Late Summer - A Sensory Experience - The Taste of Summer
The internal world of taste
Hello readers
Welcome to the second post in my August writing challenge: Late Summer, A Sensory Experience. Where I live, on the coast in North Yorkshire, UK, harvest is now in full swing. Last week’s sensory summer post was all about the sounds of summer and right now the sounds are combines crawling over the walls of the valley and in the fields around the village and of tractors and trailers trundling along the village lanes.
It’s been quite windy and rainy too so the stream has been full and bubbling, the beech trees, now heavy with beech nuts, have been shushing and whispering.
This week I’ve been running the Dawn Chorus early morning writing group and have been struck by the silence, the on-the-cusp-of-autumn peace of the early mornings. Yesterday morning I watched a stretched sunrise the colour of rose-quartz, with a few lonely herring gulls drifting past quietly, their white bellies reflecting the pink of it. It reminded me that there is a place in the morning in which there is no business, no planning or prepping or rushing or fighting, or working. It made me want to engage with that peace, and peace of mind, more. After the weeks of constant cool rain the heat of summer has returned in dribs and drabs, some days warm, some days hot. But it doesn’t feel like the blaze of summer is returning. There are now straggled Vs of geese over the house. There is now the scent of smoke in the air and it feels like the season tipping forward. It feels like August is a month that exists on a balancing point between summer and autumn, but now the weight of the season has fallen towards the mulch, earthy change of autumn now.
This week’s prompts are all about tuning ourselves not to the outside world but to the interior world, the very personal world of taste, in which by the miracle of evolution, each person’s experience is slightly different. Adults have between 2000 and 4000 taste buds. The cells in taste buds are replaced weekly. We perhaps don’t even taste things the same way week on week. So many variations in taste experience, and that’s before we come to the variation in foods. And food is so much more than fuel. It’s celebration, love, it’s comfort, it’s ritualistic. One joy that I share with so many others is the joy off growing your own. This year I have not had chance to get a proper crop of anything, but I did manage to get some very late potatoes in and come September, with luck, I’ll be eating fresh spuds out of the ground. I like them buttery, salted, not much else to them, eaten hot, or cold. The joy is really in the act of planting, growing and harvesting, of naturalness of it, this thing we’ve been doing since the neolithic.
On instagram friends and followers are harvesting their allotments, showing off their baskets of produce. People are snipping peppers off plants grown on windowsills, people are making fat pans of ratatouille with the glut of courgettes they have. My mum used to make ratatouille, but I never really understood the appeal of it, until I discovered the baked variety. It’s less watery and oh, you can add cheese too if you want. Everyone knows cheese makes all things better.
If you want a good recipe for baked ratatouille, this one on the BBC Good Food website seems to work well every time:Baked Ratatouille Recipe
And for something sweet, the Time Travel Kitchen has this glorious apricot recipe:
For me, this time of year is synonymous with dark fruit picking - blackberries, bilberries. As children my parents would drive my brother and sister and I to their home town of Thirsk and up into the forestry around Sutton Bank to pick bilberries. They had been taken there by their parents as children too. It was something of a family occasion. It was hard work. Hot, sticky, prickly, tiring work. We were each given an empty family sized margarine tub or ice cream tub which we filled to the brim with the little deep purple berries, swatting away midges, crinkling through the loamy forest floor, trying to avoid nettle patches and bracken that could slice through your legs. At first we’d set off in a huddle, then slowly spread out into the silence at the edge of the trees, foraging. Our hands would be sticky and thick with juice and we would all have red stained tongues from eating as we moved. Then the hour long drive home, lolling heads, the joy of sitting down after trudge-walking for hours. My mum would make bilberry pie the same day, which we’d eat warm from the oven with a blob of ice cream. The rest of the berries would go in the freezer, stockpiled. Nothing compares to my mm’s misshapen, sugar dusted pies. She has always been good with pastry. I’m thinking of the deep warm, purple taste of the berries, the texture of the pie topping, the way the berries had made the underside of the casing soft. I’m thinking too of my dad. It will be a year on Sunday since we sat round his hospital bed and said our final goodbyes. It’s strange to me, that we haven’t seen him at all for one whole year, a bewildering thought that sits nestled in the utter disbelief that we will never see him again, that I’ll never talk to him again. We stopped bilberry picking as a family years ago, but suddenly, oh I would go back now to the dappled, deep light of the forestry, the distant crack of twigs broken by familiar feet, my dad in the distance, picking and eating bilberries as he walked.
Without further ado, let’;s make some connections between taste and memory and start to weave them into your writing. Here is your journalling prompt for this week. Don’t forget, your journal is not a place for perfection, it is a place for reflection, to capture the filaments of ideas and join them up, locate the memories, record the interior alongside the exterior. Here are the downloadable pages to add to the first part of the journal from last week. Try answering these questions a few times, linking to different places, different memories. The aim is to create a web between ideas, memories and sensations.
This is the time of year when combine harvesters are rumbling round the fields. The hard work of those with allotments are paying off; plates are being filled with fresh produce. This is the time of year for salads and fresh fruits, for peasant food stews, for potatoes fresh from the ground, washed and boiled and buttered, eaten straight out of the pan.
When was the last time you ate freshly picked food?
Imagine it now: the feel of it in the mouth, the touch of teeth, the resistance, the texture.
What did it taste like. Use simile or metaphor to describe the taste.
Where were you when you ate this food?
What was the weather like?
What sounds were happening while you ate?
What was that summer like?
What was on the news?
What was the last conversation you had before you ate that food?
What makes fresh picked food so good?
Thinking about my parents and the bilberry picking of my youth reminded me of these lines from ‘Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney.
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
Have a look at the full poem by following this link: Blackberry Picking
It’s such a sensory poem. The subtle rhymes and the intense imagery give this poem a real sense of urgency, almost desperation. The filling of any receptacle to hand, the cramming in of the berries and yet, once removed from the bush they rot, they always rot. The disappointment of death, the lessons of youth learned.
Writing Prompt Three
For this prompt I want you to cast away the romanticism of everything we’ve talked about so far, and write about the greatest disappointment you have faced with fresh food. Think outside the box; not just a crappy meal at a restaurant, what about the time you made a picnic with fresh strawberries, only to have your boyfriend/girlfriend dump you before you got the fresh cream out (not a euphemism) or the time you travelled to a tropical country, imagining the fresh fruits you’d always wanted to taste, only to find a wet, pulpy, tasteless mess that gave you food poisoning.
Maybe, like the Heaney poem, the disappointment was more subtle. Maybe the disappointment is a metaphor for life. Can you write a poem in which the food becomes a metaphor for an experience you’ve had? As ever, this is a prompt, not a set of rules, so allow your brain to take you where it wants to go and enjoy the ride.
Summer is, of course, the season of salads and BBQ. This summer I discovered the joys of sliced peppers and baby tomatoes, fresh basil, olive oil, black pepper and garlic marinated all morning at room temperature and then, at lunch time, poured over a simple leafy salad. There is something so satisfying about simple fresh food. It feels like soaking up nutrients, soaking up the sun, and in a way it is. Thank you, photosynthesis and plant power.
Here’s a bit of fun:
Recipe for a Salad
Sydney Smith
To make this condiment your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half suspected, animate the whole;
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt;
Four times the spoon with oil from Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar, procured from town;
And lastly, o’er the flavoured compound toss
A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce.
O green and glorious! O herbaceous treat!
’T would tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he ’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl;
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me,—I have dined to-day.”
This is like comfort food in a poem. The full rhymes and joyous rhythm, the joy and humour are all rattling the reader along. This guardian article talks about this poem, Sydney Smith and the history of recipe poems:
Writing Prompt Four
Write a summer recipe poem. It doesn’t have to rhyme, but if you want to challenge yourself, why not. It should be a joyous celebration of the summer food you love. And, a person reading it should be able to follow the recipe.
Let me know what your favourite summer recipe is by replying in the comments and I’d love to see what you’ve been journalling too. What are your favourite summer tastes?
In Other News
Spelt -
We had a bumper crop of poems entered into the poetry competition this year, and enough entries to cover the cost of the competition itself, and to fund production costs of two issues of the magazine. A relief! Spelt lives to fight another day. Thankyou for your support.
This Bird’s Nest
Found in the middle of my forsythia, a goldfinch nest. I’ve been watching the parents since. I expect this is batch number two. I did not know they were in there, despite the nest being right in front of my living room window. Check your hedges, nesting is still occurring.
The Dawn Chorus
The next Dawn Chorus begins on the 4th September. Come and join me for an hour of gentle accountability. Find out more by clicking this button:
I’ll have more news next week plus a break down of what’s coming up from September for those who are choosing the paid subscriber option. Thank you so much to those who have pledged already. Your support has given me more confidence to go ahead with this new phase of my work and facilitating.
Until next time
x
Oh so much to love here!!
Just a journal exercise. Tried to write in IP :-)
Thinnings
I also thinned the carrots on Thursday
There were three or four big enough to save
First washed them with a hose at the garden
Then snapped off the feathered green leafy tops
Took them home - both of us ate two raw roots
Just one bite per carrot - sweet summer taste