A Passion for Birth
Page 43
A memorable meal owes as much, of course, to the setting as to what is on your plate. I remember driving through the Camargue with a carload of angry, quarrelling girls, arriving at Arles and handing them money to explore and find places where they wanted to eat, while exhausted parents repaired to the peace and civilisation of the Hotel Jules César. There was nothing vegetarian on the menu so I decided to wait until the cheese course. And then I saw their raw vegetables, each arranged like a still life – courgettes, carrot fingers, red and green peppers, radishes, tomatoes and the greens of different lettuces – all the vegetables of high summer served with a mayonnaise so thick the spoon stood up in it. With crisp French bread, butter and black olives, it was a splendid meal.
Crudites are perfect for a garden lunch, varied with whatever is in season, and also asparagus (steamed) in May, artichokes, spears of chicory, miniature tomatoes, and very tiny raw broad beans.
Some Of My Own Recipes (Definitely Not Slimming!)
Though not addicted to food porn, I admit that I enjoy exploring and experimenting with recipes – adapting them to be vegetarian and using a variety of herbs and seasonings. I am grateful to all the chefs, past and present, from whom I have drawn my own recipes.
Potato Scones
You will need a cast iron girdle (or griddle) for this. Never wash it. Clean it with salt and kitchen paper. My father taught me how to make these – traditional Scottish scones.
450 g (1 lb) boiled or baked potatoes
1 tsp sea salt
flour
butter
Mash cold, skinned potatoes with salt. The mixture should be dry and smooth. Work in just enough flour to have a dough you can roll out. Knowing how much flour to add is a matter of practice and varies with the potatoes used. On a well floured surface roll the mixture until it is about the thickness of a 2p piece. Place a dinner plate over the dough and cut round it so that you have a large circle. Cut out the scone shapes as if making the spokes of a wheel. Have the girdle well heated so that when you throw on a few pinches of flour they go brown in about half a minute. Grease it with a very thin layer of butter. Prick the scones with a fork and place on the girdle, turning then with a metal spatula when brown blisters appear on the underside. When done they are the consistency of soft suede. Cool and eat with butter.
To manage the dough easily, keep your hands cool and lightly oiled. My father ate them with cheese but I prefer them plain.
Morilles à la Crème
6 morilles
1 small onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
butter
1 tsp flour
salt and black pepper
284 ml (1/2 pint) double cream
If using dried morilles, soak in water overnight. Then wash thoroughly. Sauté onion and garlic in butter and when the onion is transparent, add the morilles. If served alone they are marvellous whole, but for vol-au-vents it is best to slice them. They take about 10 minutes to cook, but should not become sloppy. Sprinkle lightly with flour and stir till it forms a smooth paste with their juice. Season and gradually stir in double cream. It can also be served on a bed of rice.
Pistou Soup
This is a meal in itself. First make your pistou sauce. I make up a large quantity and keep it in the freezer.
Sauce
340 g (12 oz) pine kernels
3-4 cups roughly chopped fresh basil
6-8 roughly chopped garlic cloves
450 g (1 lb) finely grated Parmesan or other salty sheep’s cheese
568 ml (1 pint) virgin olive oil
salt and black pepper
In a Magimix or blender (pestle and mortar if you have neither) grind the pine kernels. Throw in basil and garlic. Blend again. Add Parmesan or Feta cheese. While the machine is going, gradually pour in olive oil. Season and put in pots. You can add more or less garlic according to taste and if pine kernels are too expensive, you can either mix them with walnuts or, at a pinch, use walnuts instead. But don’t use any other oil as green olive is best.
Soup
225 g (8 oz) haricot beans
olive oil
1 cup cubed potatoes
1 cup diced carrots
large cubed aubergine
4 or 5 cubed courgettes
13/4 litres (3 pints) water
225 g (8 oz) green stringless beans
142 g (5 oz) tin tomato puree
225 g (8 oz) diced mushrooms
few florets of cauliflower
4 or 5 peeled, chopped tomatoes
Soak haricot beans overnight and in the morning boil until they are barely cooked. In a large saucepan sauté the potatoes and carrots in olive oil. After about 20 minutes, add aubergine and courgettes. After another 15 minutes add water and let it come to the boil again. Add the strained haricot beans, green beans cut into inch lengths and tomato puree. Season well and cook for 10 minutes. Add mushrooms, cauliflower and tomatoes. Simmer until all vegetables are just cooked. Taste and season again. Serve with a dollop of pistou sauce in each bowl. The vegetables can be varied, but tomatoes, two kinds of beans and one root vegetable are essential.
Grilled Goat Cheese
Firm goat cheese
Chopped walnuts
Pepper
Cut the goat cheese into thick 1 1/2-inch slices. Place each slice on a circle of foil, allowing space for it to melt. Press the chopped walnuts onto one side of it and place this down on to the foil. Pepper the upper side generously. Place under a very hot grill until golden. Serve on a watercress salad with a good French dressing and some crisp triangles of toast.
When my grandson Sam was five he made up a recipe for ‘Nutty Nibbles’. Here it is in his own words:
Sam’s Nutty Nibbles
Bread – brown and crusty – 2 cups
Nuts – 1 cup
Cheese – 1 cup
Butter – 1 teaspoon
Salt and Pepper – to taste
Herbs – to taste: celery seeds, lemon, basil and dill
1 macaroon
Preheat oven to 200oc.
Break up the bread and put it in a Magimix. Turn it on. When the bread has turned into small crumbs turn it off. Put all the other ingredients in the bowl and turn it on again. When the mixture looks like fine crumbs again turn it off.
Take a spoonful of the mixture and squeeze it between your hands in the shape of a fat biscuit. Place these biscuits onto a baking tray and put them into the hot oven.
After 10 minutes, when the biscuits are brown at the edges, take them out of the oven. Allow the Nutty Nibbles to cool for five minutes before eating them.
Christmas
Preparing for Christmas well in advance is part of moving with the seasons – scenting the first whiff of frost in the air, seeing the brilliant pyracantha berries ripen on the wall opposite the kitchen window and cascade across in a sea of fire, and collecting nuts that have dropped on the lawn as branches of the big old walnut tree sway in the wind, before the excited squirrels get the lot. It started in early September, filling big bowls with white hyacinth bulbs and tucking them into the cool garden shed. As the days grew shorter, logs were sawn for fires and dried lavender tied in bunches to throw on the flames. Then there were presents to be found at craft fairs – and if I was lucky enough to be lecturing in south Germany or Austria, the magic of a night visit to the Christkindlmarkt, to find honey candles, straw and carved wooden baubles for the tree, to add to those dating from Uwe’s childhood which are beginning to look a bit tatty now, and spices for mulled wine and cider.
Uwe was born in Germany so carrying on a German tradition we light the candles on the tree and open our presents on Christmas Eve.
I suppose that I am drawn back to some female ancestral role by these rituals, the rhythmic travail and comfort of tasks long familiar and deeply satisfying: kneading dough to cook special savoury rolls and cheese brioches; making polish from beeswax, lavender and turpentine so that the old oak floors will gleam; weaving raffia in
to long swags and wreaths to hang on doors to be studded with dried flower heads from the garden and pine cones and tied with ribbons; soaking fruit in jars of brandy; pounding pine kernels, garlic and fresh basil for pesto to spice our minestrone and pasta. It is a romanticisation of women’s work, of course, thousands of years of female hard slog, the nurturing and sustaining of families, and making homes warm and welcoming. Yet it is a pleasurable counterpoint to writing, research and campaigning for women.
A Kitzinger Christmas is a vegetarian one, so there will be filo pastry stuffed with cheese, home-made hummus, goat cheeses marinated in olive oil and spiked with rosemary and other herbs from the garden, summer puddings rich with raspberries, tay berries and blackcurrants from Millets Farm down the road, stored in readiness in the freezer. We tuck into Nell’s home-baked bread with artisan cheeses and shall savour morel mushrooms with cream and Madeira; cranberry sauce which goes well with a moist, garlicky nut loaf and with buckwheat pancakes and sour cream; tarte Tatin with apples from the paddock; loads of salads with oils and vinegars flavoured with herbs and lemon; potted Stilton with the added nip of Yugoslav plum brandy; and a mix of sesame seeds, hazelnuts and pine kernels, roasted in sesame oil and mixed with herbs and spices to sprinkle on vegetables and salads.
A big wrought-iron coffer that used to be in Uwe’s grandfather’s bank in Nuremburg is lined with evergreen branches and filled to overflowing with oranges, satsumas and clementines with their leaves still on. That way there will be a dramatic still life in the spicy dark against the linen-fold panelling and flickering candles, as tantalising parcels resplendent with glittering ribbons are piled under the pungent tree. Wooden bowls of chestnuts wait to be roasted, and daughters hunt through bookshelves for poetry to read aloud by the fireside.
Five of them come home, with partners and friends. When Sam was two and a half, Tess made him a puppet theatre (a very simple one, out of a big box) and I discovered a wicked-looking crocodile to add to the stock of characters. We found Sam fluffy wings, too, and one of Uwe’s white shirts (to be worn back-to-front) for him to be a convincing angel when he handed us our presents after we had drawn the curtains on Christmas Eve.
One year I had a feminist tree – full of symbols of women’s power to give life. At first I was going to make birthing women out of papier maché but it was incredibly difficult. I told Jenny about the problem, and she and her partner made birthing goddesses and birth symbols out of delicate ceramic, which they then painted. My tree was one of the more expensive ones that are not supposed to drop their needles. It was decorated in bronze and white, which suited the white and dark oak sitting room. The birthing symbols included the hooked diamond, which represents the woman giving birth, and the maze, a symbol of women’s generative energy. There was also a wonderful Cretan snake goddess with a snake in each raised hand. I added golden and white balls and some traditional white angels.
I never thought of Christmas as just a family time when you bolt your doors, draw thick curtains and try to shut out other people. My mother always made it an opportunity to welcome anybody needing comfort and care; students from overseas, refugees from Nazi Germany, and others who were lonely, old, ill or unhappy. The smug, bourgeois, in-turned family Christmas, emotions simmering like a pressure cooker, can be a dreadful thing. I know from experience that women are most likely to phone me for urgent help with emotional difficulties at times of family gatherings. An open-hearted Christmas, with friends and others who find themselves away from home and who come to share ours, is much more fun. Christmas is a time for reaching out to other people.
The conventional Christmas is part of a tradition stemming from Prince Albert: middle-class Victorian society, with Father carving the turkey and lighting the brandy for the pudding while Mother fusses over the sprouts, tries to keep the children happy, and is up to her armpits in washing up.
Christmas is usually enacted as an expression of an intensely patriarchal society. Father Christmas holds centre stage as the giver of gifts, the spirit of benevolence, bringing the magic and excitement of a faraway glittering world into prosaic homes. He does this with much ‘hoho-ing’ and great panache. Mother Christmas is invisible. Yet it is she who does all the backstage work, while this jack-booted, heavy-bearded Nordic father figure gets all the credit. A long time ago our Father Christmas caught fire as he reached across a candle to pluck a present from the tree. Uwe rushed across, flung him on the ground, and dragged him out into the garden and hosed him down. We rolled him on the wet lawn and finally extinguished his flaming beard by wrapping him in a rug from the hall. And there, instead of this sham figure of paternalistic authority, was revealed the children’s kind and gentle grandfather, with eyebrows singed and a little shaky on his feet.
So maybe we should include the women who create Christmas, together with the central images of the tree and the birth of a Child, each of them symbols of life. I enjoy Christmas because it is the backdrop to the exhilaration of personalities meeting, meshing, sparking reactions from each other; to the laughter and heady arguments and sharing chores in the kitchen as women work together in an easy, steady rhythm. Christmas can strengthen bonds that link us, sharpening our perception, and helping us grow in understanding. It is not just a sentimental ritual, not only an affirmation of the importance of the family, but a celebration of the energy and creativity of the women who choreograph it.
My grandson Josh holding our vegetarian christmas turkey
of home made bread, wheat stalks, celery and carrot
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MY OBITUARY
Invited by a newspaper to contribute an advance obituary, this is how I tackled the task:
She died as she would have wished, flat on her back on a table with her legs in the air, in front of a large audience, demonstrating with vigour the dangers of making women lie down, hold their breath till their eyes bulge and strain as if forcing through a coconut to push a baby out. She claimed that treating the second stage of labour as a race to the finishing post did violence to a woman’s spontaneous physiological rhythms, reduced oxygen flow, led to fetal heart deceleration and could result in cardiac arrhythmia and even a stroke. She made her point.
Sheila Kitzinger lived, and died, with zest. The media described her as a ‘birth guru’, ‘earth mother’, ‘high priestess of the natural childbirth movement’, ‘the intellectual woman’s Barbara Cartland’ (she wrote about three dozen books), and a ‘benign, fat broad making bread in a stripped pine kitchen’. Though there was some truth in such descriptions, the essence of her work was her feminism. She strove to validate women’s experiences, to give words and meaning to female life events and transitions, and to challenge male autocracy and a medical system dictated and moulded by men.
She learned from her mother Clare Webster, midwife and worker in one of the first birth-control clinics, to question accepted ‘truths’ and to struggle for social justice – the basis of her books about emotional and social aspects of female sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth and the sociology of motherhood.
When she read social anthropology at Oxford in the 50s she discovered that academic anthropology ignored female realities and was dominated by a male view of the world. She pointed out that in her professor’s studies of the Nuer there were many more references to cows than to women. Her M.Litt research project was on race relations in British universities. During this time she married Uwe Kitzinger, then a diplomat with the Council of Europe, and later president of Templeton College, Oxford. They had five daughters, and when her youngest was two the family went to Jamaica so that she could do field work on birth and motherhood among Jamaican peasant women, with further research on the Rastafarian politico-religious cult. Later, with a Joost de Blank Fellowship, she did research on Caribbean women’s experiences of birth in Britain.
The radicalism of her book The Experience of Childbirth (1962) lay in her focus on women’s experiences rather than on doctors’ or psychologists’ interpretations of these
experiences. She wrote it after her fourth baby, Polly, was born and waking at 5.30 a.m. She continued this early morning writing and made it a precious space in her busy day. This was vital because there was a short time when she had three children under two, for Tess and Nell were twins, and Jenny, the youngest, was born when the oldest was still only seven.
She worked with gusto and, although she had a spell as a lecturer at the Open University, and created and helped set up the National Childbirth Trust’s training scheme for antenatal teachers, she preferred to be free of the restraints of institutions. She lectured in many countries, and whenever she went sought the opportunity to be with women in childbirth rather than on official tours round hospitals.
Some of her earliest research projects concerned women’s experiences of medical and surgical interventions in birth. Episiotomy, ‘our Western way of female genital mutilation’, is a usually unnecessary surgical wound. When a search of the medical literature revealed nothing on women’s experiences of induced labour or episiotomy, she did the research herself – without funding. She threw herself into similar studies of women’s experiences of antenatal care and was the first writer to indicate that many women suffer long-term backache after an epidural. Because it was impossible for most women to find out what was going on in maternity hospitals, she wrote The Good Birth Guide, based on women’s own accounts of care in hospitals, on obstetricians’ and administrators’ answers to questions about rates of induction of labour and Caesarean section, and care on postpartum wards. The guide’s publication opened the doors of maternity hospitals, made those who ran them ‘consumer-conscious’ for the first time, and initiated competition between hospitals to treat women with dignity and respect.