Cranes at half mast in honour of Churchill's funeral barge

‘The [winding] sheet had traditionally been made of linen, like Jesus’ shroud, but a law of 1666 ordered that they be made of wool to help boost the textile industry’

Owen Davies, The Haunted (2007)

Pasta: the product of a simple and wonderful chemical reaction between egg and flour. It has vast culinary potential, accommodating both delicately refined flavours and bold, rustic sauces. It can be a warm and homely meal in itself, or an elegant, tantalising starter. Choose a shape to fit your mood, a sauce for your temperament. Made well, it is delicious, and surely one of the most joyfully simple and satisfying foods. Made badly, it becomes gelatinous, limp, and reminiscent of school dinners thrown under the table or infuriating restaurant experiences which make you wonder why you bother eating out at all. It is the basis of Italian family cooking and eating, and a staple that has been around for centuries. It is the student’s refuge from baked beans on toast, the athlete’s energy-fuelled sustenance or the foodie’s mopping fodder for a delicious lobster bisque.

As a cook, you surely can’t help feeling smug as you say,

“Sure, I make my own pasta.”

“Without a pasta machine?”

“I like a challenge.”

N.B. This exact scenario hasn’t yet presented itself to me, but I look forward to its arrival with glee. It must be said that making pasta for the first time is an important step in your culinary life, and is something to which you will be able to return again and again, in ever varying forms. It is a rewarding and enjoyably hands on process, and an example of one the most basic, yet somehow miraculous chemical reactions between two basic ingredients.

I am not going to pretend that this recipe is quick. But it is relatively simple, and incredibly cheap to prepare. Not to mention IMPRESSIVE (and what else matters?) Be prepared to get messy, medieval, and a little bit hot and sweaty. An apron is essential, and it’s probably not a good idea to have anyone too OCD around, as flour will, inevitably, get everywhere.

Roasted butternut squash ravioli with sage butter

Ingredients

For the filling

A whole butternut squash, halved and deseeded

Olive oil

A mixture of herbs

Several cloves of garlic

Nutmeg

2/3 tablespoons mascarpone

For the pasta

600g Tipo “00” flour (or plain, if you can’t get it)

6 large egg yolks, beaten

One egg, beaten, for sticking the ravioli

For the sage butter

50g unsalted butter

A handful of fresh sage leaves

1. First, put the squash into a 180 degree preheated oven to bake. Season with salt, pepper, olive oil, herbs (sage/basil/rosemary) and put some whole garlic cloves in the seed cavity. Cook for 40 minutes, or until really soft and tender.

2. For the pasta: start by heaping the flour onto a large, clean worktop space. Make a little well in the middle, and pour in some of the egg yolk. Your aim is to slowly combine all the yolk mixture with the flour, little by little, well by well. Use the tips of your fingers to mix the flour and egg, and as you create the little balls of dough, separate these from the rest of the flour, so you can create a new well and add some more egg. You should have just enough egg to get through the whole pile of flour.

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3. Combine all the pieces of dough into one big lump, using your hands to bind all of the sections together into one, smooth whole.

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4. Now comes the workout – KNEADING. Ideal for help with anger management, pent up aggression, tension, bingo wings, inadequate biceps and basketball training. Be as inventive as you like – throw it, squeeze it, beat it, fist it, maybe even chuck it a wall or two for good measure (make sure you throw it hard enough that it STICKS to the wall and doesn’t fall onto the floor. Maybe clean the floor first in case). Technically speaking, you’re trying to develop the gluten in the flour, which is what should give the finished pasta its al dente elasticity. You will feel a difference in the dough when it’s “done”; instead of feeling floury and stiff, it will become very soft and pliable. A bit like silly putty. Next, wrap up the dough tightly in cling film, and leave it to rest in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Essential listening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVJFQkPkCg

5. Once your squash is cooked, peel off the skin and the garlic cloves, and use a fork to mash it all into a paste. Add a knob of butter, a good grating of nutmeg, a couple of tablespoons of mascarpone and more seasoning to taste.

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6. When you are ready to roll out your pasta, lightly flour a large area of your worktop. If you’re rolling it by hand, you’ll need to do it in several batches, taking a roughly orange-sized ball each time. Now, this takes patience. For ravioli, the pasta should be especially thin  – so much so that you should be able to see through it. Keep turning the dough and re-flowering the surface so it doesn’t stick. The raw dough has an amazing elastic quality – even when it is paper thin, it will hold together without tearing, so you don’t need to be too careful with it. After several turns and much sweat over the rolling pin, you should have a nice, thin sheet of pasta, ready to cut into your desired shape. Unfortunately, pasta dries out extremely fast, so you need to cut it as quickly as possible, to keep it from shrinking up. I didn’t know the trick at the time (hence why our little parcels nay have been SLIGHTLY thicker than desired), but if you keep a damp tea towel over the pasta sheets before you cook them this will help  maintain moisture.

Listening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgeI0NeOjhI >>>   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtmsIq0-T54

7. Use a small, sharp knife to cut your sheet of dough into a grid of squares (roughly 6 x 6cm). Place a teaspoon full of the squash mixture onto one of the squares, then dab some beaten egg mixture all the way around the edge. Take another square of the same size, and, placing it on top of the filling, working from the inside out and trying to avoid trapping any air inside the parcel, seal the square tightly on all sides. If you can squeeze all of the air out, this really helps things along in the cooking process; any pockets of air will only expand once you boil the pasta, causing all manner of explosions and lost fillings. Place the finished parcels on grease-proof paper, and under a damp tea towel. Around the edges of your rolled out sheets, you might find that circular moulds fit better, or lead to less wastage. Feel free to be creative with your ravioli shapes – nobody likes a square. By all means keep the scrappy off-cuts cook them up with everything else at the end.

Keep repeating this process until you have worked your way through all the dough. These quantities should give you enough to feed about six people.

8. Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil. Gently place the ravioli in the water, bring back to the boil and then simmer gently for about 6 minutes, or until tender (the cooking time will depend on how thinly you managed to roll your dough…prizes to the fastest cooking .

time).

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9. While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter in a small frying pan, and when it is hot, throw in the sage leaves to make them nice and crispy. Remove the ravioli from the pan using a slotted spoon. To serve, pour the sage butter, with leaves, over the pasta, and supply a generous helping of sea salt, ground black pepper and grated parmesan.

R.B. Kitaj, After Rembrandt, 2000, pastel and charcoal on post-it

No more the humble post-it: Kitaj’s drawing on a post-it set a world record by selling for £640 at an internet auction in December 2000. The auction was held by post-it manufacturer 3M in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the invention of the post-it note. A happy birthday.

6 Windmill Row is Phoebe’s home as well as her exhibition space, and this switch between public/private space suits her recent paintings – interior landscapes. Inside, canvases stretch from floor to ceiling (interspersed with new sculptures of heads, as if they’ve tumbled down from a nave, besides mirrors, coat hooks, a dining table, sofa and kitchen). They picture a defiant, baroque jumble of curiosities and experiences. The family drawing room might be a starting point, or a courtyard in Kensington Palace, or an Indian mountainside, but these are superimposed with other things…

King Mausol and Anna in KP, 2010

Oil on canvas

Image courtesy of the artist

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Dorothy Feaver Do you imagine a final picture at the outset of a painting? How do you get to that point – through preliminary sketches or do you work straight onto canvas?

Phoebe Cope Of course I know the subject I want to envisage. I know when I want to have a large internal space with Victorian features, and definitely not a vase of daffodils. Halfway through the painting however I might suddenly think to add that very thing I didn’t want and so my intention is liable to fundamentally change throughout a painting. It is a strange thing to pull images out of your head as there is never an end to what you find. And yet at the same time it is always the same, i.e. my marks and my idiom are purely me and no-one else and it always has had that same character, which was essentially formed in my early teens. I paint directly onto the canvas after having collected many drawings. Decisions about composition are arrived at in a bombastic process of surprise, a guerrilla style attack – precariously, accidentally and without sanctioning.

DF So from drawing to painting, and then to sculpture, do you see these as sequential stepping stones? You seem to be messing up the order, i.e. your new sculptures are reappearing in paintings. It’s as if the drawings and sculpture both act as models for the paintings, as if you are working around an idea in 3d before committing it to a 2d painting….

PC I don’t think it has to be sequential. It is all just under that one umbrella of disegno, measuring with the eye to delineate planes and forms on any given surface. I am amazed at how much longer it takes to realize something in 3d. Otherwise I would do a lot more. Painting is the quickest and easiest for me – using large blocks of colour which have an instantly emotive result. Drawing, especially in pencil, can be tricky and hard work. Yet without it you can’t manage the other two disciplines. I use anything near to me in my work; heads are significant things to have in a painting as we always try to read or recognize them. So it is a just a simple device. I would use any sculpture of heads at hand – my own as well as ones in museums.

DF And the way you wrangle with perspective is a particularly muscly kind of measuring with the eye, but also recently it’s been making room for fantastical combinations of things seen and experienced. Is it the original view that triggers off those associations?

PC I am responding to a place usually to show my elation or exaltation at being there. Painting by its nature though is a pretense and illusion. My particular way is to grasp the things that occur to me first and foremost and run with it. Like a flight of fancy, with as much nonsense and free association as I find plausible.

DF You have a notoriously hardy approach to painting en plein air…this same attitude seems to be applied back to your interiors. There is nothing sheltered or cosy or refined about them – it is as if you were turning the indoors outdoors. In King Mausol and Anna in KP the interior courtyard has the play on outdoor/indoor exaggerated by the dramatic way that plush museum walls suddenly twist against themselves into a set of rooves… In Lothario Leaning Over a Verandah there’s a hallucinatory drawing room bedded into the gargantuan landscape.

PC Yes I do like to do that. As I said in the beginning I often change my intention to subvert any notion that the painting is set at one time in one place. Being lodged in one time and place is the unreal. It is actually more real to be in several times and places at a given moment. I want to make a snapshot of this reality instead, truer to how it really is to exist. Sure, we don’t always think of the things I am proposing, these museums and mountains, but I just thought they are the kinds of quintessential places where one might take a snapshot of if one had a camera, so those are the places I chose.

DF Those paintings are very layered – at what point do you stop adding times and places?

PC I would keep adding until I realize the image is apparent and any more might undo its clarity.

DF Your pictures feature lots of other pictures, such as the National Gallery greats along the wall of the KP picture, or your mothers’ work on the walls of The Drawing Room Shankill 2007. Are these pieces noted especially, as some people might collect stamps in a passport?

PC It’s a combination of gathering souvenirs, like a tourist on holiday, and also using what’s in proximity, such as my mother’s work, a close and easy target. Essentially, a rendition of mine is going to be critical, it is going to say: hey look at this, isn’t it funny, irksome or amazing? I cannot comment in words alone because basically I can only respond to those images and life in general with the same ammunition – with images and some life, chat and exuberance of my own.

Toilet, Brooklyn 2005

Of the sterile cleanliness of Western toilets, white and tiled, [Jun’ichiro] Tanizaki writes “what need is there to remind us so forcefully of the issue of our own bodies [?]”

In the toilet Tanizaki imagines, the body disappears, is absorbed into the architecture and environment determined by the liminality of the toilet… In the toilet’s intimate space, the place where the body performs its most essential activities, the body is lost….

Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005)

In order to contextualize the long and sometimes fierce battle to provide public conveniences for women, I’ve been trying to learn more about how and where British women relieved themselves before lavatories became a feature of the Victorian streetscape. Such information is hard to come by…

Barbara Penner (author of ‘A World of Unmentionable Suffering: Women’s Public Conveniences in Victorian London’), ‘Researching Female Public Toilets: Gendered Spaces, Disciplinary Limits’ (2005)

Meret Oppenheim, X-Ray (1964)

Despite his sideswipe at the occultists, H.J.W. Dam’s article in McClure’s Magazine, which brought off the scoop of a visit to the laboratory of the retiring Röntgen, did its best to present his subject as a kind of magnetic magus, an adept of the force he has discovered: ‘his long, dark hair stood straight up from his forehead, as if he were permanently electrified by his own enthusiasm… His eyes are kind, quick, and penetrating’ (Dam 1896, 410). Dam was allowed to sit in the dark in Röntgen’s isolation box and see the effect of the X-rays for himself. His description evokes the thrills of the séance:

“The moment the current passed, the paper began to glow. A yellowish-green light spread all over its surface in clouds, waves, and flashes. The yellow-green luminescence, all the stranger and stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting, and uncanny. The metal plate seemed to offer no appreciable resistance to the flying force, and the light was as rich and full as if nothing lay between the paper and the tube.” (Dam 1896, 412)

Steven Connor, ‘Pregnable of Eye: X-Rays, Vision and Magic’ (2008)

Napoleon and the Sphinx (Jean León Gérôme, 1868)

Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (Federico Fellini, 1976)

]]> http://www.murdofleur.org/post-its/post-it-notes/5431/feed 0 http://www.murdofleur.org/post-its/post-it-notes/5434 http://www.murdofleur.org/post-its/post-it-notes/5434#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:53:46 +0000 Robert Gallagher http://www.murdofleur.org/?p=5434 From Wilhelmsplatz an arriving diplomat drove through great gates into a court of honour. By way of an outside staircase he first entered a medium-sized reception room from which double doors almost seventeen feet high opened into a large hall clad in mosaic. He then ascended several steps, passed through a round room with domed ceiling, and saw before him a gallery 480 feet (150 m) long. Hitler was particularly impressed by my gallery because it was twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

Hitler was delighted: “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” During the next several months he asked to see the plans again and again but interfered remarkably little in this building, even though it was designed for him personally. He let me work freely.

Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970)