Les Poissonchats

Oh why, don’t you worry, I know how to mend this, says my mother, when my husband’s spear headed elbows have poked yet another hole in his shirt. I’ll mend this, said my grandmother, when one of us had torn a button off our jackets. I think I’ll mend it, I say, when my favourite bowl unexpectedly bursts into pieces.

Or: as I undecidedly turn an object round and round in my hands, inspecting it from all sides as if scrutiny bore an answer, it still may serve. I think it’s our secret family motto (I dug up the official one a while ago, going something like Virtue is the only true Nobility. We’ve got that from some ancient Roman bloke. Rather cool, don’t you think?). It still may serve.

Mending, not throwing out. Repairing. Buying things that have served, repurposing things that I own, rethinking things. Maintaining things. Keeping things because. It’s probably the antithesis to modern life, that life of minimalism because of changing house often. Of burying memory under memory under memory in a mountain of junk thrown out with the dustbin each week. Some people call this decluttering and that it makes them feel free to possess as few items as possible. I imagine them having to run errands because of the precisely the thing they need but threw out the other day.

I hate running errands (I also hate shopping), and rummaging in a cupboard to find exactly what I was looking for is rather elevating. To be able to repair something is pure delight! Perhaps it’s true that owning things encompasses responsibility and care, admittedly there’s a lot of maintenance going on with having stuff, but then, am I more free owning nothing but having to run errands? Also is one really free when one doesn’t have a care in the world?

So I delight in my deliciously anachronistic life of hoarding things and put them to use, if not immediate, imminently so, diabolically enjoying the shocked/injured faces when I tell people I cook with their granny’s equipment and that I loath those modern wizard pots (I’m sure there’s black magic involved with induction cooktops), also getting most schoolmistressly when explaining how to clean my centenary cast iron pan (water, no soap, dry in the flame of the gas cooker, never ever let soak. Never!). Seamless cupboards and white couches? But for the love of gnarled old oak tables and drawers that need a soaping else they get stuck.

Mending things also is choice. Choosing what to alter, how to improve, what to repurpose and eventually, what really needs to go, go in the sense of going to be given away at the jumble sale. The junk yard is the absolute last resort (also it’s counterintuitive to decluttering because I ALWAYS find stuff to bring back home, especially from a French junk yard).

Luckily I’m not alone out here with this attitude, and over the years we’ve grown to an entire community of Mr and Mrs Fixits. We all have a barn full of silly old stuff and old materials and things-that-might-still-serve, helping each other out whenever we need something. We all bought hopelessly battered old houses on the verge of collapsing, houses that in other areas would long have been torn down to be replaced by efficiently stacked residentials. For years we’ve been working with our own hands to bring them back to glory, respectful of their history, the history of this place, and of the families that have lived here.

It isn’t the easiest way perhaps to live a life, and it may feel much at times, often requiring an extra dose of grit and virtue to go on. But as to freedom – I never felt more free than here, in this our wonky old castle, full of things, our things and things left behind by previous owners, some rooms finished and furnished, some a sheer mess of cobwebs and crumbling plaster and bulging wallpaper waiting for us to put our hands to work.

Also, in speaking of abundance, it’s strawberry season and I made this cake for Whit Sunday, obviously in a vintage copper mould, baked in the gas cooker that shares my birth year and arranged on a cake stand someone threw out, after a recipe from an old lady who I’m sure is on the same page with me when it comes to mending things. Needless to say, it tasted divine.

What you’ll need

For the strawberry salad:

• 500g of fresh ripe strawberries
• 4 table spoons of sugar
• a generous dash of quince brandy

For the cake:

• 4 fresh farm eggs at room temperature
• 150g sugar
• seeds from half a vanilla pod
• a pinch of fleur de sel
• 200g fine flour, I use a T45
• 10g of baking powder
• 0.5dl crisp dry white wine
• 3 table spoons of orange flower water
• 150g molten fresh farm butter
• icing sugar for topping

How to bake it

Start with the strawberry salad. Keep 2-4 strawberries for decorating and quarter rest. Transfer to a wide dish, add the sugar and the brandy. Let steep for 2-4 hours.

For the cake, melt the butter at low temperature, it mustn’t cook.

Meanwhile, crack the eggs into a wide bowl and mix with the sugar, the vanilla seeds and the salt for at least 10 minutes, until the mass gets fluffy and rises about 3 times the initial size.

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C and butter a bundt cake mould, dust the inside with flour.

Add the flour and the baking powder to the batter and stir under, continue stirring and add the wine and the orange flower water. Finally add the butter, stir for at least another minute.

Transfer to the bundt mould and cover with tin foil, press the rim well so the batter won’t spill. Put into the oven. After 10 minutes, reduce the temperature to 150°C and continue baking for 30 minutes. Let cool in the open oven once it’s finished.

Gently tip on a nice plate, the right moment to tip a cake is as soon as you can touch the mould without getting burnt, well before the cake has fully cooled.

Dust with icing sugar as soon as the cake is cold and decorate with strawberries.

Serve with strawberry salad.

How to eat it

We meant to have this treat outside in the garden but given we’re having an English kind of May, the moment we wanted to sit down a thunderstorm came up and the rain pelted down on our poor heads as if there was no tomorrow, so there was nothing left to do but to subside and move inside again. It still is a nice afternoon imbiss also when had inside the house at lamplight, a nice cup of strong coffee to go along is warmly recommended.