Daniel Etherington

Just too northern European

March 1st, 2012 · Main thread, Rome

Before anyone accuses me of moaning about the weather, I’d like to specify that I see this more as a pre-emptive freakout.

It topped 20C in Rome today. Just a few weeks ago it was the depths of winter. Although the snow here was aberrant, the cool generally cool temperatures weren’t. Our flat might not be designed for cold weather – it’s draughty, the heating doesn’t have a timer or a thermostat, and significant radiators don’t work – but by and large I found the winter here delightful. It suited me. I could dress in a preferred fashion (with layers, jacket). I didn’t get a stinky sweat on when I used my default form of transport – brisk walking.

The Roman summer, on the other hand is both something that I’m not used to and something that doesn’t suit me. I don’t like wearing just a shirt. And as much as I like to wear shorts, such attire is somewhat frowned upon for a grown man. Getting your first pair of long trousers in Italy is (or was) like getting your first car in 1950s America, it’s a rite of passage, visibly liminal, a public declaration of your status. (There’s a scene in the film Malèna [2000], set in the 1940s, where the 13-year-old protagonist, desperate to appear more grown up, has a tailor re-cut his father’s suite trousers to fit him. His dad isn’t happy.)

I’m British. I’m used to British weather. And although, like many other Brits, I despair of the limbo of week after week of overcast, grey weather, I don’t have a problem with the temperatures in Britain. Mostly. I mean, admittedly, I was peeved when my June wedding day didn’t muster more than 8C but hey, it was northwest Devon, so that wasn’t so unexpected. What was unexpected was leaving a Sussex August at 18C and arriving in a Roma of 40C. A temperature that didn’t drop much through much all of September 2011.

Now, British friends will say “Wow, wonderful, I love temperatures like that and sunshine.” But really, what they mean is, they love temperatures like that and sunshine when they’re on holiday, and can go spent most of the day on the beach, swimming in the sea, and potentially retreating to an air-conditioned hotel. That is a very different kettle of fish to living in a big (-ish) city, densely populated with people and cars, so many belching cars. And dogs, so many hysterical dogs. And dog owners, so many irresponsible dog owners who don’t pick up their beasts’ cacca [no spellcheck, I don't mean cacao].

Last August was a very literal shock to the system to me. I didn’t acclimatise, the baking dumpsters and cacca griddling on the pavements were – objectively – disgusting, and I didn’t enjoy spending so much time self-consciously sudato e puzzolente (sweaty and stinky!). Basically, it being so warm now, so soon in the year, ho paura – I’m scared. Scared of if I’ll ever feel acclimatised here. Scared of another several months of trying to sleep when it doesn’t drop below 28C at night in our room, even after living in a bunker all day with all the shutters and windows closed to block out the sunshine and heat (something that’s counter-intuitive for a Brit used to craving rays and vitamin D, but necessary). And I’m really not looking forward to the return of the mosquitos (though it is lovely to see the lizards emerging again).

I am just too northern European. The prospect of another hot summer in Rome freaks me out.

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Albert Nobbs, and other wasted opportunities

February 22nd, 2012 · Digressions on fiction and whatnot, Main thread

Living in Rome, but loathing dubbed films and not having very good Italian, means my cinema options are limited. Recently, we’ve had a profoundly dour selection of films available in versione originale, but as someone who adores the big screen experience, I just need to go and see… something. I still can’t quite bring myself to watch our other choice,  Shame – good maybe, but not my idea of entertainment – even when it’s now arrived at the Nuovo Sacher, a fascinating cinema that’s owned by the filmmaker Nanni Moretti and is based in a striking 1930s building, constructed along with the neighbouring Casa della Gioventu’ Italiana del Littorio, the former HQ of the Fascist youth organisation (now an arts centre). So we went to another Trastevere cinema, the Alcazar, to see Albert Nobbs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’d seen a trailer for Albert Nobbs, and the film’s premise was intriguing – Glenn Close plays a woman living as a man. The film has a good cast (including Janet McTeer as a fellow woman-passing-as-a-man, Brendan Gleeson and up-and-comers Mia Wasikowska and Aaron Johnson) and solid production values, with its late 19th century Dublin setting well realised. Sadly, however, the film just doesn’t well, live up to anything much in particular. Considering the potential of its premise, it’s downright dull. The story is thin and virtually plotless. Plus there are massive credibility issues.

Close has apparently had a connection with this role for decades, having first played Nobbs on stage in 1982. You’d think after a Broadway role and decades of effort to bring the film to the screen she would have given the character some sense of depth, but no. Close’s performance is so restrained and downbeat is seems somehow meagre. Nobbs has basically one expression – worry. Which in itself is dubious. For a woman to have lived with such a massive secret would have required huge courage. Close – who also produced and co-scripted the film – plays Nobbs with a kind of timid fortitude. That can be justified as a mechanism that allows her to go unnoticed, quietly dedicated to her job as a hotel waiter. But after Nobbs meets Hubert Page (McTeer), a painter and decorator who turns out also to be a woman, and lives successfully as a ‘married man’ to boot, she’s inspired to try and find her own wife, to share her dream of running a tobacconists.

For his role, Nobbs targets flirty young colleague Helen Dawes (Wachowski), a maid. Which is where the film’s credibility breaks down. As well as courage and fortitude, a woman such as Nobbs would have had remarkable canniness and intuition, knowing when to keep a distance. Here, Nobbs is naive and ignorant to the point of stupidity. She’s not exactly oblivious to Helen’s heated, youthful relationship with Joe (Johnson), a handsome fellow hotel servant who vows he’ll take them both to American, but is certainly oblivious to how Helen and Joe are stringing her along, exploiting her. I just didn’t buy this.

The film posits Nobbs as basically a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder. She reveals her story to Page, and although she uses the restrained euphemism of having been terribly “hurt”, she was clearly beaten and gang-raped as a teenager. After this, she found the role of a highly reserved male gave her protection, as did an apparent repression (by choice or through the trauma) of any sexuality. But even after all this, would she have really been so naive about sexuality to not understand Helen and Joe? Helen picks Albert up on not even wanting to put her arm around her, or kiss her. Nobbs believes she can win Helen over by offering stability, and even offering to support her, and be a ‘father’ to her child (Nobbs was herself illegitimate so can empathise). This ‘bargaining chip’ is credible in this yarn of 19th century people living on the poverty line, but Nobbs’ character, her apparent guilelessness, just didn’t wash for me. Nor did Nobbs’ utter obliviousness to sexuality. Even if her own sexuality was utterly repressed, Nobbs have had incredibly fine-tuned “self-preservation radar”, she would have been highly sensitive to any and all situations that could have endangered her, threatened her with exposure, even sexual situations.

Now, that women lived as men to survive in 19th century Britain and Ireland is not surprising; it’s a telling indictment of the sexism of those types of society. As a subject for fiction, it’s something that’s ripe with opportunity. That’s why it’s such a shame that Albert Nobbs is a weak film. Even if Nobbs herself is repressed and emotionally stunted, the film itself doesn’t quite need to be – it barely dares to articulate the matter of her attraction to either Hubert or Mary, for example. And it doesn’t even touch up on the dangers she would have faced in daily life, for example, in getting clothes to fit. Did she really cut all her own clothes to avoid any contact with tailors? Where did she buy her corsets, and how? Did she cut her own hair, to avoid barbers noticing her lack of whiskers? I would love to have known more about the practicalities of how she survived. How Albert Nobbs is portrayed here, she seems insufficiently equipped with survival instincts at all. As such, it’s a wasted opportunity.

And talking of wasted opportunities, the last film I saw on the big screen in Rome was The Iron Lady (2011). Here again is a story (albeit of a very different nature) of a woman who lived a remarkable life, and yet the film saw fit to concentrate on the elderly Thatcher doddering round her flat, slowly succumbing to dementia. Whatever your feelings about Thatcher, she was an incredible figure, with two powerful stories that could have been told: how a working-class woman broke into the absurd public school boys club that is British politics; or, how this remarkable woman took British society to breaking point. You could argue the doddering around the flat provided pathos in its contrast with Thatcher-in-power, the Iron Lady, but really there was too much dementia and not enough Iron, it was too fragmentary. Again, strong cast, good production values, wasted opportunity.

I could go on and on with a list of films that have been wasted opportunities, but I won’t here, I’ll just mention one more that always stuck in my craw: Creation (2009). Again, great cast, great production values, and yet rather than telling the important story – of how one man changed the shape of society, of biology, of beliefs, through his development of a remarkable scientific theory – it fussed around focussing on his guilt and anxiety over said science, personified by a relationship with his dead daughter. As such, it played out not as the story of one of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced, but as a half-baked semi-ghost story.

What were all these filmmakers thinking?

And don’t get me started on the farce of the question of Oscar nominations. Albert Nobbs has been nominated for Best Achievement in Makeup and Best Performance by Actress in Leading Role. Maybe the look they’ve given Nobbs is technically great, but IMHO the character looks like a freakishly superannuated little boy. With constipation.

[Oh, and yes I know Albert Nobbs was based on a novella, but I've not read it, so I'm not evaluating the film terms of its relationship to its source material.]

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Scones – cream first or jam first?

February 20th, 2012 · Baking, Food misc, Main thread

We’re big fans of scones in our household. My wife, Fran, is from Devon and I’ve got strong connections with this county in the southwest of England that, along with its neighbour Cornwall, is the homeland of the cream tea: scones with clotted cream and jam, washed down with (milky black) tea.

(Some say the scone comes from Scotland – does it? Are Scots and West Country scones the same thing? Or are they different types of “quick bread” with the same name? Some serious historical investigation needs to be done on that front before I’m persuaded either way. The word itself may derive from the Dutch “schoonbrot”, meaning fine bread or white bread, though that clarifies nothing.)

I’ve been making scones since childhood, presumably having fallen in love with them after childhood holidays in Devon and Cornwall.

Anyway, every time we eat them, the same two issues arise.
First, is it pronounced skon-ryhmes-with-John or skown-rhymes-with-own? (Seriously – there’s no either/or; as with many words, it varies, with the former pronunciation most common in Britain, especially in Scotland. See point 3.11 in this 1998 University College London British English pronunciation survey.)
And second, does one split the scone then spread it with clotted cream first, or jam first? I doubt UCL has done a survey on that, and among my friends things seem to be fairly evenly split. Fran is adamant is has to be jam first, then a blob of cream like a garnish, I’ve always spread the clotted cream first, like a kind of glorified (oh the glory!) butter.

Now, before I proceed, for any impoverished soul who hasn’t had the pleasure of eating clotted cream, let me tell you what you’re missing. Clotted cream – which most certainly is traditionally, and originally, from the West Country – is a very rich, delicious and generally delightful dairy product made using the cream of cow’s milk.

In days of yore it would have been made using the rich milk of local West Country cattle, like the charming Devon Reds, a breed that’s been making a comeback recently. (I’m lucky enough to be aquainted with recently retired champion bull “Freddie” Yeomadon Ferdinand, whose offspring are used for beef; apparently it’s not viable to female Devon Reds for dairy these days so I’ve never tried any Devon Red milk or dairy products.) These days, clotted cream is mostly made using milk from Guernsey and Jersey cows, the breeds now most associated with rich, fatty milk.

Clotted cream is traditionally made by heating rich creamy milk over a low heat, possibly in a bain-marie type arrangement, reducing its water content, and encouraging the creation of thick creamy clots, which are skimmed off. I’ve made cheese, butter and yogurt but never clotted cream. They demonstrated this traditional production method in episode 9 of BBC’2 Edwardian Farm series. It looked painstaking and protracted so I don’t think I’m likely to try and reproduce it any time soon. (Read the Wikipedia entry if you’re interested in learning more about the modern, industrial production methods.)

On a recent visit to Devon, I bought some clotted cream from Langage Farm, a Devon brand that uses the milk of Guernsey and Jersey cows. Clotted cream is something I crave, and one of the international delicacies I’ve not been able to source in my current city-of-residence, Rome. So this pot travelled all the way home with me. Ridiculous food miles for a treat I know.

After making a batch of scones yesterday (see below for my basic recipe), we had a cream tea – something that presumably doesn’t happen very often in Rome, even at vintage tea room Babington’s, whose version of a “cream tea”, according to their online menu, consists of “A Scottish scone with butter and strawberry jam”. With whipped cream. That’s just plain wrong.

My friend and sometime catering collaborator Mr Dominic Rogers raised the above-mentioned cream-or-jam first question, and we discussed them being “tasty either way”, but not necessarily “tasting the same”. This is an interesting point, and one I had to address in more detail. So I did a taste test.

As illustrated by this photo, it wasn’t entirely scientific: I didn’t weight out the amounts of cream and jam (in this case fragole, strawberry) used to make sure they were identical in both cases, and I only used one scone, which meant one piece had the top crust and the other the bottom crust, which have slightly different textures. However, the results were interesting (well, interesting for scone obsessives). They are all pretty obvious if you think about it, but I still feel it’s worth recording, considering the perennial nature of the argument.

1 As you bite the jam-on-cream arrangement, your first flavour hit is of jam, which is tart, sugary-sweet and fruity.
1b Do you enjoy the sensation of thick cream as it potentially touches your top lip?
2 As you bite the cream-on-jam arrangement, your initial flavour hit is of clotted cream, which is of course, smooth, gloopy and dairy-sweet.
2b Do you enjoy the sensation of sticky jam as it potentially touches your top lip?
3 As you continue to bite down through the scone, this initially flavour hit is prolonged, being dragged down through the crumb of the scone by your upper incisors and of course moving onto your palette and tongue.
4 Your choice of jam-on-cream or cream-on-jam defines the opening flavour notes, and initial mouth-feel and flavour, before mastication results in more even mixing of flavours and textures.

Conclusion
So, arguably, you have a choice based on whether you prefer the taste of cream or jam, or prefer those as the initial taste.
Either, frankly, is bloody delicious.

Here’s my basic plain scone recipe. Some people use buttermilk; I don’t, as it’s not always easy to source, and I’m not convinced it makes a better plain scone.

450g self-raising flour (or use plain flour with about 4% baking powder, ie 435g plain flour sifted together with 15g baking powder)
80g unsalted butter, at room temperature
35g caster sugar
Pinch of salt
300g milk

Pre-heat the oven to 220C.

Grease two baking sheets.

Sieve the flour (and BP, if using plain flour) into a bowl, then rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
Stir in the sugar and salt.
Blend in the milk little by little using a knife.
Bring together as a rough dough but do not knead or otherwise handle too much.
Turn out onto a lightly floured work surface and roll out to around 22mm thick.
Create rounds using a pastry cutter, or simply cut into squares.
Repeat with any off-cuts.

Place on the baking sheets, dust with a little extra flour and bake for 12-15 minutes until starting to brown.

Serve just slightly warm – ideally with clotted cream and jam!

Scones are always best on the day they’re made.

If you’re feeling adventurous, here are a couple of other scone recipes, though I would say for a cream tea, keep it plain!

Ginger beer scones, an excellent Dan Lepard recipe.
Maple syrup scones, from the Rose Bakery cookbook.

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Docking the bay

February 9th, 2012 · Main thread, Rome

Villa Sciarra, our delightful local park, remains locked up. It has been since last weekend. Rome had its atypical dump of snow last Friday and overnight we got about 10cm. Apparently this is the most since 1986, when they got 20cm+; substantial snow apparently isn’t a common occurence, and the city doesn’t really know how to cope with it, much like much of Britain (but that’s another story). Panic ensues, schools and offices are closed, trains and roads become even more chaotic (and simultaenously less chaotic – with emergency rules that decree you can’t ride a scooter, or drive unless you have chains). For dedicated pedestrians, like myself, the pavement, the day after, was largely ice.

On the Saturday itself though, when the snow was fresh, Rome was beautiful. The ancient ruins and innumerable churches and monuments are always handsome, but an icing of snow gave them even more magic. The snow also beautified things by temporarily hiding all the little, dogshit and disintegrating roads and pavements.

The snow’s mostly gone now, bar some stubborn piles of ice. There’s more forecast for tomorrow and Saturday, but we shall see. In the meantime, I’m disappointed I can’t take my normal walking routes through Villa Sciarra, a lovely little place that nestles in a bulge in the 4th century AD Aurelian Wall. Throughout the year it’s an oasis of calm, away from Rome’s absurd traffic, and a place to enjoy some sun – or much-needed shade in the summer.

On Saturday, before the lock-down, it was a peculiar winter wonderland, the palms incongruously decorated with snow. It wasn’t all wonderful though, despite the exuberrance of the play. Alongside the palms, the park also has a substantial population of mature bay trees (bay laurels; laurus nobilis). I frequently help myself to the alloro leaves for cooking. And there were plenty to spare after the snow – as the bay population was reduced, I’d estimate, by about 10-20%. It’s hard to say, as I’ve not been able to get back in since the the lock-down. I assume it’s due to emergency tree surgery, to prune the trees with broken boughs and chop up the trees that were completely uprooted, or suffered from broken trunks.

 

It reminded me a little of the south of England after the Great Storm of 1987, which devastated a lot of the chalk downlands’ distinctive beech hangers. Of course, the bays aren’t quite on the same scale as the beeches – I’d say they grow to about 6m here – but it’s still sad if you’re a tree-lover, like me. Bays clearly aren’t designed to bear the weight of snow – like, say, firs or certain pines with downward sloping branches that slew off any build-up. Not all pines are designed for snow either though – the umbrellas, pinus pinea, also lost some branches here. Another park I walk through – Resistenza dell’otto Settembre – is also closed, though it only lost a few branches from its pines. It’s kinda over-zealous. Who’d have thunk Italy would have a health & safety culture that could out-daft Britain’s?

The streets in our neighbourhood, Monteverde Vecchio, are lined with another type of shrub-tree, which I can’t identify. It may be in the same family as privet, Ligustrum, but I’ve no idea. They lost a few branches too, but, again, nothing like the damage in the park.

As tragedies go, the damage to Villa Sciarra is minor, but it’s still sad. Let’s just hope if it does snow again, it’s not as much, as quickly, and the trees weather the storm.

Quick update, 20 Feb 2012. The park is now open again, and still looking handsome. But there’s still plenty of work being done clearing up dead and damaged bays.

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Chestnut and walnut bread

February 2nd, 2012 · Baking, Food misc, Main thread, Rome

Chestnuts were an important traditional foodstuff in parts of Italy. Peasants could supplement their diets with chestnuts, and flour was a natural extension of this. Roasted chestnuts remain a common sight in Roma over the winter, though I’m skeptical about whether this is because Romans demand it, or because it’s another cute novelty to sell to tourists.

Anyway, I bought some chestnut flour – farina di castagna – from the Testaccio Ex-Mattatoio producers’ market last weekend, on a whim. Didn’t really have any idea what to do with it. And nor do I particularly like chestnuts. Living in New Zealand years ago, some friends who tried to live as much as possible by foraging provided enough for me to eat far too many, resulting in a certain aversion. Which might not sound promising, but bear with me.

After a bit of Googling and polling friends, I plan to use it to make various items at some stage, including the Italian traditional castagnaccio – a kind of peasant cake that doesn’t include sugar and instead realies on the natural sweetness of chestnuts. (Chestnut flour is also known as farina dolce – sweet flour.) Also: chestnut flour pancakes (maybe on Shrove Tuesday, which is looming) and this cake, which comes from a gluten-free angle. If I can work out a replacement for crème fraîche, which isn’t readily available here in Roma. Apparently I can use panna acida.

But first, I made some bread, inspired by a recipe in Richard Bertinet’s Dough. His version uses rye flour; here I replaced that with chestnut flour. I also reduced the yeast in his recipe and added some white leaven. What the hell.

So:
400g strong white flour
100g chestnut flour
10g salt
320g water
6g fresh (fresh)
50g white leaven (100% hydration)

Combine the flours and salt.
Whisk together the leaven, yeast and water (warm – use dough temp x 2 minus flour temp to give you a water temp… or just warm…).
Add liquid to flours, bring to a dough.
Knead.
Form a ball, rest, covered, until doubled in height. I’m not going to suggest a time, as that really is so dependant on the temperature of your room.
I divided it into two, formed balls, rested 10 mins then I made rings, but really, knock yourself out with the shape.
Prove again, until doubled in height.
Bake at 220C for 15 mins, then lower temp to 200C and bake another 15 mins. Or if you’re doing one large loaf, it may need longer. Trust your judgment!

And you know what, it’s yummy. The nuts give the crumb a slight purply tinge and the taste is indeed subtly sweet.

I really ought to try and take better pictures though. Random snaps from my phone don’t cut it. And that tablecloth is getting a bit overused as a backdrop.

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Old geezers with the horn

January 30th, 2012 · Main thread, Rome

One of our Sunday routines in Roma is going to the Mattatoio – the old abattoir in Testaccio – to the producers’ market. Wandering home yesterday, laden with veg, cheese, eggs, walnuts, chestnut flour and cose, we headed off Viale di Trastevere, up a snicket we’ve discovered, under looming apartment blocks, towards to our hilltop neighbourhood, Monteverde Vecchio.

Further up, through the labyrinth of looming walls liberally decorated with graffiti (extremist politics and/or football mostly), navigating the perennial Roman pavement adornments c/o sundry cane and their inconsiderate owners (seriously, it’s worse than Paris), we passed along Via Giambattista Marino, behind an ecclesiastical establishment. There are many in the neighbourhood, but this one’s particularly grand. Not sure what it is – a school? A monastery? Anyway, both Fran and I assumed there was some sort of event going on, as music appeared to be emerging from within burly stonework. Except that when we turned the corner at the top of the street, the acoustics changed radically and the music was revealed to be a brass rendition of ‘Strangers in the Night’. Not part of the Church’s typical Sunday program.

Heading up our street, the sound got louder, and clearer until we spotted due vecchi, two old geezers, seemingly serenading an apartment. If serenading is the right word. It looked like they had a small amp and backing track, and while one was giving it his all with a battered old French horn, the other was clutching a trumpet. This chap, a decidedly lively little chap, was so digging the tune, he kept stopping playing to dance, among the giant wheelie bins and closely packed parked cars.

We wandered past, and further up, two other, very different old geezers, were packing their rifles and gear into their car, presumably for a spot of hunting in the hills of Abruzzo.

The day before this scene, we’d watched Fellini’s Roma, a 1972 film that, via a series of loose sketches, recounts some autobiography. We see the young Fellini arriving in 1930s Rome from his native Rimini, and immediately becoming embroiled in a vigorously communal way of life, getting a room in a sprawling apartment full of large woman, squalling kids, a sunburned mammone (mother’s boy) and a selection of eccentric tenants. Going out to dinner, meanwhile, the local community (is it supposed to be Testaccio?) convenes to eat at long tables outside a restaurant, joking, arguing, critiquing the food. This includes, I believe, pajata, a delightful, typically Roman dish of veal intestines, which congeal somewhat on cooking, much like rennet from cows’ cuts is used to curdle milk for cheese-making; and snails, which prompt a few saucy comments about how mastering the art of eating them can educate a young man in how to please a woman.

A little kid sings a dirty song about how the new young man, Fellini, is going to have sex with, well, basically everyone. A young man abusively beckons his haughty sister down from where she’s posing on a balcony. Middle-aged women vie for Fellini’s attentions.

The film cuts between such scenes and scenes of contempory Rome, which is now dominated by traffic. It seems to be suggesting the exuberant, social street life of the 1930s has been destroyed, disappeared. Certainly it’s true that the streets are now overwhelmed by Rome’s very tangible car problem* – not just a traffic problem, but a problem with the sheer scale of ownership. Streets are packed with parked cars, and the character of innumerable venerable piazze and piazzale is utterly compromised by them simply having become car parks. Old neighbourhoods didn’t evolve with car-parking in mind.

These days it’s frequently hard to even walk along the pavement as it’s often appropriated for parking. Not ideal for wheelchair users or people with kids in buggies. Our personal favourite is when cop cars from the station up the road block the zebra crossing.

Anyway, so, yes, of course the modern world has quashed the traditional world of street life, but not completely. Summers in Rome are still defined by al fresco dining into the night; restaurants generally have walls of planters to prevent their spots being used for parking. And, well – the two old geezers with their feisty miniature brass section wouldn’t have looked out of place Fellini’s Roma. Their musical endeavours went on long after we’d got home, the brass still echoing down the street for at least an hour. Quite who they were serenading, I don’t know, but from the duration, she never emerged.

* something I’ve written about before:
Moto city
“Death on the Highway”

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No one likes 3D

January 23rd, 2012 · Gaming, tech & stuff, Main thread

At least no punter likes 3D. Seriously, does anyone like 3D? Does anyone know anyone who’s a 3D enthusiast? Who craves the experience of the latest 3D movie releases or is an early adopter of 3D TV? A friend went to see the latest Underworld movie, 2012′s Awakening, and a Facebook thread afterwards boiled down to “Kate Beckinsale phwoar, 3D meh.” (I only half agree with that; Beckinsale meh too IMHO.)

A few months back I also read a column in the paper where the writer was taking her daughter and friends to see Harry Potter for a birthday jaunt. The kids, 10 ish, were all nonplussed that the 2D screening was sold out and vetoed the idea of seeing it in 3D, preferring to wait for the next 2D. So if kids don’t like it, 20 and 30-something men don’t like it, who does? I certainly don’t.

Living in London the past few years, time and again I was keen to see a film, then found out it in 3D. This meant that all the central London cinemas, the ones I tended to frequent, would be showing it in 3D. Suburban cinemas would offer it in 2D, or have alternate screenings, but they weren’t generally my beat.

Sure, I’d vaguely enjoyed the 1950s throwback theme-park ride of having stuff thrown at me in Final Destination 3D and I definitely enjoyed Avatar at the IMAX, but the IMAX is the only cinema in London that is properly designed for 3D. And even there I had my reservations: I don’t like the extra equipment required (the glasses), there’s always some blurring of the image on the periphery, and there’s always the chance of eye-strain and headaches. This is even more of a problem if you already have poor eyesight; my mum, for example, is a big cinema-goer, for but 3D glasses along with her problematic vision just don’t work; it hurts.

After moving out of London to Sussex, at least the local Odeon would do alternate 2D and 3D screenings of the big releases proffering this tedious, desperate gimmick. Give me a big screen with a crisp 2D HD image anyway. A big screen and the latest in reproduction and projection technology is a joy, a reliably immersive experience that doesn’t need the muddying of trying to project in 3D in a cinema that was never designed for it, and expecting the punter to don the glasses – effectively put an extra barrier between you and the image. Even Peter Jackson looks uncomfortable here checking Hobbit shots wearing both 3D glasses and reading glasses (“It’s all good,” he says, unconvincingly). All the while enthusing about the wonders of shooting in 3D with the new Red Epic camera and saying “If I’d had the option to shoot The Lord of the Rings in 3D I certainly would have done it.” I am so glad he didn’t.

Alongside the passion of these evangelical technologist filmmakers – Jackson, Cameron, Lucas, Spielberg, who love their new tools, new toys – film distributors either genuinely believe that 3D is “added value” that will save the cinema trade in the face of on-demand home viewing (legal or otherwise), or are just so caught up in the machinery of capitalism that they’re deaf to punters’ cries. The argument is that “this is what people want”; I’ve read that so many times before though, even in other contexts, like the question of supermarkets’ over-packaging of foods. But it really isn’t what people want – it’s just what they’ve come to accept as the norm after they’re been bludgeoned by enormous marketing budgets.

Even mediocre mainstream film can prevail, financially, if it’s marketed heavily enough. You see the poster on billboards and bus-sides, you see the promo or trailer on telly and online, over and over, you see ads in mags and papers. It features a few sexy stars; it’s a sequel to another film you saw, so you’re already engaged with the brand; it comes on at your local cinema, where there really isn’t much choice. It’s a Friday night out you don’t have to think much about. You apathetically pay the extra £2 or whatever for the 3D specs. You get a headache. You moan about it on Facebook to your friends, or you mention how pointless the 3D was in your IMDB user review.

Seriously, I adore the big screen experience, I love the whole package of going to the cinema. My mind is full a lifetime of memories of walking off the grubby pavement, pushing open the cinema doors, being met by the scent of popcorn, leaving behind the real world, the bustle, the traffic, your own concerns; entering the darkened room, getting absorbed by the flickering light of the image, being immersed, forgetting your own concerns for 90 minutes. And although I like an intelligent film with a decent narrative, I’m also a fan of action, and fascinated by the aesthetics and technologies of VFX. But I just will not pay for 3D at the cinema, for an uncomfortable experience predicated on a gimmick, a gimmick that served its time in the 1950s when people were being lured away from cinemas by the wonders of newfangled TV, in a similar way to how we’re being lured away now by big-screen TVs and on-demand movies.

Frankly I’m deeply cynical when the likes of Scorsese and Herzog, filmmakers who’ve garnered respect for intelligent filmmaking, not mere popcorn fare, come out with 3D projects (Hugo Cabret and Cave of Forgotten Dreams respectively), and sing the praises of 3D in interviews. These guys may be iconic, but they’re still aging professionals who have to play the game if they want the studios and producers to back them, to fund them, so they can keep working and keep earning a living. And those studios are backing 3D, and are proffering them the latest 3D equipment. Said equipment may have come on in leaps and bounds, but so what if punters don’t appreciate the end product? Do the punters’ opinions really not matter at all. Money might talk, but, you know, people do too, and when they’re polled, they don’t generally seem to feel that 3D does add value.

Oh, and to take my sceptical cynicism a bit further, remember many of the studios are these days part of mega-corporations that include consumer technology arms, eg Sony Pictures Entertainment, and its subsidiary Columbia Pictures. And what does Sony sell? 3D BluRay discs, 3D BluRay players and 3D televisions.

Still, despite venting all that dismay and cynicism, I’m still hoping Jackson can change my mind when he transports us back to Middle-earth.

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Innocenti is bliss

January 21st, 2012 · Food misc, Rome

My noble quest to try castagnole and frappe from, well, as many different pasticcerie as possible, continues. Today we dropped by Innocenti, which, for sheer vintage cuteness, is incomparable.

Nestled in Via della Luce, a cobbled backstreet in the slightly less touristy part of Roma’s Trastevere (that is, to the east of Viale Trasteve), the shop is dominated by the vast form of a veteran conveyor oven, which is currently partially stacked with frappe and castagnole.

And very nice they are too. We bought castagnole con crema and yer basic frappe. Just scoffed a load, then managed a bit of self restraint and stashed some for later. That said, better finish them soon, so I can justify sampling some more from another outlet…

Innocenti, aka Biscottificio Artigiano Innocenti, 21 Via della Luce.


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And look at all the goodies they sell. Not just biscuits. Yum. Got my work cut out for me.

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Wholewheat farro bread

January 20th, 2012 · Baking, Main thread

Invented this one as I had some farro grain, which I’d bought when I was trying to make the Tuscan zuppa di fagioli e farro, aka bean and farro soup. Farro itself is a type of wheat grain, though the word can also be used to refer to barley and other grains, depending on where you are in Italy or who you’re talking to. Wikipedia has a good page, which doesn’t really clarify!

I played it by ear (well, by fingers) with some of the quantities, and I wanted to keep the dough very soft and wet – hence it flattened slightly when I moved it from the proving basket to bake. But flavour-wise, it’s great.

I’ve been struggling to get used to Italian flours. Many of them are low protein, unlike your standard British bread flour, which is ground from harder wheat. Harder wheat produces stronger flour, with more protein, say 13% or higher – giving the requisite gluten proteins to create certain bread structures, for the types of bread we’re more used to making in the UK.

Anyway, the recipe:

Cook about 50g of farro in water, simmering for about 45 minutes, until the grain is soft.
(You could use the cooking water for the sponge, though I didn’t in this case. You can also soak the grain overnight in ale, wine or friuit juice, if you’re interested in experimenting! Also, if you can’t get farro, wheat grains, aka wheat berries, would be fine.)

Make a sponge with:
360g water
250g wholewheat flour (I used an Italian integrale)
10g fresh yeast (or say 5g ADY if you can’t find fresh)

Leave the sponge to ferment for 8-12 hours. I did it overnight, in a fairly cold kitchen. (We’re in Rome, but it is January – nights getting down to around 0C.)

Make up the dough with:
The sponge
10g salt
150g wholewheat flour
100g white bread flour (I used an Italian bread which, despite being called “Farina di grano duro” – flour from hard wheat – and professing to be “per pane, focacce e dolci” – for bread, foccacia and sweets – is only 10% protein. See my perplexity? It worked ok though, so you could use a British plain flour.)

Bring the dough together and add the farro grains.
Knead. It’s sticky, that’s good, don’t worry!
Clean off your hands with some extra flour and bring the dough to a ball.
Ferment, covered, for about 4 hours, or until doubled in size.
I gave mine a few turns.
Turn out, form a ball, and rest for 10 minutes.
I formed a baton and proved it in a 36cm (14″) long basket.
Final prove until doubled in volume.
I turned it onto a baking sheet and made one long dorsal cut.

Bake in a preheated oven at 220C for 20 minutes, then turn down to 200C and bake for another 20 minutes. Or thereabouts.

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Pass the dolci

January 19th, 2012 · Food misc, Main thread, Rome

Italians love their dolci: sweets, desserts, ice cream and pastries, or pasticceria.

I always assumed the French had the last word on patisserie, but living in Rome, I’m not so sure any more. In Monteverde Vecchio, our neighbourhood, indeed within about 100 metres of our flat, there are at least three pasticcerie (as I understand it, the word can mean the outlet, the trade and the product), as well as a bakery/tavolo caldo (“hot table” – meaning then sell hot snacks) that also does pasticceria.

Two of these places, and another one just down the hill on Viale Trastevere, have counters around 4-5 metres long utterly packed with biscuits, pastries, chocolates and sweeties that you buy by weight. And none of them are chains.

That’s one thing I love about Italy – it’s got an incredibly strong business culture of independents, of SMEs (small-medium sized enterprises). As well as all the independent pasticceria, which are also cafés, there are umpteen independent cafés, which also sell pasticceria. Although I’m an oddity in this culture for my dislike of coffee, I’m more than happy to frequent these places and indulge in pastries and, as it’s the winter (hey, there was a frost last night), I can get away with drinking lots of the cioccolata calda without breaching too much strict Italian food and drink etiquette. Well, I say “drinking” but it’s frequently half-way to eating as Italian hot chocolate is generally thickened with cornflour, making it a thick, gloopy thing that’s almost like a hot chocolate mousse.

My current obsession is for castagnole and frappe, which started appearing in the pasticcerie shortly after Christmas, specifically at Epiphany; that’s 6 January for heathens. These are seasonal sweet treats for carnevale – carnival or Mardi Gras season.

The Christian tradition is that Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday, aka Shrove Tuesday, aka Pancake Day, is the day when you use up all your rich food products, fats and sugars to initiate Lent, the period of abstemiousness that leads up to Easter. While us Brits, and others, might have a pancake blow-out on just one day, here in Italy it looks like we’re getting weeks of the aforementioned treats.

So, castagnole are small, deep-fried dough balls, a bit like doughnuts, but the dough isn’t leavened with yeast, but with chemical raising agents, ie baking powder or equivalent, according to both the ingredients taped up on the counter at Pasticceria Dolci Desideri (“Sweets you want”!; our local, on Via Anton G Barrili) and the recipe on this blog. The word presumably relates to castagna – chestnut – though they have no chestnut flavouring. Instead you can get them semplice (plain) or filled with crema (custard) or ricotta.

Frappe, meanwhile, are basically thin rectangles of crisp, slightly puffy pastry, like a sweetened pasta, baked or deep-fried, and sprinkled with icing sugar, or sometimes flavoured with honey. The name itself (singular: frappa) is a bit confusing, as the similar word frappé means shake, or milkshake. According to the above-mentioned blog, they’re also known as cenci (the plural of cencio, rag – not very appetising), stracci (shreds; stracciare is the verb to tear or rip up) and lattughe (lettuce) in other parts of Italy.

We’ve been treating ourselves to castagnole and frappe, well, pretty much every day this week. It can’t go on, for obvious reasons, but not only are they delicious, there’s just something inherently lovely about going to a pasticceria and getting some treats wrapped up like a gift (eco concerns about over-packaging notwithstanding.)

Really, Brits have a long way to go to make the patisserie experience as charming as this. Sure we have some wonderful independent bakeries these days, but their patisserie can still seem meagre by comparison, even if they have an array of poncy cupcakes. And for people who still don’t even have access to real bakeries, some foul mass-produced “Toffee Flavour Yum Yum” from “Greggs The Home of Fresh Baking” [sic] just doesn’t cut it.

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