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PS - I made it again, for a lunch with Tom's brother William and his wife Natasha, so here it is in all its sunken glory.
I don't have a picture because we ate the entire cake before I thought to take one, but here's an amazing, amazing Nigella recipe. It's from How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Basically, I think you should bake it as soon as possible, especially if you're in a place where winter's taking its toll.
Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake
225 g soft unsalted butter
375 g dark muscovado sugar (i.e. dark brown sugar)
2 lg eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100 g best quality dark chocolate, melted
200 g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
250 ml boiling water
23 x 13 x 7 cm loaf tin
Preheat the oven to 190 C (375 F), put in a baking sheet in case of sticky drips later [basically, the loaf tin will be so full that it might, while baking, overflow], and grease and line the loaf tin. The lining is important as this is a very damp cake: use parchment or something similar.
Cream the butter and the sugar, either with a wooden spoon or with an electric hand-held mixer, then add the eggs and vanilla, beating in well. Next, fold in the melted and now slightly cooled chocolate, taking care to blend well but being careful not to overbeat. You want the ingredients combined: you don't want a light airy mass. Then gently add the flour, to which you've added the baking soda, alternately spoon by spoon, with the boiling water until you have a smooth and fairly liquid batter. Pour into the lined loaf tin, and bake for 30 mins. Turn the oven down to 170 C (340 F) and continue to cook for another 15 mins. The cake will still be a bit squidgy inside, so an inserted cake tester or skewer won't come out completely clean.
Place the loaf tin on a rack, and leave to get completely cold before turning it out. Don't worry if it sinks in the middle: indeed, it will do so because it's such a dense and damp cake.
Makes 8-10 slices.
Outside of Cambridge there's a small town called Ely, famous mostly for its cathedral, which is gigantic and makes you wonder how anybody built something so tall in the twelfth century. I think Ely should also be famous for its fresh-made donuts, but they probably haven't been around for eight hundred years, and they seem pretty secular. Anyhow, Ely used to be surrounded on all sides by water, but now that the fens have been drained, it's a fertile, green area that's full of farms. The farmer's market, held on Saturday mornings twice a month, offers carrots and potatoes with clods of earth still on them, brussels sprouts still attached to the stalk, various forms of savory pastries (which I haven't gotten used to, I have to say) plus homemade butter and bread and, if you're so inclined, live chickens. When I spotted the chickens, I assumed that you could choose one for your dinner, which seemed a little, well, direct, but in fact the whole lot was up for sale, so that if you wanted you could bring them all home and set them up in the backyard.
We made off with a respectable haul: potatoes, a swede, kale, bread, butter, a chicken (for dinner; not still wearing its feathers), and some honey. I had a donut -- fresh out of the fryer, dipped in sugar; Tom tried venison sausage with onions and redcurrant jam. Then we met the local duck who was ambling about and half hissing at anyone who got too near, and went for a drink (not with the duck).
It's been raining for the rest of the weekend, the sort of weather that makes you want to stay in and read and cook things, which is exactly what we've been doing. Death of a Salesman, Nigella bread, N. Slater potato & celeriac bake. And later, haggis, in celebration of Burns. This time I think I'll actually have to eat it. I'll try not to think too much about what it is.
In Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas, the entry under "Students" reads, "All wear red berets and tight trousers, smoke pipes in the street--and never study." I half wish I could say that all of Cambridge matches this description, and in a way it does, given that the students here do wear tight trousers and many of them smoke, but there aren't too many red berets and everyone leaves the pipes to the professors. There's also a lot more studying than would suit Flaubert. That said, the fashion here is Sartorialist-worthy. If I felt more comfortable approaching strangers and asking to photograph them, I would have examples for you,
but alas, I don't. Brown boots, usually knee high, but sometimes ankle high, are a staple, plus lots of gray and blue layers, slim trousers or jeans, sweaters, scarves, good coats (often with balloon sleeves or cape styling), and the odd bit of plaid or pattern, or a Rugby-style fitted blazer, make up the basic sartorial vocabulary. Add to this a vintage bicycle with a wicker basket in front, and you've got a combination that's hard to beat.So now that I'm over my jetlag -- it's so nice to be able to think again, and not to feel like a record being played at slow speed -- I've been going to lectures and starting to chase down the various professors I want to speak with while I'm here. I'm trying to strike a balance between going to classes that will be good for me because they will teach me things I don't know or could always learn more about, and classes that cover subjects I know well but want to learn how to teach.
At present, the lineup includes a C18 novel class, a romanticism class, a course on the influence of German philosophy on literary criticism, and lectures on Hegel, Marx, and Shakespeare. This morning I heard a masterful reading of Gertrude's speech in 4.7 when she announces to Laertes that Ophelia's drowned. Gertrude calls the branch that broke under Ophelia's feet an "envious sliver": the lecturer suggested that this was the first of a series of anthropomorphisms that make it seem as if objects have killed Ophelia -- the weak branch, her heavy clothes, and so on -- thus dispelling responsibility for the action, and and distancing both Ophelia and Gertrude from it.
Also on the topic of things academic, I was nonplussed to read Stanley Fish's piece, "The Last Professor," in the Times. Maybe it's his retirement present to himself, but he is so uncritical about what he deems the turn away from the humanities (evidenced primarily by the popularity of Phoenix University and his statistics about the ever-growing use of adjuncts) that it's hard to detect much passion, or even much resignation, in his account. It seems entirely possible that we need to come up with new and more adaptable ways of teaching literature and practicing criticism, but does this mean the death of the university as we know it? Hardly. Higher education is not purely an exercise of "determined inutility," and if some aspects of academic study do not have obvious or functional utility (if they don't make you a sandwich or distribute sandwiches to starving children), this doesn't mean they're useless. It does mean that they should be careful about claiming to distribute sandwiches to starving children if this is in fact beyond their abilities -- but it doesn't mean that they're categorically pointless if they don't. But then there's Flaubert again: "Art: shortest path to the poorhouse. What use is it if machinery can make things better and quicker?" (If the issue of commitment and social change in academic work interests you, you might want to look at Martha Nussbaum's [unfair] article about Judith Butler, "The Professor of Parody.")
Also, if you'll permit me a short coda in praise of the carbohydrate, I have to sing the praises of the chocolate banana crepe I ate yesterday after walking through Hampstead Heath with Tom and his friend Melissa. We went in the late afternoon and slogged through the mud alongside all of the dog walkers and wellie wearers (we were joking that there should be a stand at the entrance to the Heath where you could rent a pair of Wellies and a dog to walk). At the top of the Heath, there were lots of people flying kites, one in the shape of a shark, another a dragon with wings, another an arched parachute. We walked down Parliament Hill in twilight, and when we turned to look back, the light was casting the people and trees atop the hill into perfect silhouette. Then we went to a creperie and ate the best -- really, the best -- crepes made by very grumpy French ladies. This made me very happy. (Tom's been taking very good care of me.) Chocolate and banana are a match for the ages.
1) Voices
While I was on the plane on the way over, I was wondering why I was finding myself so taken with British phrases and voices. When the flight attendant -- who really was turned out in 50s perfection, complete with practical heels, perfect bun, and red and blue scarf knotted round her neck -- issued instructions about 'hand luggage' in her lilting British accent, it sounded so melodious that I didn't even really stop to think that I was mooning over someone talking about suitcases. Now that I've had a bit more time to adjust, I've become a bit more self-critical on this point, and a bit more sensitive to content. So yesterday, when a friend of a friend of Tom's told me that all Americans carry guns, I didn't just say "mmm-hmm" and nod happily. This was the very same guy who told me that if you staged Hamlet, but without all the death and tragedy, it would be the 'American' version.
2) Curries
During my trip this summer, I got a brief introduction to the belly-stretching wonder that is the English curry. The English curry is the kind of curry made by diasporic Indians and Pakistanis. Like a dialect, it's particular to time and place. I'm hardly an expert, but I've learned enough to know that it goes best with beer and that for some it's a sign of machismo to order it so hot that you sweat. Suffice it to say, I'm not really all that macho. Anyhow, Tom and I made a curry the other night when Tom's friend Harry (not Harry Perrin, but philosophy Harry) was coming round for dinner. I'm sure it was a simplified version, but it took two different combinations of spices (masalas) and cooked for ages in the oven in this large ceramic pot. Nothing to rival the Tandoori Palace, but pretty good for homemade.
3) Theater
The reason Hamlet came up in the first place in the pub was that we'd just come from seeing a really excellent version of it. It'd been years, maybe even a decade, since I'd seen a production, and so I was looking forward to seeing it on stage. They'd gotten Derek Jacobi to do the voice of the ghost, which was quite impressive, but a bit out of place, because the production was cast entirely from Cambridge students, and both Hamlet and Ophelia looked at once 12 and 22. Anyhow, watching Hamlet is a bit like reading the Bible, in that you suddenly remember that that's where all those phrases come from. It's funny memory-work, too, if you remember the lines out of sequence as I was last night. I was getting concerned that they'd cut "to sleep, perchance to dream," but then it showed up after all.
As for the production, the daring decision they'd made was to have a tank of water, sort of Hirst-style, on stage the whole time. When you came into the theater, you thought, "Oh, well, Ophelia's going to end up there," but they used it brilliantly -- as a platform during the play within the play, as the grave with Yorick's skull, and, during the scene when Hamlet calls Polonius a fishmonger, a way for him to avoid answering Polonius. He dives and surfaces between delivering his lines, and he's reading a book underwater.
4) Funny anecdotes about Blake
Apparently when Southey was visiting Blake one time, he knocked at the door and heard a distant call from Blake at the back of the house that he should let himself in. "We're just being Adam and Eve," Blake said. When Southey walked to the back of the house, he found Blake and his wife reading Paradise Lost stark naked.
5) Peep Show
Any summary I might offer would do it a disservice, and I have to say that the fourth season, which I just saw in two three-episode jags, is a bit dark, but this is amazing comedy. You can get the first season off Netflix, and rarely has the interior monologue been used to greater effect. Plus Bob Ross has a minor role as God. NB: it has nothing to do with actual peep shows; the title just refers to seeing into someone's head.
6) Record players
In fairness, there's nothing particularly English about record players, but Tom has an amazing B & O one here in the apartment that was his father's and it's been making me very happy. It's on a table under this graphite drawing of a very 70s gentleman, complete with gigantic 70s mustache, who superintends the whole operation and looks very, very cool no matter what you put on. Berg, Lekman, Simon & Garfunkel, the Specials: it's always the same expression from him. I dig.
Hello from Cambridge! I've never been so happy to see a rainy, green place. You don't even need to fasten your coat here, and it's fine to walk around without gloves. Going without an umbrella, however, is another matter entirely. All of the locals seem to manage it, but for us water-soluable foreigners, I think it's a necessity.
There's little of interest to report about the trip, other than that I was lucky to get out of Chicago at all, because I was traveling during The Month When Chicago Likes to Show You Who's Boss, otherwise known as January. Thanks to the miracle-working ground crew at O'Hare, we made it out just a few hours late, even though it had been snowing all day. On the plane I sat next to an Italian and a petite, bird-like college student who was on her way to study in England. The former occupied himself with the latter, which was a good solution for all.
Returning to the UK, there are lots of things to notice: the different road signs, the pairing of red and blue on houses, how green everything is even in the middle of winter. I still know my way around Cambridge, sort of, and this time it feels like I'm coming back to a place I know. This doesn't mean that I've learned to look to the right when I cross the street -- I completely haven't -- for now my survival strategy is to try to look in all directions at all times. It must make me look a bit flighty and confused, but it seems to do the trick.
Today marks a bit of a victory, as I've gotten a SIM card and a yoga mat. I spent a while deleting all of the contacts left in my phone, which made me wonder a bit about the legality of its origins. My favorite was "R Absinthe": anyone need a number for a little green man?
When my friend Kevin was heading to the airport and was waiting on the platform in London for the train, there were delays upon delays, and finally someone came over the intercom to say that there was a swan on the track, and as swans were the Queen's birds, or rather protected under her decree, the swan couldn't be shooed or coaxed off the track, much less forcibly removed. This was charming at first, at least to some of the other people standing on the platform, but within five minutes everyone's sympathies gave way to cries of "Forget the swan!" and "Just run her over!" The tube employees, being loyal subjects, didn't give in, and finally the swan moved of her own accord. Kevin made his flight, but just barely, and everyone else got on with their day.
You might wonder what has possessed me to spend the winter in a nation that stops its trains for swans. And spells beans "beanz" on the Heinz can (ok, maybe that's a virtue). And is going to give me a total complex about saying "pants." It's a hunch, really. Plus I miss the shipping forecast.
I set out this weekend, and this is how I'm going to try to keep in touch while I'm gone. Like postcards, kind of. But without the post or the card. More like across the pond semaphores about eating curry, trying not to be the worst at pub quiz, and attempting to mind my manners.
