An Exchange of Small Gifts
John Berger's The Red Tenda of Bologna, a menu and recipes, and eating notes
Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is about John Berger’s text The Red Tenda of Bologna and recipes given in the midst of life, a menu from this week with recipes, and eating notes.
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An Exchange of Small Gifts
One of my favourite pieces of writing is John Berger’s The Red Tenda of Bologna, a 56 page paean to a beloved uncle and to the city of Bologna. The first sentence, which is also the whole of the first page, is quite astonishing –
I should begin with how I loved him, in what manner, to what degree, with what kind of incomprehension.
His uncle was a ‘failure’, ‘according to the standards by which [Berger] had been brought up’. He was ‘hard up for money, unmarried, unprepossessing, apparently without ambition’. But Berger loved his ‘shabby and royal intransigence’. The uncle loved to write and receive letters, to travel, and he and Berger showed their affection for each other through the exchange of small gifts, which ‘conformed to the same tacit, unwritten law: any gift had to be small, unusual and addressed to a particular appetite known to exist in the other.’ The Red Tenda of Bologna is also filled with such gifts. After his uncle’s death, Berger visits the city and wanders the streets, sharing gift-like fragments of memoir, art, architecture, food, people, lines from Pasolini, and red tende linen. Then, an unexpected offer of a recipe for pasta with precise quantities, as if Berger had known and addressed my ‘particular appetite’ as a reader –
In the Via Caprarie we are going to find a kilo of passatelli in a paper bag, that looks as if it were made to hold truffles. After Easter, during the summer heat, the Bolognese stop eating lasagne and tagliatelle and move on to passatelli, a pasta in brodo. You want the list of ingredients? 400g white bread crumbs, 240g Parmesan cheese, 1 teaspoon of flour, 6 eggs, 1 small nutmeg, 50 g. butter?
Of course, we the reader are implicitly there all along reading Berger’s text, but his sudden turn to camera with – ‘You want…?’ – explicitly acknowledges our presence. We become a fellow in conversation and it is as if by giving the recipe, Berger responds to some keenness we have expressed physically as he is telling us about the seasonal shift in pasta. The passage exemplifies that moment when people, often near strangers, are compelled to tell you a recipe in the midst of a conversation. The shift from narrative into an instruction that we can take into our own lives reveals the will to nourish and to distribute knowledge that feeds — and which inevitably imparts a sense of time and place, of life, too.
I am writing about Berger’s recipe because I was given a recipe in an unlikely setting yesterday. I live 300 yards from the sea and after three years of not getting round to it, I went out in a sailing dingy, crewing for a man in a race round some buoys just off the beach. We had never met before, but someone had told him that I write about food and he told me about five years when he lived on an island in Orkney where his wife was working as a nurse. He did all sorts of jobs, as is required on an island with a few dozen inhabitants, and one of these was to run a cafe. He made mutton pies using meat from sheep that get fat eating seaweed thrown ashore in winter storms, and gelato using milk from local cows, and ricotta and spinach pies with ricotta he had made. In response to my great excitement about this, he told me his recipe for the mutton pies – we had to pause during its telling when there were gusts of wind or we had to tack round buoys: mutton mince, mace, nutmeg and seasoning and his own hot water pastry. He wrapped the pies in greaseproof paper tied with string and baked them. Afterwards when I was drinking a pint of Doom Bar and telling my name to other sailors for the first time, he appeared with a bag of frozen mince from the seaweed-fed sheep in Orkney. That evening, he emailed me a full recipe. I did not know him before yesterday, but he gave me his recipe and a bag of mince. I will tell You about the pies when I make them.
Recipes and eating notes from the week below
Wednesday’s Menu
Sam was away for a week, bringing meals to his grandparents while his mum was abroad, and when I went to visit, I decided to cook something fun to eat with his cousin and her partner who were also visiting.
spaghetti with Marcella Hazan tomato, basil and olive oil sauce
steak and aromatic salad after the Camberwell Arms
rhubarb and strawberries with star anise and Greek yogurt
I went to the butcher near Sam’s mother’s house and bought a 650g piece of rump steak. The butcher cut it for me from a whole rump, at least 1 inch thick. I let it sit with some cracked pepper, rosemary, and garlic for an hour before I cooked it. Then, after nostalgically reading early Nigel Slater books in Sam’s mum Emily’s kitchen – Real Cooking was a big part of my early teens when my mum got it – I followed Slater’s method for cooking the steak. I brushed off the rosemary and garlic, rubbed the steak in oil, heated up a heavy pan on a high heat for at least a minute until it was radiating heat and put the steak in the pan. I didn’t move it for at least a minute. I turned it after 3 minutes, cooked it for another 2-3 on the other side, then removed and allowed it to rest for 5 minutes. This method produced an excellent caramelised crust and a tender medium-rare middle. I seasoned it with salt and pepper just before cutting into slices on the table for everyone to share. We ate the steak with my version of the aromatic and sharp salad that I’d eaten the previous week, a fantastic accompaniment – the strands of sweet pickled onion and capers in the salad acted almost like condiments to the meat.
Before the steak we had spaghetti with a tomato and basil sauce for which there are versions in several of Marcella Hazan’s books, including the encyclopaedic The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Afterwards, Greek yogurt with rhubarb and a few strawberries cooked until soft with star anise, ground ginger, the juice of an orange and a few tablespoons of sugar. It was a balanced and joyful menu filled with spring/summer exuberance.
Salad after the Camberwell Arms
Ingredients (serves 4 as an accompaniment to meat)
2 medium sized heads of soft lettuce (or chicory/radicchio)
a handful of whole mint leaves and a few other aromatic herbs you have around (I added chives, parsley, and rocket)
sweet, pickled red onion
a tablespoon of capers
parmesan, to finish
To make the pickled onion:
1 red onion, halved and finely sliced
1 part white wine vinegar to two parts water, enough to just cover the onion in a small saucepan
3 tablespoons of sugar
Bring the vinegar, water, and sugar to a simmer. Add the onion and cook for 5 minutes or until floppy and no longer crunchy. Allow to cool in a bowl.
How to assemble the salad:
Wash and dry the lettuces and herbs: I tend to soak lettuce in cold water in a large bowl or in the sink, refreshing the water once or twice and picking out any bad leaves before drying in a salad spinner or tea towel. Arrange the large leaves on a large serving plate or in a large bowl. Add the mint leaves and any other herbs. Top with strands of pickled onion and sprinkle with capers. Dress with 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil and salt and pepper and mix up well. Grate a fine layer of parmesan over the top to finish immediately before serving.
Eating Notes
After lunch at a newly opened Dongbei region Chinese restaurant on Caledonian Road where I particularly enjoyed noodles with sour cabbage, I walked up to Quality Wines with a friend to meet his partner for a drink. We drank negroni and rosé wine and shared several dishes from Nick Brahman’s menu. It was my first visit to the bar/restaurant. I loved his caponata – brilliantly intense sweet-sour and oily, eaten with focaccia. Chicken with tarragon flecked sauce, asparagus and a fine dice of tomato was soft and sweet and rich. A small plate of risotto teeming with tender broad beans, baby courgettes, and asparagus and made sharp with cheese was a gorgeous expression of the season. Cannoli made in house to finish. I want to go back for a full meal with Sam.
My friend Laura took me out to dinner on Tuesday to the Thai restaurant where I live. They have white tablecloths and flowers, and I love their dish of deep-fried whole fish with papaya salad.
On my way from Pangbourne to a funeral in Cambridge on Thursday I stopped off at the branch of Three Uncles near to Liverpool Street Station for lunch. I had a box with rice, pak choi, two roasted meats (duck and char siu pork) with plum sauce. I ate it on the train.
Walking home on Friday and stopped off at the weekly market. I visited the fish van for the first time bought cod, smoked haddock, a sea bream, and a fillet of seabass. I froze most of it for another time and cooked myself seabass and noodles as I needed a substantial lunch before going out. I slashed the skin of the fillet three times with a sharp knife and seasoned with salt and pepper and put it into a hot pan for 5 minutes, skin side down. I turned it over for 30 seconds and put it on a plate. Then I put some ginger and garlic cut into very fine matchsticks on top of the fish, heated up 2 tablespoons of sunflower oil in the frying pan until very hot, then poured it over the ginger and garlic so it sizzled and made everything aromatic. I ate this with spring onion and shrimp noodles from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice.