glowing marmalades

Bob has just made his fourth batch of marmalade this month, using Seville oranges which are only available in January. Batch 1 had to be thrown away when he got engrossed in some editing work and left the boiling marmalade to caramelise. Batch 2 was an unusual recipe with dark muscovado sugar, not a marmalade for all seasons. Batch 3 was a laborious ‘fine peel’ marmalade which involved hours of paring the pith carefully away from the rind of kilos of oranges, and then cutting the rinds into vermicelli with the point of our sharpest knife. The resulting marmalade was pronounced ‘boring’. Batch 4, his masterpiece and probably the final batch of this year, reverts to a ‘traditional’ recipe of white sugar, more of the pith, and chunkier peel. I shall be sad when the kitchen stops being an aromatic laboratory of preserves.

the cormorant (we think)

The parade of unusual bird visitors continues. The other day, in our local park, we saw half a dozen large cormorants, or perhaps shags, sitting on a wooden platform in the middle of the lake. Surely cormorants are seabirds, found on rocky cliffs? But there they were slumming it among the ducks and coots. When we went back a few days later, I managed to get a distant photo of the only one who was still there.

By chance I had just read a very striking passage about cormorants in a marvellous book, Sea Room, by Adam Nicholson. Writing about the Shiant Islands off the Hebrides, he describes a close encounter with shags on a cliff face: ‘Nothing prepares you for the reality of the shag experience. It is an all-power meeting with an extraordinary, ancient, corrupt, imperial, angry, dirty, green-eyed, yellow-gaped, oil-skinned, iridescent, rancid, rock-hole glory that is Phalacrocorax aristotelis. They are scandal and poetry, chaos and individual rage, archaic, ancient beyond any sense of ancientness that other birds might convey.’ Gulp! I looked at our avian visitors with fear and respect, but they were gazing innocently at the trees, pretending to be suburban.

for those sorrowful melodies

In the bread section of the supermarket I was startled to see a tall baguette labelled ‘Pain Flute’. I was reading in English and thought the store’s labelling team had gone all poetical on a dark winter’s afternoon. Isn’t there a poem by Tagore which talks about the flute sounding the notes of the writer’s pain? When I’m trailing round supermarkets I often have low moments, and could easily imagine myself playing a pain flute at such times.

It sounded like a theatrical prop that might be used by a Japanese actor in Kabuki, perhaps a samurai sword transformed symbolically in the course of the action into a musical instrument, cutting through the formalities with its high, plaintive wail.

A moment later, of course, I came out of my reverie and remembered that ‘pain flute’ is a French term for a variety of baguette. But I had been briefly transported from the world of aspirational boulangerie to one where everyday objects carried mysterious, illuminating overtones.