Making a mark
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
I have a folder on my computer desktop supposedly full of ideas for blog posts, which I look at occasionally. Uninspired again - today is one of those days - I opened the folder marked 'moments in time' and found this - a patch of cacti, somewhere near St. Tropez I seem to recall, on which people have engraved their names or initials, mostly representing a moment of love. Whether those moments endured into the future of their making is, of course, unknown.
It reminded me of an aside from the Met, about this detail of a painting by Jean Béraud called A Windy Day on the Pont des Arts - a moment in time of a quite different kind. However, in the few words written about the painting by the Met, they mentioned that people have been doing that, leave a padlock with your names on to mark your love, and throw the key in the river below, traditionally on the Pont des Arts for some reason. This has obviously been going on for a long time, because amazingly the weight of the padlocks caused a part of the bridge to collapse, and so they have been removed, the bridge repaired and it is now a banned activity. So the physical representation of all those memories of love are now gone. Which of course does not mean that the memory is gone - at least for those who are still living and made this mark, possibly a commitment, once upon a time.
On my now long ago travels I have come across these padlocks - most notably on the Cinque Terre walk in Italy. If you're wondering who started this, the two stories most quoted are one from ancient China - two lovers, who jumped to their death from a high mountain because they were not allowed to marry - quite how the padlocks come into this I do not know. Or Serbia where a couple pledged their love on a local bridge before he was sent off to WW1 - again no mention of the padlock, but a poem was written.
Lovelocks mark a specific event in a life, but man has been trying to say 'I was here, I mattered' from prehistoric times when one of the very first forms of art made by mankind was the handprint on a cave wall. They're just hands but there's a sense of urgency about them is there not? - a clamour of voices trying to be heard.
And we are still doing it with graffiti - even the handprints - a few examples below from here and there in Eltham - anonymous - and temporary because:
"Graffiti doesn't exist unless someone got a photo, because it's gone immediately." Jeffrey Deitch
Well I caught a photo - and some of them are still there. Besides there are still examples of graffiti from centuries ago on historical sites - now sometimes preserved behind glass to ensure their survival.
Most of us leave no trace behind us, as I found when I was investigating our families' histories. Some left barely any trace at all - not even a baptism or a marriage, and before, I think 1537 when the churches started registering births, marriages and deaths by hand, most people would have left no mark at all. And yet we try through intangible ways like having children to say that we were here and we mattered. The photographs won't survive and unless you do indeed do something remarkable that will be remembered forever - and how many people manage that - then those moments in time, the ones that are recorded somewhere, will die with you.
And what has all of that gloom and doom got to do with food on this gloriously sunny and warm day? Food is so transitory. It can be made, presented, consumed within half an hour or so. Leaving just a few plates, pots and pans to be washed, and maybe a few remains to go into the compost or if it's lucky - transformed into something else with the same fate - the next day.
And yet - we remember particular meals - for the food, the people we ate with, the occasion, the place. Or we remember a more encompassing period in which we were fed by our mother, our educational institutions, our hosts in other countries or other parts of our homeland of the time.
Even more generally the cooks of the world - that's virtually everyone at some point -remembers and uses on a daily basis dishes, equipment, ingredients, discovered or created long ago and which hold within them huge amounts of human history, and which contiinue to evolve. Some of those creators and disseminators are remembered - Apicius, Carême, Escoffier... Will our modern day food influencers from Elizabeth David to Ottolenghi and the latest social media gods and goddesses of food be remembered? Will Heston Blumenthal's triple fried chips be handed down through the generations - I only mention these because they were featured in a piece in the Age about a new pub in Malvern East.
So tonight I shall be remembering how to make a potato gratin - first tasted in the Jura as cooked by Madame Perruque; how to concoct some sort of braised chicken dish - a massive collection of 'how to' memories there and how to make vinaigrette - from that first tomato salad and the everyday green salad I ate in those long ago days in France as an exchange schoolgirl. Every one of those dishes, and the wine too - a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand I think - which always recalls my first taste of the famous Cloudy Bay - a complete and astounding revelation. This will not be a Cloudy Bay but nevertheless ... Yes every one of those dishes has memory attached - mine and a more general history unconsciously used by everyone
Memory is unreliable which I guess is why we try to fix special memories in some way, although we do not necessarily recognise that that moment - that first taste of a French tomato salad for example - will be fixed and will travel through time with you.
"Has it ever struck you ... that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going? It’s really all memory ... except for each passing moment." Eric Kandel
Apologies - a very rambling mess of corny things I and others much better than I have said many times before.
YEARS GONE BY
April 26
2025 - I found it - sort of
2023 - Nothing
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2019 - Not really Wiener schnitzel
2018 - Why is bird shit white?
2017 - The cake or the decoration?
I like your rambling stories with their heart wrapped up in some memory of places and events, to which moment the food has its link. "Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine", as Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan once wrote...
😘