Thomas Jefferson – aesthete, polymath and third President of the United States – was also an ice cream fanatic. I love the fact that this intellectually dazzling politician was also the first American in history to write a recipe for home-made ice cream. I know all about ice cream obsessives; my Grandfather ate a wedge […]
Month: April 2010
The New York Chronicles Part 1: there are welcomes and welcomes
There’s been some kind of mistake…. I’m supposed to live in New York. I’m quite sure about that. But in the absence of solid evidence that it’s going to happen any time soon, I paid my fantasy home city a brief visit to check that the two of us are still suited. Of course it […]
Rice pudding in stilettos
I’ve known how to make my Granny’s rice pudding forever. It was the first recipe I could recite by heart, not counting the Fried Bread Coated in Tomato Ketchup I created as a six year old to earn my Hostess Badge in the Brownies. Granny hated being old enough to be called anything other than […]
A Chocolate Palimpsest
I’ve found the oddest books in a secondhand book shop – First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500-1800 in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, edited by Margaret Crum. The two huge volumes contain just the first lines of over 23,000 poems, spread across more than 1,000 pages. I hated the idea of all that […]