One thing about me is that I am a handsy cook. By this I mean I stick my fingers in a lot of the food I cook. An old flatmate of mine still speaks about a time I stirred a pot of soup with my finger. I guess that this kind of tactile handling of ingredients just comes more naturally to me than trying to use implements – I don’t think this is anything to do simplicity or laziness, but perhaps control or trust of my digits.
When I make tapenade for tonight’s dinner I destone an old pot of kalamata olives with my fingers. These olives were scavenged from the back of the fridge along with two other half-full jars. I rinse off the mould that is floating on top of the brine in each of the jars and carry the little films that have collected in the plug-grate to the bin. My technique to destone each olive is to stick my thumbnail vertically into the flesh and essentially open out the olive like a butterflied cut of meat. Also in the olive jar are little fennel seeds and a single small strip of orange peel, which I leave on the chopping board with the olive pits. Blackened brine accumulates under my fingernails and gradually this begins to sting.
On the road out of my village there are currently three dead crows at various stages of decomposition; jet black lumps with their wings spread optimistically outward along old tarmac. Wings spread, the olives peel back and spit out their pits – without their old skeletons they are hollow bodies that slot into one another. A passage I recently read in Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic recalls mistakenly picking up a dead crow in the garden, guts to the wind, mistakenly believing it was a glistening plum. This is sort of like the vanitas paintings I studied at school, all glamorously rotting fruit with bones.
The tapenade is a dark dusty purple black, not as jet-black as the crows. In with the olives goes a tablespoon of capers and a teaspoon of red wine vinegar, two small anchovy fillets, a few sprigs of thyme and a crack or two of black pepper. It pulps up in the blender in seconds, pulverising the butterflied olives with the rest of the ingredients into a gritty paste.
I do all the cooking in the wrong order, leaving large coins of courgette, crescents of red onion and red pepper to roast almost entirely with a shake or two of olive oil and a few cloves of garlic, before starting the tapenade. Working with the olives takes a long time and I don’t want to touch anything else with my briney fingers, so the water for gnocchi doesn’t go on to boil until after the tapenade is decanted into two small jars, sampled with a long handled spoon for good measure. I check on the veg, which is juicy and shrunken, and then the water’s boiling. I cook the gnocchi for just a minute before chucking the whole lot in with the roasted veg and coating in the tapenade. I roast this off for another fifteen minutes, grate some parmesan on top; let the salty brine and sweet vegetables coat my tongue entirely, whilst the plums in the fruit bowl wrinkle and the crows in the road melt to tar.
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.