Today I had a rather fun cooking accident. I\u2019m making candied peel, and the doorbell rang. This candied peel has a bit of alcohol in, and the water hadn\u2019t boiled out of it and\u2026 it boiled over onto the stovetop while I answered the door. I cleaned up some of it immediately, because dinner was impossible without any cooking elements for my frypan (my frypan is greedy that way – it won’t heat without help), and left the rest until later. \u2018Later\u2019 was just now for some of it. It had crystallised and could be cleaned off with an egg-lifter. When wet, it took so much more work to clear away.<\/p>\n
While I was creatively using my egg-lifter (and is egg-lifter even a word in US English?), I thought about what book I should tell you about today.<\/p>\n
Given that the other thing I did today was clean out all my herbs and spices and check their use-by date, the obvious book is to do with herbs. Just one book? Perish the thought. The only thing perished today were some very, very, very old herbs…<\/p>\n
Let me introduce you to my perennial favourite herbals: Culpeper\u2019s Complete Herbal<\/i> <\/a>and Mrs Grieve\u2019s A Modern Herbal<\/i>.<\/a> I\u2019ve had my Culpeper since high school. The powers-that-were made the mistake of letting us choose our own books for school prizes, you see. My Culpeper is much-used, and it still has a little bookplate explaining why I have it. I was awarded it for the Year 12 English prize, at Camberwell High School, in 1978. My copy of Mrs Grieves wasn\u2019t acquired until at least two years later.<\/p>\n I might throw the Culpeper a fiftieth birthday party in 2028. It\u2019s earned it. Both books have. They\u2019ve been handy to me as an historian, as a writer, as someone who loves cooking, and as someone who\u2019s curious about how we change the way we describe things. Thee two books were part of the stack I used to refer to as \u2018my external memory.\u2019 Much of my library is borrowable, but these two books do not leave my side. They\u2019re always in the room I work. Always. This is despite the fact that I actually use e-versions when I want to look something up.<\/p>\n They\u2019re too close to me to make introductions easy. They\u2019re not my oldest books, nor even my earliest. This doesn\u2019t make them less part of my life. I have other books that are equally important. When I was told I was going blind, one of the first things I did was decide that 200 books needed to stay with me, even when I can’t see them. Handling them will be grounding. I\u2019m not blind yet, and my library has 7000 books \u2013 I\u2019d own more, but many were stolen and my flat is full. I say this to make it clear how critical to my existence is any book in that \u2018must keep even if I can’t see them\u2019 stack.<\/p>\n I think we all have books like this. As of today, because of the candied peel and its wonderful interaction with my stovetop, I will forever think of the smell of citrus toffee (with a faint overtone of fine liqueur) when I think of these books. If you have a moment, I’d love to know if you have books you treasure the way I treasure these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today I had a rather fun cooking accident. I\u2019m making candied peel, and the doorbell rang. This candied peel has a bit of alcohol in, and the water hadn\u2019t boiled out of it and\u2026 it boiled over onto the stovetop while I answered the door. I cleaned up some of it immediately, because dinner was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,406,56],"tags":[561,171,157,560,79,559,52,70,96,76,558,45,86],"class_list":["post-2197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-food","category-life-experiences","tag-a-modern-herbal","tag-books","tag-comfort-reading","tag-complete-herbal","tag-cooking","tag-culpeper","tag-food","tag-history","tag-life","tag-mental-health","tag-mrs-grieve","tag-personal","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2198,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2197\/revisions\/2198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}