Food and eccentricity

Every year since 1901 Nobel Prizes have been awarded in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. The awards system was founded by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and engineer who left money in his will when he died in 1896 with an instruction that it be used to award prizes to those who have ‘during the preceding year… conferred the greatest benefit to Mankind‘.

With regards to the Literature prize, Nobel specified that it be awarded to the author from any country who has ‘produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic/ ideal (the meaning of the original Swedish word is ambiguous) direction‘. There has also been some debate about whether the word ‘work‘ refers to an individual text – a masterpiece – or the whole life’s work of the author. However, the practice is to award the prize to well-established writers in recognition of their literary achievements as a whole.

What strikes me is that, how often, I have not read anything by – or even heard of – the winner of the Literature Prize. The winners of the last four years (2018-2021) were completely unknown to me, so I resolved to address that, starting with the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk who was awarded the prize in 2018 in recognition of ‘a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life‘ (from the official announcement). A highly acclaimed novelist and poet both within Poland and world-wide, Tokarczuk’s works have been translated into nearly forty languages.

Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead which was first published in Polish in 2009, and subsequently in English (in a translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) in 2018, was my starting point (because it was in my local Waterstones, and my brother had read and recommended it). A crime novel with a difference, Drive your plow is set in a village in the Silesia region of Poland near the Czech border (the area of Poland in which Tokarczuk herself lives). The novel’s protagonist is Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her 60s, who loves animals, the poetry of William Blake (the book’s title comes from his Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and astrology. The reader learns that previously she had owned two dogs – whom she refers to as her ‘Little Girls‘ – but they have gone missing before the events of the story begin. One of Janina’s quirks involves giving people alternative names which she feels better suits their character: she refers to one of her neighbours as Big Foot and her friends include a former student, Dizzy (with whom she translates Blake’s poetry into English), Oddball (another neighbour) and Good News.

The novel opens with Janina being woken in the middle of the night by a hammering on her front door – her neighbour, Oddball, has come to tell her that he has found their other neighbour Big Foot dead (he was alerted by the incessant barking of Big Foot’s dog). On entering Big Foot’s house, they find a horror scene: Big Foot ‘was lying twisted in a bizarre position, with his hands to his neck, as if struggling to pull off a collar that was pinching him… His dirty vest was ripped at the throat.’ On closer examination, Janina and Oddball find a bone stuck in Big Foot’s throat and as Janina continues her search of Big Foot’s house she finds parts of a deer’s carcass in the kitchen and realises that Big Foot, a well-known poacher, had trapped and killed a wild deer, cooked and eaten part of it and choked on one of the bones from the deer. As an animal lover and vegetarian this, for Janina, is justice:

‘As I slowly became aware of what had happened here, I was gradually filled with Horror. He had caught the Deer in a snare, killed her, then butchered, roasted and eaten her body. One Creature had devoured another, in the silence and stillness of the Night. Nobody had protested, no thunderbolt had struck. And yet Punishment had come upon the devil, though no one’s hand had guided death‘.

Shortly after this event, members of a local hunting society begin to be murdered one by one. At each crime scene Janina finds clues which point to the victims being murdered by animals (as revenge for their mistreatment of them).

I won’t give any more of the plot away – and urge you to now go and read this strange and fantastic novel for yourself – but will instead turn my attention to food. As already mentioned, and not surprisingly considering her love of animals, Janina is a vegetarian (as is Tokarczuk herself, according to Wikipedia!). There isn’t much mention of food in the novel, though what there is matches Janina’s established eccentricity.  Living alone as she does, Janina’s cooking is for the most part routine and repetitive:

‘Dizzy, official name Dionizy, showed up at my house every Friday, and as he came straight from work, I would make dinner that day. As I am alone the rest of the week, I make a large pot of soup on Sunday, and heat it up daily until Thursday, when I eat dry provisions from the kitchen cupboard, or a pizza Margarita in town.’

Adding a complicating factor to Janina’s cooking is the fact that Dizzy is allergic to countless foodstuffs which she maintains prevents her giving ‘free rein to [her] culinary imagination‘, though since she is happy to eat the same soup five days a week, a culinary imagination is arguably not that much in evidence. Having to cook for Dizzy ‘without using dairy products, nuts, peppers, eggs or wheat‘ is obviously a challenge, though one meal that Janina produces composed of ‘parsnips roasted in olive oil. And rice with apples and cinnamon‘ sounds pretty good.

One other meal is described in detail towards the end of the novel. Janina is cooking for her three friends: Dizzy, Oddball and Good News. The meal comes at a significant point just before a significant revelation at the climax of the novel. And Janina chooses to make mustard soup – a classic central European dish – for her friends. What is interesting is that she gives the reader the recipe within the novel, so that is how I have reproduced it here with my additions, including quantities for 4 people, within square brackets:

ECCENTRIC MUSTARD SOUP (serves 4)
‘Mustard soup. It’s quickly made, without much effort, so I had it ready in time. First we heat a little butter [50g] in a frying pan and add some flour [50g], as if we were going to make a bechamel. The flour sucks up the melted butter beautifully, then gorges on it, swelling with satisfaction. At this point we flood it with milk and water, half and half [500ml milk, 500ml water]. That’s the end of the frolics between flour and butter, unfortunately, but gradually the soup appears; now we must add a [good] pinch of salt, pepper and caraway [if, like me, you can only get caraway seeds, not caraway, then grind them to a powder in a pestle and mortar or spice grinder] to this clear, still innocent liquid, bring it to the boil and then switch off the heat. Only now do we add the mustard in three forms: wholegrain French Dijon mustard; smooth brown mustard or the mild, creamy kind [I used smooth Dijon]; and mustard powder [I used 4 teaspoons of each, but adjust quantitities to suit your taste]. It’s important not to let the Mustard boil, or else the soup will lose its flavour and go bitter. I serve this soup with croutons [2 slices of old / stale bread, cut into squares, tossed in olive oil and sprinkled with salt flakes, baked in an oven preheated to 180C / 160C fan / Gas mark 4 for 10-15 minutes until crunchy].