From Word To Word

Dave Humphrey and I were having a conversation a few months back, and he was talking about how the kinds of ingredients that people use in their cooking become a sort of index to the ways that they cook.  He suggested that the best way to know how people cook is not to look at the finished dishes that they make but to look at the ingredients that they use regularly, the ones that they cannot do without, the ones that are essential to their cooking.

I was intrigued by this idea, and I would have written on it immediately, only Dave said that he might post something on the topic himself.  He thought that it would be interesting to list the ingredients that he found essential in his own cooking and to ask his readers to create similar lists on their own blogs, to see the kinds of ingredients that others considered to be essential.  This post, however, has not yet materialized, though I have reminded Dave of it more than once.  So, now, because I am very interested to have Dave discuss his essential ingredients, I am pressing the question by other means, by writing the inaugural list myself and by inviting him to respond.

The criteria for the ingredients are simple.  First, they need to be basic ingredients rather than complete dishes, though this does not mean that they need to be entirely unprepared (yoghurt or cheese, for example, require preparation but are still basic ingredients in my opinion).  Second, they need to be ingredients for cooking rather than for baking (hopefully this will steer Dave away from his bread fetish).

Taking these criteria into consideration, here is my own list of essential ingredients, roughly in order of significance.

Garlic -  A day almost never goes by that I do not use garlic.  If I could only ever have one ingredient with which to flavour my food, I would choose garlic without hesitation.  It can be used in so many ways, and it is so beautiful when roasted on its own.  I can hardly overstate how dependent my cooking is on garlic.

Onion – I am cheating her a little, gathering all of the onions that I use regularly (yellow, red, green, shallot) under a single heading. Even so, onions in one form or another are also a key part of my cooking, both in my finished dishes and in my preparation of other ingredients like soup stock and tomato sauce.

Ginger – I have only begun using ginger regularly in the past few years, since I have been cooking Asian and South Asian cuisines more seriously, but it has now infiltrated my cooking entirely.  With garlic and onion it forms a kind of holy trinity for me.

Olive Oil – I use olive oil extensively, though I use canola oil also in certain situations, and I have been using grapeseed oil more often recently, especially when I need a higher smoke point or when I want a more subtle taste.  The reason that I prefer to use olive oil most often, quite simply, is a matter of taste.  Though a particular cooking need may force me to use something else at times, I prefer the taste of olive oil in most situations, and I not infrequently substitute with it when recipes call for other oils.

Butter – I love butter.  Some of my best childhood memories involve coating my grandmother’s homemade bread with her homemade butter and topping it with her hamemade jam.  These memories have given me a preference for saltless butter and for butter that is made by hand.  Despite its more brittle texture, I feel like I can actually taste the cream when butter is made like this.  Though I now have to make do with mass produced butter, I still love it, and I refuse to substitute anything else for it unless in the utmost extremity.

Cheese – I have written on occasion about how important cheese is to me and to my family, which makes it a kind of problem ingredient for me.  In some respects, it could head my list, though I do not use it as often as garlic or onions or ginger, at least not in a single form.  What I really need is another list for my essential cheeses, but that will have to wait for another day.  Suffice it to say that cheese, in one form or another, in a dish or eaten straight from the hand, has an almost spiritual significance for me.

Soup Stock – This is another item that could very well rank much higher, but that I am not sure exactly where to place.  Besides soups, of course, I use stock in countless dishes, gravies, and sauces.  I always have some homemade stock in my freezer, and having a pot of stock simmering on the stove is one of my purest comforts.

Black Pepper – This exercise gets difficult for me as soon as I start thinking about spices.  I cook with such a wide variety of spices that it is almost unfair to start picking one over another.  With freshly ground black pepper, however, I can at least offer my favourite spice with some confidence.  I actually use several varieties of ground pepper (green, red, white) depending on the occasion, but it is the spice I use most frequently, and this is not simply by default or by familiarity.  Fresh pepper is just beautiful.

Tomatoes – I use tomatoes, both fresh and in several prepared forms that I can myself (sauce, paste, stewed), in a wide variety of dishes.  I find that tomatoes, in any form, add complexity to the taste of a dish without dominating it, and they are essential for creating the proper texture in many kinds of reduction.

Sweet Red Peppers – My love of red peppers is matched very closely by my dislike of their green cousins.  Though I usually prefer bitter tastes to sweet ones, I have never been able to accustom myself to the particular bitterness of a green pepper.  Red peppers, however, taste good in almost anything, and when they are roasted with a little olive oil, they may be my single favourite flavour in the world.

Mushrooms – I can still recall the day when I discovered that mushrooms came in other varieties than the “white ones” and the “brown ones”.  I was in grade seven or eight, and it was my night to cook.  The recipe called for shitake mushrooms.  I had serious doubts that the grocery story would carry anything that sounded so exotic, but I was surprised to find a whole mushroom section.  The recipe was a success, and my love affair with mushrooms has only grown since then.

Lemons – I am discovering the imprtance of having citrus in a cook’s arsenal.  I do not like to use vinegar heavily, but there are occasions where this kind of acid taste is necessary, and I have found that lemon (or lime or orange) serves my purposes very well.  I also like the variety of textures that most citrus fruit provides (grated rind, whole slices, juice), which makes it useful in many different situations.

So, there you are: the twelve most essential ingredients in my kitchen.  I am now leaving it entirely up to Dave to put his food where his mouth is.  Of course, others are welcome to play as well.  Give me the link if you do.

I began reading On Friendship, a collection of Michel de Montaigne’s essays, mostly as a change of pace from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which is one of those books, at least for me, that is best enjoyed in smaller sections separated by sufficient time for reflection.  Rather than merely changing Bachelard’s pace, however, Montaigne soon set a pace of his own, and I found suddenly that I had read him from cover to cover, though I had intended to read him only an essay at a time.

The collection is seven essays long, but it is the first piece, “On Friendship”, that I found most compelling.  Some of the later essays in the volume, like “On the Affection Of Fathers For Their Children” or “That We Should Not Be Deemed Happy Until After Our Death”, are certainly interesting in their way and certainly fine examples of writing as well, but they lack the passion that is so clear in “On Friendship”, where Montaigne describes his relationship with Etienne de La Boetie with real intensity.  “In the friendship which I am talking about,” he says, “souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found,” and this kind of personal passion distinguishes the essay from all the others in the collection.

Interestingly, Montaigne locates the origin of this friendship, not in a face to face encounter, but in a text that La Boetie had written against tyranny.  “I am particularly indebted to that treatise,” says Montaigne, “because it first brought us together,”  and he goes on to say that this treatise was what prepared him “for that loving-friendship between us which as long as it pleased God we fostered so perfect and so entire that it is certain that few such can even be read about, and no trace at all of it can be found among men of today.”

While I am more than a little sceptical of Montaigne’s claims about the exclusive nature of his friendship, I am fascinated by the role that writing played in the development of his relationship with La Boetie.  Montaigne read the work of La Boetie long before he met him in person, and he claims that this reading made him acquainted with La Boetie, preparing the conditions which would enable their friendship to develop when they did at last meet.  Here, at least, whatever poststructuralist criticism might say about the absence of the author and the illusion of authorial intention and whatever else, here, a reader claims that the act of reading made him acquainted with a writer in such a way that a friendship became possible.

Writing is never adequate to its author, of course, to its author’s thinking or to its author’s intention.  It is only ever adequate to itself.  Its function is not to mean what the author thought or intended, but simply to mean what it comes to mean.  Nevertheless, the example of Montaigne and La Boetie shows, as does my own experience, that writing does return us to its author in some way.  It is not that writing allows us to determine anything about the author, and it is not that writing makes its author somehow present to us.  Writing merely turns us toward an author, indefinite and undetermined though this author may be.  It allows us to make an author’s acquaintance.  It opens the possibility of friendship.

It is this possibility that underwrites the act of reading for me.  Though many of the authors I read are now dead, and though it is not likely that I will ever meet and befriend those of them who are still living, I still read in order to be turned toward the author, toward this someone else who writes for me without knowing me.  I read in order to make the aquaintence of this unknown one, to open a possible friendship with this anonymous other, even and especially because the possible friendship will almost certainly remain unrealized.

I read to encounter this impossible possibility.

This coming Saturday, May 9th is the next Dinner and a Doc, and we will be screening Up the Yangtze by Yung Chang.   The film follows Chang as he returns to China to travel the Yangtse River one final time before the Three Gorges Dam creates from it a reservoir for the world’s largest hydroelectric project.  The director himself describes the voyage as surreal, and the film has received accolades both for its cinematography and for its unique portrayal of the effects of industrialization.

Further information about the film is available at the official website, in the official trailer, and in this interview with Yung Chang.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

This is the third chapter of what I am still just calling “the Lindy novel”.  I appreciated the suggestions that people made for a potential title, but nothing has yet struck me as being quite right.  Any new suggestions for a title are welcome, of course, as are other comments, particularly with respect to the dialogue, which is not exactly a strength for me.  If you are new to the story and want to catch yourself up, you can begin at Chapter One.

Chapter Three:
In Which Lindy Meets Some People She Does Not Expect

Afterward, Lindy was never sure if she actually stepped through the archway at all. In her memory it always seemed that the archway came and passed over her, or that the panes of glass disappeared and let the smoke envelope her. The gold flecks grew and shone more brightly, and a whole sky of stars spun around her, all trailing great wisps and ribbons of silver mist. She could still see bits of the trees and the grass here and there, but they were just patches of green whirling through the gold and the blue and the grey.

After a time that seemed very long and very short all at the same time, the little spots of green became larger, and the stars became smaller and more distant, and the swirling smoke became more still. Then, all at once, the mist passed away from her, and she stood once more beneath the arch, its shell-pink stone stretching over her, and the trees swaying around her.

For a moment she thought that perhaps nothing had changed at all. The trees were all in their places, and Mister Hat’s house was still where it had been just a few moments earlier, but she soon realized that some other things had changed very much indeed. She was no longer standing in the overgrown grass of the garden. Instead, she and the arch were both in the centre of a broad circle of stone. It looked a little like the low stage of the bandstand in the park, but it was the same colour as the arch, and it was more suited for a palace than for a park or a garden.

There were also, she now noticed, a cluster of stone cottages that had sprung up in the orchard behind Mister Hat’s house. They were nestled closely together, filling the whole back of the yard, and they mingled with the fruit trees as naturally as the grass and the flowers. Cobblestone pathways joined the gates of their low garden walls, weaving between the trees and climbing the small hills with flights of stairs. Everything was so intermingled that it was difficult to tell where one yard ended and another began. It was as if the houses had seeded and sprouted there, growing slowly out of the landscape over the years.

Lindy felt drawn to the cottages as soon as she saw them. They were like a place that she had always dreamed but had just now remembered for the first time. Without knowing quite what she was doing, she walked across the stone platform and along the cobble path that ran toward the little houses, until she was looking over the walls into their gardens and peering as closely through the windows as she dared. She found an old well in the open place in the middle of the cottages, and a big stone oven beside the path that ran away from them toward the house, and a long low barn on the further side of them. All the while, she felt more and more that the cottages had just grown there with the trees, and that she was somehow a part of the growing.

It was all very beautiful to Lindy, but there was a kind of sadness about the garden now too, a kind of emptiness. The cottages were tended. The roofs were in good repair, and the paint on the doors and the shutters looked fresh, but there were no faces in the windows, no gardeners in the gardens, and no walkers on the pathways. Everything was still. Even Mister Hat’s house seemed emptier than it had before. The whole garden seemed to be remembering when there had been people living in it and to be waiting for others to come and live in it again. The feeling of sadness was in the stillness and the remembering and the waiting.

As she grew used to these things, Lindy also began to notice a deeper kind of change that was more difficult for her to describe. “Everything,” she tried to tell me later, “was just somehow more perfect, even though it looked exactly the same as it did before.”

“So,” I suggested, “for example, the trees were taller and straighter?”

“No, no,” she said, “That’s not it at all. The short things and the crooked things were still short and crooked. There’s nothing wrong with something being short or crooked. It just has to be properly short and crooked, and these trees were proper trees. They were properly tall and short and leafy and bare and straight and crooked and, well, they were properly trees, you know?”

I was not sure that I did see, but maybe you will, so I will try as much as I can to describe things exactly as she did. According to Lindy, most of the garden looked much like it had before. It was as wild and as overgrown as it had ever been, but everything now seemed exactly where it was meant to be. It was as if Lindy could now see what Mister Hat’s garden had really been all the time, as if she could now understand the reason why each tree and flower was growing where it was.

She had been wandering for some time, surrounded by this strange and beautiful new garden, when she was startled by the sound of a door opening at the side of Mister Hat’s house. Her first thought was that something else extraordinary was about to happen, and she turned toward the house almost certain that she would find a giant or a centaur or something equally fantastic walking across the lawn. The two men who came through the door, however, were not particularly extraordinary. True, one was a little taller and thinner than the average person, but he was certainly no giant, and the other was the most regular sort of man that there could be.

Even so, Lindy was a little frightened. She had only been expecting to meet Mister Hat when she had jumped into the garden, and everything had felt so empty after she had gone through the arch that she had not expected to meet anyone at all. Now there were two strangers approaching her, and she began to wonder whether they would take her to the police for trespassing.

With all this going through her mind, I think you will understand why she considered trying to run, and she did consider it very seriously for a moment, but she knew that the wall was too high for her to climb and that the men would probably catch her before she could even try, so she decided to be as cooperative as she could and to see if they would let her go with just a warning.

As they drew nearer, she could see them more clearly, and she began to think that perhaps they were not so ordinary after all. The taller man was really quite tall, and he was dressed in heavy leather clothes that looked as if they had been handmade by someone who had no idea whatsoever how to sew. They made him look like a castaway from a desert island, and he would have been quite frightening indeed if he had not been smiling in quite so friendly a way and if he had not given Lindy a little wave as he grew closer.

The smaller man was also not quite as regular as Lindy had first thought him to be. He was very bald, and he wore a fancy suit with long tails at the back, and white gloves, and shiny black shoes, like a magician without the top hat. He was walking very carefully through the grass, keeping his shoes and pants clean, hardly even looking in Lindy’s direction, but when he did look up, he did not smile at all, though he did not exactly frown either. He looked like maybe he had forgotten how to smile or frown altogether, and he did not at all seem the sort of man who let people off with warnings, but it was too late to run, so she just waited and hoped.

When the two men approached her, the shorter man in the fancy clothes bowed very deeply, cleared his throat, and said, “Miss Lindy, if I may presume to address you before the proper introductions have been made, Mister Alaisdair Bridgebane has instructed me…”

“Actually,” the taller man interrupted, still smiling,“Alaisdair only asked, really. He isn’t the sort of guy who orders people around much.” He looked even taller now that he was close, and he was looming over the shorter man’s shoulder from a rather alarming height.

The shorter man stopped in the middle of his sentence and looked up at his companion for a moment before turning back to Lindy. “I hope,” he continued, “that Miss Lindy will forgive Osborne’s appalling manners. Despite my very best efforts during my tenure as Butler in Mister Bridgebane’s service, the staff are still undisciplined, inappropriate, and even, in some cases,” he paused for emphasis, “insubordinate.”

Osborne chuckled in a low and friendly way. “Don’t worry,” he said, “Eddie always talks like that. Big words make him happy.”

The shorter man ignored him. “As I was saying, Mister Alaisdair Bridgebane has instructed me,” he paused and looked back at Osborne once more, “to inform you that he is saddened to be unable to receive you personally, though it would have been his very great pleasure. Unfortunately, matters of some importance have required his immediate attention. He has instructed,” and the shorter man emphasized this word just slightly more than was necessary, “that I am to make every effort to arrange for your comfortable stay here at The Crofts.” He bowed again. “Have you any personal effects with which Osborne might assist you?”

He gestured to Osborne at the end of this speech, and the larger man bent forward in an overly elaborate bow, his hand fluttering as low as he could reach, near his knee somewhere. “At your service Miss,” he said in his pleasant way, “especially since you don’t seem to need it.” He stood upright again. “That’s the easiest sort of service to offer, you know, the kind that won’t be accepted anyway.”

The smaller man managed to look annoyed without actually changing his expression.

“Osborne is really my family name,” the tall man continued. “My first name is Morris. Everyone calls me Moe, except old Eddie here.”

“My name,” the smaller man said, in a tone that managed to be both emotionless and offended all at once, “is Clinton Edward Beale. If you have need of my services, you should address me as Clinton.”

“I would have let him introduce himself,” Moe said, “only he thinks it’s rude.”

“It is rude, in fact” said Clinton, sounding as if he was explaining something for the hundredth time, “especially in the case of one’s social superiors.”

Moe seemed not to hear him. Instead, he offered Lindy his large and surprisingly gentle hand. Lindy took it, then offered her own to Clinton in turn. He hesitated for a moment and then shook it, once, briskly.

Lindy had not yet had a chance to say anything through all of this, and she felt a bit confused by everything that was happening to her. It seemed that Moe and Clinton were not taking her to the police after all, and they were treating her nicely enough, but she had no idea who this Mister Bridgebane was or why he would send people to greet her. Still, she did manage to say, “Good to meet you both,” without any difficulty, so she felt that she had not behaved too badly. Unfortunately, both Moe and Clinton seemed to be expecting something more from her.

“You will need,” said Clinton at last, “to accept formally the hospitality of the house. However things are done where you come from, around here the formalities must be observed.”

“Oh,” said Lindy. “What exactly do I say to, um, accept your hospitality, or whatever you said?”

Clinton looked as if he was trying very hard to be patient. “You need only say something to the effect that you do indeed accept the hospitality of our house.”

“Oh,” said Lindy again, though she did not normally talk in this silly way. “I do then. Accept your hospitality, I mean.”

“Very good,” said Clinton. “Follow me if you please,” and he began leading the way toward the house of Mister Hat.

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