Blethered version above, typed version below.
When the weight of the world gets too heavy and there is little I can do about it I try and push the darkness away by turning to the kitchen, grateful that I actually have a space to cook in and supplies of delicious comestibles to play with. There have been times when my family has had neither, and the grim stories handed down to me (though as I now know, considerably sanitised for my childish ears) still have me mindful about not wasting food and always making sure there’s a backup supply of beans and lentils in case things go pear-shaped.
The other day I was given a quantity of ripe tomatoes by the generous neighbour who lives a mile or so up the hill and around the corner. They were lovely Romas, rich and red and bursting with the essence of summer. My first thought was that my little grandmother (that’s the Latvian one) would nearly have fainted with delight at their rich scent, and my second that they were the perfect ingredient for a spell.
Properly speaking, a spell consists in words uttered to a particular formula and recited, perhaps with a few sweeping gestures, with the intent of making magic. I cast my spells in the kitchen. When I was younger I would from time to time prepare food in the hope of enchanting the living…these days I am usually on my own and so (aside from feeding family when they visit) more likely to use my cooking to call to those who have passed.
Making pasta will have my father at my shoulder, either singing the “noodle song”* with my children when they were small or quizzically enquiring “brauchst du technische beratung?” (“Do you require technical advice?”), a phrase which had become a running joke between us.
I prepare porridge the way my grandfather made it. He was raised on oats softened with boiling water and then cooked with milk and a pinch of salt and began his day with them for over nearly eighty-eight years, with the odd omission when they were in transit (fleeing Nazis, or much later, in the air between destinations). I make the fragrant dough that is the foundation of what might arguably be called Latvia’s national dish (pīragi) according to instructions given me by my auntie years ago (though I like to think that my personal tweaks have made her already delicious recipe even better).
When it comes to tomatoes one of my favourite things to do (other than savour them sliced on buttered rye toast, anointed with a little aioli or mayo, seasoned with salt and pepper, sprinkled with chopped chives and dusted with just a hint of sugar) is make soup. As good old Wikipedia puts it “An incantation, a spell, a charm, an enchantment, or a bewitchery, is a magical formula intended to trigger a magical effect on a person or objects”. My little grandmother certainly had a magical formula for dealing with the abundance of tomatoes she grew in her pocket-handkerchief-sized garden.
It begins by browning butter in a heavy-based saucepan (many things in my kitchen begin this way) and then adding a bit of semolina (though since I discovered in myself an intolerance to wheat, I substitute polenta instead), cooking it in the butter over low heat and stirring religiously. I guess it’s like a roux, but with polenta/semolina instead of flour. I cook the mixture until it’s the colour of my skin (a sort of honey brown).
I should have mentioned that this spell needs other preparations before the browning of the butter. A bit of mise en place if you will, though it feels a bit pretentious to use that phrase in this humble domestic situation. Some onions will need chopping so that they are ready to toss in to the saucepan at the exact moment of perfect browning, and then of course a generous bowl full of tomatoes, chopped into tip-of-the-thumb-sized pieces (leave the skins on) needs to be ready for action also. After the onions go in I add a good sprinkle of salt, it helps draw the moisture from them and thickens the roux. You have to keep stirring and scraping like mad so it doesn’t catch. The tommies are flung in when the onions are translucent and the mad stirring continues. Add water judiciously, not too much though…grandmother’s tomato soup should be thick and gloopy, not runny. Nor should it be blended, leave that to Mr Campbell.
Taste to see if more salt is required and then add freshly ground white pepper and a little brown sugar (grandmother was big on sugar with tomatoes). Turn off the heat and let the brew rest awhile before serving, otherwise it will be like trying to eat napalm. Grandmother usually presented it to us with a healthy dollop of sour cream and a sprinkling of fresh dill. I took my bowl to the comfort of the armchair and as I prepared to scoop the first fragrant spoonful to my mouth I swear I heard her tell me to be careful not to spill any and “would I like her to make some apple pancakes for dessert?”.
Yes please. I would like that very much indeed. She passed weeks before my first child was born (in 1987) and not a day goes by that she doesn’t wander through my thoughts.
Grandmother’s tomato soup is quick and simple, but a few (well, twenty if I’m honest) years ago I was at an Italian restaurant tucking into a steaming bowl of Zuppa di Pesce, in this instance a tomato soup with a hint of fennel, liberally embellished with a selection of recently deceased marine life (mussels, calamari, a prawn or two, pieces of white fish and an oyster), adorned with a slab of toasted bread half submerged in it (a bit like an abandoned surfboard). It was absolutely fabulous and I resolved to attempt something similar at home, building on the foundation of grandmother’s soup. I began in the same way but added a generous quantity of garlic after the onions were cooked and before the tommies went in. When the tomatoes are cooked I drown them in most of a bottle of rosé (or if I have it on hand, preferably a bottle of Rockford’s Alicante Bouchet, a fruity pomegranate-coloured wine produced a mere twenty minutes from here on the other side of the ranges). I also pour a glass for the cook.
For this version I let it simmer a bit longer, just as long as I can stretch out that glass of wine. No sugar is necessary, as the Alicante has just enough sweetness to perfectly balance the acidity from the tomatoes, which won’t be much anyway if they are properly ripe. I add a dill stalk, in preference to fennel, but you can do what you like. Don’t forget the salt and pepper, though, and a little fresh marjoram if it’s kicking about. The next stage depends very much on whether you are planning to eat solo, or are intending on serving multitudes. If the soup is just for one then whatever seafood you have managed to source can simply be stirred into the pot, but if you are sharing the goodness then I recommend cooking the fishy things briefly in a little olive oil and sharing them out between the plates before anointing the marine morsels with the soup. It saves people arguing about who got more prawns. Or something.
Serve it with a nice chunk of fresh bread, or, as I have been doing since my youngest daughter inducted me into the ways of making proper croutons using a technique she picked up during her time in the kitchen at the Salopian Inn, with delicious bits of crunchy olive-oil-fried bread ends. I don’t have their permission to share that particular trick here so you’ll have to pop along there for lunch and taste them for yourselves. I’m sure you’ll work it out. Failing that, you’ll have to wait for my novel…I’m reasonably confident that my heroine will be rustling up croutons at some point.
Inspired by the conjuring of my grandmother earlier in the week, I decided to try and call up my mother in a bit of experimental kitchen play this Saturday evening just past. Ma was of the generation that had been in the thick of the 1939-45 war and had endured the famine that followed. The experiences of those years imbued her with a very different attitude towards preserved/canned/tinned and processed foods to the one I have developed over the years. She viewed Spam as a gift from the gods…the first protein they had tasted in years; it’s fatty, salty flavour was something she continued to savour to the end of her days (she would have loved the ‘sushi’ available on Maui!). Ma also used to get quite excited about recipes published on the labels of cans and biscuit boxes. The pumpkin pie recipe from the “Libby’s” can was the bookmark in her well-used copy of ‘Fanny Farmer’ and after she found a recipe for “Pineapple icebox pie” on the side of a Christie’s Vanilla wafer packet in 1969 (when we lived in Vermont) my birthdays were marked by this heart-stopping dessert confected of layers of buttered biscuit crumbs, tinned pineapple, buttercream, whipped cream and more biscuit crumbs. She made these with much enthusiasm, a slightly bigger one each year so that eventually they were a bit overwhelming. You really have to eat them within 24 hours of making or (like a bowl of bicarbonate soda) they soak up all the aromas of the fridge, after which they are frankly disgusting. The last one she made was in 2015, as she was in hospital for my birthday in 2016 and passed away in the second month of the following year.
I happened to have acquired a lovely fresh pineapple and it occurred to me that if it were roasted it would probably be very much nicer than the tinned variety. I cut up the fruit and put it in a slow oven with a light sprinkle of brown sugar to help coax the juices out. When it was cooked I turned the oven off and left the pineapple in it overnight. Meanwhile I mixed crushed biscuit crumbs with beurre noisette and pressed them into the base of a spring form. I put that in the fridge and went to bed, but not until I had browned more butter for the buttercream layer.
In the morning I whipped up the now-cooled butter with a little icing sugar and some of the liquid from the pineapple. I spread half of that onto the crumb layer, topped it with the chopped roasted goodness and then spread the rest of the buttercream on top of the fruit. The original recipe had another layer of whipped cream on top, followed by more biscuit crumbs. It really ought to be called “arterial sclerosis pie” but fiddling about in the kitchen like this has done so much good for my heart that I am hoping the psychological benefits will mitigate any physical damage.
We shared it yesterday and it was jolly good. I’ve made a few notes on possible tweakings but in the interests of fitting into my clothes I won’t be trying them out for at least six months, however I have a feeling my heroine will be making this one, too. I’ll have to write her a nice kitchen.
*don’t ask
Such a wonderful story and memories of grandmothers and all. My nana used to sing in her kitchen but some songs were 'old'. You could not hear them on the radio anymore in my childhood. Of course she was singing what her grandmothers thought her or she just picked up by osmosis. I catch myself humming them occasionally. My sons used to come to the kitchen and say to each other: " I told you, mum is making this and this......." By my humming they will know what is going to be on the table. I do associate a particular song with a particular dish. Gift from the past, spell for a better taste....
I loved this! My Grandmother was Czechoslovakian. Born there before the turn of the 1900's and was brought to the US by the man she was destined to marry, who had emigrated here first from what is now the Czech Republic I think. I still remember her cooking Chicken Paprikac(sp.) in our kitchen. She passed when I was 9 years old. I have written for my small local magazine once a month for seventeen years+/- and you have reminded me of an article I wrote in 2012, I had to look back and see when I had written it, called The Cooking Connection. It was actually about Apple Pie. But similarly the hands of my Grandmothers, my Aunts, and my Mom are always there to guide me, their voiced always present in my kitchen.
Thank you for your stories, they are so important and I find them comforting in this world of conflict.