Fennel, Lentil, Sausage Soup

on making stuff

Here is the elevator pitch: it is going to get cold, we are not putting the heating on this winter, would you like to commit to soup?

I am writing a book at the moment, or trying to, and I can already tell it will feel cold in here this winter. Being a writer in the dark half of the year is an exercise in keeping warm against the odds: an exercise, if done right, as imaginative and interesting as the actual task at hand. Blankets; Uniqlo heat-tech shirts; soup.

It is not actually cold yet– jumper or coat, not both– but still, it’s October, which means it’s as well to be prepared. Also, because making soup is a nice activity. It makes your house feel nice, like you are a mother in a book about the days before the war. Poor, but wholesome. Also the thing about soup is because it does its own thing, at least this one does, you can come to the pot of soup as if you are the child of the mother in a book about the days before the war: when you come back to it, to eat it, it is kind of like you didn’t make it. It is kind of like the house is looking after you, like a kind of safe feeling. Is this depressing? It might be depressing to make dinner and pretend you didn’t, but truly I think most people reading this newsletter understand what I mean.

You dice either two white onions, or four shallots; two celery ribs; four garlic cloves; a bulb of small fennel; and two incredibly old carrots from the bottom of the fridge. The carrots were so old they had taken on this malleable quality, like something tensile. I cut them into slices and then into strips and then into tiny dice, and the slices had this pressed-tofu tightness to them like pieces of silicon rubber. I really liked looking at the slices of elderly carrot; and I also really liked looking at the tiny dice, not just of carrot but of the alliums and aromatics as well. I like to cut stuff very very small, partly for aesthetic but also for textural reasons. Big pieces of onion distress me.

So I fry off the mirepoix, all the vegetables, in absolutely loads of really really nice olive oil, in my big gorgeous teal Le Creuset that I love so much. The thing about the Le Creuset and the reason I mention it by name is that it means more to me than it actually is. Partly this is because it was a present from someone trying to charm me, which worked because now he is my boyfriend. Partly though, it is because Rich gave me the pot because I had spent so much time thinking and talking about the pot. I mean I put it on the front of my books and got the props person to bring one to photograph my food in and I just imagined, basically, in my own mind that my large enamel Sainsburys pot was a big gorgeous teal Le Creuset. I really liked that Sainsburys pot, which is now our bread bin, but I really wanted to make a life where I had this particular teal Le Creuset.

When I have let the vegetables get extremely soft I chop up four big “chorizo-style smoky” sausages and fry them in the same big gorgeous pot too. I put in also like a tablespoon of crushed fennel seeds.

So then this pot is something I imagined in my head and now it is in the kitchen. Which is also, on a short time frame, what is good about cooking; and on a very very long time frame, what is good about books. The gulf from idea to object is very enormous and daunting, no matter how many times you do it.

This is because making an object around your idea is, best case, like trying to build a case for a violin if you had never seen a violin in real life: like trying to build a case for a violin when you have only had a violin described to you by maybe a bright child or a drunk person with strong feelings. I guess it has kind of a long neck that is very very breakable? I guess it has a body that has no inside bit but a beautiful swirly cut out on the front to put the strings over? The swirly cut out is very important, and also it has kind of a twirly in and out part on the sides of the main body bit, so you will need to make a place for the twirly in and out part when you make your case.

Worst case, it is like trying to build a violin from this description.

Worst worst case, it is like hearing the Violin Partita no. 2 in D minor , for example, getting part of it stuck in your head, not being musical enough to sing it to anyone properly, and wandering around trying to invent the violin for yourself so that you can explain to people why this music has taken over your life. Maybe if you invent it good enough, they will also care? Maybe then?

The sausages cook quite fast and then you put in two tins of chopped tomatoes and three tomato-tins of chicken stock. Stir it up, and then I put in about a hundred and fifty grams of lentils. The thing about lentils is that they are extremely nice to weigh up in your hand: a pleasure, a small tactile pleasure of existing in a body. Puy lentils – which is what I was using, YMMV– make me feel very calm because they are so complete: each tiny bit is a unit, a smooth unit. Anyway I stirred it up some more with more olive oil and some chilli flakes and a metric ton (like a tablespoon) of smoked paprika. I turned the heat down low, and left it alone.

I put the lid on for a while and went to look at the plan for the book I am writing at the moment, which is a new kind of book for me: it’s not for children, it’s not a cookbook. I say “book I am writing” but actually I am not doing a lot of, like, sit down and write writing. This is always what happens, and I always feel guilty, and part of why I am writing this newsletter is to a) reassure other people who do this and b) reassure myself that it does actually always get done and turn out I hope pretty well.

When I had looked at the plan enough to scare myself I opened up my laptop and typed about fifteen words, enough to take the chill off the blank page. Then I went back to the kitchen and got some nice bread and put it on the breadboard Kate gave me for my birthday. I put two bowls out on the tray with two spoons.

I was sort of trying to trick myself into thinking someone else had written the fifteen words and I was just going to pop back and help them out.

Writing, actual writing, happens to me only in the stages between the lentils going in and the lentils getting soft. It happens in the inbetween when I don’t look directly at it. Everything else is about making a world where the writing can happen: about making a place where the dream won’t drift away.

So by writing I mean a lot of things, but basically I mean: cooking a lot, and going for long walks, and cutting + sticking. When I write a book I make big stupid plans with washi tape and post-its and scalpels and paint and Sharpies. I make a big grid with pieces I can slide around. I try to make a physical place for something metaphysical: a tangible textural space that the dream can slip inside and animate. I am trying to make a home for an idea, trying to figure out what kind of nest it would like to live in. Please come down from there, idea, you will like living in my book. You will like living in my life. When I am writing or cooking or painting or whatever, I am trying to make a container for something I haven’t yet seen; trying to guess what shape it will come in, what it will need, like trying to make a home for a new kind of soft scared animal. You lay out old towels and soft blankets. You put water in a little bowl. You shape the space, and hope. You make a violin case and hope the violin will land in it. You make a violin and hope the music will land in it.

When work is good- writing or music or food or whatever- it’s like it doesn’t come from you, but through you, because it comes from everyone and goes back to everyone. That is what I love about that Bach piece, you know, and why I come back to it over and over again in this newsletter. It is the sound of being a person, and Bach translated it so we could hear it. All of making stuff is an attempt at translation from the individual to the universal, for sure, but it is also a translation of the universal into the individual: from the everywhere to the here, from the everything to the this, from the not-thing to the thing itself here in front of you, which in this case, is fifteen words becoming a thousand, and a bag of bits becoming sausage soup.

I let the sausage soup simmer for basically an hour because that was when Tash got home; and then I got two huge handfuls of torn up kale and put them in right at the last minute just until they went soft and vivid green. You can thin it with water if you want. Pecorino, more chilli, more olive oil.

I ladled the soup out of the big beautiful pot and into the bowls. Because I was just adding greens and ladling it out, it did feel like someone else had made it, and I was helping. It felt like a collaboration: me and time, me and the pot.

It was extremely delicious and very nourishing– everything in it was doing me good, I could feel it. It was like the kind of soup you would want if you were cold and tired, like the kind of soup that would feel like home. A home has been prepared for you. I have made you this place.

It was like: I was eating my soup, and I was both things at once– the idea and the object, the mother and the child.

And I was very warm! Which after all was the whole point of the whole exercise.