Good Morning. This week we’re looking forward to having Sophie Paul sharing a food diary with us, buon appetito,
Kate + Sinae
Preamble
Hello! My name is Sophie and I’m a designer and writer working in independent publishing. I work in London, live in Oxfordshire, and this week I’m travelling to Glasgow to put on an exhibition at Lunchtime Gallery (plug!), so want to use my week writing with Fortified to think a bit about place: home-y food, on-the-move food, and the places we cook and eat.
I live primarily on toast and cheese, so here’s a late-night treat for you, perfect for when the kitchen is dark, and everyone else is asleep: my recipe for midnight marmite on toast with unevenly cut wedges of cheddar cheese. The toast doesn’t matter, I like brown bread, soft squishy plasticky stuff. Carve off generous slices of cheese whilst the bread is in the toaster – 2 to three minutes is my preference. I used to grate the cheese on but this is too much a aggro for the volume of cheese this dish requires. Don’t bother melting it, just slap it on and eat it in bed. The cheese gets kind of sweaty from the toast but not enough to compromise its structural integrity. To go with: a little mug of water by the bed, toothbrush with a blob of toothpaste ready to go, and a spitting mug, to ensure that you don’t have to get out of bed to brush your teeth after you’ve finished eating the toast. The only downside to this is sleeping next to a mug of spit, but I’m prepared to live with this once in a while.
Day 1: Lime and Ginger Cheesecake
Right now, it’s about 4:30pm and I’m stood over a pan of simmering ginger syrup, typing into my iPhone notes with a sticky finger. The syrup is for a lime and ginger cheesecake later. I’m upping the ginger content because as far as the recipe goes the only thing gingery about it is a gingernut base. The best cheesecake in the world is Wagamama’s white chocolate and ginger – how they used to do it with a sprinkle of spicy powdered ginger, before they started to use a sickly caramel drizzle instead.
There’s a pan of melting butter on the stovetop, and blitzed gingernuts in a food processor behind me. Next to me, three limes that I need to zest. Zesting is the worst job in baking, and every time I do it, I have visions of myself reducing my entire fist to a soft pulp.
I take the syrup off the hob and swirl the butter around in the pan. Tip it in with the biscuits, smoosh it about in a tin. My brother likes biscuit bases more than he likes cheesecake so I’ve near-doubled the amount of biscuits in it. I find the task of pressing the biscuits into the bottom of a biscuit tin almost unbearably frustrating so I actually end up putting the loose bottom of another tin on top of the biscuit base, making a kind of sandwich, and then putting the whole thing on the floor and standing on it in my socks. Let that press the fucking things in.
Around the time I start I zesting the limes my brother comes into the kitchen and starts pan-frying chicken. I am using the cheese grating holes of the grater for the limes, carving off large grooves of rind. My dad is feeding the cats and has temporarily lost one of them. My sister comes in from work with a carton of roast potatoes and a bag of strawberries. I eat a cold potato and it’s the best thing ever. Then I return to the recipe and it says to bake the biscuit base for 15 mins. I think this is pointless but I put it in the oven anyway and then start juicing the limes, which are now pale skinless orbs. I remember one holiday juicing limes that we’d picked from a grove of trees in our garden – they were like rocks, and we were working over them almost until midnight. Empty bowls of skinless half-limes accumulate on the chopping board, and I mix their juice and zest into cream cheese, cream, and icing sugar.
Whilst I’m folding the cheesecake batter my mum comes in and starts making a nut roast. I get the sense that both of us want the kitchen to ourselves, so we drift semi-silently around each other feeling slightly stressed about the messiness of the kitchen after my siblings have drifted out and my dad, having found the lost cat, has fed it whilst trying to fend the others off. Occasionally, we’ll say something to one another about the food. I tell her about standing on the biscuit base. I didn’t stand on the biscuits in my socks though, only the metal base. L started the cream cheese yesterday so you might want to use the rest of the mascarpone from yesterday to make it up. She’s not actually used that much of it, might be okay without. Oh, well we have those strawberries so could just save it for those. Yeah, okay, should I do that? You decide.
At this point the smell of burning becomes obvious – it’s the biscuit base that I’ve forgotten about. She gets it out of the oven and the edges have burnt to charcoal but the rest of the base is just about fine. I think, when I circle the base with a metal spoon carving off the burnt bits, if I had just put the base in the fridge it would have been almost exactly the same. I think it’ll still be fine though. I’ve used all the gingernuts so we’ll just have to eat it. The centre looks fine – you can probably barely taste the burn.
Sophie Paul (she/her, b. 1998) is a designer and writer based across London and Oxfordshire. Her work intersects critical theory, trashiness, and eroticisms.
Alongside Kaiya Waerea, she is one half of Sticky Fingers Publishing, an intra-dependant feminist publisher based in London.