A snaffler-up of unconsidered trifles

3 December, 2011 – Pick your verbal weapon of choice, your metaphor or simile. Choose from the colander, chinois or sieve, for there are memories that gurgle away, while others snare and are enmeshed.

In not so few words, a book review extolled having a mind like a sieve. That was the nub of the piece, though I only realised when interrupted by a text message.

Musing upon the internet and what it may be doing to our brains, the article praised the wonders of neuroplasticity and the dynamic nature of human memory as distinct from the algorithmic recall of machines and Google in particular. Asking whether today, with all information at our fingertips, it is necessary, never mind desirable, to actually know things. Questioning whether technology is freeing us to truly think, a liberation from the burden of remembering.

A bleep. The text message. A friend saying sorry. For not having made it to dinner. “For having a mind like a sieve.”

The article continued. The author quoted William James (“The connecting is the thinking”) and deftly articulated my firmly clung to hunch that when it comes to sparkiness and creativity and the pleasure of the aha! revelation, the contextual organisation of human memory, however imperfect, however messy, is a wonderful, essential blessing.

With food, certainly. What joy in just knowing where to look up a recipe? Whither the thrill in knowing how to enter the right search terms? And however tantalisingly and beautifully depicted, I don’t want to know a dish by description only. Bertram Russell’s unbridgeable gulf between ‘knowledge by description’ and ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ springs to mind, and from there, with a sideways mental shuffle, to a little snagged German vocabulary. The language seemingly explicitly grasping another important difference between ‘to know’ and ‘to really know’, between wissen for abstract concepts and ideas which we may have an understanding or knowledge of, and kennen for concrete things, persons, places with which are familiar or acquainted, that we have encountered and experienced…  These are the titbits that somehow, somewhere, have stuck and which are as good examples as any of how we accumulate mental clutter, never knowing in advance what will be useful later. The morsels, lodged to the side of the pan, perhaps to be deglazed, become the best bits.

 ******

A clever self-help book, masquerading as popular psychology and taking a truism from cognitive behavioural therapy, says that the thing to do is to change the tag-line which a bad memory carries. Turn a Western, say, into a romantic comedy by clever copywriting. Keep the adversarial struggle and set-pieces, but lose the shootouts. Add laughs and whimsy. I mock, but it is a therapeutic prescription – think and write differently, creatively; but spurn dwelling and wallowing too – that I can half agree with. Only half because I remember the withering verdict of someone who knew first hand. CBT, he found, was essentially another way of glibly saying ‘Get a grip’. I reach for my sieve.

****

No jellied eel today. Thoughts flowing, not set in aspic. Diffused and slippery; ungraspable yet unputdownable.

For those memories that murmur away, there will be salt cod. Salt cod, a celebratory enactment, first of preservation, then wallowing and washing: refreshing to reinvigorate, to get to the essence.

I can remember the last time I ate salt cod, and I can remember the first time that I saw it, fluttering on Bury market, Lancashire. Strung up, far from the coast, far from the sun. We soaked the cod for days under running water in the bath. But that is a false memory. I am sure that we didn’t, but I recall that we did. Most likely I read about such a splendid rigmarole, maybe at the time, maybe later.

Another memory, crystalline fresh. This one true. We ate the cod baked with tomatoes and black olives. It was wonderful.

And the last time, most recently in Paris. A 25th birthday. A celebration, a sumptuous feast yet a sad, disjointed occasion. The highpoint in many ways of an unfortunate mismatch. A pairing that didn’t exactly work. But still, I love above all – am drawn towards – food that is ebullient. More ebullient than elegant, should I have to choose, yet somehow every part of this meal was ebullient and elegant and majestically so. It started with brandade de morue.

For mash, think salt cod, cream and garlic.

Three days bathing, the fish more supple with each immersion. Giving a little more. Letting everything wash away, just so that it’ll taste all the more of itself.

Frothing, poaching. The fish churns a foam worthy of an incipiently rowdy sea. Garlic cloves and chunks of potato simmer alongside.

The fish broken but not for this the smothering polish of the food processor. Flakes bust with the pestle, retaining the glorious texture. Perfect imperfection then intertwined with mash. The potatoes and garlic having been coaxed through a fine-mesh sieve. Silky potatoes – no slubs, only maybe in the yarn, only in the telling from knotty thoughts.

All scooped up with brittle fried, triangles of richly-seeded brown bread. Sesame and poppy seeds. Crunchy and sweet. All soothing, creamy garlic and gentle sea-fresh saltiness in taste and aroma.

*******

There is no good reason to limit ourselves to one dish, or to one sieve (indeed the maximalist in me thinks that it’s only cooking if you use every receptacle in the kitchen). Different neural connections lay down different versions of the same event. There is no one place in the brain where memory resides. Some parts of the brain may be sobersided and reasonable but other neural networks are decidedly emotional and sensationalist. “Ceaselessly reinventing overlapping strategies,” is how one account has it. “Competing factions with different ways of telling a story.”

Back to this story. After the salt cod, back to the beginning. Another starter. Sieve again. More foods mixing memory and desire. Stirring. A salad with knobbly, Jerusalem artichokes translucently sliced and which wait in lemon water. Crisp chicory cut into long bitter strips. For burly crunch, walnuts. All wonderful. Some of my favourite things, but what I am smitten with is the dressing. Like the greatest, pervasive, enduring, memories, it will envelope and bring everything together.

Prise each pomegranate aril from its membrane. No rancid bitterness, never; tender sweetness only. Pulse with the hand blender then very deliberately grind through a fine-mesh sieve. Extract the essence, leave the pulp and detritus. Whisk with oil, season and, for a depth charge, balsamic vinegar.

Artichoke drained through a suitable implement. A jumble, and with the pomegranate, everything soon magenta, the shade of a last sunrise in Provence. Finally, the missing piece, something from further north. Tangy Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire.

***

The finest sieve in the universe. The corpus callosum. A thick band of neural tissue, 800 million fibres dense, connecting the brain’s two hemispheres. Remarkably however, more often than not, it actually inhibits interaction. Severing the corpus callosum produces surprisingly little effect.

Our two quite independent brains. The old view that the hemispheres divide tasks and specialise is now known to be wrong. Language, abstract thinking, story construction, gambling strategies and so on, both halves are involved in all of the above – but they go about their work differently. Each hemisphere has a different outlook on life, attends to the world differently and has an alternative way of understanding what it experiences.

From right to left to right again. A “team of rivals” is a contemporary conception of the brain (but we have to be a little mindful as not long ago it was seen as an “enchanted loom”). In the tug of war of understanding, the left isolates and manipulates. Identifies and breaks into parts whatever it is we are attempting to know. The right takes in the whole, not a gradual putting together of bits of information, but aha!

Both hemispheres deal in meaning, but while the left is concerned with literal and explicit meaning and logical, sequential reasoning, the right has no truck with abstraction. It specialises in contextual meaning, the implicit, and non-literal aspects of language: irony, humour and metaphor. It is the right which can integrate two seemingly unrelated concepts into a meaningful metaphoric expression. But for clichéd non-literal or metaphorical expressions, it is back to the left to deal with them.

Where my loyalties lie will be clear, but we need both, the enmeshing, the harnessing of the two hemispheres. Give me the precise break down, the individual ingredients, the chemistry of taste, the cellular structure of the potato, the science of flavour. (A piece of toast is no less wonderful for knowing about the Malliard reaction.) But also – always – give me the irreducible whole, the felt experience, the encounter with food.

***

In the fridge is pudding. The fruits of a little advance planning, borne of the knowledge that I might just have a corner left to fill.

Unlike the cod or pomegranate, the pudding has been neither refreshed nor refracted and extracted. No sieve needed. A dish prompted by the most trivial of snapped up quotations, muddled up with a famous prune and Armagnac tart (which I thought I’d adapt in tribute to sponge-like memory. To the holes in the sponge rather than the overly-vaunted quality of total absorption, obviously.)

(For a deluded moment, I thought I might have invented a new dessert. But no, by coincidence a famous TV chef has got there first. The internet leads me to a near-identical version, printed in the Christmas edition of a political magazine that I never buy, but which I discover has a greedily good food section. Who knows, that may naturally fit with the publication’s rapacious right-wing views. An unpalatable thought.)

The second finest sieve in the universe? An Earl Grey tea bag, some might say.

It came together like this. Quartered prunes steeped in tea and orange and lemon juice, together with long strips of zest and star anise. No pouring away, just wallowing and then nocturnal marinating in lip-smarting brandy. Next day, cajoling fingers of panatone into the bottom of a glass bowl, then the prunes, mascarpone with whipped double cream and orange blossom water.

A bite of cold plump Agen prunes, sharp, citrus and bitter. Shrouded in bergamot and fumes of Armagnac. Tawny, treacly, with a lick of liquorice. Sodden, honeyed panatone sponge. Unruffled mascarpone and a slight bite of golden caster sugar: not unctuous, but soft, sweet lip-enveloping cream. Unforgettable.