Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter

Author:Angela Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

The book moves among its venues at the whim of memory, according to no precise chronology. With Mrs Gray, we eat dried beans cooked a variety of ways in a variety of places. We eat potatoes and green beans boiled together, potatoes with alliums (the common name of the onion family) and olive oil, potatoes cooked in the oven with streaky bacon. Some of her recipes would certainly ease the plight of the long-term unemployed in advanced, industrialised countries because, even here, the ingredients cost so little. Then again, Honey from a Weed is a very expensive book. Such are the ironies of the politics of romantic austerity.

We make, with her, salads of hedgerow greens and boil up delicious weeds to eat hot with lemon juice – dandelions, comfrey, wood sorrel, field sorrel, wild fennel, fat hen, tassel hyacinth, purslane, field poppy. (When gathering your weeds, watch out for pesticides.) A meal may be made – has to be made – from whatever is to hand. M. F. K. Fisher’s wolf (‘How to cook a wolf’, included in The Art of Eating) was metaphorical. Patience Gray ‘met a number of people around Carrara not at all averse to cooking a fox’, and tells you how to make fox alla cacciatore (with garlic, wine, and tomatoes). ‘Exactly the same method can be applied to a badger . . .’

A connoisseur of free food, she waxes lyrical on snails, especially the Helix operta, oval in shape, golden brown in colour, ‘with a beautiful logarithmic spiral structure’. Surely, of all the creatures we eat, we are most brutal to snails. Helix operta is dug out of the earth where he has been peacefully enjoying his summer sleep, cracked like an egg, and eaten raw, presumably alive. Or boiled in oil. Or roasted in the hot ashes of a wood fire. In Catalonia, vineyard snails are laid out in rows on a bed of straw. ‘The straw is set alight and the snails are retrieved from the ashes by jabbing them with sharply pointed sticks.’ If God is a snail, Bosch’s depictions of Hell are going to look like a vicarage tea-party.

Mrs Gray does not conceal the fact that the traditional communities she describes are now in the process of violent change. Her twenty years of wandering the limestone margins of the Mediterranean have coincided with the breakdown of ancient forms of village life:

It sometimes seems as if I have been rescuing a few strands from a former and more diligent way of life, now being eroded by an entirely new set of values. As with students of music who record old songs which are no longer sung, soon some of the things I record will also have vanished.

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