Nathalie Bouffe

Despite Adversity She Continues To Bouffe

Since the blog has been hijacked, there seems to be little point in carrying on, as I’d been pretty shit about updating in the past several months anyway, and the bastard pirates who pulled the rug out from under me won’t listen to offers under, like, a thousand dollars for nathaliebouffe.com.  But tonight’s manifested itself as a chance, quiet pause in my Irish saga—literally the first moment in two weeks I’ve even had a computer to look at—and I thought, because I certainly wouldn’t want to use it to do anything even mildly productive, that I might tell you what I’ve been cooking and eating this month. 

Desperately Seeking Umami: My Lunch at the Fat Duck

The day began usually enough.  My alarm clock rang too early for its own good, and I lounged, yawning, in bed, but only for a few minutes; there was sunlight dappling the white walls of my room as it filtered through the newly fattened boughs outside my window. 

The walk to Hackney Central takes me through two long blocks of brown tenements and dirty brick row-houses before spitting me out at the Round Chapel on Clapton Road, a nonconformist church that has, like Hackney, attracted weirdos for over a century. I stopped for scrambled eggs on cheap wet toast at the Marina Cafe above the Mare Street Narroway; the matronly egg-scrambler sang "Locomotion" along with the radio, while workmen in fluorescent yellow vests spooned up beans, caffeine, nicotine. 

The 48 bus, which takes me to work, zips London down from north to south, beginning at Walthamstow and meeting me at Hackney Baths, a public swimming pool built in 1897.  The 38, which zigzags from northeast to southwest London, follows the 48 awhile but turns after the train station, bending gracefully around Hackney's more genteel curbs before bulldozing its way into the melee of junky hardware stores and West Indian groceries and Senegalese fabric shops and Turkish barbers of Dalston Junction.  Dingy curtains flap desperately from a squat's blown-out windows, like pirate flags; the streets become a veritable carnival of color. 

The 48, however, chugs down Cambridge Heath and turns into Hackney Road, down the long row of small factory fronts touting office furniture or custom-made shoes or woodturning services.  Some are specialized merchants who've built a business solely upon PVC pipes or sticks of incense or divots; some were and went bust, their storefronts boarded or bricked up, their windows jagged shards of glass.  We soar, all of us pieces of variously burnt toast sitting in a glass-walled toaster, over train gullies strung below with electrics like spiderwebs.

In Shoreditch the atmosphere changes: suddenly, the city's begun.  A blue-neon strip club atop the precum of Old Street at which a former housemate of mine worked forms the frontier; behind it, the bricked-up factories, before it, the bars and workspaces of the City, which intensify exponentially until Liverpool Street Station, a quivering hive of people-ants circulating like an ant farm on fast-forward.

The ground on which the station stands was founded as the priory of St. Mary of Bethlem in 1247 (where was your genetic material then?).  It became the world's oldest psychiatric hospital: records show that at least as early as 1403 the hospital served patients with mental disorders.  The hospital's reputation is tarred by its history of putting patients on display, insanity as a public spectacle--hence the reason, incidentally, that the word 'bedlam' came to signify chaos.  Visitors were allowed to bring long sticks with which to poke the inmates; in 1814, there were 100,000 such visits. 

Liverpool Street station was built atop the hospital in 1874, took a hit from a Gotha bomber in World War I (162 dead), had its glass ceiling shattered in World War II, burnt down in the 1960s, appeared in Mission: Impossible in the nineties, and got a subterranean tunnel blown up during the July 7 bombings last year.  (The oldest building in Miami's from, like, 1920, but hey, Will Smith wrote a song about us!)

The effects of the congestion charge become immediately apparent past Liverpool Street; private cars all but disappear. The only vehicles owning this chunk of road are red buses and black taxis and white delivery vans.  If I'm sitting on the top level, I've got ten minutes to watch a county of drones peer tiredly at the hulking monitors perched before them, ticking at keyboards, reching for their bottomless cups of coffee or Diet Coke or little twisty bags of cocaine.  (Or their bloody tea.  This is England, remember.)  They sit next to and atop each other like alphabetized spices on cupboard shelves. 

The streets here still have medieval names like Cheapside and Poultry Street and Pudding Lane, the last named for the 'puddings' (entrails and organs) that would fall from the carts coming down the lane from the butchers in Eastcheap as they headed for the waste barges on the Thames.  There's even a Gropecunt Lane; I'll leave it to you to figure out what was on offer down that street.

Finally: London Bridge.  As a bridge it's relatively boring, but the view--foggy, rainy, sleeting, gray--is always beautiful; in the sun, the reflection off the waves and glass windows of the buildings limning the river positively dazzle.  On the other side of the river: Southwark, Borough Market,
Neal's Yard Dairy.

Fuck it, though.  I'm not going to work today.  Instead, I've got a lunch date with the Fat Duck.

A Too-Smug Frances Moore Lappé Moment Gone Awry

 

To say that after a viscous, fluttery late Saturday night spent singing off-key karaoke at notorious, red-ceilinged Hackney boozer the Dolphin, I was loath to embark upon three trains to Wales is rather an understatement.  Sundays are the one day I'm exempt from the obnoxious beeping that announce the glauque beginning of my other days, and I keep that sacred, staying in bed usually until six or seven p.m.  If you're a Londoner, you'll admit: for the last six months, there's been little reason to leave the bed on Sunday afternoon, other than to go up to the window and realize how much better off you are back under the sheets.

But my love for Victoria Stewy-Libby is such that I roused myself and packed a bag for Bristol.  I was seeing so blurry that I lost (and then found) my phone and missed the first train, which meant spending two hours in that lousiest of Welsh towns, Swansea.  I sat in the basement bar of the Grand Hotel across the train station and drank cups of tea so slowly that they went cold before I reached the bottom, watching the two other patrons of the bar drink noiseless pints spellbound by the rugby on wide-screen TVs behind them.  Two younger lads came in, evidently for a 'catch-up,' plonked themselves on barstools, spoke for five minutes, and drank the next three pints stone-silent, staring fixedly ahead.  I had a four-minute cell-phone conversation, and in it probably spoke more words than the sum of everyone else in the two grim hours we were sat there.

It did get better after that.  The train to Pembroke Dock (Doc Penfro in Welsh) is a rickety, quasi steam-powered affair that breaks up into pieces at the entrance of every province until by Camarthen there remains just one wagon, and I had to request that it stop at Kilgetty.  Not only that, but the track limns the beautiful sand spits of the Camarthen Bay delta, staying unperturbably level as the ground leaps up and down in dunes and gullies and angular wet plains of ridged gray silt.  The happy few in our huffing westbound carriage stared transfixed at the long fuchsia and orange ventures the dying sun made into the slate-colored pools of resting water in the bogs, like a technicolored cat's tongue lapping up mercury-water.

Iss Vienna Finger Season

Tuesday felt like the worst day of my life. And just when I couldn’t be feeling any lower, sitting in front of a computer at 3 p.m. as it was getting dark, a package arrived, from Megan Parker-Johnson. She’d sent from Philadelphia an envelope with inside a letter in her familiar handwriting, a few maps and pictures, and a box of Vienna Fingers.

Vienna Fingers Reference One
Vienna Fingers Reference Two 

It changed my entire outlook on the day. I fairly walzed home. And I’ve been here since then, forty hours later, eating that box of cookies one by one. 

It is February right now in London. I don’t know what February looks like wherever you are; maybe you’re picking through a bowl of cherries, or chopping up a pineapple. Maybe you’re on a ski slope and the sun is shining bright. From London, February is a long, vast plain of boredom and cold, a veritable bobsled ride of fucking misery.

The food at the off-license at the around the corner is getting increasingly repetitive, and every time I go in there it feels a bit Groundhog Day. Yams, leeks, dirty bruised potatoes. A crumpled spray of coriander. Green bananas, onions shedding papery skin, fat, brittle bunches of garlic. We in there—everyone and everything—are dried out and crevassing. I’m fantasizing about radishes, about watercress, about celery. I’m fantasizing, basically, about spring.

Tonight Barnabe’s daughter Kaya and I made cake from my last box of Betty Crocker. We couldn’t be bothered to make a real cake, and there’s no butter in the house anyway, so we poured the Betty into a bowl, added eggs (we only had two), and oil. I toasted some sesame and sunflower seeds and we chucked them in. As the cake baked we came up with what we thought would be icing but turned out more to be like a sauce, out of blood-orange zest, juice, and sugar crushed from this brick of rapadura that Barnabe hauled back from Brazil. It was lovely, especially daubed with the ass end of the crème fraîche.

When I came back upstairs, there were still a few cookies left. I ate those, too, couldn’t resist. You can keep your fucking coconuts. In here right now, it’s Vienna Finger season.

Irmãos

You may wonder why despite my elation at having unlimited Internet access since moving to Hackney (I can check my email in bed!!), I’ve been such crap at posting regularly. The answer lies in my well-meaning housemates, who light the stubby home fires for me as soon as I step in the doors, destroying any enterprising intentions I may have been delusional enough to entertain. 

Exhibit A, below: Sasha and Arnaud offer to beat my cake icing for me….by shoving a fork up the insides of an electric drill. 

 

How’m I to concentrate among the mesmerizing spinning tines?

Goat Curd Cheesecake in the Lush Faerie Hodgepodge

Made the cheesecake a night before, crumbling McVitie’s digestive biscuits (my ignominious nightcap, briefly dipped in boiled water) with butter, flour and raw-sugar to make a crust.  Smeared this into the bottom and sides of a spring-form pan and tossed it to the oven before preparing the batter. 

The goat’s curd that we have at the dairy is the closest thing to cream cheese we’ve got.  I really wish we stocked stuff that’d be good to bake with—ricotta, or mascarpone, or nice cream cheese. But no…goat’s curd is what we have to work with.

Despite a name that a marketing board would need only about thirty seconds to improve, the goat’s curd is charming and fluffy without tumbling into that iniquitous slough, Insipidity.  Charlie Westhead from the Neal’s Yard Creamery in Herefordshire makes it, and it comes to us a few days later, moon-white and bunchy, like face cream in a pot already dabbed at with fingers.  It barely tastes of goat, a good thing when it comes to cheesecake, and mixing it with sugar, two eggs, lemon juice, and lavender-infused butter water alchemizes its textural irregularities into almost-frothy, foamy cream.

The finished confection is rich but not cloying on account of the tartness of the lemon and, one assumes, the goat.  Very little lavender is necessary unless you want an overwhelming flavor of bath soap to permeate the cake.  I plucked the seeds off five stems I’d gathered in Annecy and bathed them in a boiling butter-water mixture for twenty minutes or so, then strained out the lavender and poured what little liquid was left into the cake batter.  I wouldn’t use raw sugar in the crust again (I wanted brown but had none) and I left the cake in the oven slightly too long, which made no difference taste-wise but made the top crack.   

Ham hock, butterbean, biodynamic kale and chard soup

The first time I heard of biodynamic farming it sounded to me like the biggest heap of sweet-smelling bullshit I’d heard in a while. Planting to the wax and wane of the moon?  Stuffing yarrow into the bladder of a horned stag? Burying oak bark in a pig's skull for six months to add to your compost? Please.

 

Then I had an egg from Fern Verrow, and it flipping blew my mind.

 

So I reconsidered. True, the mythology of biodynamics verges on the hippy-dippy. But the logic behind the abstruse methods biodynamic farmers employ is pure and sound.  High-in-calcium oak and bone, for instance, react with the soil and pumps it with minerals so that come spring it fairly bursts with potential energy. Refusing to overexert your fields by planting them with the same crop for more than several years running guarantees sustainable soil and healthy, tasty veg. I still barely know anything about biodynamics—the examples above bear only an ignoramus’ resemblance to fact—but consider me converted. 

Fish-and-Lanx-Pie

It’s really intimidating having people from the dairy come over to dinner, because everyone is so freaking into their food and such a crack cook.  This makes compliments from them ever more complimentary but preparation all the more stressful.  But since I never have enough time to prepare beforehand it turns into a group effort and we cook by consensus; Lucy’s an old hand at mussels, Mac makes expert soups, Katie knows British cooking…it’s much better that way

I really wanted to outdo myself on Thursday night, but ran out of time éxageré: all of my guests arrived at the house before I did!  Once I flusteredly ushered everyone in and poured us all elderflower-cordial vodka fizzes, my thought was: Fuck.  I am so not together.