S. Worthen | Weblog

I took copious notes in the fascinating Jane Grigson lecture - in honor, not by! - so it is the meal which needs writing about before I start losing detail.

Tonight's dinner was orchestrated by Shaun Hill of the Walnut Tree in Abergavenny. As usual, we occupied most of the lengths of tables at St. Cat's, vases of flowers and individual, meal-specific menus punctating the laid-out tables. I pillaged a butter knife from my neighbor who was foregoing butter. The bread was pleasant, but nothing particularly special.

The meal began minorly, with a starter of meaty seared monkfish, pale in its pale creamy white sauce, understated, if puncutated with mustard seeds, long cuts of chives, and slithers of cucumber. It was better for its texture than its flavor. The wine, a 2008 Eroica Chateau Ste Michelle & Ernst Loosen, was versatile, beautifully balanced between slight dryness and leavening sweetness. I would happily make this my default table wine.

The main arrived in sharing platters as we corraled our menus and bread plates and numerous glasses into clusters to make space for the incoming dishes. The salad was exemplary, a classic variety, crunch, but never to an abuse of over-stemmed leaves. A roast rack of lamb, cut up into invidiual ribs, lay atop a stew of lamb shoulder and summer vegetables. The beans were vibrant amidst the pleasant richness of the Welsh lamb. (As an example of the generosity from which these meals benefit, the lamb was donated by the Meat Promotion Board of Wales, and by Rob Rattray of Ystwyth Valley Lamb. The wine was largely donated by its producers.)

Our dessert was buttermilk pudding, prettily plated with a pile of berries and summer fruits - black currants, peach, red currants, raspberries, bluberries - a crunch tuile, and a delicate cardamon honey syrup. The wine was elegant and more-ish, a 2002 Riesling auslese Erdener Treppchen, from Dr. Loosen of the Mosel. (C and I have been doing well with a different one of their wines lately; I am happy to know that more of their range is to my taste too.)

Afterward, apropos of tomorrow's dinner, there was a tequila and agave tasting. The cube of cooked agave was like a perfect brown bread pudding, only with a crisper texture. I have learned from the evening that I prefer blanco to aged tequila, and that it really does come in a wide range of styles and richnesses.

It's been good. I hadn't been thinking of the event as social, but there are increasingly many people I know from previous years' conversations. I have Parisian and Leeds restaurant advice, increased knowledge of Spanish butchery, and the realization that my lunch - leftovers - was thematically appropriate since the recipe was from Symposium co-chair Claudia Roden.

I went off to Oxford for most of Saturday for the Write Fantastic fifth anniversary event on Saturday, held at St. Hilda's College. I would say it was nice to be near the water, since it's along the river, but with the drizzle, there was lots of ambient water anyways.

• I had a hunch that there would be people I knew on the train over. I found clanwilliam and major_clanger towards the end of the train and joined them for politics, an Guardian Independent picture quiz, and looking at the landscape. There were steam engines outside.


• How lovely it was to see so many people, both on stage and off! I spent the debut authors panel thinking of how editors and authors might relate to my friend-the-literary-agent. la_marquise_de_ spent the first part of the panel pretending she was "just" the moderator; totally a coincidence that her first novel came out in the last year too. Sarah Ash did an even more convincing job of being purely a moderator; only just now, looking at the group's website, do I realize that of course she was there as a novelist, stealthily. The "Reflections on a Life in Writing" panel shared with us how many people they knew that they'd killed in their books. It also somewhat indirectly led to my discovery, inspired by the name of the session, that at least two of the people there are vampires. (See mirror post for explanation.)


• The pub-across-the-street was not prepared for 40+ people arriving all at once for lunch. They were very good-natured about it, and delighted with the business, but since we - pennski, A, and C. - foolishly chose our table and food before ordering it, our food arrived after the first afternoon session was scheduled to begin. Once we'd finally eaten and returned, we discovered that they'd waited just for us. Or at least for the time at which we coincidentally returned.


• The event was attended by several very tall people. I realized that I'm not used to talking to several tall people at once. It gives me neck ache.


• Business, of sorts, happened too, with an extended SHMTS* discussion with a fellow board member who was present, and a more focused BSFA one.

* The next SHMTS meeting will be in Oxford and deals with medieval maps! I'll post more details at the end of the week.

A local store acquired a distinctive sticker in its window in the last week. I did a double-take as I walked by, for there, on the sticker, on the local shop, was a Google red place-locating flag, the sort used on Google Maps when searching for locations. It was so strangely meta, a sticker derived from a virtual flag, advertising in reality its renown based on its pixel presence online.

For all I know, the stickers are common, but this was the first I've seen.

Speaking of geography, I pieced together more of Oxford yesterday. We went to visit double0hilly, meeting her, fresh from rowing, along the banks of the Isis. I'd always been to the Head of the River with other people and never put it into my mental map of the city until now. I also now know where Jericho is, Worcester College, All Soul's College, and a really poor cocktail lounge, among other places.

I've also learned how good a well-made Grasshopper is (but not at the poor cocktail lounge). There are a variety of chocolate liquors out there: any preferred ones among them you would recommend? This Grasshopper requires white chocolate liquor, but as I currently have no chocolate liquor at all, I would be happy to consider the merits of the whole range of them.

The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery is an annual conference which began nearly thirty years ago. Each year, it addresses a different aspect of the topic, as voted on by the symposium three years earlier. The brainstorming of topics is a public free-for-all, and can evolve in unexpected directions. This year, for example, "Filled and Wrapped" emerged the winner for the 2012 theme, over offal, meats, sweet, and a slew of other suggestions. But that was the end of the symposium, the last order-of-business before tea and home. Let me return to the beginning.

( Friday dinner... )

( Friday dessert... )

( Saturday morning papers... )

( Saturday lunch... )

I'm back from an overnight trip to Oxford, where I attended a wedding that, astonishingly, began early! Everyone was already gathered. We were a comfortably small number in the romanesque St. Giles' Church. It was a moderately informal service, to the degree that we were coached by the vicar when inadequately audible on occasion, and sang the hymns unaccompanied. (I realized I'd never sung "Jerusalem" before, for all the times I've heard it. It's moderately challenging, but I do like a song which features "dark satanic mills".) It was a lovely service and everyone, especially the newlyweds, but also the two people who wore hats, looked very good.

We retired afterwards to The Trout. The man behind me when getting on the bus lives in Wolvercote, and observed that everyone who comes to Oxford goes to The Trout. Suddenly, I felt as if I was repaying a cosmic debt by attending the wedding dinner: all my trips to Oxford balanced out by my pilgrimage to a pub on the banks of the Isis. Out on the patio, we saw small deer skitter by on the opposite shore, admired the resident peacock on the roof, and boggled as two carrier jets - silhouettes the size of large passenger planes - flew slowly by together, nearly wingtip-to-wingtip.

I realized right away that I was seated at the children's table - not literally, but we were all academic siblings, having studied with the same supervisor. It was a delight to catch up with them, and be introduced to other people, some for the sake of common academic ground, others because they were fixtures of my friends' lives, people I knew existed for years, but had never encountered. I met one scholar of spices, and another person who is a potential London dining companion. MIdway through the evening, we drew up our chairs all together, and there were limericks, toasts, and a round of singing "Happy Birthday" to three of us whose birthdays are this week.

I would have gone to the History of Science Museum this morning, had it been open, but it isn't until twelve. So instead, to the market, for cheese, sauce, and fruit, freebies of prepack cereal on Cornmarket, and the train to sushi, and then home.

By celandineb's request...

Here are the (large and enlargable) photos of the Symposium tea towels, the tree of virtues in yellow, the vices in red. They would have been hard to look at had I managed to fit them into one photo, so I'm afraid you can't see them side-by-side.

( A virtuous and a vicious tea towel... )

I've told you about the picnic, the punting, and the souvenirs, but not the symposium itself. Several people there said that the extracurriculars were the highlight of the show, and that the papers were just the bulk of the time. This meant I went in with low expectations, and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the papers I attended. The sessions were designed around the theory that we'd all downloaded and read all the papers in advance. In practice, perhaps three out of thirty had per session. Fortunately, most of the presenters knew this would be the case, and presented accordingly. I'd've gotten more out of the papers I followed least - I hope - if I'd read the full paper first.

Although food history relates very closely to my actual work, I've been thinking of it more as a hobby area for me for a while. Thus it was a particular surprise and pleasure when it turned out I'd heard of plenty of the people there - not as many of the historians as would've been ideal, but enough of the others that I knew I belonged.

Who was there? Ruth Reichl (previously restaurant reviewer to the NYT, currently editor-in-chief of Gourmet) gave the plenary address. Henrietta Green (of Henrietta Green's Food Lover's Fair and, apparently, nearly single-handedly responsible for the beginnings of the good British food revival back in the '70s) and Raymond Blanc (of Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, an extraordinarily highly-rated restaurant) were on a roundtable discussion together. There were restauranteurs there who owned restaurants I knew of. Claudia Roden is co-chair of the event. I met the food blogger who was one of the only people on the internet to use the world "atlet", with that spelling, when I was trying to figure out what an atlet was.

The university food service even rose the occasion, with full table service at all meals, multiple courses, and generally good food, especially given it was in a college setting. There was a play (albeit a brief one) written just for the symposium, a yearly tradition, apparently. There was a relevant movie shown on Friday night. It was well-run and well-organized. I'm looking forward to going back to it in the future.

The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery began with a pre-conference Picnic of Decadence, themed around Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. The book begins with a meeting of the Bollinger Club, feasting at Christchurch college. Our picnic, therefore, was - with Christchurch's permission - in their grounds, tranquil and expansive and green. Picnic blankets and Turkish rugs were spread on the grass, and wooden tables were laden with traditional British goodies. A decent handful of people had dressed up thematically for the picnic. Others of us had merely dressed up.

I strolled down through the grounds of Christchurch along the Cherwell with other symposium attendees to the picnic site, where we were greeted with glasses of - what else? - Bollinger champagne (donated by the company itself). Peter Lehmann wines sponsored the rest of the alcoholic selection, with bottled water to supplement. The meal started with open-face sandwiche, three kinds - whisky-cured salmon (from Summer Isles Foods); cucumber; and foie gras. They were accompanied by hard-boiled quails eggs, which took a bit of practice to peel elegantly.

We moved on to a vividly rich tomato aspic (savory jello/jelly, in effect) with a side of horseradish and the best meat pie I've ever had, smooth grained and beautifully spiced, made by Heal Farm. The accompanying salads were nicely balanced and dressed; and now, thanks to meandering condiments, I know that horseradish makes a nice addition to green salads.

For dessert, we carved slices from a wheel of Stinking Bishop cheese (which isn't really all that smell, but has a nice slightly sweet softness) and ate them with Sharpham Park spelt biscuits with seeds. We unwrapped lovely little clay pots of damson flummery, light layers of lovely, light smooth cooked damons (like plums) with layers of creaminess. There were half a dozen baskets of fruits to accompany, including an intriguingly delicate apply with snowy white flesh.

It was a lovely, relaxed, sumptuous picnic, an excellent way to start the conference, to meet fellow symposiasts, and a satisfying prequel to punting.

Once upon a time, on Friday, I attended a pre-conference Picnic of Decadence and punting expedition. This proved an interesting sartorial challenge: how to be dressed to be both thematically-appropriate for decadence AND still be able to actually punt, should the occasion arise. I was rather proud of myself for managing appropriately.

Post-picnic (of which more anon), we thronged through the grounds of Christchurch to the place where the punts had been rented. Not everyone who was picnicking was punting, so the actual numbers involved were vague until we arrived at the boats and started to fill them in in threes and fours. The few experienced punters in the group were recruited for the actual punting, and the boats started to set out.

Now I had hung back in case there was need for an extra punter. I haven't been punting in years and years, but having done it twice, I was more than happy to try my hand at it again, and anyways, I'd gone to the effort of dressing to be able to punt while looking elegant. In the end, there was a spare punt - they'd rented too many - and a spare spot in the one chauffered punt, which I was invited to take. I wavered briefly, but I knew an opportunity when I saw one. I was going to refresh my punting skills with the spare boat.

( Punting on the Isis and the Cherwell... )

P.S. Usually, in my experience, the only way to be a Known Person at a conference is either to give a paper or to already know people from previous academic encounters. This conference, I was the lone punter. Over the course of the next day or so, the passengers in the other boats stopped to talk to me. As notoriety goes, this was the right kind.