyn ladies.

Cornish Heava Cake
12 oz flour
4 oz mixed butter and lard
I dessertspoon of sugar
½ tsp salt
½ grated lemon rind
6oz currants
Milk
Beaten egg and sugar for the top.

Mix the dry ingredients by hand and add enough milk to make a soft but not sticky dough. Roll out into an oval shape about half an inch thick then roll it up like a swiss roll and set aside for an hour or two. Now roll it out again into an oval and mark the top with a knife in a diamond pattern. Brush with lightly beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar.

Put on a greased baking tray and bake for about 25 minutes at 180c until lightly golden and cooked through. Resist the temptation to ‘improve’ this recipe by adding other ingredients such as cinnamon, eggs, baking powder.

Heava cake is best eaten warm from the oven with a good cup of tea. It’s a cake that’s meant to be made quickly and eaten quickly, hence its association with the fleet footed huers.

But to a greater than St George,
Our Helston has a right, O,
St Michael with his wings outspread
The Archangel so bright, O,
Who fought the fiend, O,
Of all mankind the foe

R. Morton Nance’s addition to the traditional Hal an Tow lyrics. c1930

Thanks to Glyn Richards for his research both academic and practical…

5th May: ‘L’Empereur est mort’

'How far is St Helena from the field of Waterloo?'
'A near way - a clear way - the ship will take you soon.
A pleasant place for gentlemen with little left to do.....'


from 'A St Helena Lullaby' by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)


On the 5^th May 1821 on a campaign bed in a damp room on an even damper island, a small, sick and sad man died.  General Napoléon Bonaparte, formerly Emperor of the French, King of Italy, a soldier of brilliance, an administrator par excellence, a lover of beautiful women and a man endowed with amazing charisma, breathed his last. His final battle with an implacable enemy – stomach cancer, was lost.  Napoleon had been in St Helena six years, his last sight of Europe had been of Falmouth from the deck of HMS Northumberland where the local populace flocked to the quayside hoping to catch a glimpse of the fallen Emperor.

After the indignity of sickness was the further indignity of an autopsy; the removal of his heart – which he had bequeathed to his wife but which was buried with him, the hacking off of his testicles and penis – eventually to be sold to the highest bidder, the shaving off his hair - to be distributed amongst the faithful like the relics of a saint, the several bodged attempts to make a death mask and the final internment in a Russian doll set of four coffins; tin, lead and two of mahogany. 

It took twelve British Grenadiers to carry the coffins to the hearse. On the way to the bleak hillside tomb the catafalque was draped in Napoléon’s favourite blue cloak; the famous cloak of Marengo. 

This is Jaques-Louis David’s fabulous portrait of Napoléon showing him crossing over the St Bernard pass in order to begin his Italian campaign - which culminated on June 14^th 1800 with victory for the French at the Battle of Marengo. The portrait is part of Napoléonic mythology and is an elaboration of the truth.  Napoléon followed the army rather than led it over the Alps and he crossed on the back of a mule - not a beautiful Arab horse, and although the uniform is correct, the cloak was dark blue.  


There are many portraits of Napoléon - he was after all the master of spin, but he usually refused to sit for them. He told David “Nobody knows if the portraits of the great men resemble them, it is enough that their genius lives there.” - so David's young son actually was the model for the painting. 

There is another famous myth about the Battle of Marengo – the story of the chicken supper. The myth is that after the victory, Napoléon’s Swiss chef Dunand made a chicken stew for the General with foraged ingredients; a scrawny chicken which he cut up with a sabre, some eggs, mushrooms, a few tomatoes, a truffle, garlic, freshwater crayfish and then he is supposed to have added a slug of brandy from the General’s own flask….

The story is not true on a number of counts. According to Alan Davidson it would not have contained tomatoes – and early versions of the recipe don’t include them. Furthermore Dunant didn’t work for Napoléon in 1800 and after the battle, the General and his staff ate supper at the nearby Convent de Bosco.  Dunand did work for Napoléon later and was a friend of the great French chef Carême. After (probably) Dunand made up the story it got passed to Carême and then found itself in the Larousse Gastronomique. In the 1960s Chicken Marengo was resurrected by the American food writer Craig Claiborne and it is now all over the internet as authentic on all counts.

There is a postscript to the blue cloak story. When it was lying over the body of Napoléon, a British soldier cut off a piece of the collar, the fragment then passed through a number of hands and was sold at auction in 1996.  After Napoleon's death was announced, Madame Tussaud's displayed a wax death bed scene and they used the Marengo cloak (which had been willed to Napoleon’s son) to cover the corpse. Early one morning Jacques Tussaud found the Duke of Wellington gazing on the wax body of his great enemy. 

The cloak was apparently lost in a fire in 1825, but no one really knows the truth.

So I’ve made a Chicken Marengo - well sort of...

Inauthentic Chicken Marengo

A chicken which you have chopped into eight pieces. Save the bones and all the bits left over.

1 litre chicken stock (see method)

2 onions
1 carrot

200g mushrooms

Dried porcini – about a dessertspoonful

Parsley and thyme and bayleaf

Butter and olive oil

Truffle salt or truffle oil.

Mushroom ketchup.

100ml white wine or sherry and a slug of brandy

Take the chicken carcass and put in a pan with parsley stalks and thyme sprigs, cold water, the carrot, one chopped onion, a bayleaf and 6 peppercorns. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 45 minutes. Take a little of the hot stock and soak your porcini.

Fry the chicken pieces in butter and oil until brown and set aside. Fry the other onion which you have sliced finely, when it is light brown add the mushrooms – divide any large ones but leave most of them whole, fry gently until the onions are dark gold and the mushrooms have ceased leaking their liquor. Remove from the pan and deglaze it with whatever alcohol you have to hand, Marsala, dry sherry, vermouth, white wine….

Put the chicken, onion and mushrooms back in the pan, add the porcini and their soaking water. Cover with hot stock.  Simmer for about 50 minutes and then taste the juice.  Add the brandy and adjust the flavour by adding an umami type ingredient, I used mushroom ketchup and some truffle salt.  Taste again and season…


I didn't thicken this, but you might want to, in which case dust the chicken with flour before you fry it.

Serve with noodles or rice.


He fought a thousand glorious wars,
And more than half the world was his, 
And somewhere, now, in yonder stars,
Can tell, mayhap, what greatness is.


From 'Napoleon' by William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863 )

May 1: International Labour Day

Debout, les damnés de la terre
Debout, les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère

C'est l'éruption de la fin...


From 'The Internationale'  words by Eugène Pottier (1816–1887)


I used to hate the news on TV when I was a kid – I found it frightening, sometimes I still do. One of the main things I remember was the huge display of military pomp broadcast from Red Square in Moscow on the first day of May.  The Soviet Republics celebrated May Day because it is International Labour Day and is a special time to remember the struggle of working people all over the world for dignity and respect in the work place.  What I didn’t know was that its origins are American and I bet they kept that quiet in the Politburo.

International Labour Day started to commemorate the death of workers during the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886. The demonstration was to support a strike for an eight hour working day. When it turned violent and a bomb was thrown, the police fired indiscriminately into the crowd.  Four civilians and seven policemen were shot dead.

To counteract the apparant Communist dominance of International Labour Day, in 1955 the Catholic Church dedicated May Day to ‘St Joseph The Worker’. They made St Joseph the patron saint of workers, craftsmen and also of ‘people fighting communism’ - hmmmm…..

All of this has made me think about why we have communal holidays at particular times of year, and the way that even today festivals can sometimes be traced into the deep past.  Once upon a time community celebrations were dictated by the seasons and by cosmic events such as the solstices, or by the events that marked the year, like taking your animals to the high pasture (which btw was yesterday  http://feastsandfestivals.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/30-april-beltane.html).  Once religion became organized then feasts and festivals got pinned down, and once governments get involved they get pinned down even more.  

May Day was a holiday long before International Labour Day – and as we've seen before is associated with new milk and fresh cheese - http://feastsandfestivals.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/may-day.html

Anyway talking of state sponsored holidays we’ve got a lot of communal jollification in the UK this year.  The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee – 60 years on the throne is no mean achievement whatever your views, and of course the London Olympics, which are certainly not confined to London. The Olympic torch will be passing the end of my road very soon.

I visited the USSR in 1980 to go to the Moscow Olympic Games.  We stayed in a student hall of residence and I ate a lot of borscht. It was horrible - pink soup that was both sweet and vinegary with a knob of gristly meat in the middle, but there were some nice things to eat too. One hot summer's day we drove to the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana, on the way there we passed little wooden dachas with pretty gardens and picket fences. By their gates old ladies were selling fresh, sweet redcurrants.

Twenty years later I went to St Petersburg and hit the food markets.  What joy!  What utter deliciousness!  Pyramids of soft curd cheeses cheek by jowl with lily of the valley, bunches of fresh gathered wild greens, fat speckled sausages, slices of thick smoky ham and huge gooseberries.  I loved it.  

Anyway I’m going to try and get over my borscht phobia.  To make it even more of a May Day celebration I’ve also made vatrushki – little curd tarts as well, they are a traditional Russian accompaniment to soup.

The recipes are from ‘The Cooking of Russia’ a Time Life book published in 1971 in its ‘Foods of the World’ series. No author is credited, so s/he won't have to mind that I've tweaked them. It's a long recipe for borscht but bear with it, it's worth the effort.

Vatrushki
1 packet of ready rolled puff pastry (100% butter if you can get it).
I carton cottage cheese
2 tablespoons of sour cream
I egg and 1 egg yolk
Salt, white pepper and nutmeg
Oven 190c

You will need a 3-4 inch circular pastry cutter

Put the cottage cheese in a seive to drain off excess whey.

Cut out your circles of pastry and gently fold the edges inwards, now circling the pastry in your hands make the edge stand up and pinch and crimp as you go round. You end up with a neat little open tart. Brush the little tarts with egg yolk, put on a baking tray and chill.

Add the sour cream, egg and seasoning to the drained cottage cheese and put about a dessertspoonful in each tart. Put into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes.  Turn them down a bit if they brown too quickly, but you need to cook the pastry thoroughly. They will puff up beautifully but will subside when you take them out. Cool on a rack. You can make these in advance and reheat when you are ready. The sour cream is really important - they are much too bland otherwise.

Borscht with horseradish cream

Stage 1
1 piece brisket about 2lb-3lb in weight

Bouquet garni and cooking oil

Stage 2
4 medium sized uncooked beetroots
1 parsnip
2 sticks celery
2 onions
4 cloves of garlic
1 tin tomatoes
about six pieces of parsley tied with a bit of string so you can fish them out later
3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar

Stage 3
1lb small potatoes peeled
1/2 smallish red cabbage finely shredded.

Sour cream and a small piece of horseradish root (or a tablespoon of sauce)

Cook the meat and make the beef stock first. Brown the whole piece of beef in a hot pan in a little oil and put into a casserole, I used my slow cooker. Brown one of the onions in the same pan and add to the meat, swill out the pan with water.  Cover the meat generously with water and add the bouquet garni and a few peppercorns. Cook slowly for at least 3 hours or until tender.

When the meat is done, peel the beets and shred into fine matchsticks with a knife or julienne cutter - a food processor or mandoline helps here. (You can grate them but it makes the borscht mushy) Peel the parsnip and shred in the same way. Chop the onion and celery and crush the garlic.

Put the the vegetables into a deep large pan with a couple tablespoons of oil and sweat gently for about 10 minutes. Take the beef stock (from the brisket)  and add enough to to the vegetables to cover them, add the vinegar, bring to the boil and simmer for 40 minutes. Reserve the rest of the stock.

Cut up the meat into small pieces. Put it into the borscht with the red cabbage and potatoes, add more stock if necessary and simmer for about 20 minutes until the potatoes are soft.

 Mix the sour cream with the grated horseradish and add a pinch of salt, or mix cream with a teaspoon of horseradish sauce. Put a dollop on top then sprinkle with parsley or dill.

Serve with the vatrushki or some crusty rye bread.

I loved it by the way - it 's a perfect pick-me-up for a cold spring day....

...And I was home again, painfully at home, 

amid the smells of fish and tobacco, 

children, kittens, borscht, 

fumes rising, purifying.....

From 'The Hut' by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (b 1933)

25 April: Blue Stockings and Red Hats (Part 2)

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

and satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.

From : ‘Warning’  by Jenny Joseph (b 1932)

It’s Red Hat Day today. In twenty-six countries of the world 70,000 women over the age of fifty will be out celebrating. They belong to an organisation with no object but to help them to have fun and to remind older women that not only is it OK to do so, but you don’t have to be young to do something frivolous.

This is what Sue Ellen Cooper, ‘Queen Mother’ and founder of the Red Hat Society says

"The Red Hat Society began as a result of a few women deciding to greet middle age with verve, humor and elan. We believe silliness is the comedy relief of life, and since we are all in it together, we might as well join red-gloved hands and go for the gusto together. Underneath the frivolity, we share a bond of affection, forged by common life experiences and a genuine enthusiasm for wherever life takes us next."

When they are out having fun the members of the 20,000 branches of the Red Hat Society wear red hats and purple dresses as described in the famous poem by Jenny Joseph. Every individual club or ‘chapter’ is different but they all have the same object, to remind themselves and the world, that you don’t stop doing things because you get old but that you get old because you stop doing things.

Here's Jenny Joseph reading the whole poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cACbzanitg

Actually I’m not sure about all this – and this is not a criticism of the Red Hats at all but I think that if you are the sort of person who enjoys life you don’t just stop being like that when you are over 50. What the Red Hats do is to give you some like-minded friends too have fun with…

...and I don’t have much truck with the idea that women become invisible as they get older, I actually think they get more stroppy. I am much less tolerant of rudeness, bad service and plain stupidity than I used to be and I’m quite glad about that.  I don’t want to be a sweet gentle old lady, I want to be fierce but warm hearted - actually maybe I am fierce but warm hearted. 


This is Frank Reynold's wonderful portrait of David Copperfield's fierce but warm hearted Aunt Betsey:

But - but - but - I’ve been trying to think of other positive images of older women in literature and they are really few and far between. My first thought was Lady Bellaston in 'Tom Jones' but she does try and get rid of her rival Sophie in a rather horrid way so she’s no good.  There are some interesting older women in Dickens but apart from the eccentric Aunt Betsey they’re either really batty like Miss Flyte, nasty like Mrs Bumble or weak like Mrs Nickelby.  In Jane Austen there’s Mrs Bennett – the scary mother - and the horrid Aunt Norris who is my least favourite Austen character and in then Jane Eyre there’s Mrs Fairfax who I always think should have warned Jane and didn’t.  Give me some positive older women characters somebody…please…

So let’s hear it for the Red Hat Women and for Hester Thrale throwing a big bash for her eightieth birthday and Mrs Malaprop, Aunt Betsey Trotwood, Wodehouse's Aunt Agatha and Aunt Dahlia and all those older women who frighten their friends and relations but love them all the same… and are loved in return.

Red Hats 


225 g soft butter
225 caster sugar
3 medium eggs
150ml milk (not skimmed)
225g SR flour

1½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp vanilla extract

For the tops

5 tablespoons sieved or seedless raspberry jam

75g desiccated coconut

Glace cherries

1 baking tin 30 x 23 x 4cm lined with baking parchment.
Oven 170c

You can make this in a food processor, I used my Kenwood mixer. Make the sponge in the usual way by creaming the butter and sugar, add the beaten egg and beat furiously, then add the milk and vanilla. Sieve in the flour and BP into the mixture and give it a quick whizz. Pour into the baking tin and bake for 30 minutes or until shrunk away at the edges and springy on top.

Leave to cool in the tin, then remove and turn the sponge over so you have a flat top. Trim off the sponge edges (and sneakily eat them), now warm the jam and spread over the sponge. Scatter the coconut thickly over the top and cut into squares. Top each square with a half cherry.

I hope the Red Hats have a lovely day - and you do too.

P.S. OK so I cheated a little, there isn’t an actual day for Blue Stockings as posted last week, but today is definitely the day for Red Hats.

P.P.S. Btw do NOT, what ever you do, google ‘older women having fun’…..

What a language it is, the laughter of women,


high-flying and subversive.


Long before law and scripture


we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

From: ‘The Laughter of Women’ by Lisel Mueller (b 1924)