Good Morning!
This week on the Fortified Gazette we’re excited to have Wes Knowler sharing with us from London>Glasgow. A bit about him: Wes Knowler (he/him) is a writer living in London. In 2021, he completed the Writing MA at the RCA, and then forgot to reply to the email that would’ve offered him a reimbursement. His essays and prose poems have snuck their way into/onto Montez Radio, Sticky Fingers Publishing, DAISYWORLD, Worms Magazine and others. He’s currently writing about having a body, its slippages, the baroque.
Thanks for sharing Wes.
As ever, get in touch if you too would like to have a week writing on the Gazette, it’s open to all. Best,
Kate + Sinae
***
Hey and hello to whoever is reading this! I’m Wes.
This week is not necessarily a normal one. I’ll be working a lot, and will be up in Glasgow to hang out and read at Glasgow CCA from Friday, so this will be a journal of food snatched; chances taken, regrets made, hasty decisions, fumbled, automatic recipes – transitory food, basically. Some of which will hopefully be shared. I’ll try and catch the sensory intensities as they blur past in streaks.
A few things I need to clarify early on: I am not a foodie, I never have been. I cook, and enjoy cooking, and love and have always loved baking, but I am historically, and generally, distracted from food – whether that’s in the making, sharing or enjoyment of it. My attention seems always to be focused somewhere else. I am not scatterbrained, necessarily, and find a split or fragmented focus – navigating between responsibilities or subjects of interest – stressful. I cannot spin plates. Rather, my attention latches onto specific things, stubbornly gripping them in view until completion or dismissal, and in the slightly stagnant eclipse of that discretion my brain basically occludes what it considers to not be essential. I suppose this means that I do not consider food to be essential.
In a way, this week might end up mirroring my relationship with food generally: As an ongoing, rhythmic response to bodily need, largely absent-mindedly, but nonetheless punctuated by instantaneous, unpursued moments of synthesis and bliss. I do not pursue food, is what I suppose I’m trying to say. Food happens to me.
There are several reasons for this, some of which we might broach later. One of the primary ones is the inevitable causality of food and labour. Work – as in, work for money, not the shamelessly affected notion of practice – obviously relegates all experiences, displacing pleasure into necessity, necessity into involuntary function. Most of my working life has been physical. Kitchens, warehouses, in the streets as a bike courier – these are the settings, but both the temporal squeeze and bodily exertion of each has inevitably had the effect of shunting food down into a lower order of Thing; at least until some obdurate spasm careens my hungry frame into the nearest Tesco Metro. My job isn’t physical anymore, but the debasement persists.
How to peel all these preconceptions back and touch base with the subjectivity of food? Or, more importantly, produce something that would be remotely interesting to read? Perhaps the best way into the writing of this week will be through a generosity of description. Language and attention might bore a hole in the fog. I do love food, after all, in that I love everything that reminds you that you’re alive. I hope these dispatches will allow me to lean into the pause.
The other thing I need to say is that my phone case is broken, and so all the photos I take for my dispatches this week will have a weird vignette in the top left-hand corner, as if the image is already slipping away, or has been run through a stock Instagram filter from 2013. So each dish photographed will in turn slip away, or has already been forgotten – built or chosen as it was instinctively and with a slightly impoverished degree of care – and will be revoked instantly, down to the level of the palate, by what comes afterward. I will try and keep up the pace.
First thing this morning:
Two faintly soapy St. John's Wort pills and a cup of black Harrogate coffee (it’s cheaper than Lavazza since Brexit) in a chipped tin mug. There is also a longer, bright orange turmeric capsule that sticks to the inside of your mouth if you try to dry-swallow it, as the transparent casing begins to liquify. Also, a multipack Goldbar and a slightly nauseatingly ripe banana. The Goldbar is an elite-tier biscuit bar, in my opinion. I’m late to go to the doctors for the results of some tests which are inconclusive. Since I was a kid I’ve had irregular, seemingly random stomach aches which always succeed food or drink, but without any consistent culinary trigger. The only one which I’ve been able to reliably isolate over the years is drinking a beer on an empty stomach. Hollow imbibing is a no-no. They also tell me that I have a slightly fatty liver, which is weird; both because of my age (I am 27), and because I have a normal BMI and I don’t drink in a way that would ordinarily induce it. Apparently it could be hereditary. Apparently I shouldn’t be worried. I’ve never eaten liver or tripe.
Cycling home I make an abrupt U turn to buy a loaf of bread from a bougie cafe that I can’t afford because fuck it. I don’t even feel a glimmer of regret as I klunk my phone over the card reader. Now, unwrapped and squatting gleefully on the chopping board, it's beautiful. A slightly sour musk suffuses the boxy kitchen. I carve off a slice of end crust (not pictured – it disappeared too quickly) and munch that ritualistically. Its centre still carried a lingering core of warmth. How is it this good. Bread is a kind of magic.
It’s early afternoon now, so: another lengthy slice cut in two and slathered with a blood-red Korean pepper paste that is definitely for soups, and not intended to be used as a spread. Two eggs, messily over-easy, with barely-torn coriander sprigs and too much salt. (Distracted by this writing I let the oil get too hot, allowing the whites to bubble up violently and crisp from underneath. I am always stunned by the pearly flushness of a Greasy Spoon egg, with the whites draped rhapsodically about the plate like a placid protein-lagoon. How do they cook it so evenly all the way through?) Also: the bread is untoasted because I forgot, but doing so would feel slightly heretical. Unlike most of the Lidl loaves I normally buy, it doesn’t need to undergo the daily proximity of warming coils to methodically impede, one slice at a time, its already-on-the-turn-been-on-the-shelf-for-a-week-ness. This bread is already perfect.
Dinner, again rushed, (late for something else), I draw for H’s leftover Pozole. This is probably one of my favourite things we make at home. It’s a Mexican stew made of four ingredients: yellow onion, white corn hominy, chilli and water. The chilli we use is from New Mexico, and gets posted over from H’s dad who lives and is originally from there. The first time I tasted this chilli I was completely transfixed; it was a flavour from an ecosystem I had never experienced, that resisted all of my references for it – it is not deep and hot, and it doesn’t provoke sweat or sting your tongue. It is lingering and warm and subtly citrus, colloidal in a thin broth. I love it drowned in lime. Red cabbage, coriander, cheddar are optional, but pretty much an inevitability. It’s piss easy to make, but it takes a long, long time. The hominy needs to soak for a day beforehand, so that the kernels slowly unfurl in the soup as you leave it on a low heat for a few hours, blooming until soft; like popcorn in low gravity.
***
The other day I wrote this poem, waiting in a Sainsbury's car park.
If I could fill a warehouse
with all the Nākd bars I’ve ever
stole,
I couldn’t.
Because it wouldn’t be
much,
just a mulish pile of blue & brown wrappers
some yellow ones too
a hundred maybe;
dutifully sweeped into the middle of that
blank,
colossal slab.
Hmmm, I could taste that sourdough from 90 miles away! Beautifully written Wes