Outside over there
Several fantasies of Europe.
All through winter, I dined outdoors, although dined might be too generous a word for it. It felt teenage, a little feral – bundled into thick jumpers and thicker coats, perching inelegantly on outdoor chairs (often with a puddle of rainwater lurking in the seat, unnoticeable in the dark until it’s too late), beside a heater or, better yet, an outdoor fire. Drinking mulled wine, too sweet, tarted up with a slice of orange and a confusion of spice. Outdoors, the staff forget you; orders go unheard, plates uncleared. There’s no real atmosphere, or rather, the atmosphere is too real – it lacks the fantasy that a good restaurant conjures inside its studied interior with its beautifully attentive waitstaff, or the convivial magic of a crowded bar. Still, there’s something sort of appealing about it – like the off-kilter rhythm of an act not quite mastered. The way a drink warms you from the inside out. The singular pleasure of having sat by an open fire and later, having left into the bitter night, noticing the scent of woodsmoke still in your hair.
On Instagram, I watched an acquaintance travel through Spain, Portugal, France, Italy on extended summer holiday; in the words of someone she met there, her journey was through Tomato Europe rather than Potato Europe. The moment you hear it, it rings true. Tomato Europe, of course, is the ideal destination for a summer holiday, or better yet, a summer fling. It’s a negroni drunk with sea-salt still on your lips, ripe cheese and blue-black grapes eaten in the shade, little dishes of green olives swimming in oil. M.F.K. Fisher, Patience Gray, and Elizabeth Romer are writers of Tomato Europe. I only need to open their books at random to be transported:
“Sitting on the elevated shaded terrace of one of these ancient houses, breakfast at 10 in the morning began in this manner – bread, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil. The wines we tasted at this breakfast were so extraordinary that they obliterated the memory of the lunch – majestic – that followed later. I recall only the ‘fig bread’ served as a dessert in the shape of a little domed loaf unwrapped from its figleaves, made of pressed whole dried figs flavoured with aniseed and bayleaves.” (Patience Gray, Honey from a Weed)
“For Norah, I would get a pitcher of milk and a pot of honey. I’d put them with a pat of sweet butter on the table, and a big square block of the plain kind of Dijon gingerbread that was called pavé de santé. There would be late grapes and pears in the big bowl.” (M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me)
Yet I’m dismayed to realise I don’t have many writers of Potato Europe on my shelves. I suppose W.G. Sebald writes about Potato Europe after a fashion, but food features in his work rarely and only incidentally: it is not Sebaldian to dine.
The best example I can think of is On the Road to Babadag, by Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk (who was recently and extremely accurately recommended to me by Prithvi Varatharajan). Stasiuk is enamoured with ruinenlust; he’s drawn to “decline, decay, to everything that is not as it could or should be.” His work, too, is transportive, albeit in a different register:
“Mondays and evenings we went to the pub on Nicolae Bălcescu Road. You enter down a few steps. Inside, the flies flit and the men sit. We drank coffee and brandy. You could take the same steps to the barber, where there was an antique barber’s chair. The place was open late, to ten, eleven, and someone was always in the chair. We also drank beer, Ursus or Silva. From the street, came the steady clop of horses. Sometimes, in the dark, you saw sparks from a horseshoe. We purchased salami, wine, bread, paprika, watermelon. When the sun set, the shops glowed like warm caves.” (Andrzej Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag)
Stasiuk’s Europe – what he refers to as “the other Europe” – is Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Moldova, Ukraine. His breakfast is a shot of slivovitz, smoked pork, goat’s cheese. He drinks more than he eats. What else does he encounter? Tripe soup, vodka, aszú, pear brandy, palinka, “the smell of stewing onions”, black plums spoiling on the road, veal cutlets with fries, Ciuc beer, Laško beer, percolator coffee, raki, hard-boiled eggs. In each country he goes, he notes the brand of cigarettes they sell, and how much a packet costs.
Of course, Fisher and Gray wrote about Tomato Europe as outsiders, which is to say, their experiences are comparable to being on holiday: one long, lovely fling. Stasiuk travels with an insider’s gaze. He notices the ugly, the rotten, the cracks in the facade. Still, to draw a distinction between the idealised gaze of a holidaymaker and the eye that seeks out ruin is a false one. Stasiuk’s “other Europe” is a way of seeing, not a place on a map. To romanticise decline and decay is just a fantasy of a different sort: the way I sit by an outdoor fire, in an empty courtyard, remembering when it was still possible to dine, unbothered, indoors.
Good things to read
“There is no mere existence on the internet. There is no being known for who you idly or incidentally are. You have to show up and beg to be loved, then beg to be loved again, but for newer reasons.” Much to ponder in Haley Nahman’s essay on becoming “a less economically useful vessel for brands”, the obligations of being seen online, and having a sense of self outside social media validation. – via Maybe Baby
Laura Stortenbeker’s writing has a quality of lightness to it that sometimes makes me think of an Impressionist painter – there is a gesture towards something rather than depiction. Read her latest Tinyletter here. – via more notes
“It is ridiculous to die for fish, it is impressive to die for honour. To unite both made Vatel immortal in one scale even as he was strategically forgotten, bundled hastily off the premises before sundown so that the king might not have to dine in the same building as a corpse.” I loved this piece about food, disgrace and the strange afterlife of François Vatel, maîtres d’hôtel. – via Lapham’s Quarterly
In case of interest
For The Age, I wrote about how an encounter with a Jewish liturgical prayer prompted a decade-spanning collaboration between composer Nigel Westlake and singer-songwriter Lior.
I’m also in this month’s Australian Gourmet Traveller with a feature about the changing face of coffee in Australia. It’s not online yet, but you can find it in print, on stands now.
One more thing!
As a counterpoint, or rather a complement, to what I’ve written above, here’s Max Norman in the New Yorker, on visions of the other Italy: “the Italy of the villages whose schools are closing because of low birth rates, whose tired countryside is cracked and dry or blanketed by gray smog. It is often a poor Italy, a desperate Italy, an Italy that smells like cigarette smoke and old frying oil.”