“If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world…”
~ What We Imagine Knowledge to Be: James Gleick Reads Elizabeth Bishop
AT THE FISHHOUSES
by Elizabeth Bishop
by Elizabeth Bishop
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
What is “Slow Writing”?
You’ve probably heard the phrase tossed around for other topics:
- Slow Food
- Slow Cinema
- Slow Fashion
- Slow Travel
It’s a movement based on Carl Honore’s 2004 book, In Praise of Slowness, which is about the detrimental effects of building an entire culture around the benefits of speed.
- Bold Palates: Australia’s Gastronomic Heritage, (2012) by Barbara Santich see my review
- Dining Alone, Stories from the Table for One, (2014) edited by Barbara Santich, see my review
- Enjoyed for Generations, The History of Haigh’s Chocolates, (2015) by Barbara Santich, see my review
But I think I like this one best of all. Wild Asparagus, Wild Strawberries, is a memoir of her two years in France in the 1970s. It’s a perfect book for anyone who loves travelling to France, or who yearns to travel to France, or for world-weary tourists who feel nostalgic for France ‘as it used to be,’ or for anyone who loves reading about food!
I first went to France in 2001, for a week in Paris and a week in the Loire Valley. Things have changed a lot since then, but from this book I can see that changes since the 1970s are even more dramatic. In her family’s first sojourn at Nizas in southern France, Santich documents a passing way of village life, dominated by elderly people whose children had mostly moved away. These people were custodians of traditional ways of doing things, from selecting cuts of meat to cooking rabbit to harvesting the grapes for wine and celebrating afterwards. My guess is that those elderly people who constituted the population of Nizas in this memoir are all gone by now, and the villages that are not in decline have been reinvented as upmarket tourist destinations or as holiday properties with absentee owners for much of the year. Nevertheless there are places that defy these trends and Wikipedia shows me that Nizas is one of them. When Santich was there in the late 1970s with her husband and two small children, the population was under 400, and now it is nearer to 600. Whether that makes it a viable population or not, I do not know.
| Historical population | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Pop. | ±% |
| 1962 | 502 | — |
| 1968 | 504 | +0.4% |
| 1975 | 391 | −22.4% |
| 1982 | 398 | +1.8% |
| 1990 | 459 | +15.3% |
| 1999 | 525 | +14.4% |
| 2008 | 567 | +8.0% |
| 2012 | 593 | +4.6% |
(Onzain in the Loire Valley, BTW, which seemed to us to be a dying town in 2001, now has a population of over 3000.)
But when Santich ventured to France in the late 1970s, living with her husband and two small children in the small village of Nizas in Occitanie, village life was still thriving even though most of the young people had moved on to opportunities elsewhere. There were bustling markets – enough of them for one to be operating somewhere nearby every day of the week, and for most of the residents to bypass the small supermarket and shop instead in the charcuterie or the boulangerie. Santich writes with great affection about learning to cook the French way, and to differentiate between foodstuffs that at that time* in Australia were homogenous. By the time they move to Caromb in Provence, she has a deeper understanding and appreciation of practices and customs:
I remember what attracted me to Waverley Root and his book, The Food of France, when I first read it: it was the way he showed that recipes are not created out of thin air, magicked into existence by a culinary fairy’s wand. All recipes, all dishes, have a story, an ever-evolving story, and that story depends on the climate and geography of a region and the foods it produces; on its trading relations in the past as well as in the present; on the origins and histories of its people, with their beliefs and values and religions; and on a whole web of other intangibles. It’s a complex business, what people eat and why, and I have so much more to learn. (p. 126)
One of the most interesting aspects of this culinary journey is the author’s reappraisal of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. This book, by the American Julia Child and her French co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, was my bible when I was learning to cook, and although I knew that the recipes had been somewhat adapted for the American market, I considered it an authentic representation of French cuisine. And so did Santich, at least to start with, but as her knowledge and expertise grew, she began to rely more on the advice of the women who guided her in Nizas, in Caromb and in Rimberlieu, a place too small to merit a Wikipedia presence nearCompiègne, in Northern France. She quite rightly points out that some of the quantities in Mastering the Art are discouraging, to say the least, and Julia Child’s ingredient list for the rustic pot-au-feu are extravagant compared to the prudent and economical French version based on the livestock ordinary French villagers are likely to have.
Santich has a lively unpretentious style, self-deprecating about her own ambitions and misconceptions, and droll about some of the culinary adventures that didn’t turn out as hoped. There are twenty recipes in the book, many of them published in Australian Gourmet and Epicurean for whom she became a feature writer, and many of these are likely to be trialled chez moi in due course. But her amusing chapter on snails means that I am unlikely to ever try replicating her efforts, (even though I have fond memories of a romantic interlude with The Spouse in the Parliamentary Dining Room, which took place over a plate of Victorian snails).
‘When you pull a snail out of its shell and pop it piping hot into your mouth,’ writes Waverley Root, ‘you are likely to consider it a simple dish, and to have no idea how much effort has gone into its preparation.’ (p.127)
No indeed. Now that I know what’s involved, I can understand why they cost so much too.
Wild Asparagus, Wild Strawberries is a lovely book. IMO it would make a great gift for one of those friends so hard to buy for!
*Although the food, culinary options and dining habits of Australians in the 1970s were not, IMO, as bleak and bland as many commentators make out, it is true that you had to know where to go to get good coffee, adventurous ingredients or cafés and restaurants that sold flavoursome food. Margaret Fulton was making a huge difference, and supermarkets for all their faults were stocking a much wider range of products than their predecessors. But still, in my experience, there was only one kind of butter, and the range of cheeses was small. To get anything interesting, you had to go to the markets. And even as recently as five years ago, I had to go to Hampton St for chestnuts for the festive vegetarian pie in Green Feasts by Richard Cawley.
Author: Barbara Santich
Title: Wild Asparagus, Wild StrawberriesPublisher: Wakefield Press, 2018
ISBN: 9781743055335
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press
Title: Wild Asparagus, Wild StrawberriesPublisher: Wakefield Press, 2018
ISBN: 9781743055335
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press
Available from Fishpond: Wild Asparagus, Wild Strawberries: Two years in France