On October 2022

making soup and re-reading Annie Ernaux, predictably; rosehips, an elixir for patience, and celebrating three months since The Yellow Kitchen was published, my mind blows

On Monday, I was stubborn as a Capricorn goat. I left the house early for a swim, when the streets were lit by lamp posts, a heavy rain was falling and I refused to take an umbrella because I hate having to carry one once it’s wet and dribbling. Like a goat, I was stubborn and I don’t have natural waterproofing. I arrived at the station soaked and dripping, and there I stood inside a Tube carriage. Everyone else looked oddly dry in comparison with me and I was hit with the image of doodles of a stick figure standing under a rainy cloud, looking sad to raise awareness about loneliness back in school. I swam and it gave me a purpose for being wet and I dried myself before heading to the office. This is the second edition of The Onion Papers’ almanac – On October 2022 – or an exercise in slowing down to note the change of season.

The days’ length continues to decrease (approx. 2 hours). The palette of nature is lava, orange and brown for the leaves that perform acts of resistance on trees, red and yellow for those that have fallen and cover the ground of a thin and crackling layer. Purple and grey have taken the lead in my wardrobe and my ankles are cold. I favour the sweetness of rolling up the bottom of my trousers for an apparent combo of playful socks and sneakers. I have been eating breakfasts of bruised, discounted red plums and muesli and enough muesli to make me nauseous. The pace of work has been such that I haven’t read a book from the first to last page for leisure, but I sat through an album in full. I was moved to tears as I listened to women talking to each other about creativity and age and dodging expectations – Géraldine Nakache and Lauren Bastide (French speaking) and Tracey Emin on the Great Women Artists podcast with Katy Hessel, specifically. 

Last Sunday, I returned to the woods. It’s the season of orchards with bullace, beech nuts, crab apples and sloes due to blossom, and I’m craving a crumble. The woodland was generous with wonders – buoyant leaf patterns, tall grass and sun streams, glossy Porcelain mushrooms and tiny ones nesting between the wrinkles of broken branches; lilac gills and puff balls; rosehips, lots of them. I picked some, vain and seduced by the vivid coral colour of their skin and their antioxidant benefits. They’re full of vitamin C, I had read once, but they’re hard work to clean and they challenge my patience skills.

walking, thinking, sketching, in no specific order

Before using rosehips, you will have to rinse and halve them so you can remove the seeds and hair inside. This is a laborious and long process, but a necessary step. Do you remember the itching powder from playground time? It’s made with rosehip hair: the French translation is poil à gratter – boom – itching hair, it all makes sense now. My intention was to prepare homemade rosehip oil to apply on my skin as it heals scars and helps with pigmentation issues. I was excited at the idea, but then I researched the process with the rosehips scattered over my kitchen counter, and I learnt that I’d need to dehydrate them first to avoid spoiling the oil. This indicates that I would be using the oven for longer than it felt necessary when the original idea was to forage and to entertain the wish of living more sustainably. (Note to self: do your homework). I’m also scared of the cost of turning the oven on, but is simmering a casserole more cost effective? In the kitchen, I wrestle with contradictions constantly. I research ways to compromise but I don’t spare enough time to draw conclusions, fast faster, I’m hungry! 

A sweet alternative to the beauty oil is to cook rosehip syrup, which will give a twist to my bowls of porridge or yoghurt. All you need are rosehips, sugar and water. 

Once the rosehips are halved and cleaned, put them away in the freezer for one day or night. This step will enable the rosehips to soften, which will help you to get more of their juice out. Defrost by leaving them inside a bowl. 

Pulp the rosehips with an immersion blender and pour the paste into a casserole. You can use a tablespoon of the defrosting water to help with consistency as you reduce them. Cover with water, bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes. 

Strain the mixture through a muslin cloth (or a kitchen towel), making sure to squeeze as you go so you can get as much liquid as possible. If you’re an impatient person too, it might be worth straining the liquid a second time to clean up any leftover itching hair you might have missed the first time around. Measure how much liquid you have and add 50 grams of sugar for each 100 ml of liquid. Heat up but keep the temperature at a low/medium level. Once the sugar has dissolved, you have a syrup. 

Preserve in a (sterilised) jar and keep in the fridge.

doodling and cleaning rosehips in my pyjamas

While I haven’t read a book in full, I have celebrated Annie Ernaux for her Nobel Prize by returning to cornered pages and underlined sentences inside the editions of her books in my library. The committee detailed: ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she covers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’ – and I cheer for women’s voice, for the recognised era of short books and for personal memories being read as political.  

In the suburb where I grew up (Val-d’Oise, 95), there is a large mall called Les Trois Fontaines. The shopping centre spreads across levels and contains a hypermarket Auchan, shops, restaurants, services such as clinics and banks; it’s a place where capitalism suppressed the word super with hyper. Everything is too much, insofar that my mother would have to take a photo of our parking spot before walking away, just so we could find our car again. I haven’t visited since the recent renovations so my memory is one of the Trois Fontaines as they were built: a testament of the 70s, cements and arches and rounded geometric shapes. This is the place where I cashed my first pay-check (oui oui, I physically deposited it!) and nobody will ever steal away from me how proud I had felt that day. On the edge of the mall, on one of the parking lots, there was a bar that used to stay open until the early hours of the morning. I would go there to dance, wearing denim shorts and Converse All Stars, ready to test my limits. My friend C. and I would drink homemade mixes of Passoã with fruit juices, sweet and sweeter the transgressions, straight from recycled plastic bottles as we made our way to the club with the RER A. We would separate at the door because I was underaged and I needed to use her ID card: C. would go first with her passport and I would follow a few minutes after with her carte d’identité. I don’t think we fooled anyone, but we buzzed, our vibrant years outside of the Trois Fontaines. Les 3 Fs, as we called them.  

I haven’t returned to the Trois Fontaines since I left France in 2012, but I found its bricks and stories again in one of Annie Ernaux’s books. Not only the author lives in Cergy, the city where the shopping centre is located, but Ernaux also published journal entries from her trips to the Trois Fontaines between Thursday 8th November 2012 and Tuesday 22nd October 2013. Regarde les lumières mon amour was published in France in 2014 and liberated me from the prejudices that had kept me away from literature before: the word itself, the concept of who books are written for and by. With Regarde les lumières mon amour, I dared to think that it’s possible to speak about these things – the 95 and not Paris, l’hypermarché and not the Printemps, class as it stitches with everyday details. I went on a cruise with Ernaux next, Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story), being the next book of Ernaux I picked – freedom, is what this one granted me. There I was, a girl, but exploring my sexuality. Annie Ernaux had proclaimed, in my own interpretation: It’s okay to be a young girl and to have sexual desires. It’s fine to make decisions in the name of desire.

Writer Lauren Elkin made an important point of reminding us that Ernaux should be read as a working-class writer and that she is working between places, from where she started in Yvetot in Normandy to being an ‘agrégée de lettres modernes’ who lives in Cergy and writes into/against the bourgeois tradition of French literature. You can read Lauren Elkin’s wonderful interview with Annie Ernaux from the 23rd issue of the White Review here. Another important point that comes out of this conversation between Elkin and Ernaux is the assertion of memories as a collective history. The Years and Happening are two fundamental examples that show the power of a shared imagery and how vigour of not letting someone look away can be expressed with writing – what I think the Nobel Prize called ‘clinical acuity’. 

‘Le lit n’était pas défait, tout était pareil et presque une journée s’était écoulée. C’est à ce genre de détail qu’on mesure le début du désordre dans sa vie.’

This is from Happening, which I only own in French. I read the book at summertime, in one sitting on a bench outside of the Pincio terrace in Rome. I walked back to my friend’s flat, who was hosting me, and I started writing my first short story in English. This one is bound to the drawer, but my point is that Annie Ernaux loosens tongues with her daring books, short like slaps and the vocabulary simple in honour of truth be told. 

There are many wonderful profiles about Annie Ernaux being published in the wake of the Nobel Prize news, but there is also Ernaux herself. She is, after all, a diarist. Getting Lost was just published on 21st September by Fitzcarraldo in the UK (translated by Alison L. Strayer) and is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and half she had a secret love affair with an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. ‘This is writing as desire. It’s not always that way.’ Ernaux writes on Monday 6, then on Saturday 27: ‘Another source of pain: I cannot give up writing the world and for two years, I’ve done nothing. I can no longer live like this. Men and writing – a vicious circle.’ Her descent continues and, towards the end of the book, on Monday 19, Ernaux declares: ‘To reread The Mandarins made me really want to write about this passion, without cheating.’ Women, de Beauvoir and Ernaux, the honesty that breaks vicious circles – no cheating, wishful thinking.  

in bed with coffee and Annie Ernaux

So, in October 2022, Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize for literature and I feel rather paralysed by my fear about the future of our planet and society. Last weekend saw a conjunction between Jupiter and the moon as they rose and set together during the night between the eighth and ninth days. There will be a partial solar eclipse on the 25th of October and those who are superstitious exhale as the 13th brushes Friday off this month. The new moon is in Scorpio, sensual and deep rumour has it, and I conclude that we should hold each other tight to keep warm this winter. Workers strike. Don’t look away: Women, Life, Freedom. Iranian women and protesters are taking the streets across the country following the death of Mahsa Amini. Jin – Jiyan – Azadi.

Epigraph to The Yellow Kitchen

In the kitchen, it’s a good season for vegetables. Artichokes can be steamed, their leaves slowly peeled one after the other, and dipped into a potion of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Autumn does snacking better than I remembered, slice an apple and dive into a jar of peanut butter. Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips, carrots and celeriac, roots and roasts. I won’t be carving a pumpkin, but it’s a good time for those who eat soups. 

Zuppa di farro, eaten with my my legs crossed on the floor: 
1 onion, thinly chopped
1 handful of sage, parsley and rosemary
2 carrots, peeled and thinly chopped
2 celery sticks, peeled and thinly chopped
1 handful of cherry tomatoes, halved (peeled if you can be bothered)
1 can of cannellini beans, drained
1 tbsp tomato purée
150g farro

1 litre or so of broth, plus extra for topping if needed 

Start with making the broth, heating up water to the boil together with vegetable scraps and one stock cubes. Reduce to a simmer. 

In a heavy duty casserole (large enough to fit the soup), fry up a battuto made of onion, sage, parsley and rosemary. Swirl around until fragrant, add the carrots, celery sticks and cherry tomatoes. Cook for a few minutes on a low heat. Add the beans and cook for another two minutes or so. With the help of an immersion blender, reduce to a thick and rough paste. 

Stir in the broth and bring to the boil. Add the farro and a squeeze of tomato purée, lower the heat and leave to simmer for approximately 40 minutes or until the farro is cooked. Top up with broth and season as you see fit. 

a very good zuppa

On 7th October 2022, I also celebrated three months since my debut novel, The Yellow Kitchen, was published. I still pinch myself and I’m grateful to everyone who has supported my book, reading, writing blurbs and sending me messages about it. Seeing Claude, Sophie, Giulia, and even their mothers, coming to life through readers has been the most wonderful thing that has happened to me. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to write this novel in my second language if I hadn’t read authors like Annie Ernaux before. I’m indebted to booksellers for making the magic happen and to independent bookshops for picking The Yellow Kitchen as their July book of the month. If you’re interested to hear more about the process of writing The Yellow Kitchen, I spoke about it with my best friend and Salmon Pink co-host, Irene Olivo, here. 

To celebrate and if you’re looking for a way to use extra apples as it is custom to do so in autumn, here is an easy tweak for Sophie’s strawberry and almond brioche tart from The Yellow Kitchen. Apple tart, the cushion edition (no kneading involved): 

For the dough:
½ tbsp dry yeast
2 tbsp milk, lukewarm
200g plain flour
2 eggs
½ tsp salt
15g icing sugar
90g butter, at room temperature

For the filling:
1 egg
60g butter, soft
50g brown caster sugar
80g ground almond
4 or 5 apples, peeled, cored and sliced thinly 

Start with making the brioche dough: pour in the lukewarm milk inside a small bowl, add the yeast, mix and leave it aside for approximately 10 minutes. Meanwhile, on a working surface, make a volcano with the flour, salt, icing sugar and butter. Add the eggs and yeast in the middle and knead for at least 10 minutes, or until the dough comes together in a ball.

Place the dough inside a bowl. Cover with a lightly wet towel and leave it to rest in a warm location for one hour and a half, or until the dough has doubled in size.

Preheat the oven to 180C, fan. Lightly press the dough down to remove any gas. Line a sheet of baking paper on top of a tray and stretch the dough into a circle directly on it. Prepare the filling: whisk the egg, the butter and sugar together. Add the ground almonds and continue to mix until the preparation is homogeneous. You’re looking at a rich and thick frangipane.

Spread the frangipane filling over the dough, then scatter the sliced apples on top. Bake for 25 minutes or until the dough looks golden and the frangipane has settled. 

(The original recipe for the strawberry version was shared as part of this Salmon Pink supper.)

chronology

I cut a slice of apple tart, held it between my fingers and dipped it inside a cup of coffee, when I realised that I couldn’t have done this with a crumble. Autumn, a conversation between harvest, abundance and decline, a reminder of the false expectations of a Golden Age under capitalist standards. This apple tart is better served cold overnight as the frangipane will have settled and gained in taste. Patience, but I’m not patient; time matures into realisation and maybe tomorrow I will drizzle some rosehip syrup over my yoghurt. 

Margaux 

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P.S. If you’d like to support my work, it’d mean the world to me if you’d consider buying a copy of The Yellow Kitchen. You can do that from your preferred retailer or via online stores like Bookshop.org or Waterstones. 

‘Stylishly written, this witty portrayal of the appetites and private passions of a young group of friends is a moreish and utterly satisfying feast’ – Caroline Eden

‘A heady mix of politics, friendship, sex and food, poignant, provocative and utterly distinctive’ – Paula Hawkins 

‘An exquisite novel — beautifully rendered, powerfully told, and so deeply felt. I urge you to read this novel — you will never forget it’ – Lucia Osborne-Crowley