Lockdown Food with Helen Garlick
Helen Garlick started this series during the first Coronovirus lockdown, as we looked at food and assembled meals in a different way, disregarding recipe books and using ingredients that that we may have disparaged in the past.
For the first helping of lockdown food musings, here are two poems, one about the iceberg lettuce and the other about the humble onion.
War time diaries and recipe books are good reading too, not because we have to cope with shortages but it’s good for us to remember how much more difficult shopping and cooking was in both World Wars. Also, it's inspiring, now that we need to think twice about making trips to shops, to see how people concocted meals of what they had to hand. Here are extracts from Few Eggs and No Oranges: The Diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940 – 1945. Published by Persephone Books…
Convalescence
Post viral recovery can be a long haul. We seem to have lost the concept of convalescence, of the need to understand that full recovery from illness can take a period of time, that needs to be accepted and catered for in every sense. Helen Garlick searches her cookery book library for dishes to tempt and nourish invalids and convalescents…
As the risks of a new lockdown rise, Helen sends us this new contribution to her series.
The Ultimate Lockdown
If you ever feel at risk of sinking into depression over your social life during these socially isolated and distanced times, or look at your store cupboard and wonder whether you can hold out until the next Ocado delivery, or indeed try to to get a slot and fail, A Woman in the Polar Night by Christianne Ritter is the book you need to have by your side.