Tarragon Tales

I have been nurturing tarragon for over a year since I bought my first small plant in spring. Last summer I could pick only very small amounts, but the plant I nursed then is getting much bigger this year in its earthenware pot. I've also planted three new seedlings directly into the garden bed and they are doing well. Hopefully I will have a bed of tarragon one summer soon.

The plant dies completely away in winter. As autumn comes in and the cold weather begins to accumulate the plant is reduced to sparse sticks with fewer and fewer of shiny green leaves. Then it disappears. This tendency to disappear caused Mark Crick to portray the herb as an 'aristocrat' in his very amusing book The Household Tips of the Great Writers (Granta Books, 2012).

In that book tarragon appears in his parody of Pride and Prejudice. The herb is likened to the aristocrats from Netherfield who disappear to more pleasant climes, Bath perhaps, in the winter months, leaving the poor Barrett girls and their mother bereft in their hopes of finding suitable marriage partners. When it does show up,the herb is praised for its sublime flavours, much loved by cooks, and Crick suggests poached eggs with fresh tarragon as a nice dish. I agree. Eggs poached or boiled and scattered with tarragon are lovely.

I took the recipe one step further  to produce Eggs with tomatoes and tarragon.

Thus: cook up a thick tomato sauce with onions, garlic and tomatoes. You could save a small quantity from any tomato sauce you make for pasta and so on.
Put three or four tablespoons of your thick tomato sauce into a wide pan (I use a frying pan) and heat it through without drying it out.
Create a space in the middle of the sauce and break an egg into it. Continue heating slowly until the egg is cooked to your liking. When almost cooked sprinkle the egg with finely chopped tarragon leaves.

Serve on hot buttered toast.

Flaubert Reading Spree

Keen readers know the joy of mining a deep seam of interest in a topic as we move from one lead to another, books leading on from one to another. I had this experience recently with the French master, Gustave Flaubert. I started by re-reading Madame Bovary, Flaubert's most famous novel. I read it in a new translation by Lydia Davis and it was a revelation. I had read the book many years ago and was swept up then by the strength of the marvellous story, but my new reading brought me to a much greater appreciation of Flaubert's brilliant writing style and I wanted to know more about the author.

Flaubert (1821 - 1880), lived and died more or less on the same piece of ground in and around the French city of Rouen. He spent most of his adult life living quietly with his mother, niece and their various housekeepers in their large house beside the River Seine at Croisset, just outside Rouen. He needed quietness and solitude to compose his great works of literature, but he also, from time to time, bit sharply into the big apple of friendship, love, cosmopolitanism and travel.

While he had a great capacity for friendship and was loved by women, Flaubert hated the idea of marriage or of anything, the career in law that he was expected to enter for instance, that would fix him into the cement of a bourgeois existence . He loathed bourgeois values and views which he contrasted with his own beliefs in the value of art and the life of the artist. 

Those beliefs come out in all his novels where he lampoons human stupidity with great delight while he lingers over the exact description he wants to create. As he wrote of his slow, painstaking way of composing:

'May I die like a dog rather than hurry by a single second a sentence that isn't ripe.' 

Flaubert's letters are an absolute joy to read though not very easy to obtain. Luckily my local regional library still has Volume 1 of the Letters, edited by Francis Steegmuller, a great Flaubert scholar. I am yet to find a copy of Volume 2 and may have to read it in the State Library. However, the letters are full of the most tantalising ideas about art and life with Flaubert's dark, but amused, view of humanity's follies being very apparent.

He was not at all impressed by the idea of 'progress' and indeed his rejection of any such idea is a big theme in his books, including Madame Bovary. He hated the railways that set up during his lifetime, believing that they would only enable people to move around more,meet, and be stupid together.  One can only imagine his disgust at our modern, frantic, moving around. No doubt the advent of tweeting, messaging, and blogging, would have appalled him deeply.

On the bedside table

I have a big stack of books on the bedside table, some read some unread. I'm sorting them out today. This is the list:

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte. This book has been on the table since mid last year when I finished reading it, inspired by seeing the new film. What a wonderful novel it is.

The Conformist, a novel by the Italian writer Alberto Moravia. First published in 1951, the copy I'm reading is an American paperback published by Steerforth Italia, Vermont, U.S. in 1999. I'm reading this to prepare for viewing the film later this term (The Conformist directed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970). I've started on the novel and find it fairly slow-going so far; not a difficult read but rather flat and schematic.

State of Wonder (2011) by the American, Ann Patchett. Boy can she spin a yarn! Great female characters and a terrific story. Can't wait to read more of her books. This book has to be returned to the library.

Also borrowed from the library:

Reading Madame Bovary (2010), a collection of short fiction by Amanda Lohrey. Strong stories with interesting themes. I'm still dipping into this one.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. This famous novel was first published in 1856. I first read it decades ago and I'm looking forward to reading the new translation by Lydia Davis (2010).

Other books I can now return to the shelves are The Acolyte (1972), a novel by Thea Astley and Minitudes (2000) a book of diary entries for the period 1974 - 1997 by Barry Oakley.

Meanwhile I continue to dip into Cold Mountain Poems, the poems of Han Shan in a lovely edition by Shambala Publications.

There, I have cleared up the bedside table muddle. Now there's room for a few more books.