If you’re heading out for dinner in the rather exclusive North London area of Primrose Hill, a church might not be your most obvious choice of venue. However, last night my friend Lou and I took over the kitchens of St Mary’s Primrose Hill, to hold our first ever supper club. Taking the First World War as our theme, we served up 3 courses – all inspired by dishes eaten widely in 1914 – to 21 paying guests, with all the profits going to the church’s youthwork.
Author: Rebecca Selman
Quinces
For this post I am going to break my rule of literary chronology, leaving the early 18th century novel for the time being in order to revisit the late 16th century and an author who has featured frequently in this blog, namely Mr William Shakespeare. And the cause of this literary rewind is the quince, the strange, knobbly pear-like fruit which, as the Observer food writer Nigel Slater says, “can’t be eaten raw” and is “a devil to peel”. We have a quince tree in the garden and about a month ago my landlady challenged me to find some literary/culinary uses for the plethora of fruit that ripen and rot very quickly if not picked and made good use of; I like a challenge, so the research began.
The Luxury of Time
One of the most interesting features of Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe is the detailed accounts of how the protagonist learns to survive on an uninhabited desert island. Once he has built and furnished his shelter, he begins a journal (using paper and ink that he has found on the wrecked ship) and, through this, documents his attempts to build his own version of English society on the island. He describes making different shelters, building a boat, civilizing a savage – Man Friday whom he rescues from cannibals – and, most importantly for my purposes, growing and cooking food. Continue reading “The Luxury of Time”
Food: A Survival Manual
The summer sun and the holidays mean I haven’t blogged for a few weeks. But whilst I was sitting on my tropical holiday island – well, okay, the Costa Brava – one of my chosen books for holiday reading was the account of a man’s experience on a desert island, namely Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
Continue reading “Food: A Survival Manual”