April Peels
crostini and gnocchi di polenta; waiting room listens, books, unite
Bonjour, you. If you’re new to The Onion Papers, Peels are a round-up feature at TOP, which comes out on the first Monday of each month. I hope you’ll enjoy it,
Margaux
It rained. A tree snapped and fell across the pathway, and it kept raining for days that felt like months. But isn’t it always the wettest April? The warmest summer after the coldest winter? I asked myself, seeking reassurance in what I had known before, until the MET brought some clarity: ‘some places in Scotland saw more than double their average rainfall for the month’. Then, one morning, the sky cleared and Amelia sung to the sun.
Bread update:
I kneaded, I put the loaf away in the fridge to proof overnight, and I forgot to bake the bread the next day. On repeat. When a dough is over-proved, the fermentation process is over-stretched, and the dough won’t rise as much. But even if exhausted air pockets make a denser bread, a flatter bread is a good base for great crostini and sandwiches. Highlights from this month include:
Russell Norman’s anchovy and chickpea crostini from the Polpo cookbook, topped with a fennel carpaccio on top (lemon and parsley seasoning);
haricot beans and tuna (olive oil, salt and pepper for the dressing);
LET: Ludo’s Egg Tramezzino (boiled eggs, mayonnaise, leaves, a drop of green tabasco, salt and pepper).
Listening, reading:
This month, I’ve sat in waiting rooms, which means plenty of listening time. First up was Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris, which is a haunting exploration of love and resilience, set during the Siege of Sarajevo. I wish I had read it on paper. Then Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor did something powerful – ‘no, not for me!’ I said when the novel started, still the voice held me close until the last page. It’s a visceral and funny book about motherhood and identity. Solider Sailor explores the clash between love and personal identity, a stream of consciousness inside the mind of a mother whose marriage is fading and whose emotions are conflicted between self-preservation and an outward, motherly form of love and care.
Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you."
And I gulped Jazz by Toni Morrison (the quote above is the opening).
Also, my (few years old) silly playlist for waiting rooms:
On paper, I read The Door by Magda Szabó for book club and my novel, Breaststrokes (in an actual book form!). I love them both.
The Door follows the 20-year long relationship between two different women. Emerence is practical, anti-intellectual and hostile to the church; Magda is abstracted, literary and religious. While the two women are from the same rural region, Emerence remains a mystery to Magda – ‘She was like a character in an epic poem who dissolves into thin air.’ The novel is filled with references to Greek myths, the Bible and other mythologies, the writing visual, a wordily work of subtlety that wrestles intense emotions inside the silence of unspeakable actions.
She [Emerence] asked if I [Magda] wanted her to get anything. I stood there gazing after her, wondering why she still stuck with me when I was so very different from her. I had no idea what she liked about me. I said earlier that I was still rather young, and I hadn’t thought it through, how irrational, how unpredictable is the attraction between people, how fatal its current. And yet I was well versed in Greek literature, which portrayed nothing but passions: death and love and friendship, their hands joined round a glittering axe.
— The Door by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix
In the kitchen:
I recommend easing tingling nerves with an ice-cream scoop and some instant polenta. Gnocchi di polenta, served with creamy mushrooms:
for the gnocchi: instant polenta, Parmesan cheese and white flour
for the topping: leek and parsley, chopped; chestnut mushrooms, sliced; mascarpone and oat cream
In a casserole, prepare the instant polenta following the package instructions. Add enough flour and Parmesan to solidify the mixture. Then, with the help of an ice-cream scoop, make balls of polenta. Leave them to dry on a floured surface while you make the sauce.
In a pan, fry up the leek and parsley with some olive oil. Add the mushrooms and cook them. Add the mascarpone and a gulp of oat cream as it’ll help with texture. Simmer on a low heat. Gently add the gnocchi, coating them with the cream, and cook for another 2 minutes.
Serve with some grated Parmesan and black pepper on top. Happy news: it’s easy to chew and delicious.
From The Onion Papers:
‘It smells of wet grass inland and of barley along the coast’: an undated travel log from Islay, featuring film photos, cliffs, seals, and the whims of the ocean Atlantic.
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I wrote about whisky this month, which is something new to me, so I ended up quoting Agnès Varda:
I also like to think that if you opened me, you’d find a pebbly beach. That if I were a whisky, the liquid would be peated with a salty undertone – but that is an autofiction of my own. I quote Agnès Varda, and a part of me is frustrated at myself for writing about alcohol, as a woman when the industry is still predominantly male, from the angle of personal experience. Until I realised that I had forced this expectation on myself not to write about the topic; I was afraid. But here is something else I believe: the land, like our bodies, grows old through the irrevocable passage of time. We break and we adapt, and we rot or thrive.
– Whisky Diaries: reconsidering the word ‘terroir’.
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A love letter for April, and three recipes for pesto.
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Drafting in Kitchens: a dispatch from rue de Fleurus, hanging out with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and a recipe for brothy butter and broad beans, topped with grilled asparagus.
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Looking ahead (Glasgow, GMT):
‘Joyeux 1er mai à la française,’ my grandmother texted on May Day. Unite, check on friends and take actions, pals. Call for a cease fire in Gaza. Write to your MP. And write again to ask for a global plastic treaty (the UK only throws almost 1.7bn pieces of plastic every week.) In April, the UK passed the disgraceful Rwanda bill and now is important to learn what to do if you see a raid. The JCWI has plenty more information and resources. ‘Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible’, be realistic, ask for the impossible – we define our activism; we have a voice. In May, there will be an opportunity to glimpse at Saturn too, which will rise on the east, around 2:30am, on the last day of the month.
Margaux
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