Just under two years ago I wrote a post about Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel The Light Years, the first novel in a series of five – The Cazalet Chronicles – a family saga spanning three generations and unfolding between 1937 and 1950. The Light Years covers the build-up to the Second World War and – in culinary terms – is a masterclass in the writer’s use of food to locate a story in a particular moment in time. Continue reading “Food as distraction”
Tag: marzipan
Food and change
Literature is often – always? – about change: changing ideas, feelings, relationships, situations. And often such changes are brought about through a change in location. Commonly characters in novels move from one place to another in the course of the story: for example, Caithleen and Baba in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls or Eilis in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. In both these examples, the characters’ physical journey from provincial Ireland to big cities (Dublin in The Country Girls, New York in Brooklyn) mirrors a personal journey from naivety to experience. Continue reading “Food and change”
Easter baking
Like Christmas, Easter provides the keen cook with the opportunity to spend hours in the kitchen. There’s the traditional dinner of roast lamb – the springtime counterpart to the roast turkey Christmas dinner.
And when it comes to baking, Easter offers its own slightly lighter variants of Christmas delights, which stlll contain many of the same ingredients, specifically dried fruit, nuts and marzipan. Instead of the heavy fruited Christmas cake there’s the simnel cake, which can be made at the last minute, dispenses with the icing and makes a real feature of the marzipan. And the dense alcohol-rich fruited filling of the mince pie gives way to the lightly fruited and spiced hot cross bun. Continue reading “Easter baking”
Hotel Life
One of the perks of my job is travel. And since most of my work trips require an overnight stay, I’ve become increasingly familiar with hotel rooms in the last couple of years. I still feel a flutter of excitement when I open the door of a hotel room to see it for the first time – and thankfully the flutter only occasionally turns to disappointment. And the delight of the bedroom is often matched – or surpassed – by the breakfast choices on offer in the hotel restaurant the next morning. Continue reading “Hotel Life”