Impossible Ideas, Home Cooked by Sophie Herxheimer

Guest essay from Writing with the Seasons - August 2024

Welcome to Writing with the Seasons, a collection of writing prompts, ideas and inspiration that follow the rhythms of the natural world as the year unfolds.

This month, we’re sharing guest essays on the theme of recipes to celebrate the Write & Shine Summer Festival—our feast of creativity, with delicious, virtual writing workshops on food, memory and taste.

Today’s piece is by the wonderful artist and poet Sophie Herxheimer.

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Mum was a wonderful cook. It was part of her seductive arrangement. She was a fastidious sensualist and cared to the precise edge of salt, fork and tarragon about the sheer pleasure in food as it landed on the tongue.

Having been expelled from school at fifteen, she was sent along to North West Essex Technical College to at least get a qualification—in Catering and Hotel Management, ‘lest she be left a widow.’ There, she became acquainted with all the classic French sauces and methods, some of which she sporadically strove to teach her two daughters, if we were at enough of a lull between arguments for the mayonnaise not to curdle.

Me and my sister were frequent pastry makers as small children, mum had a special word for rubbing the fat into the flour: frickling. She showed us that to make the pastry light, you’d frickle the mix slowly to make fine, fine crumbs—and then bring the dough together with one swift gesture: delicacy and speed.

Cooking was a thing we did.

Our south London Bohemia featured a stock set of paperback recipe books squeezed dogeared into a shelf by the fridge. William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch was playfully wedged between a couple of haughty Elizabeth Davids. Like all the grownup’s books in those days there were no coloured pictures, just tasteful drawings for section headers—aspirationally continental across the cracked pages: raffia-clad Chianti bottle, limp rabbit, tureen… Colour was added by the attentive cook: a smear of tomato puree, the brown ring of a teacup base, plus the actual ingredients before us in the kitchen: piled in ebullient glory on the creaky table.

Mum and her younger sister ran a textile design company from our house, and as teenagers during our summer holidays from school, we were often in charge of making everyone lunch. This would be for us, mum, auntie Sarah and whoever else was working there: usually about six or seven of us at the table with design assistants and a secretary. There was always something in the fridge that could be tricked up into a meal. Cheese on Toast Deluxe was a staple, the concept being that you put a thick layer of cream cheese under the dovetailed gold planks of Cheddar or Red Leicester that greet the grills flames—on a piece of proper bread (toasted one side under the grill, before cheesing, seasoning and melting to a goo on the ungrilled side). This was likely accompanied by tomato salad with chopped herbs, spring onions, and a flourish of vinaigrette.

We were sheltered from the burgeoning culture of convenience food, except when we went round to our school friends’ homes and had shady encounters with instant mash and Angel Delight. Obviously there were school dinners too, revolting—and the many other tests and interesting surprises—of eating not at home.

When mum died (of cancer) in 2011, the grief threw me wholesale into poetry, a place that up until then I’d mostly only visited. I made a little book in memory of her—a screen printed blaze of black and yellow: 12 poems, 12 drawings, titled Hurricane Butter. The following poem that gives the book its title, is a true account of one studio lunch from my teens. (Every day was ‘take your daughter to work day’, lol). The company secretary at the time was a neat woman who liked to hold forth on clever subjects during lunch. She left soon after this episode.

League of Demons

Shining in its sun-drenched yellow glaze, the butter.
Its glow is mesmerising. I long to slap it through
my fingers on to all the cool clean surfaces, and say so.
Mum laughs, nods: you’ve got sixty seconds; go!

I claw two hands full of it: ooze it into the phone
dials holy recesses, let it drip and melt down all
the bell-shaped slopes of our 70s art nouveau glass
lampshades, massage it into the wide pine slabs
of that huge table, skate its greasy script across
the metal breadbins mirrored belly with my finger.

I am Hurricane Butter. My sister draws in her breath,
makes a few decisions there and then.

One essential ingredient that both my sister and I inherited a love for, and still need to find and use daily in our own strands of work, is PLAY.

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Sophie Herxheimer is an artist and poet. Her collection Velkom to Inklandt (Short Books, 2017) was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and her latest collection is INDEX (zimZalla, 2021) 78 collage poems published as a deck of prophetic cards. Her mum was the inspiring textile designer Susan Collier.

This essay is brought to you by Write & Shine, a programme of morning writing events and online courses. Summer Festival artwork is by Alice Ferns.