Letter

  We have just received the (rather wonderful!) covers for the next three Persephone Classics, which are Mariana, Little Boy Lost and Kitchen Essays (to be published in October).  The latter has had a little boost recently because it is mentioned in Kate Colquhoun’s Taste: the Story of Britain through its Cooking, newly out in paperback. In it Kate Colquhoun writes about a new breed of cookery writers which emerged in the 1920s: they were ‘wry, cultured and ineffably polite, their outlook was as light and refreshing as their soufflés, chaudfroids, iced coupes and chicken mousses; they loathed starch and delighted in discernment… Agnes Jekyll cooked “friendly” rice pudding with marmalade and egg yolks and re-baptised roast leg of mutton the more alluring “Gigot de six heures”, a modern take on Eliza Acton’s version with its cloves of garlic, vegetables, claret and brandy. She simmered tomatoes in consommé, straining and softening them with whipped cream into a soup, and she transformed mashed potato from stiff tastelessness into something “not much thicker than a well-made apple sauce”, thinned with butter, stock or boiling milk and mashed with a clove of garlic.’ And so on.

    There was also a boost for the Vicomte de Mauduit’s They Can’t Ration These because Sue Perkins held a copy up and read out of it in The Supersizers Go… Wartime, a television programme in which she and Giles Coren lived on 1940s food for a week.  This is what Giles Coren wrote about it: ‘Everything in the 1940s seems to have been the colour of a manila envelope: the food, the clothes, the women's legs. We live on “national loaf”, which is bread made from whatever you make bread from when there is no wheat - I'm guessing pea flour, brick dust and hair. Then there's ersatz coffee, powdered egg, mock duck, mock ham, mock chicken, mock chocolate and Spam, which, alas, was not mock.’  The food suggested by the Vicomte is far from manila envelope-coloured, it is mostly green, yellow and berry-coloured.  Indeed, for those who missed Be Nice to Nettles Week a month ago, the Vicomte has several delicious nettle recipes (nb. they are only just past their peak).  Talking of picking nettles: June, July and August are the months for pick your own farms – even town-dwellers will find one not so far away from where they are.

  Lastly – there was a good discussion on Radio4’s A Good Read about Daddy’s Gone A’Hunting. And the New Scientist had a fascinating article called ‘The Day the Sky Exploded’ about the day a hundred years ago, 30th June 1908, when there was an explosion in Tunguska in Western Siberia which was so powerful that light from the blast was visible as far west as England.  There is a conference of scientists in Moscow this week to discuss what caused it – possibly an asteroid or comet exploding, or the result of a massive escape of high-pressure gas from deep within the Earth’s crust, or something crashing into the earth.  Whatever the cause, we plan to reread The Hopkins Manuscript (about the moon crashing into the earth) and urge you to do the same!

Nicola Beauman
30 June 2008
Lamb’s Conduit Street