Rain

[raven]

I'm in limbo, and always hungry. It's a time of transition. I'm at home right now - up north, where it has been raining solidly for about two weeks and we have a shortage of hot water and a hosepipe ban (North West Water are.... peculiar people at the best of times), and today there is a family friend visiting, and my grandparents are long-term visiting, so there is a feeding of the five thousand going on.

What else to even say? I feel like I ought to record something of this short space of passing days - days between seasons, rainstorms and taught courses - where I have nothing very much to do, save packing, and am reading novels very slowly and otherwise finding ways to fill time. I've seen friends, most of them very old friends: hathy_col and I go for cocktails and dinner, talk about Deep Space Nine and True Blood, fit in a groove of friendship now worn smooth and comfortable (I noted in passing that somehow or other we've got to ten years of being friends, mostly without noticing); the other day I saw Becca, my high school best friend, for the first time in seven years, and discovered that after all this time pink wine is still the drink of choice.

Writing, right now, is like pulling teeth and I'm not sure why. I'm starting to develop a theory that writing is difficult when it's the only thing you're doing with your day; if you have a day of speaking to people, running around, reading textbooks as well as novels, or at least other things to do, then you've got the raw material to write with. (Obviously this can't be the case for everyone - professional writers write all day every day, but then that is something I don't aspire to.)

So, novels. This week, I have read Her Fearful Symmetry, the second Audrey Niffenegger novel, and I thought it was readable, but excessively bizarre. It's a ghost story, but more macabre than creepy, and sometimes I felt very conscious that this is a novel about British people written by an American, and... in the end I didn't really know what to think of it. Possibly I'll re-read it at a later date.

I also read Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (for some reason I thought this was a much older book than it is), which I liked, after taking a very long time to get into it. It's kind of sort of the story of a man who goes from the US to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, only it's filtered through his translator, whose command of English is magnificently idiosyncratic, and somehow this approach brings more depth to it all than a conventional style would have done. It's good.

Um, also several Star Trek novels, because I'm predictable, and I'm kind of leafing through a book gavagai gave me - it's called How To Cook Without Recipes. This is something I'm always on about, if you have the misfortune to be occasionally cooked for by me; I disapprove strongly of people thinking that "learning to cook" = "memorising recipes". Somewhat infamously, I can cook but can't follow recipes; my approach to cooking is to throw ingredients into a pan and taste periodically until whatever it is tastes right. Obviously recipes help - it's helpful, upon deciding that you want to make apricot chicken, to google for it and find that lime juice and cinnamon are helpful subsidiary ingredients, but that didn't stop me altering it to suit myself. You get the idea.

(The natural conclusion to draw from this - yes, you're right, I can't bake. My attempts at baked goods are usually biscuitlike or expeditions into excessive bicarb.)

I like the general thesis of the book, then - that specific recipes, giving you exact amounts, are a relatively recent invention, and knowing what flavours go together is more important than knowing these exact amounts - but the author is somewhat tedious. No more so than in his chapter on chilli, in which he sagely explains that chilli is an overpowering flavour, used only by poor brown people, and it has no place in a self-respecting cook's cupboard, use black pepper instead. While he might be making a valid point by saying that in cultures where chilli is a commonplace ingredient, people's palates respond to it differently from those in cultures where it isn't so common, he does makes it entirely clear who's the "normal" person, from his perspective. And so, and so. I'm still reading it, but am much less inclined towards taking anything he says seriously.

What else? Well, next week I am going to Oxford for a while, to see andrew, and then I am going to London for a couple of days, to see gavagai and to go to a Vienna Teng gig, and then I am coming home for twenty-four hours, and then I am on a one-way flight to Ithaca, and thus passes the glory of the old world.

(See, that's a pun. Look, I made a pun.)

Comments

[gavagai]

re chilli WHAT WHAT WHAT. EVEN IF THAT WEREN'T NORMATIVE AND CRAP HE WOULD BE WRONG

I AM TOO HORRIFIED TO USE PUNCTUATION

[raven]

WRONG WRONG WRONG BELIEVE ME I AGREE ENTIRELY

[gavagai]

CHILLI TASTES NOTHING LIKE BLACK PEPPER

I MEAN I CAN SORT OF SEE THE IDEA IN SMALL QUANTITIES BUT THEY ARE NOTHING ALIKE ON ACCOUNT OF ONE OF THEM BEING CHILLI AND THE OTHER BEING BLACK PEPPER

WHAT

[raven]

BUT WHITE PEOPLE USE BLACK PEPPER GOD LAURA DON'T YOU PAY ATTENTION

[gavagai]

THAT'S JUST CONFUSING DO BLACK PEOPLE USE WHITE PEPPER THEN

PLUS WHO USES GREEN PEPPER

[raven]

YOU OPPRESS ME WITH YOUR WHITE PEPPER

[gavagai]

MY WHITE PEPPER IS TASTY AND COMFORTING

PLEASE DON'T TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME

[raven]

....I, er, don't even know what it is. /fail

[gavagai]

I think it's just the same but with the black skin on the seeds removed. Personally I think all the varieties exist so that people can have those pretty transparent pepper mills with different coloured layers.

(You broke the chain, I was totally gearing up to make really bad allcapsed invisible knapsack jokes about black and white pepper, though had not quite got to the stage of thinking up any)

[raven]

Ahhh. Consider me enlightened.

(I cannot think of any either! But notice I am not making pepper knapsack lolcats, this is progress)

[soupytwist]

I was all set to go on a bit about how I'm the opposite, I find cooking very stressful but can follow a recipe, except WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCKERY WAS THAT GUY ON ABOUT, DOES HE EVEN HEAR HIMSELF, SERIOUSLY, HAS HE EVEN GONE ANYWHERE NEAR AN ACTUAL CHILLI IN HIS LIFE BECAUSE IF HE HAD HE WOULD REALISE HE WAS CHATTING CRAP. REALLY RACIST AND ANNOYING CRAP. And he got PAID TO WRITE ABOUT FOOD. Good grief.

I now want to read Everything Is Illuminated, which I had previously got the idea wouldn't be my cup of tea but that sounds very much like it is!

[raven]

See now, I really think that's the fault of everyone else and not you. I think this kind of pitching by mainstream food writers of cooking as a Hard And Stressful Thing That Must Be Perfect is terribly irritating but kind of insiduous. The guy who wrote this book I'm reading I don't even. I just re-read the chapter and if possible, it's worse on a second reading - he goes on and on about how chillis are used by poor people because they don't have decent ingredients and there's no need for Westerners to indulge. I just. Another book that may as well have "ONLY WHITE PEOPLE NEED APPLY" on the cover.

..grargh. EII is great! Very hard to get into, but gets really compelling after the first hundred pages. I really liked it.

[msilverstar]

I think the movie of Everything is Illuminated is better than the book, really loved it.

That cook without recipes book sounds like it was written forty years ago, wtf no chili pepper??

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec - I'll look out for it, I really would like to see how it's treated on screen when so much of the novel is wordplay.

[bibliotropic]

I follow recipes, but with lots of hmm how about this? Oh, I don't have that; this will do. Wouldn't this taste great with that? ... I guess that's not so much following as wandering around recipes. And I read cookbooks all the time for ideas, ideas, ideas. I have a binder where I keep them all, but I certainly don't have anything memorized.

But I think an important reason that some people are really bad cooks is because they don't believe in recipes, but have never learned - by experience, from wiser relatives, by reading, by just generally thinking about things - about how to handle food, about technique, about how long certain things take, about proportion, about how to find the harmony in the flavours - how to cook.

Doing recipes, when you're learning to cook - especially if you don't really have a background in it due to any number of social and cultural factors - are like doing scales on a musical instrument, like lessons and studies. And sometimes, just following the steps and having things come out okay is what gives people faith in themselves as cooks and the courage to experiment with food. It's kind of an anyone, even people who have no idea how raw things become delicious meals, can cook thing. ...the evolution my sweetie has had between January and now, going from cooking frozen chicken burgers with processed cheese and ordering out all the time to making soups and roasts and wonderful curries (all of which I'm pretty sure have chillies in them, because chillies are beautiful and delicious).

I couldn't stand Everything is Illuminated. ;)

[raven]

Oh, now this I do agree with. I apologise if it came across above as though I thought cooking from recipes had no place in how people cook, full stop. I suppose what I'm really railing against is the thought that you have to cook how other people cook - that it's somehow illegitimate to alter and throw in and take out and make stuff up however you like. I also do think that you're probably not having any fun if you don't have the occasional total cooking disaster because you made some sort of misguided alteration or the cinnamon was stale or not fresh or all the four cooks thought to add a teaspoon of bicarb. It's all part of it.

[nerves-patterns.livejournal.com]

What I found interesting about Her Fearful Symmetry was the lovely parallel of the plotlines - Robert/Elspeth, Julia/Valentina (whose relationship is as intense as the other, romantic relationships), and Martin/Marijke. I liked Martin a lot, although he ultimately reminded me a little too much of Anne Tyler's The Accidentaly Tourist.

Two things stood out for me that didn't seem particularly well thought-out, or well assembled: the very last chapter (what an odd place to end - it felt so different from the ending of The Time Traveler's Wife, which closed things up neatly and optimistically); and the title. All of Niffenegger's carefully crafted references (to art, to literature, to music, to pop culture - everything!) always fit in with each other and with the plot like clockwork. The title of this book, to me, did not; that kept throwing me off as I was reading.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I am so happy you'll be here soon. I would meet you at the airport with an OMG/crabcake banner if I weren't going to be moving my life at the same time. ♥

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

Chili is addictive (it can trigger the release of endorphins, aside from everything else) and you do tend to need more chili to get the same effect-- my dad, after decades of chili abuse (he used to eat them raw as a child to impress friends and win money) tends to over chili-- as in, "Oh, we don't have any soured cream to contrast the heat of the salsa. I'll just put extra-hot chili sauce on, so I'll still have a relative contrast of hot and even hotter."

The other thing about tastes pairings is that there is such a range in what's paired and it can be so cultural. Like pear and cardamon is an obvious combo to some, but for others, it's not and they'd just assume pear and cinnamon.

And even though I really like it, I occasionally have moments where I taste cinnamon in something savoury and I go "wait, but cinnamon is for sweet things! What's it doing in my lamb? Oh wait, I put it there because I like it..."

Or lamb and mint, which are frequently used together in some places, but just not a thing in others.

[anyone skimming these comments, SPOILERS]

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I wasn't sure what to think about the ending; somehow I thought it suited Robert. I mean, he remains an enigma despite being the POV character for so much of the novel, so it does sort of make sense for him to disappear, without explanation. But I do get what you mean, absolutely.

What I wasn't sure of was how easily Elspeth is convinced into going along with Valentina's plan. She isn't written as though the whole thing was a devious plan, and her initial reaction is the same as the readers' - no, no, this is a terrible idea. And Valentina's defining characteristic is that she hates confrontation, doesn't stand up for herself. So how does she convince Elspeth to do it, or alternatively how does Elspeth have a rapid enough personality change to do it?

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Oh, honey! Me too. I can't wait till September.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Mmm, chilli is definitely something that has a cumulative effect over time (my mother is quite like your dad) - but somehow I really don't like the suggestion the author makes that this is illegitimate or invalid or something that proper people don't do. It's so white-privileged and Western-centric and graargh.

I think there are some objective taste pairings that taste good, but that they're really basic - things like bitter and sour tastes going together, and creamy and sweet - and they're expressed in culturally specific ways, like your lamb and mint example.

Re: [anyone skimming these comments, SPOILERS]

[nerves-patterns.livejournal.com]

That's a good point about Valentina's inability to stand up for herself - although I think we see her come out of that a little bit. She apparently punches Julia in the eye, right? And she breaks away from Julia in smaller ways by having a romance with Robert, by making her own dress, by making plans to go to school, and so on. Maybe that makes her plan to die, and to have Elspeth help her, a little more solidly grounded.

I was really thrown off by the fact that we didn't see Elspeth's thought process before she took over Valentina's body, since most of the other times, we get virtually everything she's thinking. However, we're blind to the other big secret in the book - the twins switching - and we only get Elspeth's perspective after the fact on that, too; so although it's tremendously dissatisfying, perhaps at least it has a parallel? XD

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the idea that using specific flavours is wrong is sketchy on multiple levels. It's a ridiculous my-(western)-food-culture-is-superior thing, and also, factually incorrect, in that chili isn't overpowering in *context*. Maybe if you're unused to it, but you could say that about anything- Salt! Lemon! Shrimp!

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

I've just bought Her Fearful Symmetry, so it's good to know that it's apparently readable. And I know what you mean about the British-people-written-by-an-American thing - I just finished To Say Nothing of the Dog and, while I loved it unreservedly, I did keep getting jolted out of the story ever so slightly by Americanisms.