Perfect Porridge

For my Scottish ancestors it would be tantamount to blasphemy to suggest that porridge tastes better when made in a microwave. However, though I’m not sure why, it really does. It also has the advantage of allowing you get on with other things instead of standing there wielding a spurtle. With the oatmeal used below (as opposed to rolled oats) you do have to stop and stir every 2-3 minutes to avoid it going lumpy though. In this version you make the porridge quite thick and add milk just before serving.

Makes one generous portion. For more than one person add the same quantities again per portion and increase the cooking time proportionately. Remember to use a bigger bowl as the porridge bubbles up excitingly in the later stages.

Ingredients

A handful of sultanas

2-4 tablespoons of apple juice

60g Oatmeal (rather than rolled oats)

300ml water

Salt (for its moral value rather than its taste)

A handful of mixed seeds (pumpkin, sunflower etc.)

Sugar or honey or mashed banana to taste

Full-cream milk

1. The night before soak the sultanas in the apple juice in a covered bowl.
2. Mix the oatmeal, water and salt in a large microwavable bowl.
3. Cook in a microwave for 2 minutes at 800W (vary the time according to the power of the microwave). Stir it and do the same again. Leave for a minute or so before taking out.
4. While the porridge is cooking roast the seeds by stirring them in a dry pan over heat. Keep stirring them or they will burn.
5. When you take the porridge out mix in the sultanas, seeds, sugar/honey/banana and (last so it doesn’t go cold) the milk.
6. Soak the bowls you’ve used in cold water (no need for anything else) and by evening they’ll pretty much clean themselves.

You may be hungry again before you’ve even left the house but it’s good while it lasts. 

Thrift

The missus repaired some clothes the other day. As well as breathing new life into old trousers and not blowing the housekeeping the way her shopping benders usually do, this enterprise had the additional benefit of allowing her to feel thrifty. With the economy looking likely to tank again and George Osborne cutting the public sector like... well like a right-wing ideologue, surely making a few savings of this sort should be the order of the day? Thrift is practical. Thrift is virtuous. Thrift is sometimes a bit sanctimonious perhaps, but basically good. Isn’t it?

The merits of thrift in fact depend on who you want to do good for. It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you’re saving money you’re not spending it (though I know a six-year-old who would disagree). It did take a genius to work out what this means and that genius was John Maynard Keynes. Though often associated with the “hike up tax then spend like a drunken sailor” left-wing of politics, Keynes had some pretty subtle insights into the nature of recessions. His most influential principle was that, when economies are flat-lining, something needs to stimulate demand and get the wheels turning again. You can give people tax cuts and hope they spend more but, tight-fisted buggers that they are, the public might actually save some of the extra rather than blow it all on an Amazon binge. At times like this someone else needs to step in and flash a bit of green. That fall-back spender is usually the Government (pay attention young Osborne), though what they do with all the DVDs, books and iPods is a mystery.

Though not the first to notice the downside of saving, Keynes offered the clearest statement of the so-called “paradox of thrift”. One way of expressing this is to say that I may benefit if I follow Marguerite Patten’s wartime austerity tips described at last year’s Seedy Saturday. I save and my quids are in. However, if everyone starts making do and mending, demand will contract and the economy will head down the toilet. Keynes would’ve used a more decorous image as he was a gentleman as well as a genius. Whether or not he would have been as much of a gentleman had he met the young Marguerite in the Blitz is unknown. He was also, after all, an associate of the metrosexual Bloomsbury Group.

So it’s personal gain set against group loss. Still Christmas is coming and we all have a chance to be economic heroes. You may be sick of shops putting up their displays at the end of summer, outraged at being told to get your last minute gifts in October, and mad at the excess of Mega-Monday, but if there was ever a time to splash out surely this is it. Even that dourest of puritans Gordon Brown thought spending was our patriotic duty. From Superdrug to Skylark, from Tesco to Tizz’s, your town needs you! 

John McGowan, 8th Dec 2011 

Baking Bread

Anyone not like homemade bread? No? I didn't think so. It’s a byword for serious cookery, often delicious and the smell alone is reckoned to turn a shoddy house into a saleable property. It also seems to be the piety of the week for those of an environmental turn of mind. Not just regular bread either. To be truly committed to the earth these days sourdough is de rigeur. Just like our ancestors used to make in the days before we were corrupted by modern luxuries like coal-fired power stations, global trade and er... yeast. I can’t help but wonder though: what’s so sustainable about making your own bread?

Undeniably, home baking appeals to those with a  self-sufficient streak, though most of us don’t grow our own grains and mill them. Even so, with a bag of flour from Tesco you have a fighting chance of attaining the glow of self-righteousness  that radiated from Tom and Barbara in The Good Life. Rather inconveniently for the emissions-conscious though, baking a loaf in a domestic oven uses many times the amount of energy of commercial oven. You can get around that one fairly neatly using one of those very clever bread machines which not only consume less lecky but also do some of the work.

It’s the hassle factor that seems to be the main sticking point.  If you’ve ever tried bread-making you will have noticed that it requires a certain commitment. Even if someone has a bread machine how likely are they to use it regularly? Some of us might be good for a few loaves or maybe a month or two of obsession, but who is going to live off home made bread unless they have to? Then there is the problem of who is going to eat a diet of our hearty loaves (not my kids anyway). It’s no wonder that one of the earliest specialist trades in human society was that of a baker. A professional who could make economies of scale, a range of products and leave the rest of us free to get on with other stuff. Without bakers, it’s difficult to see how we would ever have got out of the stone age.

“Hello axe-maker. I’d like to upgrade my old flint hatchet to one of those new bronze ones.”

“Sorry guv I don’t have time for this bronze-smithing lark. I’m too busy punching down my dough.”

One might reasonably assume that we wouldn’t have science, medicine, art and technology (including bread machines) if people had been piddling around all day with their sourdough starters.

Even if oil runs out and we’re left in a Mad Max-like future, spending our Lewes Pounds on home grown vegetables, it’s hard to see bread-making catching on en masse. Still, though it may not last more than a few minutes as the latest eco trend, it is good to see someone blowing the trumpet for a homemade loaf. In that spirit then let me finish with a recipe.

Venetian Olive Breads

This recipe accompanied my Viva Lewes Column on the 17th of November 2011

Konditor and Cook, posh bakers extraordinaire, do roll-sized versions of this Northern Italian classic. If you’re near the Borough Market this means lunch is sorted. Here is an attempt at something similar. Use whatever bread dough you fancy but this one is easy and works well. The whole thing takes about 5 1/2 hours all-in though you can do the first rising overnight.

Makes 8 rolls

For the Bread Dough

400g strong white bread flour or Italian’00’ flour if you can get it.

225 ml tepid water

1 level teaspoon of easy blend yeast

1 teaspoon finely chopped oregano

1 egg

25ml olive oil

Pinch of salt

For the filling

1 lump of fresh buffalo mozzarella

200g pitted green olives

1.    Heat the inside of a mixing bowl with boiling water. Mix the 225 ml of warm water and the yeast and  then beat in 175g of flour to make a batter. Cover with a towel and leave for 2-4 hours or overnight.

2.    When you come back to it fold in the oregano, egg (beaten first) and olive oil trying not to tear the stretchy glutens too much. Then fold in the flour and salt in a similar way. Use more flour if you need to but you’re trying to get a slightly sticky dough.

3.    Give it three quick kneads over the next half hour on a lightly oiled surface. (Sorry if you like kneading but the idea that a lot of it is necessary to build glutens is a myth). Then cover and leave for 30 mins.

4.    While you’re waiting slice the mozzarella thinly,  and make sure you have this, the olives and a small bowl of water handy. Grease a cookie sheet and put that nearby too.

5.    Put the dough on a lightly floured board, give it a quick knead and then cut it into eight roughly equal sized pieces. Roll one piece of dough into an approximately circular shape about 1/4 inch thick. Put a slice of the cheese in the middle of the dough circle and then 2-3 olives on top, then another slice of cheese on top of that. Then gather the edges of dough around the cheese and olives to make a kind of sealed parcel with the filling inside. Try and make sure it’s completely sealed. Wetting your fingers at this point might help it stick. Then flip it over and put it on the cookie tray with the round side up. Go through the same process with the remaining bits of dough, making sure the finished rolls are spaced out on tray. Once all the rolls are on the cookie tray cover them with a wet dish towel and leave them in a warm place to rise for 90 minutes or till they’ve doubled in size.

6.    Preheat your oven to 200C (180C fan) or gas 4. When they have risen take of the towel and bake the rolls for 12-15 minutes. You can brush them with beaten egg before cooking if you prefer. Leave them to cool a bit before eating.

Pope Paul V

“BURN THE POPE!” I heard them cry. This was my introduction to the Fifth in Lewes, 20 years ago, deep in a banger-strewn crowd at the Cliffe bonfire. Being a cradle, though lapsed, Catholic it was hard to know what to make of it. Perhaps a slightly over-the-top protest at the conservative policies of the Roman Catholic church? Or possibly I’d misheard and the sentiment was merely to spurn the poor old Pontiff. Or it might even have been something to do with soap. It was hard to tell with all the noise. But craning my neck above the crowd there clearly was a Pope. Sitting on top of a big pile of sticks. What on earth, I wondered, was the trouble with the Pope that caused him to be incinerated on a yearly basis?

 Courtesy of Viva Lewes

I’m not sure whether I felt reassured to find out that this ritual had been going on since the 1670’s and that the Pope concerned was well past caring about his profile in Sussex. The Pope who is burned (the same one every year) is Paul V, head of the Catholic Church from 1605 until 1621, and who thus just managed to get himself in the frame to be in charge at the time of the Gunpowder Plot.

So was he really so bad? Well it depends on your perspective. For many he was a champion of the Counter-Reformation who re-established Catholicism in southern Europe and completed some of the greatest projects of the Renaissance, including St. Peters and the Vatican Library. For others he was an overbearing autocrat with an exalted view of the Church’s authority over secular powers. He succeeded in pissing off most European governments including that of Venice who, when they got a bit uppity about running their own affairs, found themselves excommunicated. His CV also included the first condemnation of Galileo for suggesting the earth might not be the centre of the universe. Probably not one to mention at an interview when you think about how things turned out.

Paul’s dealings with England were comparatively mild. He’d barely got his bum on the Papal throne by the time Catesby and Co moved into action and it’s not clear he was even involved in any plotting. English animosity seems to rest on a letter he sent to James I in July 1606 which by all accounts contained friendly congratulations on James’ accession to the throne. True, James had been King since 1603 so this might be considered a bit late but Paul had only been in office himself for a year or so and who knows what the post was like in the 17th century. The real reason the English take a dim view of Paul was that the he also condemned the  oath of allegiance James demanded of his subjects. If you’re wondering whether James was annoyed I ask you, is the Pope Catholic?

Of course James may also have been feeling a little sensitive after the latest in a sequence of several plots to assassinate him. It seems James wasn’t all that popular, with his main qualifications for kingship being that he was a Protestant and that he was prepared take a  relaxed view of his mother’s decapitation by the previous regime in return for supreme power. It’s strange then that we still celebrate the deliverance of the king Charles Dickens described as “cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, and cowardly”. Still he was obviously relieved at the thwarting of the plot and decreed that “Henceforth and in perpetuity ye Rooks and DFLs of Lewes shall annually drink a bellyfull of local ale, bury your differences and shove fireworks up the backside of that bloke in Rome before torching him whilst making as much noise as possible”.

Or something like that anyway.

John McGowan

Butts

Photo by Alex Leith

When did my kids stop having bums? I can date it precisely to when ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ became the literary touchstone in our house. (For those of you not familiar with this oeuvre, think Harry Potter meets George from Seinfeld). No longer do the nippers sit on their bottoms or give each other a kick up the backside. Now it’s all falling on your butt, getting your butt over here, or (close your eyes) showing your butt as a hilarious joke. Occasionally they may refer to wiping their ass but what happened to their arses?

Before you get the idea that this column is simply going to bemoan the mangling of the Queen’s English by upstart Americans, I’ll quickly identify myself as an admirer of H. L Mencken. Mencken’s analysis of the American language ninety years ago should have been more than enough to stop whingeing about those colonial barbarians. Incredibly though people still rant about the perversion of the mother tongue. To them I say that the Empire is gone and that we haven’t had any pretensions to being cultural top-dog since the Beatles. The divergence of languages has been around since communication began, as when ancient peoples moved to new territory their speech would eventually change into something different. If this didn’t happen we’d all still grunt instead of talk and take umbrage every time someone came up with a new word for axe.

More recently though we've had trains and planes, radio and TV and lots of other features of the modern world to mix up this process. This has led to a new thing to get steamed up about: namely that the distinctiveness of British language is under attack from Americanisms arriving on these shores by the gigabyte. It’s worth noting that the opposite view holds in some quarters and Britishisms also permeate or, depending on your point of view, pollute the American idiom.

So are our very glutes threatened by linguistic uniformity? For an answer I turned to Google’s Ngrams application which allows tracking of the frequency of word usage across a wide range of sources. From a look at the “British English” corpus 1980-2008 it’s clear that backsides are sagging, bottoms and bums are looking wobbly, but arses seem to be holding firm. Butts are steady, asses less so. Worryingly, both butts and asses are considerably more frequent in occurrence than their British counterparts. It’s hard to draw firm conclusions from that though as it might be the result of an attachment to fag butts (that’s British fags), nostalgia for water butts and a hitherto unsuspected persistence of synonyms for donkey. It also seems implausible that we will stick out our tushes any time soon and are even less likely to start using fanny-packs.

Still, it’s doubtful that these consolations will be truly enough for those who care about the British posterior. It’s clear we need more radical action to preserve our rear-ends. Perhaps threats are in order for those who continue to import transatlantic trash. It may also be time to bring out the big guns of Glaswegian slang from my youth. I hope then my kids realise that I’m making a stand for cultural distinctiveness when I say that, if they don’t shut up about butts, I’ll give them a boot in the bahookie. Sometimes that’s the only language they understand.

Dog Days

“Doaaaaaagggg daaays are ovaaaahhhhhhh!” warbled Florence Welch on my car radio and from the look of the sky I couldn’t help agreeing with her. Right on cue an autumnal nip crept into the air on the final day of the school holidays. The only way is down till next March at least. It got me wondering though. What on Earth are dog days and are they actually over (other than in pop musings)? And while we’re at it why bring dogs into it in the first place? A problem given the Trouble With’s antipathy to all things pooch.

Dog days have been around for a long time, at least since Aristotle in the 4th century BC and they refer to the hottest, most sultry days of summer. For some reason this period seems to have been perceived as a bit of a downer by the ancients. Full of fever and drought, mad people and well, mad dogs. Give or take a bit of rioting, we probably have a more up-beat view of the summer heat in modern Blighty, though anyone who has experienced the heat of high summer in Greece or Italy might think that the Romans were onto something sacrificing a dog appease the weather gods.

Though going out of your front door should be enough to tell that the hot bit of the year is finished I can confirm that the dog days are also officially over. The very latest estimate of their end is early September and in most sources they are considered to be wrapped-up by late August. The name derives from the position of Sirius the “Dog Star” during the summer when it rises just before dawn. The ancient Greeks and Romans thought that the seeming increased proximity of the brightest star in the sky increased the temperature on earth. Though that might sound silly now, they had no idea that Sirius (actually two stars not one) was around 50 or so trillion miles away and even the new Lewes solar power station would have a bit of trouble picking up heat from it.

The “dog” part of the Dog Star is due to the location of Sirius in the constellation canis major (the larger dog). One of the troubles with the ancient Greeks was that their names for the patterns of stars were fanciful to put it mildly. I mean look at this picture of Taurus. You might think “bull” but only about the possibility that Taurus remotely resembles a four-legged animal. Similarly canis major could be any number of things. To me it looks more like one of those giant mobile phones from the 1980’s or maybe a nice iron bath-tub on its side. Pity they didn’t think of that in ancient Athens. Every day in the summer could be a bath day. We might have been spared Keanu Reeves’ musical pretensions. And who wouldn’t pay to see a film called Bath Day Afternoon?

Lewes Astronomers put on a series of talks by guest speakers on the first Wednesday of the month in the Town Hall. Find details here.