Albion

       Perfidy so vast

       as to lose a na-

       tion on the pre-

       text of popular

       will, for parti-

       san reasons, is

       rather like our

       habit over here

       of secessionism.

       But who could i-

       magine being im-

       itated beyond a

       sense of shame?

Origins of Wednesday x: Gérard and the proof of jell-o

We can't have been alone in
noticing how doctrinaire our
gastronomic texts have turned.
Even in the matter of jell-o,
there are those who'll contend
that it's all in the mold, and
some, the hue, as others claim
weights are what make it true.

This last assertion struck our
Gérard as reflecting his own
experience, sufficiently to in-
sinuate itself into his mind un-
der the appealing pseudonym of
"logic." And little is so con-
soling as the mantle of that
mentality, where it already lies
so close at hand - and especial-
ly, in the intimidating court of
cuisine. 

Logic it was, then, that drove
Gérard to create his masterpiece,
a well-jelled swimming pool of a-
gave extract, to celebrate his
new aviators. Ours was not to rea-
son, against a slope of verdured
slime, but rise to praise how tea-
sin' was the rôle played by the 
lime.

               We have given the measurements for the 
               water for the jelly in grams, rather
               than millilitres. This is because, al-
               though millilitres and grams are equal,
               in recipes where precision is important
               you get a more accurate result if you
               weigh the liquid.


Honi soit
qui mal y
pense.

Jack Adair-Bevan

Paûla Zarate

Matthew Pennington

Iain Pennington

The Ethicurean Cookbook

  Recipes, Foods and Spirituous

  Liquors, from our Bounteous

  Walled Garden in the Several

  Seasons of the Year

  [The Mendips, Somerset]

    Summer:  Pineapple Weed Jelly

    220 grams caster sugar

    40 grams pineapple weed

    13 grams gelatine leaves

    Cherry Spoom to serve

Ebury Press

op. cit.

Not so wild a dream

Broadcasting from France was finished for me .. I could join the caravan of neutrals already making for the Spanish border and Lisbon and listen to their endless postmortems ..; or I could go to England. We knew, somehow, without inquiring, that England would continue to fight. 

I thought I had reasoned myself away from all youthful feelings of kinship with England, but now England seemed intimate, understandable, and terribly important.












Eric Sevareid
Not So Wild a Dream
Knopf, 1946©

Incoming mail - a hat in the ring for a KG

A curiosity of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the escutcheon visited only hours ago, is that its lineage goes back to the middle of the same century to which the English Cocker Spaniel traces its own - not that anyone on the planet, save our happy few, appreciates this dazzling correlation.

The 14th Century was evidently a good one for tonsorial flamboyancy, to which I think the world remains unanimously drawn in the featherings of a fine scrounger for woodcock and sandcrabs, if less consistently so in KG's. That said, I hazarded an inquiry to a reader this morning, on whether one had unearthed another portrait (L) of the KG discussed on the 13th, guessing that not very many people would be so self-effacing as to conceal a brow to which a refining benevolence must certainly have been extended.

I suppose one deserved the answer which was returned in the afternoon post in monochrome, tending to undermine one's somewhat prayerful hope that the eradication of the nobler properties of any face had not become a custom, while one was out at the beach.

An inconvenient feature of any life conducted with inattention to our media is not only the assumption that everyone is still parsing his way through Horace and savouring martinis of gin, but the discovery that hair, per se, is being cultivated as volubly in one's own species as in its better. I'm not sure that I welcomed this tossing of a hat into the ring for a KG, either, naïve as it surely would be, to suppose the honour to be above campaigning.

But one learns from the times. I set about, this evening, specifying terms of a search engine to comb the known world of forelock cultivation, and found it invading even the innocent world of the parallel bars, where I let the matter rest.

Honi soit qui mal y pense

Since childhood I have loved the way this radiantly defiant expression more than merely trips off the tongue. I still think the light seduction it works in one's oral muscles and nasal resources is well worth a closing of one's door, to indulge the act, its insouciant cadence and its soothing resonance, a dance of a vowel line parsed by a sibilant whisper and soft press of the lips. I was taught it as a little mantra for playground courage; and as much as anyone, I needed some. It's those who have that kind of courage who are my heroes.

Here, working with a large and somewhat ambiguous image, I knew that whatever drew me to this face was concentrated within its contours, and I was pleased to believe I found it. The follow-through of the upper arm is strengthened by the set of the jaw and the confident lips; that's where this face held me, and confidently projected the distribution of the limbs, concluding with the hand resting at the waist. This is the image on my telephone screen. I admire this man.