To win a copy of Sophia Bennett's The Bigger Picture, just answer the question below in the comments section.
‘Which creative woman has most inspired you, and why?’
Then send a copy of your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so that we have your email address.
Closing date: 7th April
We are sorry that our competitions are open only to UK Followers
Good luck!
Sunday 31 March 2019
Saturday 30 March 2019
Cabinet of Curiosities - A Cat's Got In! - by Charlotte Wightwick
The last few weeks for me have been all about one thing. No, not Brexit.
February and March have, for me, been the months of The Cat. Within days of my Feline Overlord arriving, I was fully under the paw, accepting as standard the fact that I will be woken up every day at 5am by a barrage of yowls, followed by a large furry creature sitting on my head, attempting to lick my face and demanding I get up to feed it. Not to mention all the 'help' I get whenever I sit down to write anything.
The joys of cat ‘ownership’ have made me wonder what feline artefact should be placed in the Cabinet of Curiosities to celebrate the thousands of years that humans have been domesticated by cats.
The next candidate for the Cabinet of Curiosities has to be the suit of feline armour recently doing the rounds on Twitter, reportedly made for Henry VIII’s cat Dagobert. I suspect I wasn’t alone spending a few confused minutes wondering how on earth one persuaded a cat to wear said armour (presumably a LOT of whatever the sixteenth century equivalent of Dreamies were) before finding out that Dagobert probably never existed, and the armour is modern, created by Canadian artist Jeff de Boer. A disappointment.
I saw my final option on Twitter too, but this one is attested by the good folks (and specifically Mark Forsyth, author of A Short History of Drunkenness) at History Extra. And it’s a good one: the ‘Puss and Mew Machine’: a mechanical cat-shaped gin dispenser. The machine was a way of illegal gin-sellers avoiding the swingeing taxes that the government had imposed in an effort to ban drinking among the lower classes in the eighteenth century. You can find out more at https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/gin-craze-panic-18th-century-london-when-came-england-alcohol-drinking-history/. I knew there was something missing from my life, and now I know what it is.
So, which feline delight shall go into the Cabinet? A mummified kitten, a ninth-century monk’s companion, some impossible feline armour or a mechanical gin-dispensing cat? Its tricky. But as a ‘word hunter’ myself, I think it will have to be the memory of a small white cat, over a thousand years old but immortalised forever:
I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
February and March have, for me, been the months of The Cat. Within days of my Feline Overlord arriving, I was fully under the paw, accepting as standard the fact that I will be woken up every day at 5am by a barrage of yowls, followed by a large furry creature sitting on my head, attempting to lick my face and demanding I get up to feed it. Not to mention all the 'help' I get whenever I sit down to write anything.
Stevie the Cat, helping. Source: C. Wightwick |
The obvious place to start is of course ancient Egypt, where cats were famously worshipped as gods and millions of cat mummies have been found. Personally, I’ve never quite got over the horror/ fascination of seeing kitten mummies at the British Museum as a small child: somehow the idea disturbed me more than the idea of embalmed people. I’m not sure what this says about me – nothing good, I fear.
Ancient Egyptian cat mummies
Source: Wikipedia Commons
|
One of my favourite ‘real life’ historical cats is Pangur Ban, the subject of a ninth-century Irish poem, who spends his time hunting mice while his master, the monk and author of the poem, styles himself as a hunter of words. As a lover of medieval history, there’s something about this poem that really appeals to me: it gives me an incredibly vivid image of a tonsured and robed monk, writing long into the night with only his white cat, chasing mice through the library, for company.
The next candidate for the Cabinet of Curiosities has to be the suit of feline armour recently doing the rounds on Twitter, reportedly made for Henry VIII’s cat Dagobert. I suspect I wasn’t alone spending a few confused minutes wondering how on earth one persuaded a cat to wear said armour (presumably a LOT of whatever the sixteenth century equivalent of Dreamies were) before finding out that Dagobert probably never existed, and the armour is modern, created by Canadian artist Jeff de Boer. A disappointment.
I saw my final option on Twitter too, but this one is attested by the good folks (and specifically Mark Forsyth, author of A Short History of Drunkenness) at History Extra. And it’s a good one: the ‘Puss and Mew Machine’: a mechanical cat-shaped gin dispenser. The machine was a way of illegal gin-sellers avoiding the swingeing taxes that the government had imposed in an effort to ban drinking among the lower classes in the eighteenth century. You can find out more at https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/gin-craze-panic-18th-century-london-when-came-england-alcohol-drinking-history/. I knew there was something missing from my life, and now I know what it is.
So, which feline delight shall go into the Cabinet? A mummified kitten, a ninth-century monk’s companion, some impossible feline armour or a mechanical gin-dispensing cat? Its tricky. But as a ‘word hunter’ myself, I think it will have to be the memory of a small white cat, over a thousand years old but immortalised forever:
I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
Written by an unknown Irish monk, 9th century. Trans Robin Flower.
The page of the Reichenau Primer on which the Pangur Ban
poem is preserved. Source: Wikimedia Commons
|
Labels:
16th century,
18th century,
9th century,
Ancient Egypt,
cats,
Egyptian mummies,
gin,
Henry VIII,
monks
Friday 29 March 2019
The Bigger Picture by Sophia Bennett
Our guest for March is Sophia Bennett, who has been here before. She writes about herself:
Welcome back, Sophia!
Rejection, failure,
anxiety and disappointment – a story of women in art
In 1979 a ground-breaking artwork called The Dinner Party was exhibited at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It celebrated great women in history and
the female-centric art forms of needlework and painting on china. In three
months over 100,000 people came to see it. Many of them wrote to the artist
afterwards to say it had changed their lives. It was the most successful
exhibition in the museum’s history.
Sophia Bennett's novels tell the adventures of creative young people in the worlds of fashion, music and art, and have been translated into over a dozen languages. She is the winner of the Times/Chicken House Competition for Threads and the Romantic Novel of the Year for Love Song, and has been shortlisted for the Booktrust’s Best Book Award for You Don’t Know Me. Amanda Craig, writing in The Times, called her ‘the queen of teen dreams’.
Sophia teaches Writing for Children at City University and regularly gives masterclasses on aspects of writing. She is currently a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, based at St George’s University of London.
She lives in London, where she can be as close to as many art galleries as possible. The Bigger Picture is her first work of non-fiction. (But probably not her last.)
Welcome back, Sophia!
The work was due to go on tour but instead it was boxed up
and put away. Art critics called it ‘kitsch’ and museums didn’t like its
focus on female anatomy. All except one decided not to show it. A planned tour
was cancelled. The artist, Judy Chicago, spent that summer alone and $30,000 in
debt from the cost of making it.
The Dinner Party
consists of three tables in a triangle, with custom-made settings for 39 great
women in Western history. The names of 999 others are painted on the tiled
floor. It took Chicago five years to make it, with the help of nearly 400
mostly female contributors. She did it because she had realised that in order
to be recognised as a serious artist herself she needed to reintroduce women
into history – where so often their contributions had been forgotten. She also
wanted women to celebrate themselves, their bodies and what they made. Now this
seems obvious, but in 1979 the idea was too radical to survive the censure of
the art establishment.
Chicago was born Judy Cohen in 1939. She took her adopted
name in 1970 when she launched herself as a feminist artist, to divest herself
of ‘all names imposed upon her through male social dominance’. She was,
however, always grateful to her own father for the liberated, pro-feminist
example he set. He had encouraged her to express her ideas and to take art
classes, which she did from the age of five at the Art Institute of Chicago.
After this start, it came as a shock to her when, at art
school in Los Angeles, her teachers did not value her opinions or her art. At
first she tried to please them but, frustrated, she went on to study female
artists and writers and developed her own style, introducing softness and
female-centred experience into her paintings and sculptures – which can be as
big as a room, or as small as a biscuit.
Today, The Dinner
Party is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, with
regular exhibitions to explain how it was made. As well as making art, Chicago
has for decades encouraged communities of women to come together and support
each other. Nearly fifty years before the #MeToo movement, she was describing
and addressing the same issues. Finally, the world has caught up with her.
* * *
Or what about Gwen
John - Rodin’s rejected muse, whose letters to the female object of her desire
were locked in a cupboard?
To look at the muted tones and inner stillness of her
paintings, you would think Gwen John had a quiet life. In fact, she was daring,
independent and passionate. She was once overshadowed by her beloved younger
brother, Augustus, but she has since become the more famous ‘John’.
Gwen was a lawyer’s daughter, born in Tenby, a seaside town
in Wales in 1876. Her mother died when she was eight. In 1895, aged 19, she
left her unhappy home to join Augustus at the Slade School of Art in London.
After living in a run-down London squat, John and a fellow artist called
Dorelia McNeill decided to walk to Rome, selling paintings along the way. This
was not normal behaviour for young women in 1903!
In fact, they ended up in Paris where John was soon
modelling for Auguste Rodin to earn money while she painted. They had a long
affair and she moved to Meudon, a suburb of Paris, to be closer to him. However,
Rodin did not return John’s obsessive passion. She nearly stopped working, but
her brother Augustus encouraged her to pursue her talent. As I’ve found, the
story of women in art often includes men who supported them – fathers,
brothers, partners, lovers – only for their legacy to be ignored by the people
who wrote that story later on.
John’s paintings portray the opposite of her precarious
adventures. Their closely-related tones suggest calm, intimacy and reflection. Leading
a solitary existence, she painted mostly interiors and portraits of women,
including the local nuns. Her sitters look thoughtful, as though they have a
deep interior life. John doesn’t make them look idealised and beautiful, but
intelligent and interesting. Often, she would create many different versions of
a painting until she felt she had got it right.
She was unlucky in love again, this time with a woman called
Vera Oumancoff. Gwen showered Vera with letters enclosing over a hundred
drawings and watercolours. Unmoved, Vera stuck them in a cupboard. John’s final
days were spent in Meudon, in a house on stilts set in an overgrown garden,
surrounded by cats she fed with expensive paté. She set off for Dieppe one day
in 1939, and died there, aged 63 – eccentric and independent to the end.
However, in a twist of fate, Gwen’s hidden letters to Vera
were discovered decades later, along with their exquisite enclosures. The person
who found the letters was Susan Chitty, who went on to publish the first major
biography of John in 1981. This led to the art world’s full appreciation of John’s
talent at last.
Another thing I found fascinating: how once women became
writers of art history, instead of merely the passive objects of it, the bigger
picture of great women’s achievements began to emerge.
* * *
“I fight pain, anxiety
and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness
is to help creating art.”
– From the autobiography
of Yayoi Kusama
Yakoi Kusama is one of the most successful artists alive
today. In 2014 her solo shows – and there were many of them – were attended by
more people than those of any other artist in the world. Her works are alive
with colour and pattern and, to quote one of her works ‘Filled with the Brilliance of Life’. She is known as ‘the princess
of polka dots’.
Yet Kusama has lived with mental illness most of her life.
In fact, this has been a contributing factor to her career. Yayoi sees the
world differently from most people. From childhood she has had severe obsessive
thoughts, and visions where sunflowers or dots on a tablecloth would seem to
multiply until they were infinite and all around her. Though frightened at
first, Kusama eventually found these visions reassuring as if the dots, like
infinite stars, were connecting her to the universe. This is what she has consistently
tried to express in her art.
Her mother did not make it easy. She wanted Kusama to marry,
not become a professional artist, so she took Yayoi’s art materials away. Kusama
simply started creating with old seed sacks and mud. She made thousands of
works before she left Japan, and then destroyed most of them to make room for
more.
In 1957, encouraged by Georgia O’Keeffe, Kusama went to New
York. Here, her avant-garde work influenced Pop artists like Andy Warhol and
Roy Lichtenstein (another fan of dots). She constantly experimented with new
materials and new technologies to create paintings, sculptures, installations and
performance art. And yet she failed to find the success she craved, though the
men around her did. She returned to Japan, disappointed and, it seemed,
defeated.
But she couldn’t stop making art. Today, Yayoi works in her Tokyo
studio by day and lives in a psychiatric institution across the road by night.
With bright red hair and polka dot clothes she is an icon of the art world,
while crowds queue to see her sculptures of dotted pumpkins and ‘Infinity
Mirror Rooms’ around the globe. She says, ‘Love is the most important thing.’
Her art, born out of fear and anxiety, is perhaps so popular because it is
suffused with wonder and joy.
* * *
I learned about Chicago, John, Kusama and a host of other
artists during the intense months of research I did last summer for The Bigger Picture. It was the
brainchild of Holly Tonks, then editor at Tate Publishing. Her idea was to
celebrate Tate’s new emphasis on supporting traditionally marginalised artists,
be they women, non-binary, non-white or not from the Western tradition of
making art. And to target the book at the next generation of artists, art
facilitators and art lovers – ie young teenagers: my audience.
I found out about the project when I was pitching another
book and basically begged to be allowed to write it. With over 50 full-colour spreads
illustrated by Manjit Thapp, the result was a labour of love.
It was made difficult – and therefore more interesting – by
the fact that every artist in the book by definition has a fascinating life,
body of work and artistic process… And I only had a maximum of about 400 words
to describe each one. If she was alive and chose to contribute an interview (16
did) I sometimes had only 200 words. How could I possibly sum up the ground-breaking,
zeitgeist-skewering, post-Communist, internet-savvy multimedia achievements of
Cao Fei in three small paragraphs? I couldn’t, of course. I can only hope the
book will get its readers Googling like crazy.
One of the toughest artist profiles to write was Judy
Chicago’s. I wanted to include her because she is such a central feminist icon,
with something to say about almost every aspect of art the book discusses.
Then, to our joy and astonishment, she also agreed to contribute an interview. I
was thrilled – and had to cut my own wordcount by two thirds. So I was pleased
to know this blog would be a home for what I had to leave out, and the chance
to connect Judy’s journey with some of her fellow ‘rejects’.
For thousands of years – until the lifetime of my young
readers – women have been ‘other’ in the history of art: seen and not heard.
They have known every form of refusal, deprivation, anonymity, disappointment,
invisibility and anxiety. And yet art has been made, always. Great art, even.
Wherever we look, we find it, even if the name of the maker has been lost in
the mists of time.
Women have persisted, extemporised, explored, expressed,
resisted, created, reached out, reached up. I find them all so inspirational. I
love their work. I so admire those other women – curators, critics, historians,
biographers, gallerists, collectors – who since the 1970s have been gradually
reintroducing them into the history of art where they belong.
The teens I write for are besieged by images of perfection
and it is creating levels of anxiety they don’t know how to manage, at an age
when they should be loving the chance to explore who they want to become.
Thinking like an artist is about looking, not looking perfect. Or being
perfect. That is what Gwen and Yayoi and Judy knew. That’s what I hope the
readers of The Bigger Picture can discover
for themselves.
Thursday 28 March 2019
Medicine, Murder and Mouse Droppings - by Ruth Downie
If I’d known that my three chapters for that “start a novel” competition would turn into a whole series of murder mysteries, I’d never have based them on a Roman army medic. All I was looking for at the time was a character who was in a quandary, plus the suggestion of a story to follow.
There wasn’t a story, of course - which was something I had to confess when an agent got in touch and asked to see the rest of the manuscript. What I didn’t dare tell her was that I didn’t know enough about Roman army medics to write one.
Fortunately, plenty of ancient medical textbooks survive and there are modern scholars who know how to interpret them. You’ll find some of them listed at the end of this post. Meanwhile, here are ten of the fun facts that have kept me entertained over the years while I’ve tried to find G Petreius Ruso, Medicus, credible things to do.
1) Buyer beware! Ancient medical practice had no quality control. Much as anyone today can call themselves a ‘therapist’, anyone in the classical world could call themselves a doctor.
2) When only the best will do: Xenophon, doctor to the emperor Claudius, earned a vast salary. However, demonstrating that you don’t always get what you pay for, Xenophon was said to have finished Claudius off by sticking a poisoned feather down his throat, faking an attempt to save the emperor from the poisoned mushrooms he’d been fed at dinner.
3) “Only a doctor can kill a man with impunity.” Pliny the Elder was not a fan of the medical profession. Not only were doctors dangerous foreign* charlatans who conspired to murder the population of Rome, but they also expected to get paid for doing it.
*Doctors were often Greek.
There wasn’t a story, of course - which was something I had to confess when an agent got in touch and asked to see the rest of the manuscript. What I didn’t dare tell her was that I didn’t know enough about Roman army medics to write one.
Fortunately, plenty of ancient medical textbooks survive and there are modern scholars who know how to interpret them. You’ll find some of them listed at the end of this post. Meanwhile, here are ten of the fun facts that have kept me entertained over the years while I’ve tried to find G Petreius Ruso, Medicus, credible things to do.
1) Buyer beware! Ancient medical practice had no quality control. Much as anyone today can call themselves a ‘therapist’, anyone in the classical world could call themselves a doctor.
2) When only the best will do: Xenophon, doctor to the emperor Claudius, earned a vast salary. However, demonstrating that you don’t always get what you pay for, Xenophon was said to have finished Claudius off by sticking a poisoned feather down his throat, faking an attempt to save the emperor from the poisoned mushrooms he’d been fed at dinner.
3) “Only a doctor can kill a man with impunity.” Pliny the Elder was not a fan of the medical profession. Not only were doctors dangerous foreign* charlatans who conspired to murder the population of Rome, but they also expected to get paid for doing it.
*Doctors were often Greek.
4) Human arteries were full of air, or possibly milk, and one day
somebody would devise a way to prove it. (To be fair, not everybody
believed this. We only know about it because the multi-talented Galen
took time to pour scorn on his deluded competitors. According to him, his own
public lectures on anatomy - complete with live animal dissections -
filled the crowds with wonder and his rivals with envy.)
5) This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.
With no microscopes, scans or x-rays, and with human dissection not
allowed, the best place for a doctor to learn about anatomy was
somewhere with a handy supply of injured patients - like a gladiator
school, or the Army.
6) Practice makes perfect: Some of the surgery on offer was
top-class. Field hospitals in the first world war were still using
amputation techniques that would have been used in the Roman army, and
for the bold and the desperate, it was even possible to have successful
cataract surgery.
7) Maybe it’s the bad air. The causes of disease were largely
unknown. Bacteria and viruses were still undiscovered, which perhaps
explains a whole slew of remedies using animal waste, including lizard
dung to make ladies’ complexions glow, and wild boar dung - smeared on
fresh, if necessary - to treat injured chariot drivers. The emperor Nero, who fancied himself as a charioteer,
was said to prefer his boar dung dried, powdered, and drunk with water.
Still, looking on the bright side - if you were unlucky enough
to have a mouse infestation and a bald patch, and on top of all that you
found that your wine had gone off, you could grind the mouse-droppings
into the vinegar to make a hair-restorer.
8) Remember to pack the medicine: Drugs derived from plants, animals and minerals were widely used and common medicines like opium were very well understood. In the absence of inoculations, travellers might ask to be prescribed a theriac - a complicated mixture of dozens of tonics and antidotes that would protect them against foreign diseases and poisons.
9) Where doctors failed, the gods could succeed: here’s the cast of a plaque set up by a grateful worshipper who had his deafness cured at the temple in Epidauros.
10) And finally: The weak (who include “a large proportion of townspeople and almost all those fond of letters”) need to take good care of themselves. In particular, if last night’s meal has not been fully digested, the weak person should stay in bed “and neither work, take exercise nor attend to business.”
As a townsperson who is fond of letters, this is the only piece of ancient medical advice that I can fully recommend.
For more rounded and reliable information, try:
Roman Medicine - Audrey Cruse
Doctors and Diseases in the Roman Empire - Ralph Jackson
Ancient Medicine -Vivian Nutton (not a light read, but an excellent in-depth study)
The free Futurelearn course on Health and Wellbeing in the Ancient World, offered by the Open University.
Anything by Professor John Scarborough
Anything by Professor John Scarborough
On the subject of women practising medicine - here's the delightful tale of “Agnodike, the Flashing Midwife”, being discussed by Professor Helen King of the Open University.
Click here to visit an earlier blog post on the theory of the Wandering Womb
I'd like to thank the re-enactors whose collections are displayed in my photos above but I can't remember where I took all of them - if you recognise your kit please let me know!
I'd like to thank the re-enactors whose collections are displayed in my photos above but I can't remember where I took all of them - if you recognise your kit please let me know!
Ruth Downie writes a series of mysteries featuring
Roman military medic Ruso and his British partner Tilla - find out more
at www.ruthdownie.com.
Wednesday 27 March 2019
What's for dinner? by Janie Hampton
'Simple but appetising' minced meat pie. Woman's Own, 1964 |
July by Raymond E Meylan |
However, tastes and ingredients were not as culturally diverse as they are now. Even Gallati with her Italian background, only used garlic sparingly. Avocadoes were a rare treat reserved for dinner parties, not for every-day sandwiches. Other ingredients were available. Not many recipe books now would include gulls eggs, smoked eel or 'cannelloni stuffed with calves' brains'. Duck aux cerises froides (duck with cold cherries) involved crushing the cherry stones to retrieve the tiny nuts. Aspic appears often, an ingredient my mother used 50 years ago for parties. With aspic and jelly moulds, she could make one chicken and tin of peas feed 20 people. I remember being surprised by old men saying with glee, ‘Mmmm, aspic! I haven’t had that since the nursery!’ Egg en gelée is poached eggs in aspic. To achieve that special 1950s look, you could mix aspic with mayonnaise (homemade, obviously) before piping it artistically onto your fish. Remember ‘Russian salad’? Tiny cubes of carrots and turnips with peas, mixed into mayonnaise, served in tomatoes with their insides scooped out, and a touch more aspic. Don’t forget the sprig of parsley!
Gallati also suggested which drinks to serve, including cocktails. In January, one could drink ‘Peter Pan’, made from equal parts of gin, French vermouth, orange juice and peach bitter. Shaken not stirred, as is August’s ‘Highland Cooler’ of whisky, bitters and lemon. Whereas July’s Pimms no.1 demanded No Shaking.
The illustrations by Raymond E. Meylan still look modern – stark black and white ink drawings adorn the start of each month’s recipes. They remind me of 1950s tiles or Heal’s fabric, and would work well as tapestry designs. Meylan also designed logos for chemical companies in the 1960s, when abstract corporate logos were all the rage.
I love the mixture of French and English to give the recipes continental class, such as ‘carrots vichy’ and ‘crayfish a la russe’. ‘Moussaka á l’algerienne’ brought together Greece, France and North Africa. At my very first dinner party, cooked on my 13th birthday for six school friends, the menu I wrote by hand stated ‘Saucissons en toade dans une hole.’ Maybe Mary Gallati’s French was as bad as mine, and she just didn’t know the word for carrot or crayfish? Like Gallati, I also tried the latest pudding – Baked Alaska. Only I had never seen one, just heard about it. So the cake underneath was soggy, the meringue chewy, and the ice cream completely melted. My friends claimed to be delighted by the glacé cherries sprinkled all over it.
The days of tiny supermarket trolleys, trendy baskets and kitten heels! Photo by Tesco Stories, 1963. |
February by Raymond E Meylan |
I love the mixture of French and English to give the recipes continental class, such as ‘carrots vichy’ and ‘crayfish a la russe’. ‘Moussaka á l’algerienne’ brought together Greece, France and North Africa. At my very first dinner party, cooked on my 13th birthday for six school friends, the menu I wrote by hand stated ‘Saucissons en toade dans une hole.’ Maybe Mary Gallati’s French was as bad as mine, and she just didn’t know the word for carrot or crayfish? Like Gallati, I also tried the latest pudding – Baked Alaska. Only I had never seen one, just heard about it. So the cake underneath was soggy, the meringue chewy, and the ice cream completely melted. My friends claimed to be delighted by the glacé cherries sprinkled all over it.
If only I had used the Woman’s Own Cook Book of 1964 which has handy tips on ‘The etiquette of dining’, such as how to cut a grapefruit, and where to place the glacé cherry. I didn’t know that ‘the chief male guest sits on the hostesses right, and the chief woman guest on the host’s right.’ Woman’s Own usefully pointed out that if there were eight people round the table, the sexes couldn't alternate and ‘adaptations are made at the host’s end.’ How confused the hostess of the 1960s would be by same sex couples, and non-binary people. The ‘chief duties of the host are pouring out wine and carving.’ Thank goodness nowadays, we can pour our own wine, and carving meat is a rare occurrence at a dinner party.
An exciting dinner party in 1964. Which side of the hostess will the chief guest sit? |
The chapter about children’s food insisted that they needed bland, tasteless, preferably steamed, mush – what we used to call ’Nursery food.’ Oat or barley ‘Jelly’ was recommended to build up weak children, and raw beef juice ( i.e. watered down blood) for delicate and anaemic babies. Colour, experimentation and taste were not encouraged.
'All-on-a-level kitchen', Woman's Own 1964. I've often dreamed of a tidy kitchen like this, and to wear kitten heels for cooking. |
Here are some recipes from Mary Gallati’s Hostess Dinner Book:
August: Sweetbreads Maréchale Place 2 large sweetbreads (lamb’s pancreas) in water and boil. Cool and remove fat and sinew. Cut into slices, roll in breadcrumbs and shallow-fry. Garnish with points of asparagus. Pour melted butter over . [Note to reader: à la maréchale is a French phrase for cooking food à l'anglaise ("English-style"), i.e. coated with bread crumbs and fried.]
August: Sweetbreads Maréchale Place 2 large sweetbreads (lamb’s pancreas) in water and boil. Cool and remove fat and sinew. Cut into slices, roll in breadcrumbs and shallow-fry. Garnish with points of asparagus. Pour melted butter over . [Note to reader: à la maréchale is a French phrase for cooking food à l'anglaise ("English-style"), i.e. coated with bread crumbs and fried.]
December: Smoked Eel. Cut into 3 inch sections. Garnish with quartered lettuce and tomato. Pass round horseradish sauce separately. Horseradish sauce: 4 tablespoons fresh grated horse-radish. ½ teaspoon salt. 1 ½ tablespoons vinegar. ½ cup cream. Cayenne pepper. Mix, add cream beaten stiff.
May by Raymond E Meylan |
Labels:
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Tuesday 26 March 2019
Paris by the book, by Carol Drinkwater
Grace, my young English heroine in THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, who is trying to escape the scars of her violent upbringing, is in search of adventure and perhaps a romantic encounter. When she steps off the train from London into the unknown exotic world of Paris in April 1968 she has no idea what lies ahead, the future that awaits her.
I have spent this last weekend wandering the streets of the Left Bank because my husband, Michel, has a festival in progress - the first GrecDoc has been unveiled; his newly-founded festival of modern Greek documentary films is underway. I am not in the cinema watching all the films because I have been on the jury to choose the winning three, so I have seen and enjoyed them already. They represent a fascinating window into modern Greek life and its recent, sometimes turbulent history.
This photo was taken by the young Greek director, Stathis Galazoulas, during the screening on Friday of his award-winning short film, My Grandmother, the Tobacco Grower.
The audience is assembling for the very first Grecdoc festival in Paris
photo: Stathis Galazoulas, March 2019
I had considered writing about modern Greece and some of the fascinating facts I have learned and discovered through these films, but I am going to leave that subject for another day, another blog. Who knows, another novel?
Because, the publication of my novel, THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF is drawing close, 16th May - as I write, there are 53 days to go - I want to touch upon the role Paris plays in the book. If you read my blog of last month you will know that vital sections of the book are set in Paris in 1968.
During April and May '68, the lead up to and the unfolding of the students' uprising. It was a time of hope, of dreams of peace and a new order. A vision of a fairer world.
It was the Sixties, hippies, flower power, anti-Vietnam War peace marches, the murder of Martin Luther King.
Michel's Grecdoc festival is being screened at a fabulous little cinema on the Left Bank at 5, rue des Écoles. Le Grand Action is an art house cinema in that it is not in the business of showing the latest American blockbusters. It opens its doors to lesser known films and to small festivals such as GrecDoc. It is in the heart of Paris's student land. Further along the street is the famous Sorbonne University. This area of the city is central to the action of the '68 sections of THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF. It is the stage upon which many scenes are set.
Although I know this area well and over the years have spent many hours walking these streets, this weekend I began to see the quartier anew. Perhaps because the structuring and writing of the novel is behind me now and I know these characters so well. I have lived with them, inhabited their hopes and dreams for the best part of two years. This weekend, I could look quietly at all that was around me, through my characters' eyes rather than my own. I was pacing the very same streets, gazing upon buildings, statues, parks, seeing them as Grace, the novel's central character, and Peter, one of the two young men she meets during that summer of '68, (both of whom impact dramatically on the rest of her life, but in very different ways), might have seen them.
The front façade of the Sorbonne University, Paris 5,
Founded in 1257.
Peter is a student at the Sorbonne, studying politics and social sciences, when he first meets sixteen-year-old Grace, on her first day in Paris. He might have walked in and out of these great doors almost on a daily basis. Perhaps Grace waited outside for him before they went off to explore the city? During the uprisings in May '68, the Rector of the Sorbonne locked the doors of the university, in response to a peaceful student demonstration, thus shutting out the students from their belongings and lectures halls. This act was partially responsible for the escalation from civil urest to street violence, the involvement of the police, the building of the barricades and, after days of riots, the occupation of the university by the students themselves.
Grace and Peter were participants in these events. For a young girl of sixteen, May 68 was a life-changing experience. Grace was waking up to some of the possibilities that life could offer her, to her own sexuality and the power of her own convictions and voice. Women's rights, sexual liberties. A better education system. Respect and opportunities for the working classes. The rights of the people.
Across the street, still strolling along the rue des Écoles, is a fine statue I have never noticed before. Michel de Montaigne, one of France's most renowned philosophers, famous for establishing the essay as a literary genre. I stood in the spring sunshine taking photos of the statue, asking myself might Grace have lingered here, leaning against this statue, reading a book, while waiting for Peter? Or might she have walked right by it on many occasions as I have done?
Michel de Montaigne 1533 - 1592. Renaissance philosopher.
On one of my recent afternoon strolls along rue des Écoles, I took a right hand turn, descending to Place Maubert (where I lived with Michel in the tiniest and most romantic of studios when I first came to Paris). It's famous food market was in full swing. In the bar, Feignes Alain, on the corner of rue Frédéric Sauton and 18 Place Maubert, after an incident occurs during the demonstrations, Grace stops to buy herself a glass of wine. She is shaken by what she has witnessed and what has befallen her personally. The shadows of real life are beginning to cloud over her. Her dreams of a carefree summer are slipping away. It is time to quit the city, she feels, and travel south in search of sun and new adventures.
Alone and unnerved by the rising violence in the capital, Grace eventually catches up with Peter and a few of his comrades at Chez George, 11 rue des Canettes, Paris, 6e arrondissement. They are deep in conversation, mulling over the escalating events. Chez George was one of the students' regular hangouts in the Sixties. Today, it has become almost a Left Bank institution and you can still enjoy its 'great vibes', a decent meal or simply a glass of wine. Late in the evenings it is a very lively joint. Downstairs, in the candle-lit cave, where the music rocks, young locals come to dance and swing. Today, it is in the very capable hands of George's daughter and his grandson, Jean François. Do pop in, if you are in Paris.
While in the vicinity, why not visit one of my favourite churches in Paris, Saint Sulpice? The present church is the second on the site. The original was Romanesque. The one that dominates Place Saint-Sulpice today was founded in 1646. Its interior is quite daunting, exceedingly high ceilings, little ornamentation and usually, outside the time of Mass when its great and very splendid organ is played, eerily quiet. The Marquis de Sade and Charles Baudelaire were both baptised here. Victor Hugo celebrated his marriage to Adéle Foucher within these great stone walls.
If you are a visitor to Paris, Sunday organ concerts are held regularly in the church.
But I digress.... Saint Sulpice plays no role in the novel except as a landmark when Grace is discovering her new city while searching for a place to stay.
A short walk away is the rue Guy-Lussac. In a studio in this street, Peter and Grace camp out, sleeping on the floor of a fellow student's pad while he, arrested during the student riots, is being held in a prison cell. This rather attractive little street played an important role in the '68 students' revolution. In the novel we find Grace here, spending back-breaking hours, working all through the night, building barricades in the company of other students and citizens. By this point in the story, the revolution has caught the attention of the nation. Parisians from all walks of life were shocked by the clamp down and the violence shown by de Gaulle's military-minded government towards the young. Many joined the cause, which escalated into violent clashes with the police who used tear gas and brutality to quell the growing force of the voice of the people.
Unfortunately, the uprising and the national strikes that followed were short-lived. By mid-June, de Gaulle had the country back under control. Elections were called and his government was brought back with a greater majority.
However, the long view of history shows us that it was not in vain. Many historians claim that May '68 transformed France, bringing it - kicking and screaming perhaps - into the second half of the twentieth-century. It is seen as a cultural turning point, "a social revolution rather than a political one." (Alain Geismar.)
For a young girl like Grace who suffered violence in her childhood, the street fighting is too confronting. She needs to get out, to move on.
Peter and Grace's flight from Paris during the turbulent month of May '68 leads them to the south, to a secluded house on a cliff's edge not too far from Marseille. It is the house of Peter's aunt, a renowned artist. Overlooking the most spectacular landscape of sandy bays and rocky inlets, Grace believes she will find the harmony she has been seeking.
A few photos I took of the Calanques area when I was researching the novel.
But here in the south, Grace meets another young man and falls under his spell. Here, at the House on the Edge of the Cliff, which stands high above these magnificent bays, witnessing all, summer arrives. The days grow hot and emotions reach a fever pitch until a tragedy ensues and Grace's life is never to be the same again ...
Over the years right up to the present time, when Grace looks back on that summer of '68, it is not the weeks in Paris that haunt her but the months that followed ...
THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF is published on 16th May.
The publishers are saying: "Carol Drinkwater's epic story of enduring love and betrayal, from Paris in the Sixties to the present day."
It can be preordered and shipped worldwide free from
https://www.bookdepository.com/The-House-on-the-Edge-of-the-Cliff/9781405933346
I hope you will read and enjoy it.
www.CarolDrinkwater.com
Labels:
Alain Geismar,
Chateau Michel de Montaigne,
Les Calanques,
Michel de Montaigne,
Sorbonne university
Monday 25 March 2019
Strawberry Hill by Miranda Miller
Last month I was lucky enough to catch the last day of an exhibition called Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill. Horace Walpole was a great original, the son of Robert Walpole, a powerful, corrupt statesman and de facto first prime minister. Horace had exquisite, if camp, taste and inherited enough money to indulge it. Walpole has been called the father of British art history as well as the inventor of gothic and he was also, as the author of The Castle of Otranto, the founder of gothic fiction. In this portrait by Rosalba Carriera we see Horace as a rich young aristocrat in Venice on his Grand Tour, looking fey and delicate with his powdered face.
He never married or had any illegitimate children and is generally assumed to have been gay. At the age of twenty-three his father pulled strings to get him elected as Whig MP for Callington in Cornwall, a seat he held for thirteen years without ever visiting it. When he was about thirty he bought a small villa in Twickenham, originally called "Chopped Straw Hall", which was not nearly elegant enough for the fastidious Walpole. He He called it “my little plaything” and spent the rest of his life transforming it, filling it with his wonderful art collection. This was not just a private collection; he used to charge a guinea for a tour by his housekeeper. although he insisted that no children were to be admitted. "The highest personages of the realm," including the royal family, came to visit his creation. In a letter to a friend he complained: "I have but a minute's time in answering your letter, my house is full of people, and has been so from the instant I breakfasted, and more are coming- in short, I keep an inn; the sign, the Gothic Castle...my whole time is passed in giving tickets for seeing it, and hiding myself when it is seen- take my advice, never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court, everybody will live in it but you. " He loved jokes and once wrote, “The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” He used to receive guests wearing this wooden trompe l'ceil cravat carved by Grinling Gibbons.
After his death in 1797 the house and contents were inherited by a cousin. After a famous sale in 1842 that lasted for twenty-four days all four thousand objects in his collection - paintings, miniatures, furniture, coins - disappeared into private collections around the world. Luckily Horace kept meticulous records of everything he collected and wrote to a friend: “How merry my ghost will be, and shake its ears to hear to hear itself quoted as a person of consummate prudence!”
A brilliant art detective, Silvia Davoli, spent years tracing his collection and,for a few months, a hundred and fifty works from fifty-five lenders brought this unique house back to life. Walpole coined the word "gloomth" to describe the mixture of warmth and gloom he wanted to create in his fake ancestral castle, which was complete with an armoury and battlements. The lavish use of deep red, as in the gallery you can see below, creates a sympathetic atmosphere. He wrote of it, rather disingenuously, “Well! But I begin to be ashamed of my magnificence. Strawberry is growing sumptuous in its latter day...in truth my collection was too great already to be lodged humbly.”
He loved objects that told a story, the more macabre the better. For example: a clock Henry V111 gave Anne Boleyn on the morning of their marriage; Mary Tudor’s hair; an Aztec mirror which Queen Elizabeth’s necromancer, Dr John Dee, is supposed to have used in his supernatural research. Hogarth, one of his favourite artists, visited the the convicted triple murderer Sarah Malcolm in her cell and painted a sympathetic record of her. Another exhibit was Hogarth’s painting of a production of John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera, which satirized the corruption of Hioace’s father Robert .
This portrait of Horace aged about forty by Joshua Reynolds suggests complexity, wit and subtlety. He holds a print of an imperial Roman marble eagle. He loved anuimals and once wrote, “ I know that I have had friends who would never have vexed or betrayed me, if they had walked on all fours. His beloved cat was also resurrected in this remarkable exhibition; when his pet tabby fell into a tub while trying to catch goldfish and drowned, Walpole commissioned his old schoolfriend Thomas Gray to write a poem in its memory, Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes:
on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow.
The blue and white Chinese porcelain vase refersred to in this poem could be seen in the hall of the house. This famous poem was first published by the Strawberry Hill press, which Walpole set up in 1757 in the grounds. Here he printed his own works and also designed his own typeface, His four volume Anecdotes of Painting in England is still admired by art historians and his poshumously published memoirs are very entertaining and shrewd about politics.
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Other exhibits were a portrait of the Percy sisters by Van Dyck; a formidable portrait of Catherine de Medici and her children; a double portrait of Henry VIII and Francis I and a cabinet full of Walpole's miniature collection, which was considered one of the best in Europe. He also supported many female artists, including Anne Damer and Diana Beauclerc. Like the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and John Soane’s museum in Lincoln Inn Fields, Strawberry Hill is imbued with the eccentric personality of one man.
A boy as a Shepherd by Peter Lely
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