An Imaginary Banquet and Poetics

The snow still lies thick upon the ground, trodden likewise into café au lait tinged slush whose crumbly consistency is owing to its powdery quality and to the continuing frigidity, and from here I can see the deep paw-prints which a child made in the snowbank on the rear windshield of a car presumably on Monday. The trees are thickly clad, though the wind perturbingly wafts drifts of it to the ground, and in the courtyard the dusting against the solid dark ivy and the spades on the bicycle seats and the rampart along the top of the brick wall separating it from the next court have remained intact. The sky is as blank and greyish-white as an old computer screen, though of course unpixelated.

Yesterday Gi. did the first proper installment of our Christmas shopping: sugar, tomatoes, green beans, etc. I have daydreamed about baking Vanillekipferl, Dominosteine and maybe a chocolate or caramel brittle, to give as presents, but haven't found the time, leisure, or will to realize it. The dulce de leche coffee and the seasonal bowl of eggnog have yet to be made. An experiment with dissolved cream toffee, coffee, milk, cocoa powder, and plum liqueur produced reasonable results, and resembled a certain bottled Irish cream. I might make the eggnog today if a kind person would procure the ingredients. The recipe is from one of our Christmas books: you beat together egg yolks and sugar, add milk and heavy cream (I use whipping cream if we have it) and rum, and stir in beaten egg whites. The rum technically decimates germs; we never leave the eggnog sitting around long, though, but at least drink it straight away when it's fresh and before the egg white foam separates as it inevitably and annoyingly will. There might be vanilla extract in it too. In the New York Times food section I noted a butterscotch variant, but it might be too fiddly, whereas I have resolved upon a course of plain (if any) cooking.

As for the medieval repast, it is unlikely to be made but I've been thinking about it. If relevant Guardian articles and my recollection are correct it turns out that for a British Christmas the main dish was once boar or peacock, which became a swan in the 17th century up until the Victorian Age, when goose and turkey became popular. But I have been thinking more of the desserts. The question is whether anyone will eat apples and oranges and nuts if they are presented on the table. Watching another food documentary this time set in the Provence, I was thinking that the 13 Desserts seem somewhat medieval, so I could arrange a plate or two with raisins, nuts, dried apricots, prunes, figs, sliced nougat, etc., as the lady did, also with marzipan. I thought of making apple dumplings but they seem a lot of work, and straight roast apples with raisins in the middle are never accorded the affection which they deserve in my point of view, though to be fair the last round which I made was blackened (and in the case of exposed raisins, charred). I was thinking that it would be nice to press marzipan into a little cake or tart mould (we have two little ones), lined with ground or chopped almonds so the marzipan doesn't stick, and then to decorate it with pieces of glacé cherries or the like; or to make a Middle Eastern plate with halva, pistachios, dates, etc. Blancmange seems a little of a bother, but it is mentioned *pedantic cough* in the prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Besides, and of course not related to desserts, I have a hankering to make Yorkshire pudding once.

Unrelated to the Middle Ages and to British cuisine, I was thinking of putting together a fruit bowl as I did for my birthday, and which was much appreciated; the way it was special is that the fruit was more varied than ordinary, I washed and dried it very carefully, let it ripen in the early autumnal warmth for a day or two, took out our silver or pewter dish as well as a grand pottery dish to arrange it in, and of course spent much more time thinking how best to present it than customary. But what's nicer is the basket which we have every year on Christmas morning, most often containing a pineapple, a coconut, and a package of figs and of dates, besides the slew of mandarin oranges and apples.

Anyway, now I have had the enjoyment of imagining all this excellent food without having to shop for it, pay for it, wash dishes for it, prepare it, or dispose of any disasters (my rule of thumb is that if it's edible I must eat any remainders of my cooking, and I believe have only had to concede inedibility twice, though the improvised pumpkin pie I finished on this principle at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, with its hardbaked shell and stringy and savourless filling, will likely haunt me far into adulthood), so I am content.

As for the bookshop, three gentlemen have come to pick up their orders and one lady came in, first of all to point to the audiobook in the window and ask me if I knew what "On Civil Disobedience" was about. Whereupon I said, I think justly though maybe naming the date might have helped, that Thoreau was against the Spanish-American war and therefore refused to pay taxes, and was therefore locked up in prison, where he wrote this as a plea for non-violent resistance through non-cooperation with the government, and that it influenced among others Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. This disquisition comes courtesy, I believe, of an introduction to that essay, which is one of those cases where after reading the thorough and unobjectionable introduction the tiny flame of curiosity for the book proper has extinguished itself. She ended up buying a different philosophical work and intermittently commanding her little white-and-orangey-brown dog to staaayyy. As she paid and received a little bag for her purchase and I asked whether she would like a receipt, the dog growled here and there, and she cheerfully remarked to him in an aside how nice it was of him to protect her. Which is in retrospect kind of funny; at the time I was thinking absentmindedly that his growling sounded like mild disembodied thunder so that one couldn't really tell where the little dog left off and the noise beyond the shop began.

One of the ordered books was the Nicomachean Ethics, so I asked the customer whether he was reading it for a course, but he said just for leisure and seemed to genuinely enjoy looking forward to the prospect; he wondered why I was surprised at the purchase and I said that I'd tried to read the Poetics and found it very tough going, and mumbled something about laconic language. He said that he had to check the glossary for practically every page but otherwise it was fine. So I'll take his word for it and admire a better man than I.

In German translation and likewise in a R*** edition (I mention it culturally and not advertisingly, hence the asterisks) the Poetics weren't so bad, however, though I never finished it or indeed broached more than a fourth or so of it, and I think the point is mainly to describe what plays were like in Aristotle's time and a major point in reading it is to see which blueprints playwrights have followed or sworn off following ever since. The stuff about poetry being like dancing in rhythm, etc. and so forth, didn't seem all that interesting. The true ordeal was when Papa and I once started the beginning of his Metaphysics in the original, and despite our Greek courses had to look up terms constantly whilst my not so carefully cultivated grammatical knowledge unravelled at the critical junctures, and I still have no idea what the words with half a dozen definitions like thymos exactly mean. Doubtless it would be better today, but I still think that Aristotle dominates the fine art of making one feel that one has made no progress in grasping anything.

Anyway, the second pair of people has walked by with a Christmas tree, so on that note (also since Mama has come in) I will end this post!