No. 2555: Last words
You are invited to write a poem or short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. Maximum 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2555’ by 24 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net.
In Competition 2552 you were invited to follow Bernard Levin (who liked eggs boiled for the duration of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro) and spice up a cookery column with similar cultural references.
Unfortunately Bernard did not tell us who was conducting while he was boiling; a Toscanini egg, for example, would be a much softer thing than a Klemperer one. W.J. Webster observes that Levin, of course, was being light-hearted, not pretentious; indeed, the Figaro/eggs recipe is also ascribed to Beecham, that most down-to-earth of musicians. But the idea of the comp was to use the reference as a base camp from which to scale the peaks of pseudery, the pyramids of piffle that loom when a skilled craft morphs into a Fine Art. Basil Ransome-Davies even managed to produce a recipe for . . . but read on.
Commendations go to Alanna Blake for a Keats-inspired autumn feast, Barry Baldwin for a Shakespearean fry-up, and Josh Ekroy for a musical pudding. The winners, printed below, get £25 each while Mr Webster wins the bonus fiver.
I was re-reading Adam Bede the other day — ah, for a world where one churns one’s own butter! — when it struck me how few people nowadays would realise that Hetty Sorrel shares a name with one of our most magical vegetable-herbs. Alone, sorrel is sharply subtle, Daumier made edible. But sympathetically matched, it has the power to transfigure even a classic dish. If you ever thought, for instance, that Potage Darblay, that Roi Soleil of soups, was beyond enhancement, try serving it with a simple chiffonnade of sorrel — the exquisite tones it adds to the masterwork are like notes written in the margins of Principia Mathematica by Gottlob Frege. The palate glows with the brilliant points of colour of a Seurat canvas. And if we sense rouge et noir amongst those colours, we are back at our starting point in fiction with another, if Gallically variant, Sorel.
W.J. Webster
Imagine Giotto’s perfect circle, drawn on the spot, the very image of completeness. Don’t be bored by this completeness (as Nietzsche wrote, life is far too short to spend boring ourselves). Don’t be drawn into a mesmeric inertia, a Hamlet of the kitchenette. The circle must move; or be made to move. This belief may be illusory, but we know from William James that the ‘will to believe’ is itself an instrumentality. While moving the circle (usually clockwise), imagine T.S. Eliot reciting the passage from Book V of Paradise Lost in which Raphael repeats God’s warning to Adam and Eve. This will give the gravity, the pace, the rhythm, the Stimmung. Soon the colours will appear, themselves moving, colours redolent of Lord Leighton’s richly erotic painting ‘Flaming June’, achieved almost entirely in shades of orange. Finally remove the lid and heat the contents in a pan, stirring occasionally.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Breakfast classics — for that Proustian moment that defines the day. For perfect timing, take your cue from Diego Velasquez’s ‘Old Woman Cooking Eggs’: better than a thousand words on technique. Plenty of oil, heat, watchfulness — ah yes, how quickly time destroys our best endeavours, as Der Rosenkavalier reminds us. So I time the heating while reciting the first three cantos of Il Purgatorio, slip in the egg, and continue with the next two cantos — in Italian, naturally, and with due respect for Dante’s shadowy, lingering vowels. If you have a dialect other than pure Florentine, you may have to adjust the number. And toast. Eschewing the Stalinist regularity of the toaster, I go for the pre-heated grill and all the resonances of the Ravenna mosaics of St Lawrence, with their glowing heat still powerful after 2,000 years. The bread, of course, is organic, for the taste of Hardy’s prose in every bite.
D.A. Prince
‘All the dexterity’, wrote Sterne, ‘is in the good cookery and management of’ digressions’, and this has inspired some excellent hors d’oeuvre, which are diversions to a main course, rather in the manner of the second movement of Debussy’s ‘La Mer’. An ‘ooze of oil’ – as in Hopkins’s ‘God’s Grandeur’ — brings out the shimmer of the anchovies (so reminiscent of Schiele’s ‘Melanie with Silver-Coloured Scarves’); swells the rubicundity of pissaladierre (tartines topped with tomatoes, as if just plucked from Picasso’s 1944 still life sequence); and adds tang to the culatello, as gloriously hammy as Wolfit, and as well-soaked as his protégé, O’Toole! Add peppadews, as sour and exhilarating as Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia, and South Pacific shrimp in a subtle marinade, in which cilantro and lime blend together with all the surprise of comedy and tragedy in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. And now, as Nicklaus would say, the main course . . .
Bill Greenwell
‘How sweet of you to seek my humble opinions. Of course art and cookery are intertwined. How could De Camprobin have painted his exquisite still lifes unless he knew the taste of every sweet morsel on his tongue? And in that same tradition, the freshly butchered meats of Mateo Cerezo ache for nothing more than a hot pan, a simple olive oil, a handful of herbs, and the noble onions of Iberia. You say that fish is a problem. But, dear boy, remember the great sauces: Hollandaise weeping across fresh salmon like the folds of Christ’s robes in a minor Dürer. Even that oft denigrated sauce, the sorrel, clinging to flesh like something from a country lane attaching itself to one of Constable’s wagon-wheels. Art and cookery are about temptation. Who would not want to slice the lemons in Braque’s ‘Le Jour’ to taste again the beauty of France?
William Danes-Volkov
No. 2555: Last words
You are invited to write a poem or short story or news report containing the line ‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from there’. Maximum 16 lines or 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition 2555’ by 24 July or email jamesy@greenbee.net.
Comments