Output requires input. This is true in language learning, skill-building, and creating. This is the year of MARINA's Eat the World and Eliza Clark's She's Always Hungry . Over the next twelve weeks, I'm munching on, sipping, guzzling, and inhaling beautiful and delicious things. Enjoying the things I consume, and curating what I experience, take in, and eat .
This first week, fittingly, is all about food.
Here's what I've been eating:
Books
Butter , Asako Yuzuki
This, I think, is the book of the year. Luxuriating in everything about this book is the most perfect start to this adventure in eating. It all begins with the absolutely perfect covert art. That distinct yellow is absolutely butterly delicious. I enjoyed this with an absolutely huge amount of mapo tofu.
Tastes like: butter. As a child, I used to eat globs of butter in secret while my mother napped. This is that kind of pure pleasure.
The Book of Difficult Fruit , Kate Lebo
A delectable concoction of memoir, personal essay, cultural history, and food writing. Each chapter revolves around a fruit, exploring its histories and connections to the author's amusing and moving memories. Lebo provides recipes that accompany the rest of her prose and echo it in fascinating and delicious ways by playing with category (does lip balm belong in a food book?). In contrast to the expectation of full-page color photographs facing accompanying recipes, this book has a few charming black and white illustrations. A faded mosaic of fruit illustrations facing the title page of each chapter lends a quaint quality; one feels that this book is an artefact of knowledge—personal and historical. It opens up obscure histories and explores an atypical mode of writing about the self and food. From an external perspective, it reveals the nature of genre and the beauty of the endless possibilities of non-fiction prose.
Tastes like: mulberries.
Everyday Drinking , Kinglsey Amis
Amis wrote three short books on drink, which are collected for the first time here. Full of perfect sentences and acerbic observations. To be eaten up with dry-roasted peanuts.
Tastes like: a nice large drink.
Magazines
Cake Zine – Candy Land
I enjoy the paper they've used in this zine. (it's a genuine wonder I wasn't one of those kids that ate paper) It isn't shiny paper; it's like the pages of a book. There's a most excellent essay on aspartame, the artificial sweetener, in this issue. I am an enjoyer of sweeteners, but this is a summer issue of the zine, from when Diet Coke is the only true beverage. As we enter winter, if I'm seeking indulgence, sweetness needs to come from brown sugar.
Tastes like: chalky candy necklace (compliment)
Table
A really well put-together magazine with a diverse range of forms within.
Tastes like: meringue with freeze-dried raspberries.
Movie
Tampopo (1985) is a strange film. It's also delightful. It's unctuous and joyous, even as there's a melancholy to its framing. In the quest for the perfect recipe for a bowl of ramen is all the stuff of life. Delicious.
Tastes like: a runny fried egg with perfect brown edges and large flakes of salt.
Fragrance
Lush's American Cream – I bought this after nearly going nose-blind testing all the perfumes at Lush. Nearly all their perfumes have something gourmand in them. I enjoyed This particular scent because it's a bit strange and unexpected.
This is how Lush describes the scent: Drop into our diner and order a splash of this delicious vanilla scent. Spritz yourself with the sweet vanilla absolute and benzoin resinoid to create this creamy milkshake perfume you (and others) won't be able to get enough of.
I don't think they've quite captured 'milkshake' but there is something creamy and vaguely nostalgic about this scent. I've been enjoying wearing it with other culinaryly suggestive scents to create flavored milkshakes on my skin. A particular favorite is this with Beauty Pie's Brazilian Lime, Fig Leaves, and Tea, which puts me in mind of Nirula's Lime Ice – a lime soda with a vanilla ice cream float.
Tastes like: vanilla ice cream but as if you're remembering the taste of vanilla ice cream, and mixing it in with the exhilaration of a childhood summer's day out.
Cocktail Corner (three recipes that aren't really recipes)
These are the drinks I served at a Diwali party at home. All the drinks, you'll notice, are outrageously strong. These are measures from the heart. The mixers purposely lean sweet so that the drinks stands up to the extremely large quantities of alcohol involved. They are all also built drinks, because it makes it much easier to serve guests than shaking each drink.
Spiked Thai Iced Tea
Brew Thai tea leaves. After straining, place in the fridge until chilled.
Fill a glass with ice. Then, add 10ml of Velvet Falernum and 70ml of dark spiced rum. Top of generously with cooled iced tea, then mix in some condensed milk.
A possible experiment for next time would be to add in some kafir lime leaves for a fragrant element that might balance the sweetness.
Rooh-Afza Watermelon Basil Cooler
Pre-soak basil seeds. If you can't find those, soak chia seeds.
Stir Rooh Afza in a glass with 60ml of Watermelon and Basil Gray Goose. Add a few large ice cubes. Add soaked basil seeds and top with soda water.
Garnish with mint.
Saffron Old Fashioned
Make a saffron-infused caramel with brown sugar. Steep a few fronds of saffron in hot water and make the caramel using this infused water.
Make an old fashioned as usual, with bitters, and replace the sugar with this syrup.
Dessert
A recipe for cake on the side of a packet of fine semolina from M&S. I took this recipe as a very light suggestion while making a saffron-flavored cake for my Diwali party. I infused the butter in the cake with the saffron and brushed on some of the brown-sugar saffron caramel from the Old Fashioned on top.
Tastes like: the glow of a fragrant candle.
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Thank you so much for reading!
Living deliciously,
Tej x
