I loaded Marmite back into the trailer, and we drove home, covered in glory and billy stench. And Rich welcomed me home with open arms and told me that he was proud of me. I had to wash my hair twice to get out all the billy odour, and even my handbag smelled for days afterwards.
20 September 2010
Every Friday night we go out for fish and chips. Everyone who happens to be home piles into several cars and we drive for 15 minutes to reach St Dogmaels – a charming little seaside town that flings its pink, yellow and blue cottages over hills sloping down to the sea. St Dogmaels is famous for two things – Bowen’s Fish and Chip Shop, which is without a doubt the best fish and chip shop in West Wales, and its mermaid legend, sworn to be true by the people who live there. The story goes like this:
There was once a fisherman named Peregrine, who lived in a terraced cottage at Cwmmins, St Dogmaels. Peregrine was out fishing one day at Cemaes Head, casting his nets for herring, when he pulled up a mermaid instead. She begged to be put back into the sea, but Peregrine would have none of it. He tied her up firmly and headed back for land.
But as he sailed, the mermaid wept and sobbed so piteously that he finally gave in, and released her back into the sea, near the bar at the estuary. Before she swam away, the grateful mermaid promised to tell Peregrine whenever there was a storm approaching.
On 30 September 1789, Peregrine and many other fishermen set out for a day’s fishing. The sky looked fine and clear. But when Peregrine’s boat reached the bar, he saw the head of his mermaid emerge. She warned him that there would be a terrible storm that day. He heeded her warning and turned back, trying to persuade the other fishermen to return to St Dogmaels with him. They just laughed at him and carried on out to sea.
Suddenly, the southwest wind veered around to the northwest and blew a sort of hurricane. A terrible storm followed, and the sea ran as high as a mountain, carrying everything before it. The fishing boats were smashed like twigs; some thrown onto the beach, others onto rocks. All the fishermen perished – except Peregrine and his crew.
This story is memorialized by a statue of the mermaid, looking wistfully out towards the bar at the mouth of the River Teifi. I’ve often looked at this figure, smooth and sinuous in wood, with her strange, pensive expression, and thought about the tale. It’s so perfectly Welsh in its specificity, its strange blend of matter-of-fact mystery and pragmatism.
In a classic fairy tale, there might be a romance between Peregrine and the mermaid, and some grand conclusion. But in the Welsh story, Peregrine and the mermaid strike quite a mundane bargain – she tells him about the storm. No palace, no marriage, no gold ring, no nonsense – just a sensible weather warning, which he sensibly accepts. And the naming of dates and locations is so exact – the story even gives Peregrine’s address.
Wales is a place so steeped in magic that each location has its own fairy tale, and there’s a shoulder-shrugging acceptance of obvious things like mermaids and dragons. It’s said that the last dragon in Wales was killed in Newcastle Emlyn, just down the road from us, and the story even reports that the river was polluted for two weeks afterwards.
In any case, Bowen’s Fish and Chip Shop is real and warm, and we greet it gratefully each Friday evening, driving up the long hill and looking eagerly to see whether it’s open. We know it’s open, of course, because we always phone ahead. But we look anyway.
The restaurant and takeaway are run by Mr and Mrs Bowen, an irrepressibly cheerful couple who always manage to smile, despite their gruelling schedule. Mr Bowen gets up at 6 a.m. to cut up all the potatoes for chips, and the two of them cook and serve all the food until night. In the summer, when the tourists come, they hire a lovely lady with bright pink hair to help at the counter.
The place is always immaculate, hung with black-and-white photos of St Dogmaels in decades gone by. The fish is fresh, the batter delicious and crunchy and never greasy. We always order the same things… and Mrs Bowen always remembers our order, so that we can just ask for ‘our regular’.
The Bowens are very attached to Benji, who at four-and-a-half has a round, cherubic face and a cowslick sticking his hair straight up on one side. They gave him a watch once, which he wears proudly, although he can’t yet tell the time. And they ply him with sweets, and let him hand round the container of lollipops which gets offered to customers after their meal. Last time we went, Benji went into the kitchen and offered Mrs Bowen a kiss, much to her amusement.
Once, after we’d left the restaurant, I commented on the Bowens’ kindness to Benji, trying to work it out.
‘It has to do with perthyn,’ Rich said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Perthyn.’ He thought for a minute. ‘There’s not really an English translation for it. It has to do with a connection. It means “related to”, but it also means belonging.’
Perthyn. I asked him to write it down for me, so I could think about it later. Every once in a while I come across a Welsh word that has no equivalent in English. Welsh is a misty, romantic language, with soft edges. It has no harsh swear words of its own, and when Welsh people want to talk about hard-edged things like money or science, or when they want to swear, they usually slip back into English. But there are complicated, delicate concepts that can only be expressed in Welsh.
Not only is there no translation for perthyn in English, but I’d never even considered such a thing. Connection, relation, belonging. Ties.
If there were one way that my life before could be described, it would be by its complete lack of perthyn. I was an only child, and my parents took me away from our extended family in Texas when I was very young. We floated in a rare and isolated bubble, my parents and I, just the three of us.
We were always strangers in our neighbourhood in some sense, even when we’d lived there for many years. When the time came, we casually sold all of our belongings in a yard sale, and moved across the entire country to start again in California. And when the time came again, I left even my parents behind and crossed the ocean to go to a new country.
Perthyn is not something that I ever learned, or experienced, or felt before. But now, it seems that I’ve found it at last.
24 September 2010
The leaves are dropping, and the wind is beginning to bite. We’re doing all the things around the farm that Rich calls ‘battening down the hatches’ for the winter. Preparing for the coming rains, he’s dug a gutter under the sill of his new shed, and lined it neatly with concrete so the water runs into a mesh-covered pipe in the centre. Benji watches the water running in this with great fascination, and religiously keeps the leaves swept out so that it runs properly.
Benji and Rich together closed off the end of the shed with reclaimed sheets of tin and posts from the barn, and have started shifting all the firewood logs to this new location, closer to the path and easier to reach from the house. They took the quad bike down to the woods last weekend and came back up with heavy rounds of oak, which Rich has been steadily sawing into chunks.
This wood won’t be ready for burning for another two years, but to miss out a year of wood gathering means there’ll be a hole in the cycle when the time comes. We had the first fire of the year in the wood burner the other night, and the dry, radiant heat spread through the room like butter over toast. We all sighed and snuggled into the leather sofa, smelled the wood smoke and counted ourselves lucky.
I’ve been thinking about this perthyn thing that Rich keeps talking about. Perthyn – connection, relationship. Here on the farm, everything is about perthyn.
Rich’s father, Taid, lives in an apartment connected to the house. He has his own kitchen, lounge, bedroom, porch and garden, but he joins us for supper each night. He’s independent when he wants to be, but surrounded by people when he chooses. When we bale the straw, Taid comes out with a wooden rake to rake up the bits that are left behind, and put them into bags, because he no longer has the massive strength needed to lift the bales and swing them onto the trailer. But at age
72, he’s still part of the farm. That’s perthyn.
And someday, Benji will lift the bales, and it’ll be Rich who rakes up the bits left behind. It’ll be Rich and I, maybe, who live in the little apartment at the back, and our children and their children who live in the big farmhouse. That, too, is perthyn.
And in the end, perthyn even applies to our food. We have a relationship with it. For example, we recently bought in some bull calves, to be turned into beef, for our roast dinners. But at the moment, they are babies. We teach our dinner to drink milk, and it looks back at us with wide, round eyes. I resist this massive sense of connection, because it feels painful. The heartstrings that tie everything together tug and pull in my chest.
I’m more accustomed to indifference – to the anonymity of the city, and distance. Floating in isolation is peaceful. To live in this awakened net of connections means that every change, every fluctuation, has its answer in a flickering nerve ending of my own. I’m connected to people and animals and growing things, and each time one of them grows or dies or changes, it affects me – and sometimes it hurts. The fairy tale of connection sounds wonderful, but the reality can be painful, like a frostbitten limb coming back to life. I hadn’t thought of that.
30 September 2010
I want to get some sourdough bread starter.
I’m not sure why. In a way, it’s an unlikely thing to do. As far as I know, sourdough is a pioneer tradition from the USA, and it’s not something that the Welsh people are really familiar with. When I asked him about sourdough, Rich just looked at me blankly.
But I’ve this little idea that keeps niggling at me: to get some sourdough starter. I’ve a picture in the back of my mind of a pioneer woman in a covered wagon, setting out for the new world, a calico poke bonnet on her bowed head and a wooden bowl containing sourdough starter on her knees. That sourdough is her security – her insurance. No matter what happens on the long, unimaginable road to the place she doesn’t yet know, she’ll be able to make bread for her family. As long as she has her sourdough, she can feed the people she loves.
I suppose I’ve done just the opposite – I’ve left the new world, to come back to the old. Maybe I too want some sourdough as insurance for my journey.
The thing about sourdough is that it’s lineage food. You can take a little bit of it, and make your bread. Save some back, and it’ll make another batch. You can keep it indefinitely, passing it down from generation to generation, keeping it alive. A little bit of the old world, alive in the new.
In Ireland, apparently, they have the same idea with kefir, a fermented milk product that’s like yogurt. My Irish friend Barbara told me that in Ireland the woman of the house is the steward of the kefir, which is valued for its health-giving properties.
As with sourdough, you can hold back a bit of kefir and start a new batch with it, so it can be kept going forever. When a son marries, his mother gives a bit of the family kefir to his new wife, thus passing on the responsibility for his health and wellbeing. What a lovely idea. Hmmm… can I get some kefir grains? How does it work? Where can I buy them? Must remember to look it up.
I love this idea – the woman as the holder of the family’s health, using food with history to nourish. Food that has tradition, and meaning. Curious as to what’s behind this circling sourdough thought that keeps nudging at me, I look it up online. I’m ravished by the images that come up.
Sourdough, which is believed to be more healthful than other types of bread because of the fermentation process that makes it sour, has been used since biblical times. And sourdough is sexy. Legend has it that sourdough bread became popular because of the belief that baking powder was an anti-aphrodisiac. Men who feared losing their virility by eating biscuits made with baking powder chose sourdough bread instead.
Families and bakeries throughout the world own sourdough starters that are many human generations old, revered for creating a special taste or texture. The practice of making and baking sourdough is steeped in tradition and ritual. For thousands of years, in each village, the peasant women of Europe all baked on the same day, so that they could use the communal stone bread ovens.
Each woman would take her starter, saved from the previous week’s dough, and mix it with new ingredients. The dough was left to rise – with a piece held back, to be the starter for the following week. The rest was formed into loaves that were marked with the family sign, the source of the traditional slashing of bread loaves. The bread was then taken to the village ovens to bake.
The individual, braided seamlessly into the communal. Each family with its own distinct mark – but all the loaves in the same oven. Unique, but connected.
I can imagine the fires being lit in the great ovens, the creaking wooden doors, the stones glowing red-hot, the loaves being shovelled in – each with a different sign cut into the crust – the perfume of the baking bread, the women leaning on fences and gossiping before gathering to collect their loaves and take them home… I can almost smell the bread.
I read on and learned that you can use sourdough to make cookies, cakes and waffles – or to tan a hide, cure an aching back, as a glue for sealing a letter or a paste to paper a cabin. So many uses.
I also found something that I should have remembered – that sourdough was the main bread made in Northern California during the California Gold Rush of the late 19th century, and has remained a major part of the culture of San Francisco. The bread was so common that ‘sourdough’ became a general nickname for the gold prospectors.
I came to Wales from Northern California, and San Francisco is as close to an original home for me as anything can be. So the thought of bringing a piece of my heritage to Wales, and braiding it into the food traditions that we follow here, seems right and lovely. A little bit of the new world, here in the old. Food for my journey… food for my thoughts.
There’s also something else that I like about sourdough, and kefir – something that has to do with its ability to reproduce itself, and maintain a lineage through time. I suppose it has to do with aliveness.
These things are alive – actual microorganisms that live and create a certain effect. They ferment the milk, or make the bread rise. They need certain things to survive, and neglect – or too much salt – will kill them. By feeding the sourdough starter, or the kefir, we’re interacting with the tiny organisms that we can’t see.
It’s like our bull calves, but on the tiniest cellular level. We feed the calves, and the calves feed us. We feed the sourdough, and the sourdough feeds us. A closed circuit of interaction, like touching two wires together and feeling power flow. A relationship.
Maybe that’s it – I can’t have a relationship with a plastic-wrapped container of yogurt, or a loaf of bread that I buy from the shop. It’s a dead end. It doesn’t mean anything. I throw away the wrapping and eat the product. That’s all there is to it.
But the kefir, or the sourdough – there’s a whole world of mystery contained there. It has its story, its legends, its thousands of years of history. I can touch that history, and blend it into my own family’s history.
As I use my hands to make the bread that will feed my family, I can tell myself the stories and the images linger in my mind – the women by the stone ovens, the gold prospectors by the fireside, the pioneer woman in her poke bonnet, clutching her wooden bowl. The tiny living organisms in the bowl as I stir it are like a universe in reverse, as small as the stars are distant, world upon world.
In a wonderful crystallization of this heritage, Joli has now picked up the torch to carry it forward, playing with the marvellous idea of creating a healing ‘medical bread’ that’s actually good for you.
She’s frequently to be found in the farmhouse kitchen up to her elbows in flour, making up recipes, kneading dough and experimenting with new ways to ferment starter. Here’s what Joli has to say about bread:
‘I love bread. The history and mystery, the crusts and shapes, grains and textures. How have we managed to make someth
ing so necessary and magical into such a pointless, empty food? It frustrates me to hear things like, “wheat is bad, don’t eat bread”, because bread is in almost every culture, so we simply can’t be doing it right.
Joli’s Rye Sourdough Bread
Prepare the starter
Mix 50g (2oz) rye flour with 25ml (1 fl oz) lukewarm water in a breathable (not glass) container – e.g. a Tupperware box, or a bowl covered with clingfilm – the gases produced in the fermentation process can break your container.
Continue to add 50g (2oz) rye flour and 25ml (1 fl oz) lukewarm water every day for a minimum of four days, by which point your sour should be bubbly on top and smelling… sour! You can now use this ‘starter’ to make bread whenever you want – it’s active! Don’t worry if there is some separation.
Make the ‘production sourdough’
Mix 50g (2oz) of the starter with 150g (5oz) rye flour and 300ml (10 fl oz) lukewarm water.
With wet hands, place the dough in a bowl, cover and leave until the next morning/evening, depending on when you started. This is your ‘production sourdough’.
Make the sourdough bread
Make your final dough with 450g (1lb) of your production sourdough (tip the rest back into your starter), 350g (12oz) rye flour, 2 tsp salt and 200ml (7 fl oz) lukewarm water. This dough should be very wet, and you don’t need to knead it, given that rye flour is so low in gluten.
Leave the dough to rise until the next morning/evening and then bake for up to an hour at 200°C (400°F). It’s better to let the loaf sit for a day before cutting into it. Don’t be alarmed by the flat top.
Secrets from Chuckling Goat Page 5