Canterbury (II)

No-one travels with all of themselves; I think you would go mad trying. You move, you meet people, you introduce yourself, but which bits do you introduce? Hello, I am a student, I am a cook, I am a writer, I make charcuterie, I like to draw, I am learning the viola, some people think I drink too much; hello, I am a chef, I am an author, I know your daughter, I play guitar not as often as I’d like but too loudly; hello, I am your guest. You choose a piece for each city or household you visit and hope the rest will come out eventually or (conversely) that it will never emerge. Everyone has at some stage had to cling to the belly of a sheep on their way out of the door – in a manner of speaking. In different households, anyway, you get to eat different things. For several years I would always receive a Snickers Easter egg from my grandma thanks to a chance remark made at a tender age; when I am in Canterbury I am always a child, and so I eat pasta and cheddar cheese, as is right.

London (II)

In a grey spring in London the bright splashes of cherry blossom and three-cornered leek only accentuate the greyness, even the daisies revolving in the grass around dandelion suns lack lustre, and what should have been a lengthy head-clearing walk becomes a shorter one and then a bus journey, to sit in a cafe and drink excellent but expensive coffee, but on the way back the grey clouds shift and churn and the warmth lifts the pinks and yellows in the trees and fences and makes you think of other, lonelier places; the white and deeply pale green of the three-cornered leek, the wild garlic of the city, smells of distant heat, caught here in the grey.

Gela

For miles around town all you can see from the train in are endless ranks of polytunnel and netting, empty in the summer’s heat but surrounded by scorched and crawling weeds, while above the beach rise the twin chimneys of the slumbering oil refinery which sprawls beyond, a dark mirror as big as the town itself; this was a fishing village once, and you can still hear them cry out their catch in the dusty streets as fishermen always have.

The oil failed, or it never really worked in the first place, and the refinery remains as a monument to nothing. Now your tomatoes come from here, both in this baking heat and from the polytunnels in winter, fat ones, round ones, little cherry tomatoes on the vine, the countryside is swaddled in plastic which even the crawling weeds struggle to break through to ensure the supply of tomatoes never stops. The displays on vans and piles of boxes in the dusty streets tell a different story, though, of sweet round cucumbers halfway to being melons, bunches of creeping tenerumi, blood-spattered mulberries, and those ripe and ribbed tomatoes, all the more delicious for the rot at their heart.

Caltavuturo

I have never seen a town with so many steps in it, it clings around the mountain like a squirrel around a tree, steps running upwards and downwards in rickety iron and packed earth and polished Sicilian stone, though I don’t know who uses them. Everybody who needs to get around does so by car, of course, specifically by tiny, battered Fiat. If you do choose to follow the steps you might, having dodged the staring and honking cars, find hunched to the north a great barn of a church, its clay tiles cracking before your eyes; go the other way and you see carpets of alexanders grow around and over the castle which gives the town its name, the pot-herb of Alex- andria spread feral here as it is in Kent, in Suffolk, wherever the Romans have been, filling the air with bitter complexity. Back in town at a confluence of steps the bar sells every complexity of pastry, little lobster tails, choux buns filled with pistachio, gleaming praline, but your hill-worn legs are tired, and so you want instead the satisfaction of buttered rice, deep- fried, just-warm.

Marseille (II)

I feel we hardly scratched the surface, how could we? When I lived in the city I lived in a village, walkable and concise, to cross the river an undertaking, and this city sprawls, up hills and into the projects, across water and stone; we trace a little spider’s dance across it, through bus tickets and metro tickets and lengthy walks along tramlines, roadworks, markets, weeping figs and cardoons and bitter leaves. Maybe in a week you might get to know a street, a little, on nodding terms – maybe you feel close to a cobblestone or two, a rickety table that tomorrow you will never see again. At least what we eat we have really taken on board, I think, perhaps a roll of tuna and potato and sharp harissa, perhaps a rust-red sausage, fat boiling beneath the skin.

clammy cells

I’m sure I say this every year, but autumn really is an extraordinary time for British food. We spend the height of summer eating greenhouse tomatoes and endless gluts of courgette, wishing we were south of the thick black coffee line drinking something cold and pale in a cafe by the sea; it’s a season that we are not fully equipped to deal with, and so we spend it semi-conscious, drifting between shore and field in a sort of gentle fever dream, punctuated by ice-cream. Autumn, on the other hand, is the time to wake up. The hedges are making good on the promise of the early blackberries, with damsons, crabapples and soon sloes weighing down the spindly branches; country roads are once again teeming with semi-wild game birds, running idiotically between their Scylla and Charybdis of front wheel and gun. On the days after the first shoots, the flattened corpses of young partridge carpet the roads.

note for uk customers:

Though we are happy to do it, shipping books to the UK from the US is currently massively expensive. We have a flat rate shipping option for single titles, which goes up another $10 for each additional book. We hope to soon stock this title and our other Nickel Dinner titles with a UK-based bookshop or distributor with a mail order operation. Until that time, copies of this book can be found sold for £17 cash at The Yellow Bittern luncheon restaurant and bookshop, in London, at 20 Caledonian Rd. Give them a ring either before or after serving (11 am hour, or 5 pm hour) and ask for Oisin or email oisin.davies@gmail.com to inquire – collection or UK shipping is possible for eager readers.