Ooops. I hadn’t fully checked my programme. Before the estimable Jim Godfrey there’s a panel discussion on Vegetable Culture, which I suspect will allow for a diversity of views.
The reason is that the planned speaker, Simon Schama, is unable to be here. Grave disappointment.
Ceremonials over — winner of the Sophie Coe prize sounds like a fascinating paper on the poppy in Anatolia, which I’ll try to obtain — the panelists are taking the stage. Paul Levy, Raymond Sokolov, Fuchsia Dunlop and Elisabeth Luard.
Ray Sokolov is restaurant critic for the Wall Street Journal. He sees not the depreciation of vegetables, but a tension in the west in which vegetables are a superior product, in addition to being the low-down food of the poor. He then goes through a series of quotations from classical sources. We’re on Jacob and Esau and the mess of potage; not very complex, but also a harbinger of the future, with famished Esau, the hunter, willing to sell out his future for something to eat. Hunting and gathering succumbs to agriculture and the settled life.
Homer, in The Iliad 13, “588 or so” talks about an arrow bouncing off the shield of noble Menelaus, “as when on a threshing floor black beans or chickpeas bounce off the winnowing fan”. War contrasted with peaceful harvest.
Virgil wrote a poem that is basically a recipe for salad.
Now we’re on Shakespeare, contrasting Falstaff as the gross meat-eating prole — “capons by the ton” — contrasted with Llewellyn promoting the virtues of the leek. “Will you not eat my leek,” he asks, which could be misconstrued.
Virginia Woolf “is completely anti-vegetable in a way, but not really”. Followed by a quote about the poorness of English cooking from To The Lighthouse.
