From Fasting to Feasting

It has been a busy time here. Two weeks ago it was the Jewish New Year and last week it was the Day of Atonement, the most holy day of the year when we have to fast for 25 hours. Not easy!

By way of a contrast, today there was a food festival at Leicester's Belgrave Hall. When I saw a stall from the well-known vegetarian Indian restaurant, Bobby's, I eagerly joined the queue. The girls were serving up a choice of two vegetarian curries. The left-hand tray contained paneer curry, the right-hand noodle curry...

And this was my lunch. Delicious...

Belgrave Hall is an 18th Century house built by a rich hosiery merchant and now used as a museum. It is right in the centre of Leicester City and yet you can walk round its walled gardens and feel as if you're in the countryside. This is where we ate our lunch...

The Most Haunted House in Leicester:

Belgrave Hall has the reputation of being the most haunted house in Leicester. A victorian lady has apparently been seen walking around and apparently the aroma of Victorian-style cooking has been smelt. There is a video that apparently shows a ghostly white lady walking through the upstairs rooms, but today, on this lovely sunny autumn afternoon, there was certainly nothing spooky going on at all. 

Mind you, I wasn't about to hang around and am now home, safe and sound, long before the sun sets when I fear that ghostly apparitions might well walk once more. 

Writing About Food

Our writing workshop met this morning and I suggested we do a writing exercise before getting on with our critiquing. I chose an exercise from one of my favourite and well-used books, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. She recommends a short session (we did five minutes) of brainstorm/freeflow writing followed by a further session to edit some or all of the material produced and then to share the pieces out loud. 

I had chosen food for our writing exercise, anything to do with food. I guessed that each of us would produce something totally different and I was right. We heard about the bulk cooking of pizzas for a family gathering and the way that food can touch the memory like no other sensation can. We were taken into a French kitchen with its rich atmosphere and pungent aromas. We mused at the way in which a trip to the market to buy cherries turned into memories of an aunt and her hat-purchasing fetish and we had a mouthwatering account of all the foods that we have, over the years, brought along to our monthly lunch gatherings. (Yes, we are ladies who lunch as well as ladies who write!)

Although most of us are fiction writers, every piece of writing was based on true events, most of them long-ago memories. This was also true of the piece I'd written, except it isn't a long ago memory. It happened yesterday. I wrote it in short poetry-style lines. It's not meant to read as a poem. It was just the way it fell from my pen:

I love cheese,

creamy yellow cheese, 

crunchy mature cheese, 

soft runny French cheese, 

the kind that stinks out your fridge,

cheese wrapped in nettle leaves,

even blue-veined cheese,

but yesterday I wanted cheese scones for lunch.

We called at the bakers.

They only had cheese straws.

We popped into the deli

But baclava doesn't do it for me.

We had soup for lunch instead

and I disappeared off to write,

trying to ignore the noises from the kitchen.

Clunk, whir, click.

Teatime.

He brought me a steaming mug of tea 

and a plate of tiny, round,

perfectly formed,

cheese scones.

They dissolved on my tongue.

From a man of few words 

They spoke a million.

Only one left. Proof of the pudding...

Thinking about Food

After last week's blog post poem I've been giving 'stomach-gate' some serious thought. I recently saw an advertisement on the TV for a Food Smart - Change 4 Life campaign. I signed up and received a bright yellow pop-up recipe book with lots of healthy recipe ideas. I even downloaded their 'Be Food Smart' app on my iPad... and yet... and yet...

Why do I keep finding myself sitting beside an empty cake/chocolate wrapper with incriminating crumbs around my mouth? Is it enough to blame it on comfort eating? Is it? No, I don't think so either.

One of the main messages in the Food Smart campaign is to cook from scratch as there is so much hidden salt, sugar and saturated fats in ready-made foods. I do usually cook from scratch, except when we go for the occasional restaurant meal. Restaurant food isn't the healthiest way to eat. I watched a famous chef on the TV the other evening making a 'really tasty' shepherds pie. He used equal amounts of butter and potato when making his mash. Gaaah!! All that cholesterol!

My major problem is snacking in-between meals. The Food Smart campaign suggests exchanging chocolate and cake for fresh fruit but I know, truly in my heart I know, that I wouldn't stick to it. I love fruit but I have it as well as the chocolate and cake and so I'm going to try and change the ratio bit by teeny bit and see if I can kid my body into accepting the 'fruity' in place of the 'sugary'. Well, it's worth a try and it's recommended in today's Guardian in this article Healthy Food: can you train yourself to like it?

Look! I'm even experimenting with new fruit.
Anyone know how you eat sharon fruit?
It's a bit solid!

As for exercise, the suggestion in my poem that I do sit-ups is now out of the question as I've pulled something very painful in my lower back. [You see, I said it was intolerable!] And so I'm going to start walking more and see if that makes a difference. Watch this space!

What do you do when/if a similar stomach-gate looms large in your life?

Do you remember when...

Nostalgia and 1950s food

‘Do you remember when...’ is an excellent way to start people talking, be it a chat over a cup of tea or the start of a writing workshop session. It never fails. However, when BBC Radio Leicester interviewer, Rebecca Bryers, contacted me to arrange to interview some of the contributors to my memory project, Leicester Jewish Voices, I wondered if they would mind being asked yet again to retell the stories that they had written about so willingly just over a year ago. I need not have worried. They spoke with fresh enthusiasm, as if this was the first time of telling, and their memories can be heard on the Radio Leicester website. There’s even a video recording of one brave lady. Like I said, people love to talk about memories and that includes me.

I rather suspect that I am obsessed with nostalgia and it’s never the important life-changing events that I remember. It’s the small insignificant ones like going into the sweet shop across the road from my Grandma’s house and buying one fruit chew for a farthing. That was in the pre-decimal days, of course, when there were four farthings to a penny and twelve pennies to a shilling, which is now a 5p piece. I could have bought 48 chews with a shilling. I wonder what you can buy for 5p today.

Is my preoccupation with memories a case of living in the past or a healthy interest in social history? Some might say that history is all about facts whilst memories are unreliable reports but you only have to look at two contemporary historical accounts of the same event to disprove that theory. I read History at University but it wasn’t so much the political significances of the battles that fascinated me. It was finding out what their homes were like, what they wore, what food they ate...

Food! Now that’s guaranteed to send me on a nostalgia trip. Remember the sweets that we had as children? (Unless you’re considerably younger than me in which case the following is a social history lesson.) Gobstoppers that changed colour as you sucked and would contravene health and safety these days, rainbow coloured sherbet served in a piece of paper twisted at the bottom to make a bag and licked from a grubby finger, chewy white sweet cigarettes with red dye on the tips. Imagine giving those to children today. I used to practise inhaling and blowing pretend smoke rings into the air.

1950s sweets might have been exciting but the main meals of the day certainly weren’t, not in our house anyway. We always knew which day of the week it was by the food on our plates. On Sunday Mum roasted a joint of beef, which she sliced up on Monday and served cold with chips. On Tuesday she minced the left over slices and made them into a shepherds’ pie. On Wednesday we had shin of beef stewed with lots of onions and carrots to pad it out. Thursday was liver and onions with a tomato thrown in for colour. And then there was Friday, my most favourite meal of all time, steamed fish, mashed potatoes and homemade white sauce followed by the most mouth-watering dessert ever, an Apricot Sponge from the Co-op. I can still remember that wonderful combination of tastes. I can even taste them as I type.

The 1960s saw Mum spread her culinary wings. We had bolognese that was not from a tin, something called Vesta that involved small cubes of reconstituted chicken, topped off with noodles that Mum dunked into the chip pan to make them crispy and fat. But there was still a pattern to our weekly menu until Mum launched herself into 70s style cooking and then we never knew what day of the week it was by the food on our plate. Chilli-con-carne, curry and rice, a pizza for Sunday lunch. Mum’s carefully planned menu had finally bitten the dust.

It’s strange how things turn around. Now, decades later, Mum has finally admitted to being too tired to shop and too weary to stand in the kitchen cooking. She’s moved to sheltered accommodation in spite of her concern that things would be unfamiliar. She soon found that life there is more familiar than she had expected. She has roast beef on Sunday, sliced up the next day and served cold with chips. There’s shepherds’ pie and stew. She even has steamed fish, mashed potatoes and homemade white sauce, which made me think once more about those delicious Apricot Sponges. I’ve searched everywhere for them but it would seem that like the Co-op divi they are no more. In a way, I’m glad because I know that the taste wouldn’t taste half as good as it did in the old days.