She goes on
Feb. 27th, 2006 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4For lunch today I had beef sandwiches lovingly prepared for me by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
addedentry, leftovers from a surprisingly successful Sunday roast. I say "surprisingly" because we looked through at least five completely different sets of instructions for how to do the perfect roast before deciding on a strategy which split the difference between the various methods and probably combined the worst features of all of them.
I never learned to cook a roast. In our family Sunday roasts were nearly as rare as Christmas; my parents preferred lower-fat options in general, and my dad -- a butcher's son -- disliked meat in general (and has since become a vegetarian). My friends thought my household was strange and wonderful because we had weird food like pasta and salad, while I thought their meat-and-two-veg meals were an exotic luxury and doubtless delighted their parents by asking for more cabbage, please. So everybody won, in a way.
It's a funny business, though, homemaking. First your home makes you, and then you try to make a replica of it, or a reaction against it (or a mixture of both); a museum of the childhood you did have, or a theme park of the childhood you didn't. Either path is full of pitfalls, because the childhood you had no longer exists to be reconstructed (or rebelled against) except in your treacherous memory. Did we really never have roast potatoes except at Christmas? Does it matter? Sunday's roast potatoes (Delia gratias) were entirely edible. We learn so much by accident, by immersion in our families, that it's easy to forget that these skills are learned; that somebody somewhen picked up a book, or asked a question, or went Away and returned with Knowledge, or thought to themself what if... and didn't wait to be told they couldn't.
I learned all sorts of things at home: things like how to take the top off a soft-boiled egg, and how to clean pennies with Coke, and how to make covers for geography textbooks out of maps, and how to make candy-canes out of pipe-cleaners, and how to hack the hi-score charts in Tetris, and how to make compilation tapes, and how to chop onions, and how to keep two children entertained in a car for two and a half days. My dad taught me to do cartwheels when I was four or five years old; he turned a cartwheel on the lawn, lanky legs and bright yellow t-shirt spinning like a pleasure-beach pinwheel on a stick, and said "now you try". I fell a hundred times before I worked out how to do it, but I've never forgotten, and sometimes I turn feet-over-hands down the corridor at work when everybody else has gone home. I want my life to be one long backstage party in an Angela Carter novel, and sometimes it is, sometimes it is. My ancestors are immigrants and dancers and silk-weavers and Salvationists and people who quietly but fiercely wanted their children to succeed, and I don't need to carry their pictures in my wallet.
How does all this make a home? No, I don't have the answers, only questions, but a quilt stitched together from old photographs won't keep your family warm. "I never learned to cook a roast", I say, as if the time for learning had passed by in the dark, my wick forever untrimmed, but a shout from the next room startles me out of my stupor. Stop dreaming, it says, there's bread to be baked. So I shake the strands of cobweb from my head and start sifting flour.
addedentry, leftovers from a surprisingly successful Sunday roast. I say "surprisingly" because we looked through at least five completely different sets of instructions for how to do the perfect roast before deciding on a strategy which split the difference between the various methods and probably combined the worst features of all of them. I never learned to cook a roast. In our family Sunday roasts were nearly as rare as Christmas; my parents preferred lower-fat options in general, and my dad -- a butcher's son -- disliked meat in general (and has since become a vegetarian). My friends thought my household was strange and wonderful because we had weird food like pasta and salad, while I thought their meat-and-two-veg meals were an exotic luxury and doubtless delighted their parents by asking for more cabbage, please. So everybody won, in a way.
It's a funny business, though, homemaking. First your home makes you, and then you try to make a replica of it, or a reaction against it (or a mixture of both); a museum of the childhood you did have, or a theme park of the childhood you didn't. Either path is full of pitfalls, because the childhood you had no longer exists to be reconstructed (or rebelled against) except in your treacherous memory. Did we really never have roast potatoes except at Christmas? Does it matter? Sunday's roast potatoes (Delia gratias) were entirely edible. We learn so much by accident, by immersion in our families, that it's easy to forget that these skills are learned; that somebody somewhen picked up a book, or asked a question, or went Away and returned with Knowledge, or thought to themself what if... and didn't wait to be told they couldn't.
I learned all sorts of things at home: things like how to take the top off a soft-boiled egg, and how to clean pennies with Coke, and how to make covers for geography textbooks out of maps, and how to make candy-canes out of pipe-cleaners, and how to hack the hi-score charts in Tetris, and how to make compilation tapes, and how to chop onions, and how to keep two children entertained in a car for two and a half days. My dad taught me to do cartwheels when I was four or five years old; he turned a cartwheel on the lawn, lanky legs and bright yellow t-shirt spinning like a pleasure-beach pinwheel on a stick, and said "now you try". I fell a hundred times before I worked out how to do it, but I've never forgotten, and sometimes I turn feet-over-hands down the corridor at work when everybody else has gone home. I want my life to be one long backstage party in an Angela Carter novel, and sometimes it is, sometimes it is. My ancestors are immigrants and dancers and silk-weavers and Salvationists and people who quietly but fiercely wanted their children to succeed, and I don't need to carry their pictures in my wallet.
How does all this make a home? No, I don't have the answers, only questions, but a quilt stitched together from old photographs won't keep your family warm. "I never learned to cook a roast", I say, as if the time for learning had passed by in the dark, my wick forever untrimmed, but a shout from the next room startles me out of my stupor. Stop dreaming, it says, there's bread to be baked. So I shake the strands of cobweb from my head and start sifting flour.
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But none of these and nothing else can touch the beauty
Date: 2006-02-27 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 06:27 pm (UTC)Uni term finishes on 17th March, so after that I won't have choir after work / on Sundays / all the bloody time, which means I will be free more often. We should meet up some time after that... Though cartwheels will probably have to wait till it's warm enough to do them outside, I think (office antics notwithstanding)!
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Date: 2006-02-27 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 09:09 pm (UTC)And I am touched by the courtesy of being asked, but really, if I minded people linking to my stuff, I wouldn't put it on the public world wide whatsits. :-) Links are good. Readers are good. Especially nice readers who say kind things about my writing. Yes. :-)
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Date: 2006-02-27 07:07 pm (UTC)Now there's a fine opening line for a poem, in a Wendy Cope kind of way. Though I'd have thought you'd have no problems cooking a roast if your baking is anything to go by! Beautiful writing, as always.
asking for more cabbage, please
You're not alone in quite liking cabbage, though brussels sprouts really are beyond the pale.
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Date: 2006-02-27 08:21 pm (UTC)Interestingly, I've never cooked a roast either. I did go out with a guy who made himself a full roast dinner with all the trimmings every sunday, which I thought was amazing... for a while. Then it was just boring, having the same thing every week. Maybe in stressful times there's nothing like the comfort food of home (spinach and potato!!! egg in a nest!!), but there's always room for a spice-rack of variety in the kitchen.
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Date: 2006-02-27 09:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 08:50 pm (UTC)But you sift flour for bread? Now that's classy.
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Date: 2006-02-27 09:04 pm (UTC)And I don't always sift flour for bread. It depends if I'm trying to do it "properly" in the sense of weighing everything and sifting and not getting any flour on the palms of my hands when rubbing-in ... or "properly" in the sense of Just Knowing how to cook and not being tied to recipes and weights and measures.
I think I am only just starting to realise quite how lucky I am to have my parents as two such good role models for completely different ways of getting things right. :-)
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Date: 2006-02-27 09:49 pm (UTC)My parents taught me to cook, but I never cooked at home - they mostly taught me by packing me off on courses in half-terms. When I did Christmas dinner a couple of years ago, it was the first time I'd cooked anything "big" for my parents.
I hate LJ
Date: 2006-02-27 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-27 09:51 pm (UTC)Thank you.
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Date: 2006-02-27 11:44 pm (UTC)1) I can't cartwheel. Do you think it's too late for me to learn?
2) Cabbage is lovely very lightly fried, so it's still nearly raw but just butter-softened.
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Date: 2006-02-28 11:52 am (UTC)2) Mmmmmmm. Indeed. Also lovely raw. And pickled. And actually I even like quite-well-cooked cabbage provided it's got a bit of salt and pepper on it. I think I am generally quite cabbage-positive. :-)
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Date: 2006-02-27 11:47 pm (UTC)And it's so true that we re-make and unmake and our made by some idea of home. When a cople gets together these two ideas of home quietly collide, and then it's years of negotiation about whether the water had to be boiling first, whether pillowacase need ironing, and how to get red wine stains out of the carpet.
I can't turn cartwheels. It's one of my absolute aspirations.
I can sit in the lotus position for hours, though. My mum taught me that.
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Date: 2006-02-28 12:00 pm (UTC)years of negotiation about whether the water had to be boiling first
Exactly! In a nutshell.
It gives me perspective-vertigo, if I think about it too hard, the idea that the pinnacle of thousands of years of civilsation is people arguing over whether you should cut sandwiches diagonally. But then the idea of it being expected to be a pinnacle rather than just a random point is just subscribing to the myth of progress instead of accepting a cyclical view of history, and, and.
I'm so excited that everybody wants to learn cartwheels! I never knew it was such a desirable skill! I'll have to write to my dad and thank him. And maybe I should give cartwheel classes in the park in the summer. It could be the new poi. ;-)
I think I can sit in the lotus position, but it hurts. I'm probably doing it wrong. My ballet teacher would be furious if she saw how un-bendy I'd let myself get, but then part of that is cycling muscles getting in the way (or so I tell myself). I really need to get more generally fit somehow.
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Date: 2006-02-28 09:14 am (UTC)Neither did I, because the kitchen was Dad's domain and we didn't go in while he was doing Sunday dinner. But when I left home I taught myself, with my friends, and it was fun. Although I did have to phone home when doing my first roast turkey because we'd cooked it as long as the formula suggested and it was still pink. Dad was v calm and told me to carve it and stick it back in, which worked fine.
But I never learnt to turn cartwheels. I am envious of anyone who can!
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Date: 2006-02-28 06:54 pm (UTC)Some bread and dreams at the moment sounds lovely to me!
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Date: 2006-03-12 11:13 pm (UTC)I had many homes as a child; I've now lived in London for six years and it's longer than I lived in any other city. My parents divorced when I was young so I always had at least two homes.
Only in the last few years have I started to give any thought to the environment I create for myself. It's an interesting experiment.
Also interesting is going back to visit my parents after living elsewhere for eight years - my methods have changed, in some instances, where theirs haven't, and some of the things I take as canonical turn out to be more malleable than I had assumed.
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Date: 2006-03-15 06:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-27 11:11 am (UTC)