Cornflower

Composers' dogs

    Over on Cornflower Books we've had one or two posts about writers' dogs, so let's balance things up and look at the canine companions of well-known musicians here. When I was writing about Aldeburgh and Benjamin Britten yesterday I remembered this picture of him with his dachshund Clytie which I'd seen in the newspaper recently, and on looking for it online, I discovered this lovely post on composers' dogs - well worth a look to see who had which breed (Grieg shares my fondness for Labradors, for instance, and there's a link to a very touching story about Glenn Gould's closeness to his dogs).

The first stitch

    It doesn't look like much yet but I've just begun my first line of stitching on our panel of The Great Tapestry of Scotland.

    The length of heavy chain stitch you see above, ably executed by Lucy, links the spirits to the sea, and I've taken over with stem stitch to outline the heads.

    I'm consulting Crewelwork by Jacqui Macdonald to make sure I'm forming my stitches correctly, and I learn from that book that stem stitch "was heavily used during the Arts and Crafts period when it became known as South Kensington stitch".

The comfort of a sweet disorder

    "I always loved the house but I believe it has been remodelled, reconstructed along modern lines by one of Sir Christopher [Wren]'s innumerable imitators. Now the rooms are regular and well-proportioned and the light no doubt floods in through the modern sashes, the chimneys draw properly and the draughts are kept to a minimum. For my part I regret this enthusiastic conformity to whatever men of fashion in Europe tell us is elegant. There is something false about all that symmetry. It used to be that a gentleman's house was the history of his family, and you could see in its lines when they had been in funds and expansive, or when times were hard. Those curling chimney stacks, and corridors and eaves stacked one next to the other, provided the comfort of a sweet disorder ..."

    That's a passage from Iain Pears' novel An Instance Of The Fingerpost; I like it for the image its final phrase offers, and for the idea that a house, as he describes, reveals a family's history - or did so in the 1600s, the period of which he writes. The curling chimney stacks pictured here belong to the Tudor part of Hampton Court Palace, itself the subject of remodelling by Wren.
   
    Thanks to The Landmark Trust, you can stay at Hampton Court, either in Tudor quarters or - as we have done - more spacious Georgian ones.

Books and cakes - 56

    "The boy had separated the fire into two glowing hillocks. From between these he now pulled a flat stone on which were baking a number of little cakes. The two children ate them hungrily as soon as they were cold enough to hold. They were brown on the outside, white and floury within, and sweet to taste.

    'Your cakes are splendid, Simon,' Bonnie said. 'How do you make them?'

    'From chestnut flour, Miss Bonnie. I gather up the chestnuts in the autumn and pound them to flour between two stones.' "

 

    Food features strongly in Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase; there are the pasties, apple dumplings, apple cheescakes, lemon tarts and porridge with thick yellow cream which the children are fortunate enough to get from various sources on their way to London, there is the grim and meagre fare they are unfortunate enough to have set before them at Mrs. Brisket's, and there's the comforting food of home at Willoughby Chase itself, warming possets and pipkins of hot savoury soup, the cosy room aglow with a rose-scented nightlight, the girls warm from their baths scented with bunches of lemon mint.

    But it is Simon's chestnut cakes I've made to go with the book (which we're talking about here) - drop scones or Scotch pancakes made with chestnut flour and cooked on a piece of Bake-o-Glide on the Aga simmering plate.

    They don't look like much, but well-browned and rustic and sweetly earthy of flavour they are a taste of that scene where Bonnie and Sylvia find sanctuary in Simon's surprisingly comfortable cave, and they go down well with a drizzle of maple syrup.

A form of self-expression

 

   "The pleasant English art of "doing the flowers" is one of the few home-crafts to survive the Industrial Revolution. Year by year machines replace the old skills, even music-making succumbing to some extent to the wireless. There remains this lovely but simple art, a form of self-expression defying regimentation, doing the flowers. We may not all play musical instruments, paint in oils, draw in water-colour, but we can all if we like paint pictures from our own gardens." 

    That is the opening of the little booklet Flower Schemes by Constance Villiers-Stuart which belonged to my grandmother and was written, I think, in the late 1950s or early '60s - it is not dated, but its look and some of its references give a clue as to its vintage. Mrs. Villiers-Stuart - who was the author of Spanish Gardens and Gardens of the Great Mughals - gives helpful advice on which flowers look best in what sort of container and with what colour interior decor, but it is her remark there about 'doing the flowers' being a form of self-expression that I wanted to grasp and examine because she is right, though I'd never thought of it in quite that way before. Even the least fussy trimming of stems and 'arranging' of a few blooms in a vase can be "this lovely but simple art", and then perhaps as here we photograph the results, and that too is a small creative or interpretative act, and that leads me on to think of what else we do in our daily lives to which we may not accord the same status as, say, making music or painting or writing, but which is at its essence a similar form of self-expression.

A Wagnerian rag

   

    We had a literary curiosity yesterday, and I have a musical one for you today. I heard the piece on Radio 3 this morning and couldn't quite believe my ears, but yes it is what it seems, a ragtime version of Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde: click here (listen to the Chopinata first, if you want) and skip to the 3.23 mark and enjoy the "novelty piano solo" Isoldina by Clément Doucet -  rather catchy in a toe-tapping way, though I expect Wagner is turning in his grave, and don't you think this must have been part of Mrs. Mills' repertoire?

    To redress the balance, here is the real thing with Jessye Norman, and here is Liszt's version.

A Victorian lady detective

    I have another book to give away, and this time it is something of a literary curiosity, featuring as it does the first female detective in fiction. Please do head over to Cornflower Books to enter the draw.

Wall of wool

    This is the "wall of wool" at the Royal School of Needlework, Hampton Court Palace, and it contains colours - some no longer made - for textile work including repair or restoration.

    I came upon it in The Story of Colour in Textiles by Susan Kay-Williams, Chief Executive of the School, and from the School's website I see you can buy various items bearing that inspiring image, for example coasters, greeting cards, and a notebook (perfect for recording details of textile projects).

Settling in for the afternoon

    How's the snow where you are?

Edited to add: there's some suitably chilling, snowy reading over here.

Marmalade muffins

    "... And when she got there, the cupboard was bare ..." and so the poor family had a modified version of the thing she'd intended to make for them.

    We had a small bowl of the weekend's marmalade sitting in the fridge, and I decided to put it into a muffin mixture, so I set to only to discover that someone has been using things and not then adding them to the shopping list so we lacked a few ingredients. I went ahead with the recipe (Marmalade Apricot Muffins from Susan Reimer's Muffins Fast and Fantastic) but used demerara sugar instead of granulated, poppy seeds in place of apricots - though that was my intention all along - and made a very small quantity of vegetable oil stretch a long way. And then I found there were no baking cases of the right size ...

What are you waiting for?

    I'm giving away a great novel over on Cornflower Books today, so do pop over there and enter the draw by answering a simple question - full details here.

Threading the needle

    When I posted a few weeks ago about The Great Tapestry of Scotland I didn't know that I'd be having a wee hand in the making of it myself, but so it turns out as I've been invited to join a local group stitching here in north Edinburgh.

    Above is the design for our panel, representing the 1914-1918 War, and in the finished sequence it will follow Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art (and neatly those are Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh 'spirits' flanking the soldier and lady) and in turn be followed by the building of HMS Hood and the Battle of Ypres, that is according to the master list.

    We are just at the very early stages of outlining the figures, and I'll be doing my bit on that soon, but for more excitement, take a look at the Tapestry's Facebook page and see some of the wonderful work which has already been done on other panels.

A wake-up call in a jar

    "I like my marmalade to shine in the morning sun. A bright, jewel-like mixture with thin strands of peel ... the point of this golden jam is its bittersweet quality. It's a wake-up call in a jar."



    That's Nigel Slater (The Kitchen Diaries II again), and it was his recipe I used for marmalade-making over the weekend. On Saturday I peeled all the fruit* and shredded it quite finely, added the juice, pulp, seeds in a muslin bag, and water and left it to stand overnight. Yesterday the mixture was simmered until the peel was soft and translucent, then the sugar was added and the boiling commenced, and the fragrance alone was worth the effort. The taste is vibrant without being bitter, and the balance of tart to sweet is just right.

 

I am pleased with my "pots of bright, shining happiness", as NS calls them.

*1.3kg. Seville oranges, 2 sweet oranges, 2 lemons, a few pieces of stem ginger.

A quiet and humble loaf

    Before baking,

and after.

    Nigel Slater's cider loaf (see p. 6 of  The Kitchen Diaries II). Wholemeal spelt and strong plain flour and cider for "yeasty sourness" make "a quiet and humble loaf".

    We ate it for lunch with cheese and a simple soup of seven vegetables; I don't think we'll get the chance to test its keeping qualities as it's unlikely to last the day.

Gatherings

    The November garden yielded this posy and this burst of intense colour, December gave us a lot of greenery, now in January there's just enough in flower for what you might call 'a select gathering'. (The honeysuckle is 'Halliana', I believe.)