The Virago Book of Food edited by Jill Foulston

Subtitle: The Joy of Eating

Virago have published some wonderful anthologies over the years, and this is a wonderful addition to their list.

It opens with Banana Yoshimto contemplating her kitchen and closes with Pierette Brillat-Savarin quoting her great-aunts final words – on the subject of dessert. In between there is a wonderful journey through food writing.

You will find an extraordinary rage of writers: lots of Virago authors, food writers going back through centuries, literary giants, wonderful authors of biography and memoirs.

They cover a wide range of subjects – every angle you could think of: festive food, housekeeping tips, holy food, lack of food, and much, much more.

They will take you to all four corners of the globe and across many centuries.

A wonderful book, but a very difficult book to review. So here is what I’m going to do. I’m going to select nine contributors to invite to an imaginary dinner party and a quote from each to give you a taste of this wonderful book.

(I’d love to invite more, but I haven’t enough seats.)

Here they are:

Jane Grigson (1920 -190)

“In the Middle Ages – and until reently in some parts – the cherry fair was a great festival. People wandered about the orchards,; the fruit was picked and sold; there was dancing, drinking and making love (a few years ago there were still people in our Wiltshire village with birthdays nine months after the Clyffe feast, which took place every year at cherry time). the poignancy, colour and glory in lives which were normally brutish had by the thirteenth century turned the fair into a symbol of the passing moment.”

Hildegarde of Bingen (1098 – 1179)

“The will is like a fire baking every action in an oven. Bread is baked in order to feed people and strengthen them so that they can live. The will is the force behind the whole of the action. It grinds the action in a mill, it adds yeast and kneads it firmly and thus carefully prepares the action, like a loaf of bread which the will bakes to perfection in the heat of its zeal.”

Sarah Waters

“Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster? If you have, you will remember it. Some quirk of the Kentish coastline makes Whitstable natives – as they are properly called – the largest and the juiciest, the savouriest yet the subtlest, oysters in the whole of England. Whitstable oysters are, quite rightly, famous. The French, who are known for their sensitive palates, regularly cross the Channel for them; they are shipped, in barrels of ice, to the dining-tables of Hamburg and Berlin. Why, the King himself, I heard, makes special trips to Whitstable with Mrs Keppel, to eat oyster suppers in a private hotel; and as for the old Queen – she dined on a native a day (or so they say) till the day she died.”

Christina Rosetti (1830 – 94)

“Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries–
All ripe together
In summer weather–
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy.”"

Claudia Roden

“Oriental New Year meals end with fresh dates, figs, and above all pomegranates – all of which are mentioned in the Bible – as the new fruits of the season. In Egypt, we thought pomegranates would cause our family to bear more children. We ate the seeds sprinkled with orange-blossom, water and sugar.”

 Rumer Godden (1907-98)

“The greengages had a pale-blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear-green skin; if it were craked the juice was doubly warm and sweet. Coming from the streets and small front gardens of Southstone, we had not been let loose in such an orchard before; it was no wonder we ate too much.”

Della Lutes (1872 – 1942)

“It was a tedious job, making apple butter, but less so, it seems to me, when brewed out of doors, especially on an October day with the sun beating warmly down on your neck, and crimson leaves drip, dripping from the maple trees – sometimes straight into the huge pot itself, like some jocose gamester flipping cards into a hat.”

Louisa May Alcott (1832-88)

“”It’s time for lunch girls, and I bought mine with me, it’s so much jollier to eat in sisterhood. Let’s club together and have a revel,” said kate, producing a bag of oranges, and several big, plummy buns. “We’ve got sardines, crackers and cheese,” said Bess, clearing off a table with all speed. “Wait a bit, and I’ll add my share,” cried Polly, and catching up her cloak, she ran to the grocery store nearby.”

Celia Fiennes (1642 – 1741)

“In most part of Sommer-setshire it is very fruitfull for orchards, plenty of apples and peares, but they are not curious in the planting the best sort of fruite, which is a great pitty; being so soon produced and such quanteteyes, they are likewise so careless when they make cider, they press all sorts of apples together, else they might have such good cider as in any other parts, even as good as the Herrifordshires …”

My only problem now ……… what on earth do I give them to eat?!

A Boy at the Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy

Richard Kennedy came from Carbis Bay, just a few miles from my home. It’s a small, sleepy Cornish town with a lovely sandy beach. I recall being taken there as a child on annual Sunday School treats when the highlight of the day was a bottle of lemonade and a saffron bun after happy hours playing in the sea and on the golden sands.

But Richard was sent away to school. A very good school – Malborough – and no doubt his family had great ambitions for him.

Unfortunately though, Richard was not a success at school and at the age of sixteen he was back in Carbis Bay with not a qualification to his name. He was happy to be back, but he wasn’t to stay long. His Uncle George spoke to a friend and Richard found himself off to London to be employed as an office boy.

Uncle George’s friend was Leonard Woolf, and so Richard found himself at the Hogarth Press. And so we see the Bloomsbury Group through the eyes of a gauche sixteen-year old boy.

Richard made the tea, printed book-jackets on the treadle press, helped with type setting and packed and depatched books. Eventually he was even sent ot Scotland to sell books. He was just the boy in the office though, so nobody took much notice of him. But he watched them!

Leonard Woolf took an interest in the boy’s future and encouraged Richard to learn bookkeeping. He kept a close eye on the petty cash and office expenses too. Virginia Woolf was a more distant figure, but a dab hand at packaging books when called upon. Other notable figures passed by, but Richard gives them and his less distinguished colleagues and friends just the same attention.

After a year though, it’s all over – Richard is sacked for cutting paper the wrong size.

But the details that he does remember from his short employment allow him to not only give clear and charming account, but also to pepper his story with simple and striking line drawings.

A lovely little book!

An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay

“Write her life, they urged me, even at her graveside; noone but you should do it. Who better? You with your command of words, and besides, you were the closest.”

So begins Francesca Kay’s debut – a novel, written as a biography. Its subject is Jennet Mallow, a successful and acclaimed 20th century artist.

She grew up in Yorkshire in the 1920s, and learned at an early age that her artistic talent and dreams would set her apart from her family: her priest father, her resentful mother and her much more conventional sister.

Working as a land-girl in Cornwall during the war she encountered artistic communities for the first time and she realised that there was another way to live.

And so after the war she moved to London to go to art school. It was there that she met David Heaton, a rising star of the art world, and the man she would marry and have children with.

At first, David was at the centre of his social circle, while Jennet cast herself as his supporter,and struggled to balance the roles of wife, mother and artist in her own right.

But things changed. The family moved to Spain, in an attempt to escape the darkness and poverty of post war London. There Jennet found her inspiration and began to paint in earnest, while David lost his and began the descent into alcoholism and self-destruction.

And so it went on. Jennet’s star rose rises while David’s fell, and gradually thing fell apart. Life would never be easy for Jennet. There was always that balancing act, the difficulty of of living in a world dominated by men, and a world that did not judge men and women by the same standards.

The emotional truth of Francesca Kay’s story never falters and she uses language quite beautifully. However, the biographical style is sometimes a problem. I never doubted the truth of Jennet’s story but I did sometimes feel a little removed from it.

But it is the art that makes this book sing. Jennet’s story is rich with wonderful detailed descriptions of her art, in exquisite prose that really will paint pictures in your head.

“Ultramarine blue, Byzantine blue, cobalt, cerulean. Christening the sky with their precise richnesses of colour was like learning a new language, one she found she loved. She had not dared to think of art as a way of living. But now, here, suddenly, it struck her as the only way, the only way that she could say out loud what she knew she was worth…”

“This series is a kind of prayer, a glimpse of what infinity might look like. The shades of milky-white and grey, mothwing, oyster shell, sand, pale lilac, midnight-blue and inky black, are so subtle that their gradations can hardly be discerned, and yet it is clear from their slight stirrings and their iridescence where the air begins and where the water ends.”

To do that in a first novel is really quite extraordinary.

451 Fridays: Which book to save and which book to become?

Did you know that the lovely Elizabeth at As Usual, I Need More Bookshelves hosts 451 Fridays every Friday?

She was inspired by the Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451 and now she invites a different person each week to first list five books that they would save and then pick which one that they would “become” so that the book will never be forgotten.

Today she is featuring my choice of books. Do take a look here and let us know what you think of my choices.

The feature is open to everyone so, if you would like to participate, do Elizabeth know. It will make you look at your books in a whole new way!

And thank you Elizabeth, for having such a wonderful idea and running with it

Library Loot / Cover Attraction

Just one library book this week, but it’s gem. It’s also very beautiful and so it is doing double duty as both Library Loot and a Cover Attraction.

Here it is:

The Spy Game by Georgina Harding

‘If you were a sleeper, how long do you think it would take before you forgot who you really were? If you were living undercover for years and years. Which person would be you?’ On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna’s mother disappears into the fog. A kiss that barely touches Anna’s cheek, a rumble of exhaust and a blurred wave through an icy windscreen, and her mother is gone. Looking back, Anna will wish that she could have paid more attention to the facts of that day. The adult world shrouds the loss in silence, tidies the issue of death away along with the things that her mother left behind. And her memories will drift and settle like the fog that covers the car. That same morning a spy case breaks in the news – the case of the Krogers, apparently ordinary people who were not who they said they were; people who had disappeared in one place and reappeared in another with other identities, leading other lives. Obsessed by stories of the Cold War, and of the Second World War which is still a fresh and painful memory for the adults about them, Anna’s brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was a spy working undercover and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort between fact and fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how do you know who a person was once she is dead?

Have you seen a lovely cover this week? Then do share your Cover Attraction here.

And have you found any great books in the library? Share your Library Loot here.

Teaser Tuesdays / It’s Tuesday, where are you?

Just quote a couple of spoiler-free sentences the book you’re reading to tempt other readers.

Here is mine:-

“What adventure may come, I have not at this moment the faintest conception. The fun lies in the search.”

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB

I have recently found myself to be alone in the world, with just twopence in my pocket. But I shall not teach, I shall not sell bonnets. I am in London, the greatest and richest city in the world, and so I leave my future in the hands of Providence. I shall stroll out this morning and embrace the first stray enterprise that offers…

It’s Tuesday, where are you? is hosted by raidergirl3.

This all comes courtesy of Miss Cayley’s Adventures by Grant Allen

Buried Treasure

To look at this pile of books you might think they were nothing special, but you would be wrong.

I love a shiny new book as much as anyone, but I love the sense of history attached to an old book too. And I hate the idea of a book being ditched just because it’s a little old and scruffy.

There are often wonderful books to be found in the 50p boxes outside my local used bookshop, so I rushed over when I saw that they had been topped up. Here are the books that I had to bring home:

Lady Into Fox & A Man In The Zoo by David Garnett

I was very taken with the idea of Lady Into Fox when I read about it at Stuck In a Book. It was in library stock and so I ordered it up, but when I read it I knew that I had to have a copy of my own to keep. This is a lovely illustrated  paperback edition from 1940 and it came with a number of bonuses – a postcard from the period, a newspaper cutting about the author and, best of all, A Man In The Zoo, another short work that I haven’t read.

Four Gardens by Margery Sharp

I read The Eye of Love by Margery Sharp last year and fell in love with her writing. Sadly though it is the only one of her works in print, and so I have been ordering others up from the libary’s fiction reserve and picking them up where I can. This book comes from a series I have never seen before – published by in Leipzig in English  as Volume 5233 of The Tauchnitz Edition of British and American Authors. I wonder what other books were in that series and just how this little volume found its way to Cornwall.

The Dangerous Islands by Ann Bridge

Ann Bridge was a diplomatic wife and drew on her travels and experiences to publish twenty six books between 1932 and 1968. Her books were both praised and popular but none are in print now. I have Peking Picnic and Illyrian Spring in my Virago Modern Classics collection and, though I haven’t read them yet, I love the synopses and the pages I have scanned.  I am particularly intrigued by this book because  it was published in the year of my birth (1964) and because thanks are given to the clerk of the council of the Isles of Scilly – we can see the boats and helicopters that travel to the Scillies from our house.

Star-Brace, The End of the House of Alard, Sussex Gorse and Three Against The World by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Isn’t that a wonderful set of titles? Sheila Kaye-Smith is another woman author who was praised and lauded in the 190os but who is no longer in print. Most of her work is set in her native Sussex, and it seems that she was compared with Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb – two of my favourite autors. That plus the synopses from another two unread Virago Modern Classics on my shelves (Joanna Godden and Susan Spray) were more than enough to ensure that I would scoop up any of her books that I came across.

Truth is Not Sober by Winifred Holtby

I have read two of Winifred Holtby’s novels, The Crowded Street and South Riding,and they were both quite wonderful. Some of the short stories in this collection are in Remember, Remember!, Virago’s collection of her shrter works – but not all of them! And I am charmed that this copy comes from the Timothy Whites Circulating Library of Fareham and dates back to 1935.

A wonderful haul for just £4 !

An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear

I enjoy series books, but they often cause me to worry. So may times things go wrong. An author runs out of ideas, the characters lose their interest, or sometimes books just become variants on a familiar formula.

And so I wondered when I picked up Jacqueline Winspear’s fifth Maisie Dobbs book. Particularly as there was a noticeable change in cover design – lovely, but much lighter and brighter.

I am pleased to be able to say that any worries that I had proved to be quite unfounded.

The story opens in London in 1931 with the economy deep in recession. Business is hard to ome by and so Maisie is relieved to undertake an investigation for the potential purchaser of a Kent estate.

James Compton, of the Compton Corporation, is the potential purchaser of the Sandmere Estate, but he has concerns.The present owner, a younger son who became heir when his brother was killed in the Great War, has run down the estate and it is very nearly bankrupt. And there has been  a spate petty crime and vandalism in the house, and at the accompanying brickworks. The Compton Company needs to be certain that there is nothing amiss before taking ownership

When Maisie arrives in Kent she finds a community at war.  The landowner, the local villagers, the incoming workers for the hop-picking season – both travelling gypsies and working Londoners – dislike and distrust each other. 

And there seems to be a deeper mystery – why is their a stony silence about the night that three members of a Dutch family were killed in a Zeppelin raid?

Jacqueline Winspear has skilfully avoids the pitfalls that so often befall series books.

Her plot is well-constructed, complex and compelling. It has its roots, as do all of her plots, in the Great War but she takes a new angle that feels entirely  appropriate. That war did change so many lives in a multitude of ways. The resolution is striking and thought provoking.

Characters and the times and places that they live in are wonderfully evoked, and every detail rings true. Maisie’s personal story continues to develop. Changes happen and more changes seem to be on the horizon, and it feels entirely right. Even after life changing events life can hold more twists and turns.

If only all series worked this well …

Library Loot

My library scales were perfectly balanced this week – 4 books back and 4 books out!

The books going back were:

• True Murder by Yaba Badoe
• An Equal Silence by Francesca Kay
• An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear
• A Boy at the Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy

All interesting books. I’ve wrtten about True Murder already and I’ll catch up with the other three over the weekend. I haven’t written much this week because I’ve been knitting a birthday present with a tight deadline.

And here is my quartet of new books:

The Clothes on their Backs by Linda Grant

“In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents’ home? This is a novel about survival – both banal and heroic – and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live.”

I read Linda Grant’s When I Lived in ModernTimes a few years ago and really liked it, so I had been keeping an eye out for this one. It finally turned up this week.

The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews

“Meet the Troutmans. Hattie is living in Paris, city of romance, but has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Min, her sister back in Canada, is going through a particularly dark period. And Min’s two kids, Logan and Thebes, are not talking and talking way too much, respectively. So when Hattie receives a phone call in the middle of the night from eleven-year-old Thebes, begging her to return to Canada and help sort out their family, she knows she has to go. When she arrives home, Min is on her way to a psychiatric ward, and Hattie becomes responsible for her niece and nephew. She quickly realizes that she is way out of her league, and hatches a plan to find the kids’ long-lost father. With only the most tenuous lead to go on, she piles Logan and Thebes into the family van, and they head south.”

I wasn’t that taken when I saw this book on the Orange Prize Longlist, but when I saw a copy I picked it up and I was won over.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

“In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the ‘hush-hush floor’ of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life’s romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.”

Doesn’t that sound wonderful? I wasn’t expecting to see this on the shelves so soon after publication, but I’m thrilled that I did.

Chez Moi by Agnes Desarthe

“At forty-three, Myriam has been a wife, mother, and lover—but never a restauranteur. When she opens Chez Moi in a quiet neighborhood in Paris, she has no idea how to run a business, but armed only with her love of cooking, she is determined to try. Barely able to pay the rent, Myriam secretly sleeps in the dining room and bathes in the kitchen sink, while struggling to come to terms with the painful memories of her past. But soon enough her delectable cuisine brings her many neighbors to Chez Moi, and Myriam finds that she may get a second chance at life and love.”

I didn’t know the book or the author, but the cherry-red spine was so appealing on the shelf. When I picked it up and  read the forst few lines I was charmed, and so home it came.

Have you read any of these? What did you think of them?

And what did you find in the library this week?

See more Library Loot here.

Teaser Tuesdays / It’s Tuesday, where are you?

Just quote a couple of spoiler-free sentences the book you’re reading to tempt other readers.

Here is mine:-

“I shall not forget the sight of him as we left, that picture stays strong with me: his figure still and straight on the wide shore, the land huge and bare about him, the snowy dip of the valley at his back, the mountains on either side, twin peaks they were of seemingly identical height, rising steep and smooth and streaked with grey as if in some strange reversal the rock were ashes that had been poured down to the earth from heaven; the sea a darkened pewter and having that sluggishness to its movement that comes from when it is heavy with the beginnings of ice. In all God’s earth, from the tip of Africa to the Indies or the wide Pacific, a man may never see a sight so lonely.”

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB

It is August 1616 and I am aboard the Heartsease.We have been on a whaling trip high into the Arctic, and now we must return home before the ice closes in. But we have left a man behind. Thomas Cave made a wager that he would stay, alone, until the next season. It is madness. Surely no no man could survive a winter so far north in such terrible conditions…

It’s Tuesday, where are you? is hosted by raidergirl3.

This all comes courtesy of The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding.

Highly recommended!