Single shots: Henry VIII and his wives teapot

Dawn spreads its amber on the waters of the Thames on the morning of Catherine Howard’s execution. She looks pale, on the verge of fainting as she climbs the steps to the scaffold. Dark crescents under her eyes betray a sleepless night spent in morbid ritual: she is said to have practised placing her neck on the chopping block brought to her cell at her request. She has been helped up to the spot of her death but clings on to a macabre version of courtly propriety by tremulously proclaiming her punishment “worthy and just” before execution. Her soon to be widower, Henry VIII, is not there to witness her act of contrition, having sunk into morbidity and bouts of overeating in the wake of her persecution and trial.

It is exhausting to be a monarch of such unyielding will. It is trying to stand on the right shoulder of God where you were perched by divine law upon birth: the weary loneliness and the precipitous fall nobody can ever share with you. Everything looks like treason from that height. How many wives must be confined, capitally dismembered, or simply dismissed to quench this thirst for the absolute certainty of glory and succession?

Catherine Howard, like Anne Boleyn before her, is ultimately sacrificed at the altar of Henry’s boundless vanity. All for nothing: God will make sport of Henry’s desire for a male heir by killing his only son and successor, Edward VI, aged fifteen. A pubescent corpse before the Virgin Queen takes to the throne.

Tea will only arrive in England a handful of years after Elizabeth’s death in 1603.

So:

Catherine had to endure the chill of a February morning at the scaffold without its comforting stirrings.

Anne, before her, was shunned and shattered like glass by her king in ignorance of its reddish translucency, which might have reminded her of the colour of the hair of both her predecessor, Catherine of Aragon, and her successor, Jane Seymour.

Henry could not distract his gout nor warm the gloom in his spirits with its steam.

Its aromatic bitterness never touched the parched lips of Edward as he succumbed to a fever.

It is not hard to imagine Catherine Parr, tight lipped and plump chested, nestling a cup of tea in her ivory fingers on the day of His Majesty’s burial. Yet this did not happen either.

The fragments of the story of Henry VIII and his many wives would make for macabre panels on this ceramic teapot if this teapot had not done what history is wont to do: consign cruelty to its cursory place; turn the tyrant into a quaint relic; blend barbarity and civilisation like you would the finest tea leaves from China in a porcelain pot.

Single shots: prawns

One afternoon you think that you are grilling prawns, the whiff of brine and salty smoke invades the kitchen and your nose. Then you look down and you take in the choreographed massacre on the pan. Bodies transfixed by fire pile up glistening like the corpses of soldiers at the battle of Thermopylae. You have become one of the cruel all seeing gods of Ancient Greece. For a moment you toy with the idea of turning the dead into a glittering constellation in a distant galaxy.

Never mind beauty and pain: with a faint turn of your wrist you toss them one more time over the fire. Now you are ready to devour them.

You are how you cook: nouns and verbs

As I explain at the end of this post I sat down to write something else: an inoffensive post about a recipe from my grandmother’s village. That post took an unexpected detour into family history but also Spanish history and politics. I hope you will be able to read the love between the lines, but also the anger. The anger will explain the terrifying photograph of small children doing the fascist salute as they visit their incarcerated Republican fathers in jail in 1939. I find it so upsetting that I almost censored myself. I now realise that news about the possible discovery of the location of Lorca’s unmarked grave have stirred me.

For someone who has spent the last year assiduously thinking and writing about food and its cultural purchase I have very little interest in recipe books. I wonder why this is: I do like books and food as separate items. I don’t have a problem with the aspirational consumption masquerading as creation they embody. The same thing can be said about books about design and, in fact, most coffee table books and I love those. I used to live with a friend who treasured them: they lined the wall of the kitchen we shared. They were as a rule sturdily yet lavishly put together: thick covers, inventive fonts and layout, expensively lit and studiously composed shots. Yet not even once did I cook following their recipes. I suspect my parents and their own disinterest in cookery books may be behind my own.

I think of their approach to cooking and I realise that it reflects their character, their gender, their age. My father, like most men of his generation in Spain, is an occasion cook. He will prepare the roast lamb we invariably eat on Christmas Eve. He makes a fabulously colourful seafood salad filled to the brim with prawns, mussels, crab, and tuna when he wants to fete friends: the salad reflects his largesse. This material generosity is reflective of his character and attitude to life: he is a man of deeds rather than words. Love walks the walk with him. It also goes beyond his individual history and temper: most Spaniards of his generation pile food on their tables out of an anxiety born out of early deprivation. Madridians like my father grew up in a grey city haunted by a Civil War that had barely ended when they were born. Misery and squalor hollowed the stomachs and starved the spirit of its working class. A fried egg was a Sunday treasure; children plucked the leaves of a tree tellingly known as “pan y quesillo” (“bread and cheese”) and stuffed them in their mouths to stave off hunger; a handful of marzipan figurines were the only present received on the day of the Epiphany. These children were used to the smell of fried innards wafting from corner bars; rarely had proper chocolate; were given a bright orange “American cheese” that came in aid packages. So older Spanish men show their prosperity with their well-stocked larders and generously furnished dinner tables.

My mother, by contrast, although never ungenerous, is thrifty and riffs like a Jazz musician in her daily shopping. She leaves the house to buy hake and comes back with keenly priced steak after extracting a solemn promise that she will not be disappointed and a couple of chorizo sausages from the butcher. She brings marvellously unexpected combinations of fruits: a pineapple that bursts in your mouth sweet and sourly, bags of mahogany chestnuts, pomegranates that she patiently deseeds until her fingers are tainted red and wrinkled. How could she have any interest in the tyrannies of recipe books full of unheard of spices and cream? Memory, necessity, and pleasure, dosed measure by measure, inform her cooking. These cannot be found in print anywhere.

When it comes to food, my parents speak a language that is all nouns and verbs. There are no adjectives: they will never subtitle their dishes in brackets. Food hits the stomach and the palate with a forceful thud. Ingredients transition from counter to pan and then on to table with admirable integrity: an honest steak, roughly chopped then freshly grilled vegetables, a piece of fruit that you peel at the table.

Today I sat down to write a recipe from my grandmother’s village: I was going to dissect it and for once give you what most expect from a food blog. Another time. I now live in another country: I am not my grandmother, or even my mother; I am a woman of another time that speaks another language groping in the darkness of food memory and culture. The book that can guide me has not been published.

I would not kick him out of bed for eating crisps

And by golly, you’d be right. In the Renaissance that is, since potatoes were considered an aphrodisiac by doctors when they were first imported from America.

More about spud studs and the relationship between culture, history and food in this episode of Melvyn Bragg’s erudite and criminally addictive In Our Time.

Oh, and speaking about food, you will never hear a plummier accent than historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s, you could make a cake with it.