Last week we celebrated St Valentine’s Day, a
day even more reviled than Christmas for its commercial quality, in fact it’s
often denounced as a fake feast day since opinions are divided as to who
Valentine actually was and why this day is dedicated to lovers. Most would
agree that he was a 3rd century Roman priest – some even have him as
the Bishop of Terni in Umbria - who appears to have been martyred on February 14th,
the day we associate with him. One
hagiography claims Valentinus was put under house arrest by a judge who put Valentinus’
beliefs to the test by asking him to restore the sight of his blind daughter.
But what is the association with
romance?
The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493
has Valentine being arrested and imprisoned for aiding Christians and even
marrying Christian couples who were being persecuted by Claudius II of Rome.
Yet another account claims to be
the ‘real story’: here there is
agreement in that Valentinus was imprisoned and tortured for performing
Christian marriage ceremonies. One of his judges, here named Asterius, on being
so astonished when Valentine prayed with and healed his blind daughter, that he
himself became a Christian. In 269 AD, Valentinus was sentenced to being
beaten, stoned and finally decapitated for supporting Christian marriage. And
herein lies the romance: before his death, he wrote a note to Asterius’
daughter, signing it, ‘from your Valentine’.
Now some say that it wasn’t until
the time of Chaucer in 14th century England that Valentine’s feast
day was associated with romantic love. But that last ‘real story’ is the one
that has my vote. Not because of its hagiographic credentials, nor for its ring
of authenticity. It is an account by Father Frank O’Gara of Whitefriar’s Street
Church in Dublin. To put it purely and
simply, the Irish tell a cracking tale; as well as having the gift of the gab,
they have the gift of the craic.
On that same day last week I got
to the supermarket display of beautiful orchids just in time to see a young
woman scoop up every last one. That got me thinking: I guess we girls, less
than confident that our gallants will do the romantic thing, just get on with
it and treat ourselves! So off I went
home and made up a batch of Pavlova.
I use a failsafe recipe of Alastair Hendy’s –
no eggy smells, no seepage or separation. Here it is as it appeared in his Masterclass
column in the Sunday Times on 8.4.2001
Ingredients :
4 egg whites, 120 g castor sugar, 110 g sieved
icing sugar, 1tsp cornflour, 1 tsp white-wine vinegar, half tsp vanilla extract; approx 300 ml double
cream and fruit for decoration.
Method :
Set oven at 150oC / 300F/ Gas
Mark 2; cover a large baking tray with lightly greased baking parchment.
Beat the egg whites and caster sugar for about
3 minutes until very firm. Then add the icing sugar, cornflour, vinegar and
vanilla for a further 4 minutes until ultra-firm, white and glossy. The trick is in beating and beating and then
beating some more; the consistency is moving from ultra-firm to cement-like! With circular sweeping movements spread it out
onto the parchment so that there is a slight hollow in the centre and nice
fluid lines around the sides. Just
before placing in the oven reduce the temperature to 140oC/290F/Gas Mark 1.5
and bake for around 1 hour 10 mins or I hour if you have an electric convection
oven. For smaller or individual meringues you need to reduce the cooking time
accordingly. Your cooked meringue should be firm on the outside and wonderfully
gooey on the inside; leaving it to cool in the oven stops the pavlova cracking
so much.
I have once had the pleasure of entertaining a
lady Muscovite and it just so happened this was the dessert on my menu. Being
an Applied Linguist, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity for phonological
practice. Thanks to Olga’s coaching, what we serve up is now pronounced
PAV-lo-va, with resounding Russian first-syllable stress.
Instead of making one large
meringue base, this time I made three heart-shaped (well, nearly!) couple-sized
ones : one for H’n’me, and one each for our sweet-toothed, sweet neighbours,
Anna and Olympia….to share with their respective Valentines!
One friend is such a devout fan
that he has been served one such large pavlova in its entirety for his sole
enjoyment. Stephanos, in response to your recent ‘lemon curdy greetings’, here’s a sweet salutation!
Living out in the sticks, it’s
only now I’ve seen the award-winning film, ‘The Iron Lady’. Unquestionably
Meryl Streep deserved every accolade and award for her role as the older
Baroness Thatcher, magnificent in her control, diction and facial expression. The
film did focus on her father’s influence, her ascent in the political world,
her friends and foes, the fighting spirit that ensured her place in world
politics, but that also led to her downfall. We saw what her career cost her in
terms of family life.
It saddened me, however, to see
how much time was spent on seeing things through her dementia. Certainly many of her policies were greatly
unpopular- the Poll Tax being one of them- but whatever our political position,
we cannot deny that she was a great political force. Paradoxically in gender
terms, she could be described as one of our last real statesmen, leading her
country as she did to war, as well as through political and economic crises. How
sad today to see political action based on currying popularity, maintaining
power, rather than consistent with an overall perspective and cohesive policy as
was the case with her. She showed herself to be a person of moral fibre, the
longest-serving UK Prime Minister of the twentieth century, and the only woman
to have held such a post.
Rather
than focus so much on the image of an ailing old woman, we needed to have more
of a balance and see the strength that personified her and earned her global respect.
And here I reach for another
image, a metal metaphor: Antony Gormley’s towering steel structure, the Angel of the
North. Its picture is reproduced courtesy of Google images. This 20 metre-high structure
in Tyneside expresses the mettle, if you like, of the northerner. Like the
Angel, our image of Margaret Thatcher should have been allowed, though visibly
tarnished by the passage of time, to stand as a symbol of strength, dignified
and true.
Finally, our alkyon or kingfisher seems to have heard my plea and protected us
from adverse weather conditions. I recently
managed to do some tidying up in the garden. Here you can see its prior sorry state
and Leon doing an inspection of it in the ‘after’ shot.
Yes, we have been having more
dreary, grey days with much atmospheric humidity than we want but it’s not so
cold and the snow that has fallen has been mainly on the high ground.
Our lilies and primroses are currently in bloom.
So to paraphrase Percy Bysshe Shelley in his Ode to the West Wind:
If Winter is on the wane, can
Spring be far behind?
