Transitions

Meredith sent me the promised SK Writers Guild manuscript evaluation—with luck I’ll have made a few changes to A Clear-Cut Case and be ready to seek a publisher by the end of next week.

After that, my husband and I will start moving to Saskatoon. (We’re keeping the farmstead for now, so it’s only a partial move). Yes, I have mixed feelings about the transition. But it’s necessary, and I’d best get on with it.

Some of My Cookbooks

In lieu of a blog about writing, here’s my musing on a culinary transition:

I used to picture entertaining dinner guests in the library: Oak-panelled walls lined with books. Thick Persian rug on the floor. A well-set table beside the stone fireplace, logs alight with red and yellow flames. Silverware and delicate porcelain on white linen. And me as hostess serving lovely, elegant food.

This imaginary foray into Entertaining took place when I was in my teens. Way back in the mid-nineteen sixties on a grain farm in Saskatchewan. We’d eaten plain, home-cooked meals on a Formica-topped table in the kitchen, my dad’s radio blaring out the day’s news. Dinner—a substantial spread of meat, potatoes, and vegetables— was at noon; supper was at six. The food was good, but there was nothing elegant about it.  

Mom was a traditional cook. Like most farm women of her generation, she grew a large garden. Preserved our winter supply of fruit and vegetables. Baked bread, pies, and cookies. And prepared three square meals a day. From scratch. Company for supper meant the Sunday evening version of our everyday fare. Roast beef with all the trimmings rather than pasta with tomatoes and cheese or leftover stew from the night before.

I liked my mother’s food but aspired to serve my guests something classier. Something that would make them sit up and take notice.  I wanted to make the sort of meals found in cooking magazines from the seventies and eighties. Elaborate meals with appetizers, several side-dishes, and desserts that could grace a high-end pastry-shop.

Which I did make. Sort of. But as poet Robert Browning wisely said, a person’s reach should exceed their grasp, “or what’s a heaven for?” My meals may have been more elaborate than my mother’s, but they wouldn’t have passed muster in a three-star restaurant.

Then, in my early thirties, I discovered medieval cookery. Or to be precise, the cookery of the nobility and the rising middle class. And my ambition went up another notch.

Between 1984 and 2004, I prepared thirteen or fourteen multi-course feasts based upon recipes from medieval manuscripts. Each menu consisted of eighteen to twenty dishes, which I cooked or assembled in my small farmhouse kitchen. And then served to guests on whole wheat trenchers which I’d baked four or five days before.

Since then, I’ve prepared one medieval picnic. Sometime around 2012. Although it was a fine event, complete with live music, exotic costumes, and good food, that picnic marked the end of my avocation as a medieval cook.

I still prepare food. And entertain. But aging has caused me to make changes— which soon will be exacerbated by my move to a cohousing condo in Saskatoon. Maybe I’ll take a leaf from my mother’s book. And cook a pot roast with potatoes, carrots, and onions for a company meal.