Cakes and Home-bakes

 The kindness of strangers 

The coffee walnut cake in this photo was made for us by a total stranger.  Thank you Maggie of Duntroon B&B in Nairn. She made this just because I told her on the phone when I booked that it was a wedding trip.

Some of the best people love to bake - sadly, many others are frightened of cake. 

Cake-oholics have such a strong desire to scoff the lot that they are unhappy around home bakes. Writing workshops focusing on food can be fraught with dangers as relationships with food seem to be dysfunctional in so many people. (But that's not a subject for a cheery blog post.)

BUT in Scotland there is still much enthusiasm and I've made friends and connections owing to the marvellous female freemasonary of baking.  In the Town Hall cafe in Oldmeldrum a friendly lady exhorted us to visit Delgatie Castle as it had won an award for the Best Home Bakes recently. The splendid Town Hall cafe is run by a group of volunteers and is always full of grateful customers. In winter here many things shut down but not these small local centres of cake-centred excellence. Delgatie Castle's Laird's Kitchen is open all year round and this little castle is run by another group of enthusiastic women as the Castle is now a private Trust and kept alive by those who value it.

On Radio 3 the other morning I was surprised to hear Fraserburgh (a local town) mentioned - a woman had phoned in about being proactive in music education.  She said it was no use waiting on the vagaries of unreliable governments and that we should create the things we want for our communities ourselves. I suspect that her musical education initiative involves cake in some way.

It seems that for many communities home bakes are a way of bringing people together and making them feel good. Here's a quotation from another local business based in Banff - Spindrift Studio bookshop and cafe -  "for Writers and Readers and Lovers of Cake". I am still looking for a grown-up poem about the value of cake - so many are childish and don't explain the appeal for adults.  Michael Rosen's Chocolate Cake was written for children but has its darker side. Link below. 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/michael-rosen-chocolate-cake/8833.html

The New Ground Gallery and Tea Room here in Gardenstown also deserves a mention for providing us with marvellous gluten-free cakes so that everyone can enjoy them (you'd never know).


Displacement Activity
For many writers baking is a creative substitute - we make a lot of cakes before settling down to write . It sure beats cleaning. 

There are many recipe poems

You may want to have a try at one.  Using the language of recipes, especially the verbs, can be very effective: fold, mix, blend, add, stir, combine, whisk, shape, cut, paint, decorate, smooth, taste ....

Also CAKE is a four letter word that is a good basis for acrostic poems. 

Copyright prevents me from including some poems here and it's good to respect the need of poets to make a living.

But here's a snatch from a poem I love and have used often in workshops:

Eating Poetry

BY MARK STRAND

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

There is currently a news item that claims German Stollen has become more popular than Traditional British Christmas cake. I don't have a problem with this as it means we can have both.  We can have our cake and eat it and then eat another. 

  

Dresden’s Christmas market was mentioned in the chronicles for the first time in 1474. The tradition of baking Christmas Stollen in Dresden is very old. Christmas Stollen in Dresden was already baked in the 15th century.

In 1560 the bakers of Dresden offered the rulers of Saxony Christmas Stollen weighing 36 pounds each as gift, and the custom continued. Augustus II the Strong (1670 –1733) was the Elector of Saxony, King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania. The King loved pomp, luxury, splendour and feasts. In 1730 he impressed his subjects, ordering the Bakers’ Guild of Dresden to make a giant 1.7-tonne Stollen, big enough for everyone to have a portion to eat. There were around 24,000 guests who were taking part in the festivities on the occasion of the legendary amusement festivity known as Zeithainer Lustlager. For this special occasion, the court architect Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann (1662-1737), built a particularly oversize Stollen oven.  An oversized Stollen Knife also had been designed solely for this occasion.

 Don't you love the idea of a giant community cake with its own oversized knife?

Scottish Christmas Cake 

A particular  favourite of many is the traditional Scottish Christmas cake, the Whisky Dundee. As the name implies, the cake originated in Dundee and is made with Scotch Whisky.  

In England we're more used to this sort of thing and as it's my last blog before Christmas...

You may need to know the names of those reindeer.....

NOW, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!

On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!

Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

The Night Before Christmas

by Clement C. Moore  (1779 - 1863)

Happy New Year!

I want to add the name of a friend here.  I am writing this postscript in April and want to remember and celebrate another doyenne of home-baking, my friend Yvette Sutton who died on 17th April. Yvette had many other talents too but cake making gave her much pleasure and later on she turned a hobby into a business.  She will be missed by all who were lucky enough to know her. 

Cormorant or Shag?

To begin with a remarkable poem:

Amazingly this is attributed to Christopher Isherwood who was not Scottish and not known for humour and whimsy but he did write an excellent nonsense poem about the cormorant (or shag):

The common cormorant or shag
Lays eggs inside a paper bag.                                            
The reason you will see, no doubt,
It is to keep the lightning out.
But what these unobservant birds
Have never noticed is that herds
Of wandering bears may come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.

I think the photo at the beginning is of a cormorant - it looks like a totem pole feature and stands about seeming to air its wings.  The shag, as we all know, has a tuft on its head. The picture below comes from the RSPB so it must be correct. I'm glad we've cleared that one up.

Since I moved here birds have become a bit of a fascination.  There are so many new to me as I've never lived on the coast before. Around here, as well as the famed puffins, we have gulls, gannets and guillemots, terns and turnstones, kittiwakes and cormorants, oyster catchers and eider ducks - in short, dozens of seabirds to entertain us with their eccentricities. The guillemot is one of the most charming and the local ones look like tiny penguins when standing upright. We saw one on the beach but sadly a local fisherman told us it had come inshore to die.  It was a privilege to see one so close up and still (birds will never keep still when one wants to identify them) and he or she was there for a few days and we respected its privacy.

But you are probably bored by birds by now.... They are so hard to identify sometimes - what with the winter plumage, the summer plumage, the eclipse plumage; the juvenile, the male, the female - I don't think I'll ever be a true bird-nerd.  Instead I'll share with you a poem that was inspired by the sheer excitement of watching gannets diving into Gamrie Bay one bright morning:

Gannets

Sally Givertz

  

We sipped our EMT and nibbled

at home-made biscuits

They careened down in diagonal darts

Headstrong, headlong into the

white-capped cobalt sea

Unruffled by the wind that

soughed round the house

and curled the crisp white waves

Straight in headfirst to swim

in their *third element

Snacking on sand eels

Ultra-fresh breakfast

No messing about

We sat in our high bed

Looking out over the bay

Hugging ourselves

  

(third element – they move from earth, to air, to water)

©sallygivertz2013

This link will take you to a YouTube clip of diving gannets:

http://www.arkive.org/gannet/morus-bassanus/video-08a.html

Many Scottish poets have written about birds and you can find some of them on the Scottish Poetry Library website:
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets

So far I have discovered and enjoyed Kathleen Jamie's Ospreys - about their migration journey  and The Roost - which is about rooks and the way they live. I could go on about rooks but I won't - except to say that they get a bad press. They are cheerful and sociable birds. They look very decorative when ruffled by the wind and they have nice trousers.

To end with, a sample of a poem by Robin Robertson called Trumpeter Swan (not a local species as far as I know but he is Scottish):

You can learn how to fly, see all the edges
soften and blur, but you can't hold on
to the height you find
you can never be taught how to fall

I imagine this is a metaphor about the unfortunate aftermath of fame and success.  What do you think?

But I can't end on such a sour note so a postscript is needed: 

The simple Bard, rough at the rustic plough, 
Learning his tuneful trade from ev'ry bough; 
The chanting linnet, or the mellow thrush, 
Hailing the setting sun, sweet, in the green thorn bush; 
The soaring lark, the perching red-breast shrill, 
Or deep-ton'd plovers grey, wild-whistling o'er the hill;

Robert Burns 

1786

My thanks to the "simple Bard".

Moon, June, Speech Balloon

Oh dear! It seems to be cows again.

But there is meaning in all this.  I want to draw your attention to the wonderful work of the Poetry Archive (see link on right of page).  The archive is largely due to the work done by Andrew Motion during his time as Poet Laureate and as well as text contains many voice recordings of poets reading their work.  So we have the opportunity to hear some of the best contemporary Scottish poets reading their poetry with the Caledonian cadences of this part of the world.  

The cow jumping over the moon is to illustrate one of my favourite poems by Scottish poet Imtiaz Dharker. Apart from other things it celebrates the famed fluency of footballers, our love of a good cliché and the originality of the Red Tops. It is hilarious and you can hear it on:

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=14256

You can also hear some of the work of Jackie Kay, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, Robin Robertson and many others.

Two of my favourites are: Lochan by Kathleen Jamie and In My Country by Jackie Kay.

Many poems are about identity and I became curious about the identity of a woman I was reading about in an old local history collection put together in 1968 by a Gamrie preservation group: "a'tween troup heid & gamrie mohr".  One of the records tells of a local woman whose husband, Hamelyn of Troup, died fighting for Edward I in the fourteenth century. 
I felt compelled to write about her:

For Eleyne widow of Hamelyn of Troupe

 "Grant her keep herself and her children a merk a week"

Eleyne, Ellen, Aileen, Eileen, Elena?

Who were you?

Did it compensate for the loss of your man?

Or was he brutal, a drunkard, a mercenary

Who took the King’s shilling and died for his trouble?

Maybe you and the bairns

Were more cheery without him

Free to make noise and laugh

To eat odd things at odd times

Glad of the merk a week

Glad to have his room not his company

Or was the hoosie hollow

Were you bereft and slow-footed

Did the bairns forget to play

And the meals go uncooked

The days seem endless?

Eleyne and your merk a week

Who were you?

   

©Sally Givertz 2013

To end on a cheery note here are some puffins photographed locally.  Who can not be cheered by a puffin?  

Next week I think that the local birds will be making an appearance. 

A'tween Troup Heid and Gamrie Mohr

“a field naturally adapted for fancy to sport in”

If you look carefully at this photo you can seen St John's church - a grey ruin - in the middle distance. 

It is a place of beauty and one can walk up to it from the beach following the line of a little stream, but it has a strange history:

St John's Church

On a high cliff beside Gamrie-mor stands the old Church, said to have been built in 1004. It was dedicated to St John, and, according to tradition, it owed its erection to a vow made by the leader of the Scots in a conflict with the Danes, that if St John gave him the victory this monument of his gratitude would be raised above the foeman's landing-place.

Until the Church became a ruin three skulls were preserved fixed in niches in the wall on the east side of the pulpit. The story is that the defending Scots succeeded in gaining possession of the top of the hill, directly over the Danish main camp, and, by rolling down large stones upon the invaders, obliged them to abandon it and escape by the north-east brow of the hill where many were killed in the fight.

1004 A.D. – Castlehill of Findon/ Den of Afforsk

 “a field naturally adapted for fancy to sport in”  -  (A’tween Troup Heid & Gamrie Mohr 1968.)

  

You and I are sacrilegious in this very

Christian place and yet the thought of Danish invaders

Stabling their horses in the Church of Saint John

Out of spite to the saint favoured by the enemy,

Still shocks.  They regrouped and had another

Set-to with the Scots.  But the Thane had had enough.

So with rolled stones and drawn swords

They bore down on the Danes and

cut them to pieces to a man.

The skulls of the three sacrilegious chieftains

Were set, grinning, in the walls of the church

And the saint had the last, cruel laugh. 

© Sally Givertz 

I have a habit of standing just outside the front door each morning and looking up at St John’s; watching the weather, checking my thermometer and breathing the fresh air. There were rumours that one of the skulls was still on display at the Museum of Banff (MOB) but sadly these are unfounded.  The skulls seem to have been looted and lost but the church still stands and was being used as a burial-place until the last century.  It still holds a certain power - a sort of "stage presence" up on Mohr Head and we are pleased to see it there still. 

Next week I'll focus on some Scottish contemporary poets and the wonderful resource of the Poetry Archive. 

The Friendly Cow ....and other cattle

Is this what you expect?

Well, yes we do get these around here and they are very attractive, but there are so many others too.  All manner of cattle - my favourite herd grazes on a high meadow above Crovie in a shallow dip of land overlooking the sea.  Sadly I didn't get around to photographing them. 

But you are dying to know about the Turra' Coo so I'll put you out of your misery of suspense:

 

The Turra' Coo (The Turiff Cow) is a story about a white cow that was resident in the small Aberdeenshire town of Turriff in north-east Scotland in the early twentieth century which was involved in legal disputes over taxes and health insurance.  This is her centenary year.

Under the Liberal government of the 1910s, the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George made national insurance contributions compulsory by employees for all workers between the ages of 16 and 70, through the National Insurance Act. This caused outrage among the farmers local to Turriff, who claimed that their contributions were too high and that as they were rarely able to be off work due to illness like industrial workers it was unfair for them to have to pay for a service they were unlikely to use.

In Turriff, popular protests were held in the Johnston and Paterson Mart, and Robert Paterson, a Lendrum farmer refused to stamp the insurance cards of his employees. This resulted in orders on 13 December 1913 for Turriff's sheriff George Keith to seize property to the value of £22 from Paterson's farm. However, this was more difficult than it seemed as officers could not move property without local assistance, and the locals refused to help in protest. The only way for Keith to follow his orders was to remove a piece of property which could move by itself, so they chose the Patersons' white milk cow, which was led to Turriff on foot.

The next day, the citizens of Turriff found the cow tied in the village square, decorated in ribbons and painted with the words 'Lendrum to Leeks' in reference to Lloyd George's Welsh origin, and representing the sheriff's and government's victory over the hostile farmers. The cow was put up for auction. The response was a near riot, and a 100-strong mob proceeded to pelt the sheriff's officers with rotten fruit and soot. The cow escaped in the chaos. 

The cow was eventually sold and the local community rallied together to buy back the cow for Lendrum, where the cow died six years later and was buried in a corner of the farmland.

It all provided a running joke at the authorities’ expense and has put the little town of Turriff firmly on the map.  There are even Youtube clips! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdHda8kWXI8

So where's the poetry in all this?

Well, when the cow was returned to Lendrum farm she was re-painted with the defiant words:

Free!! Didn't ye wish that ye were me

And since that splendid day the Turra' Coo (I've yet to learn her name - maybe you can help?) has inspired artists of all descriptions and there are stories, Bothie Ballads, and paintings featuring her.  Local people are very fond of her and her statue is much admired. Many traditions have sprung up and she  garlanded with flowers and notified about our weddings.  We even recite poetry to her.

On our wedding day we took a little trip from Banff to Turriff and I read the romantic lines that I had lovingly crafted earlier. It is an interactive poem and we performed it joyously! Please note the remarkable rhyme-scheme and moving sentiments:

A Weedin’ Vow 

from Sally Gray to Peter Gray on our weedin’ day

Here and now beside this cow

I make a vow

I say to you beside this coo

I will be true

And if you too

Will love me true…

Hold hands and mooooo!

Do you think it might catch on?

Finally a word about how to live and it was penned over a hundred years ago - what would poor W.H.D. think of life today?

W. H. Davies

Leisure

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

from Songs Of Joy and Others (1911)

We do have time to stand and stare and that's one of the great joys of living here. We also have some very charming sheep but I'd better move on to other subject areas in the next blog or I may lose you altogether...

Sally's Scottish Poetry Blog begins....

The beginning is always the hard part. Why blog?

I suppose I want to tell you - my English friends and others -  about north-east Scotland.

A few months ago I had no idea that this place was so full of riches: fertile land, natural beauty, the sort of light and changing skies that bring artists flocking; cheerful and confident people and of course, history. The terrible history of the Highland clearances, of lost communities and the end of the main livelihood of this area - fishing.

But people have adapted - as they always do - and new industries and communities have grown up here with a mood of optimism and good humour.

Poetry will loom large in this blog - you have been warned. Perhaps you will look away now and never come back but that can't be helped...

(I won't include complete poems by living poets as they deserve to maintain their copyright.  I publish extracts that might inspire you to seek them out.)

Kathleen Jamie goes first:

The Creel

Kathleen Jamie (b. 1962) 

(extract)

The world began with a woman,

shawl-happed, stooped under a creel,

whose slow step you recognize

from troubled dreams. You feel

obliged to help bear her burden

from hill or kelp-strewn shore,

........

creel: wicker basket for carrying fish, peat, etc on the back

thirled: enslaved

This poem is worth looking for (it gets more cheerful) and it is both a creation myth and a reminder that we are not as  important as we think we are and that the world will turn without us.  I've decided that hedonism is the way to go now that I am (slightly) older.

Something more colourful to end with...a view of part of my village.  

Seatown, Gardenstown.

Tourism is a major industry for this area and the village comes alive in the summer with visitors from all over the world. The internet has made so many new things possible here. Even Amazon delivers!! Not nearly as remote as you might think.