Food
Michele Roberts on the creative juices of food
Published 30 June 2003
Good food is not only pleasurable - it also gets the creative juices flowing
Over the years I have occasionally taught fiction writing at the Arvon Foundation, which runs five-day residential courses for would-be writers. One of the pieces of advice I offer in the morning workshop to students tackling writer's block is to have something delicious to eat. Another tip is to practise automatic writing. Given a phrase, you then write non-stop for three minutes, whatever comes up, without censoring. A good way to get the juices flowing is to begin with "I hate" or "I am disgusted by . . ." Hate and disgust are helpful energies and provoke original writing. Last week, teaching with my friend Sarah LeFanu at Ty Newydd, the Welsh version of Arvon, I began wondering about disgusting food.
None of us gets nostalgic about school dinners, do we? From primary school, I remember fatty mutton in greasy gravy. Rice pudding, tapioca pudding, semolina pudding, macaroni in warmish sweetened milk. Slimy and disgusting. At secondary school, a convent, the nuns' speciality was carrots boiled to a pulp, tasting of soap. Slimy. Or spinach, bitter and sour and, yes, slimy. Too close in texture and appearance to spit and sick, to all those bodily wastes we shun, which the feminist author Julia Kristeva calls "the abject". Giving an abstract name to wanting to throw up helps keep it at bay. Kristeva refers somewhere to "those currents of bodily feeling we call emotion". In the writing workshop at Ty Newydd, we began by translating abstract words like bliss and desire and contentment into sensual, physical images. Then we went in to lunch.
The food at Ty Newydd, like the food at the Arvon Foundation, used to be disgusting. The weekly menus were the same every year. Rocklike sausages, soggy pasta, stodgy nut roast, terrible mixed salads of tomatoes and wet lettuce and tinned sweetcorn dumped on top of the hot main course, a vile pink paste called pate. No vinaigrette and no real coffee. One year at Arvon, I taught with the novelist Paul Bailey, a noted gourmet. He insisted, so bad had the food been all week, that we cook dinner on the last night. We sent out for supplies of olive oil, herbs, almonds and booze. The scrawny lamb chops were transformed, baked in a bath of Cognac flavoured with copious amounts of garlic and rosemary. Despite the ancient, feeble oven, no friend to pastry cooks, Paul whipped up featherlight pear-and-almond frangipane tarts. We made a proper tomato salad, parsley-sprinkled flat slices laid out on a vast tray. There was not a soapy and disgusting tinned sweetcorn kernel to be seen. I'm arrogant enough to be sure that if only we'd thought to cook on the first night of the course, the students' work would have benefited.
Last week at Ty Newydd, Sarah and I discovered a revolution had occurred. A warden had been appointed and given charge of the cooking. This was still done by a team of students every night, but Jude provided the recipes, the know-how, the inspiration, hovering over her sous-chefs and gently suggesting clever ways to do things. She even made lunch every day. Rather than rootling dispiritedly in the fridge for bits and bobs, we were presented with platters of spice-scented couscous, potato salad tossed in mayonnaise, home-made hummus, large bowls of green salad properly dressed. Everyone rejoiced and felt cosseted and cared about and ate well - and returned invigorated to their work.
Sarah and I did even better. Ty Newydd is on the coast near Criccieth. Sally, the director, has a husband called Ellis, and Ellis goes lobster fishing. On Monday and Tuesday, the wind was up and he couldn't get to his pots, but on Wednesday he arrived at our door with a large scarlet lobster: "Here you are, this is for your tea." Not only kind, but particularly fitting, for Sarah has just published her biography of Rose Macaulay, and Rose Macaulay, though a near-anorexic as a young woman, wrote the memorable pastiche: "Lobsters I loved, and after lobsters, sex."
We borrowed a rolling pin and a garlic crusher from Jude, for bashing the carapace and winkling out the meat from the legs. I whisked up a mayonnaise. We feasted, and toasted Rose and all lobster lovers.
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