Hello! This week we’re really looking forward to having Cornelius Prior writing for the Gazette, with accompanying paintings by Klaussie Williams.
Cornelius Prior (they/them): I’m a writer and an editor in the cultural sector. I write about books, homosexuality, cities, and occasionally art and moving image.
Klaussie Williams (she/her): I’m an artist and bookseller. I make abstract water colours, book jacket illustrations, and draw the places and things I like.
Here’s the first post of sickbed food.
Enjoy,
Kate and Sinae
Preamble
I had plans for this newsletter that were incompatible with the plans coronavirus had for me, so instead of writing about decadent weekend eating, pre-exhibition sustenance, exhibition-recovery snacks, and food cooked for loved ones I suppose I will be writing from isolation about sickbed food, about food that I enjoy or can muster the energy to make when I’m ill. The only unchanged part of the plan is the collaborative element. Klaus, my partner, is across the road in the home we habitually share, and is, as you will see, busy abstracting my meals into beautiful, colourful grids.
Sickbed food: day one
It’s Palm Sunday, the first day of holy week, and the church bells are coming in loud through the window. I wake from a dream in which me, my partner, and my friend’s partner are in bed together to find that I am extremely hungry. I am ready to drink some coffee and eat a horse. A while ago now Klaus and I went to stay with our friends Rebecca and Sam and on both of the mornings we woke up there, they poured us coffee from a yellow enamel coffee pot. I—someone who has, instead of replacing the broken glass pouring jug, for months been using a small flower vase to make my morning filter coffee—quickly came to covet the elegant pot with its long spout. Sam, as if he knew something about me, told me I could even put it back on the hob to reheat coffee that had been forgotten and left to go cold. Ours is red and it arrived yesterday and, as I feed my starter, Klaus makes coffee in it.
I eyeball the measurements because the kitchen scale is out. Some people are very precise about every element of their home sourdough production and buy expensive equipment in an effort to stamp out inefficiencies and perceived imperfections in the bread-making process. I do like experimenting, using different flours, trying new folding techniques to strengthen the gluten and so on, but the project management approach to bread-making has always to me sounded like more hard work than three ingredients really necessitate. For me, a big part of sourdough’s appeal is how forgiving it is. I prefer feeding my starter with rye or wholemeal flour because I think it works and tastes better but I’ve not had either of those flours in for a while, so I use strong white. I try to feed my starter at roughly the same time everyday, at the same time I feed the cats, but sometimes I forget and leave it on the windowsill for a day or two until it develops a bit of a skin. Sometimes I pre-shape the dough, bench rest it, and do the final shaping and sometimes I bung it in the banneton whenever I feel like it. It’s almost always been fine. Once I started thinking of making bread as more of a collaboration between me and the yeast—which seems to change with the weather, the barometric pressure, the temperature, and probably the phases of the moon—than the pursuit of perfection, I could give up the illusion of control and enjoy the simplicity and joy of making and eating bread. That moment of anticipation before taking the lid off the dutch oven, the smell rising through the house, warmth wibbling in a shaft of light.
We are going to watch the football at Skehan’s later, so I take an LFT, pick up my coffee and watch a thick line appear where it should and a faint line appear where it shouldn’t. Fuck. I toast and burn a hot cross bun, slather it with butter and eat it. Shit. For the first two years of the pandemic, though I was very anxious, I didn’t have a single dream I could confidently say was ‘about’ covid but recently I’ve been having dreams littered with positive LFTs every few days. In the dreams, I always experience a surge of nausea so strong I can still recall it the next day, like copper on the tongue and the feeling of uneasiness unfurling in the pit of my stomach. I am always in some suboptimal experience or place like a crowded club or Stratford. In my waking life, here, today, I mostly feel annoyed and I’d be lying if I said something like apprehension hadn’t pulled at one of my strings, but I’m alright. I have a plan. I let the people who need to know know. I post about it on twitter because I want people to make a little fuss over me (at a distance). A friend who lives across the road is in Australia visiting her family so her flat is vacant. I pack my bags and make my way over.
[hot cross bun]
Once installed there, I water the plants with one hand, eat an ice lolly with the other, and ponder my options. I had plans to meet a dear friend who is in town on Monday and who I’ve seen once, for a single hour, in the past two and a half years. I took off work. We were going to go to an exhibition or two, have cider and eat chips. I wanted to find us somewhere that uses a quarter of focaccia, sliced through the middle, to sandwich an array of fillings. I planned to include what we ate together in this diary. I had plans to cook something elaborate for friends, a practice I newly enjoy. I wanted to put plump green olives in small dishes and listen to snippets of living room conversations while I cooked. I had plans to wear a mesh vest to the club on Friday and see what post-clubbing alimentation would call out to me in the early hours. Now what? Half of the ice lolly I am eating falls to the floor while I am watering a plant called Mother in Law’s Tongue. Today is not my day. I struggle through a job application before the fog I can sense on my mind’s horizon rolls in and settles. I decant last night’s cabbage and potato soup into a pan and heat it until it’s bubbling at the edges.
[cabbage soup]
I suppose I will spend this week writing about sickbed food: noodles, broths, biscuits, satsumas, lemons, ginger, spice. This soup, for instance, which probably due to its associations with 90s diet culture seems abstemious, appropriately lenten, but is actually pure comfort: filling, generously salty, and sufficiently spicy to feel medicinal. It’s not ideal, all of this, not what I’d have planned and certainly not what I’d have liked, but not not worth writing about, either.
[ramen]
YESSS