Mango season, flying across the water, and spring bounties
With Signe Johansen, Eric Puchner and Rowley Leigh
Around this time every year, my grandfather would go to the greengrocers along the high street and queue with the other grandfathers for a box of ripe, fragrant Alphonso mangos. Politely jostling for a spot along the rows of blue plastic crates lining the outside of the shop like British punters at the bar, he’d take his time gently squeezing the fruit with the furrowed brow of concentration. They’d all be doing it, weighing each one in the palm of their hands, inspecting for the mysterious marks that indicated under or over ripeness. That meticulousness is probably why it took so long to get to the front.
It seemed the precise science of evaluating these mangoes was a innate instinct — but it’s sadly not one I inherited. I wander the little Turkish grocery store now and try to imitate the action with no real idea what I’m looking for, scared that the man behind the counter will tell me off for handling his precious merchandise. Does that soft spot, in which I’ve left an indent of my thumb, mean it’s ripe, or too far gone? Is that red streak on the skin just aesthetic, or a sign its time is yet to come?
Fondling these mangoes somewhat self-consciously on Edgware Road, I wish I had asked for my grandfather’s insight while he was still around to pass it on. Like Signe Johansen writes of her farfar today, we also didn’t have a particularly chatty relationship. But he knew his produce, and it would be nice to feel — when I finally settled on a fruit — that he would have made the same decision, and that I could therefore have confidence in the sweetness inside.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
Fruits of his labour
Signe Johansen on her grandfather, resistance, and the sweetness of a Norwegian summer
May in Norway is a time of celebration. As everyone emerges from a long winter, communities arrange a dugnad — Norwegian for a gathering of neighbours and local volunteers who organise and clear debris, arrange necessary maintenance and generally spruce up neighbourhoods and communities in time for the many parties and parades that happen on the 17th of May, Norway’s Constitution Day. It’s also the month we remember Norway’s liberation from occupation under Nazi Germany.
This year, as we mark the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) day on the 8th 0f May, I’ve been reflecting on the quote from Finland’s beloved cartoonist and writer Tove Jansson: “I only want to live in peace and plant potatoes and dream!” In 1940, Julius, my farfar (paternal grandfather) joined the Norwegian resistance against the Nazis. He was captured, tortured, lost a kidney and spent the war years in a POW camp before being released to see Norway regain her freedom from German occupation in 1945.
Julius went on to raise a family, have a successful career as an insurance executive, and lived a hale and hearty life well into his eighties. In truth, he and I had a slightly awkward relationship: he didn’t understand my love of books, languages and appetite for travel; I found him ornery and was desperate to ask him about the war and his experience in the resistance, but knew better not to. Thankfully we established some common ground: his beloved summer farm. My father and I joked that the man would trade half his family for a supply of the best dung to boost his annual strawberry crop, the crimson jewel in his horticultural crown. And who could blame him? As Charlotte Mendelson rightly claims in her late Onward and Upward in The Garden column for the New Yorker, “Take strawberries: the point of summer.”
The point of the farm, as we all understood it in an age when PTSD wasn’t yet identified and that generation didn’t seek counselling for their trauma, was to help Julius recover and eventually thrive after his wartime incarceration. It was his pride and joy, a pleasure unalloyed.
Signe Johansen is the author of seven books, including Solo: The Joy of Cooking for One, Smörgåsbord, Spirited, How to Hygge and Scandilicious: The Secrets of Scandinavian Cooking. She is co-author/recipe tester/ghostwriter of a dozen more books on food and culture.
Right now, she is enjoying Jenny Linford’s new book Repast: The Story of Food (Thames & Hudson and The British Museum), Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story collection Show Don't Tell (Doubleday) and Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime classic The Heat of the Day (Vintage)
The blue of your dreams
Novelist Eric Puchner on a lake just off Highway 35, the latest in our There's a Street in my Neighbourhood series
Highway 35 runs along the eastern shore of Flathead Lake in northwestern Montana. A glorious drive, in a car, but a harrowing ordeal to cross in a bathing suit and bare feet. It’s like that video game from the 80s, Frogger. The road is a major trucking route, the shortest route between Kalispell and Missoula, which means a steady stream of rental cars and Harley Davidsons and logging trucks rattling by at 50 miles per hour. My in-laws’ house is on one side of the highway, just south of a blind curve; the gorgeous, beckoning lake is on the other. Getting from house to lake means spotting an opening, saying a hail Mary, and dashing across the asphalt like a frightened rabbit.
If you survive the crossing, you find yourself at one of the most beautiful spots in the world.
The lake is ringed by mountains, big ones, and the blue of it is the blue you see in your dreams. Imagine if an ocean somehow decided to retire. If it’s the weekend, though, it’s also quite noisy. One person’s church is another person’s playground. Jet skis and wave runners and speedboats blasting classic rock send waves crashing against the dock. (Americans like nothing better than to fly across water at flamboyant speeds.)
Eric Puchner’s novel Dream State is published by Sceptre on May 8. It’s the 111th pick of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, and film and television rights have been acquired by A24
Eric is reading Karen Russell’s Orange World, her story collection that came out in 2019, and Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realm around Us
Omelette fines herbes, from Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business
At Le Cafe Anglais we used heavy iron frying pans, which were never washed but polished with salt and stored with a thin film of oil. At home I resort to a small non-stick frying pan. One tip: although an omelette does indeed cook incredibly quickly, many people panic and try to shake it and turn it too soon. All this activity can stop the omelette from cooking. It is also worth knowing that it will not colour in the early stages and it is only towards the end that it is important to turn and agitate the omelette.
Serves four for a main and six for a starter.
a few sprigs of parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives
3 fresh eggs
oil, for cooking
10g (1⁄4oz) butter
salt and black pepper
Pick and wash the parsley leaves and then chop all the herbs: the parsley and the chives should be chopped quite finely, while the chervil and tarragon should be roughly chopped so as not to bruise them or damage their flavour.
Thoroughly whisk the eggs in a bowl with a fork or whisk so that yolk and white are completely integrated.
Season with a small pinch of salt and a little freshly ground black pepper and add the herbs. Heat the pan with the merest film of cooking oil with the suspicion of a heat haze. Add the butter and quickly, before it has a chance to burn, pour in the eggs. Do nothing for 30 seconds apart from keeping the pan over a high heat, and wait until the eggs start to bubble up.
At this point scrape around the sides of the pan with a wooden spoon or fork and then, holding the pan slightly angled away from you and pushing it in that direction, give it a sharp jerk back towards you so that the raw mixture at the back is tossed back down to the bottom.
Do this two or three times, making sure none of the mixture is sticking to the bottom of the pan. When the mixture is still soft and runny, hold the pan at an angle away from you and give it a sharp knock on the stove so that the omelette slips down towards the edge of the pan. Roll the mixture from the side nearest to you down towards the edge of the pan.
Roll the mixture from the side nearest to you down towards the opposite edge and then, inverting the pan, roll the omelette right out of the pan onto a plate.
WINE: An omelette and a glass of wine? Elizabeth David’s great book suggests yes, although experts claim that eggs spoil wine. I find that most white wines and light reds have no problem.
Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business was published by Unbound in 2018