SUMMER BITES
Make the most of the memorable tastes of summer with top-quality, fresh ingredients
Late last year I was invited to be the guest speaker at the Katherine Mansfield House and Garden annual fundraiser, in a sit-down conversation about the books that have influenced me. In preparation, I read a number of Mansfield’s books, including
The Katherine Mansfield Cookbook, which was published in 2018. This little cookbook contains a number of quotes from Mansfield, and provides an insight into the eating habits, social mores and manners of life more than 100 years ago in the places she visited and lived in, particularly New Zealand, London and France.
England, she describes as “merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy”. Of Swiss cooking she wrote “and the FOOD. It’s got no nerves. You know what I mean? It seems to lie down and wait for you; the very steaks are meek. There’s no contact between you and it. You’re not attracted. You don’t feel that keenness to meet it and know more of it and get on very intimate terms. The asparagus is always stone dead. As to the puree de pommes de terre, you feel inclined to call it Uncle.” Reading this made me wonder if a lot of the dull, stifled cooking that prevailed in New Zealand restaurants during the 1960s and 70s could, in fact, be attributed to the legions of Swiss chefs who ruled over the kitchens of the tourist hotel corporation hotels at that time. The food was exactly as ghastly as Mansfield described.
Editor Nicola Saker writes in the introduction to the Mansfield cookbook, “Mansfield understood how good food could be simple, but also delight and seduce: ‘I feel gay and at peace — the whole house takes the air. Lunch is ready. I have a baked egg, apricots and cream, cheese straws and black coffee. How delicious.’”
The appeal of simple, good food is timeless. A ripe juicy fig served with a slice of paperthin sweet and salty prosciutto, a sun-kissed tomato sliced and drizzled with really good quality extra virgin olive oil, fresh basil, salt and pepper, cobs of just-picked sweetcorn boiled for no more than three minutes and served with lashings of butter, salt and pepper, or fresh raspberries and vanilla icecream. These enduring tastes are memorable for the quality of the ingredients that make them — the fig must drip with sweetness, the tomato burst with a pow in your mouth. While the sun shines, tastes like these are ours for the picking.