Drinking French - David Lebovitz

I’m not self isolating as such, but I’m currently unemployed which amounts to much the same thing in that I’m spending a lot of time home alone. This is fairly high on my list of favourite things (just me and the books, various creative endeavours, a stack of Mae West films, the radio for company, and time - it’s all good). It helps too that in this city centre at least there’s little sign of shortages. Apparently there’s not much pasta or toilet roll around but not being in need of either of those things I’m not overly worried.

My own experience locally is that bigger supermarkets are struggling rather more than smaller shops to keep their shelves stocked, the difference between panic and calm might well be less than half a mile. Going out in the city is surprisingly calm and serene at the moment and gives a totally different picture to all those images of empty shelves and impossible to get home delivery spots.

Anyway. It looks like we’ll all be spending more time at home over the next couple of months, if for no other reason than that so many events are being cancelled. Which seems to me to be a great chance to get into the kitchen and actually engage with some of the cookbooks I so happily collect.

The first one up is the last one through the door - David Lebovitz’s ‘Drinking French’. I saw Anja Dunk talking about it on Instagram and wanted it badly enough to order it straight away. I’m not on a book buying ban, but with no money coming in I’ve really cut down on what I spend so getting this feels like an indulgence in itself. I used to buy books like this because they were specifically useful for work, without that excuse it feels like even more of an indulgence - which is actually quite nice.

It was also worth buying, it’s an absolute gem. I was principally interested in the apéritifs section, not selling them any longer hasn’t dented my passion for them. What Lebovitz does is introduce a range of apéritifs with a run down of their history and flavour profile, then follows that with a couple (or more) drinks recipes for them. It’s surprising how often books are not laid out like this. Byrrh and Suze are the bottles I’ve been curious about, and this book is encouraging me to make the effort to get them at some point.

It’s also reminded me of how much I like Pineau des Charentes (a mix of grape juice and brandy, there are also apple versions which are fabulous), has interested me in Picon, and RinQuinQuin. I already have a bottle of Dubonnet to play with and a goodish range of vermouths so there’s plenty I can be getting in with before buying anything new.

Apéritifs are only part of the story here though. There are also café drinks which covers coffee,
tisanes, has a really tempting recipe for Armagnac marshmallows, various takes in lemonade, and something to say about flavoured syrups. There’s a whole chapter on liqueurs and infusions which are tempting me yet again to try and make my own liquors (I have not had much luck with this, I don’t know why not) though maybe it’s wiser to buy the commercial versions. Again they come with some really tempting sounding cocktail recipes.

The actual cocktail chapter has a pleasing selection of classics, modern takes on classics, and so on. They’re things that you can make at home without to much effort or trouble, they sound good, and the list of ingredients isn’t daunting - all of which is exactly what I want in a cocktail recipe.

A chapter on apéro snacks is a nice finishing touch, along with instructions for making a range of bar syrups for home use (again, they mostly sound like things I’d use). And as a final bonus - it’s an American import about French drinking, so for once with an American book it’s probably actually easier to source some of these bottles in the U.K.*

*Amazon are fairly good for liqueurs they’re generally not the cheapest but this is balanced by their delivery which is probably the most convenient, Gerry’s in Soho (you can order online) The Whisky Exchange, and Master Of Malt are all excellent.

A Virus Post

I wasn’t going to post about this, but it’s been an elephant in the room for me all week, and consequently I’ve not really been thinking much about anything else. It’s an odd time to be job hunting. I feel like I’m self isolating anyway - which has not allowed me to do as much reading as I thought it would - and between employment uncertainty, and not knowing what the implications of this virus are going to be over the next couple of months is making it really hard to plan.

I like having a plan and things to look forward to - as lots of us do. I’ve gone ahead and booked flights to Shetland in May knowing that they might be cancelled, but also knowing that last minute travel is prohibitively expensive. I’m not making any other plans more than a few days ahead, partly because so much stuff is getting cancelled anyway, but more because being prepared to do whatever we can to slow the spread of this thing down is important.

I’m also sympathetic towards people who are stocking up, not that there’s much evidence of panic buying in Leicester city centre. I grew up on an island off the mainland of Shetland, there were never more than a couple of families on it, generally just us in the winter, and getting storm bound wasn’t unusual. A formative experience in all sorts of ways, I’ve never liked to have empty cupboards - just in case, and because you never know.

When I found out I was being made redundant last year one of the first things I did was clear out all the cupboards in my kitchen, getting rid of anything out of date, and restocking them until they were over full (there may be olive oil and preserved lemons lurking in a box under my bed)*. It was a mostly rational decision, I was working for Waitrose, knew I wouldn’t be able to easily buy a lot of these nice things anymore, and that whilst I was earning there was no guilt attached to buying a few extra packets of biscuits or the expensive sardines with lemon. There was also an element of this being something that I could control in the middle of having no idea what the future would bring.

And very useful all those things have been, they’re still helping me keep a lid on my current spending without my going without which has been really good for morale. After fires in Australia, floods here, a climate crisis that everybody is surely closer to having to accept, Brexit, and all the other crap going in the world, a situation where the advice is more or less to hide under the blankets is something it seems we can embrace.

If extra pasta and toilet roll (or choco Leibniz and preserved lemons) make anyone feel like they can at least do this one thing in the face of very real worry about either our own health or that of our loved ones I’m not judging. Just in time logistics inevitably means that any significant or unexpected demand for specific items will cause short term supply issues. If nothing else this might be a timely reminder to think about how supply chains work, and all the things we’ve come to take for granted in how we shop.

Mostly though, just keep well!

*My kitchen is tiny, there are only 2 very small cupboards to put food in.

Chocolate and Bananas - a Baking Post

When I’m staying with either of my parents a childhood love of bananas comes back in full force, at home they seem to be a real effort to eat, which is why I had 2 very ripe specimens left in the fruit bowl this morning (when they start to go a bit mushy I just can’t).

At least it was an opportunity to make Sue Quinn’s Brown Butter, Banana and Tahini Chocolate Chunk Cookies which have been on my to do list for as long as I’ve had Sue Quinn’s brilliant book Cocoa.

The cookie recipe only needs one banana, and doesn’t need doubling. Years ago when I worked in the kitchen of a nursery I used to make a really good banana loaf, unfortunately I’ve lost that recipe in the mists of time and couldn’t find anything that sounded much like it when I started looking (in my memories there might have been sultanas in it?) but a Mary Berry recipe looked hopeful.

To be fair I chose the Mary Berry recipe partly for its small quantities (it’s on the BBC website) and because it would finish off an open packet of chocolate chips as well as use that miserable looking banana, but it was not a success. This is partly because I’m a little bit ambivalent about the flavour of baked bananas - it’s quite a strong one, and in this loaf cake seems oddly synthetic. The texture is also a bit odd - sticky, very moist, and a touch rubbery (for want of a better word). It’s not a cake I’ll make again.

The cookies on the other hand turned out really well*. Tahini, salt, and the brown butter all do their bit to balance the banana and make something which tastes just grown up enough. I didn’t have the spelt flour the recipe called for, but will make sure to have it if I make these again. I’m wondering what Rye flour would be like too, and peanut butter instead of tahini (depending on what’s in the cupboard). There’s a link to the recipe Here, but honestly - buy the book.

I’ve enthused about ‘Cocoa’ a few times in the past year, but it really is an excellent book. Everything I’ve made from it has been excellent, it’s much more than just sweet things, has made me a committed fan of cocoa nibs, and is the first place I look if I want something a bit special to cook for an occasion. The flavour combinations are great, and all the information about cocoa and chocolate is brilliant too - especially the bits about buying, tasting, and storing.

*If I’m ambivalent about baked banana, D is not. He ate a couple of the cookies, and took more away with him. He wasn’t impressed by the loaf cake either though.

Some Books for International Women’s Day

As it’s International Women’s Day which seems like as good a time as any to shout about some great books (most of which are sitting in my to be read, or finished, pile).

I’m going to start with Georgette Heyer. I’ve read my way through a pile of her books in the last week or so because I’ve been feeling low and Heyer cheers me up. It’s partly her humour, partly the comfort of falling into something so familiar, and generally because I think Heyer is something special. Her books aren’t perfect, but whilst she more or less follows the rules of the genre she’s also continually playing with, and bending, them. 

Which is probably a good opening for Helen Taylor’s ‘Why Women Read Fiction. I’ve dipped in and out of this and really ought to get stuck into it properly. The bits I’ve read have been interesting, especially on the marketing of books, and I hope to be reporting back about the whole thing soon. 

I bought Carolyn Grant’s ‘Voyaging Out, British Woman Artists From Suffrage to the Sixties’ as a Christmas present for myself, it’s reproaching me a little for not having read it (I’m not working, why am I not reading more?). Regardless, it’s exciting to finally see women artists being rediscovered and assessed in the same way that authors have been over the last 40 years or so.

Which leads me to Lennie Goodings ‘A Bite Of the Apple’. Virago holds a special place in my reading life which makes me a little nervous about drawing back the curtain on what working for them was like, but then I look at the index to this book and get really excited, so again, it shouldn’t be long before I read this.

A book I am reading through at the moment is Darra Goldstein’s ‘Beyond The North Wind’. Technically it’s a cookbook, but that’s a very reductive description. I have a shelf of Virago paperbacks by early women travellers, ‘Beyond The North Wind’ puts me in mind of them. It’s as much about the place and the people as it is the food, more than travel writing, more than a cookbook, more than the sum if it’s parts. Patience Gray did something like this in ‘Honey from a Weed’, Caroline Eden and Eleanor Fords books (the one they wrote together as well as their separate works) are excellent too, and so are Olia Hercules. 

Signe Johansen’s recent food and drink books, ‘Solo’ and ‘Spirited’ deserve a shout out too, ‘Solo’ for making cooking for one sound like fun. I love cooking for more than one, not so much just for myself - for all of us who feel like that there are probably some questions to ask about our relationship with food. Johansen is good on the self care side of this, and her recipes are delicious. ‘Spirited’ is a useful book about drinks, not all alcoholic, with the specific aim of being women friendly. I know from 20 years selling alcohol that it’s an area where female customers often lack confidence, anyone trying to change that is doing us all a favour. 

Another recent buy is Helen Lewis’ ‘Difficult Women, A History of Feminism in 11 Fights’. I heard her being interviewed on Radio 4 where she was so compelling that I decided to get the book now rather than wait for the paperback. I had better read this before the paperback comes out.  

The Penguin Book Of Mermaids edited by Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown

I can’t resist a book that covers folklore (or as this one says Literature/Mythology) and haven’t been resisting this one for a good few weeks now. It’s the perfect book for dipping in and out of. It’s also the perfect blend of scholarship and entertainment to be a really useful thing to have around, and if you want more than that, a third of its selections are published in English for the first time.

Sections cover ‘Water Deities and Sirens from Olden Times’, Mermaids and Other Merbeings in Europe’, ‘Literary Tales’, and ‘Merfolk and Water Spirits Across Cultures’. Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ is the longest pieces in the book, most other entries being between a couple of paragraphs to a couple of page, and entries are comprehensively introduced. 

To have a book about Mermaids handy for bath time reading seems a bit self consciously affected, but it’s been perfect for picking up for the 5 - 10 minutes that I prefer. It’s a great bus book for the same reason, and reading through it in fits and starts like this has given me plenty of time to think about some of the stories.

Some were already familiar, some are interesting as curiosities or glimpses into other times and cultures (if that sounds patronising it’s not how I mean it) other stories are haunting enough to have got right under my skin. These have mostly been from the ‘Literary Tales’ section, specifically I’m thinking of Kurahashi Yumiko’s A Mermaid’s Tears, and Genevieve Valentine’s Abyssus Abyssum Invocat. 

Neither were writers that I was familiar with, Kurahashi Yumiko has been compared to Angela Carter for her subject matter and erotic content, but the introduction also points out that she was much more conservative in her position on women and sexual politics than Carter. Either way I’d like to read more of her work, although a quick look at amazon suggests that’s she’s not been translated. I’ll look out for Genevieve Valentine too who should be easier to find. 

As I’ve said, I can never resist books like this (not that I try very hard) and they’re generally satisfying, but this one is genuinely something more. A proper treasure chest full of material to explore that I’ve found really inspiring. Mostly my interest is in tracing links between different traditions as well as how they diverge. This collection makes me wish that I could write fiction. 

Devil’s Cub - Georgette Heyer

I can’t even guess how many times I’ve read this book over the years, but I expect it’s into double figures now. I guess I last read it about 7 years ago, that’s certainly when I last blogged about it, but Heyer is a writer that keeps on giving and every time I read her I find something new.

‘Devil’s Cub’ was probably my first favourite Heyer, both for it’s humour, and the moment when the heroine shoots the hero to avoid being raped. How I understand that scene has changed over the years, but it has never lost its power for me. 

I did wonder what I’d think of the hero this time round, especially in a post Me Too world. What I found was a novel that feels like it’s very much about consent, and an even further conviction of how subversive Heyer is as a romance writer even at the beginning of her career.

The plot of ‘Devil’s Cub’ was easier to swallow as an uncritical 13 year old than it is now, but it throws up more interesting questions now than it did then. The Devil’s Cub is the Marquis Of Vidal, the book opens with him blowing the brains of a highwayman across the road before casually resuming his journey to a party (when it’s pointed out that the ladies might object to the sight on the way home, servants are sent to clear up the mess). Within a chapter or two he’s drunk and shooting someone in a duel. As this character isn’t a common criminal there’s every possibility the Marquis will be had up for Murder, it not being the first time he’s got into this mess. He’s 23.

As well as a budding career as a serial killer, Vidal also has a thing for the ladies. He’s perusing Sophia Challoner who’s very beautiful. She has some idea of marrying him, but makes it quite clear that she’d be equally prepared to be his mistress if the price is right. He hasn’t really noticed her older sister, Mary, but Mary (20) is rather more in love with him than Sophia, and so when she gets a letter meant for Sophia planning an elopement she swaps places with her sister.

This is where the plot falls down a bit. Heyer needs to get Mary to France, and to do it she has her behave in an absurdly reckless way. Simply destroying the letter would have scotched the elopement. Disguising herself as her sister, and keeping up the pretence until they’ve reached the coast where she further pretends to be more or less up for anything is not the obvious course of action.

At this point Vidal, declares one woman is more or less as good as another, forces her into his yacht and threatens rape. Mary holds him off with a severe bout of seasickness, and once in France by shooting him with his own pistol (handily pocketed from his coach, loaded. Miraculously it doesn’t accidentally go off before she needs it). This is the point that Vidal falls in love, and Mary starts to feel guilty. 

I thought the threats of rape and violence would bother me more, but Mary consents to get into the coach, she opts to stay in it, and when she reveals her identity she does it in a way designed to provoke anger and possibly expectation. To make sense of her it’s hard not to think that part of her wants to be carried off and relieved of the responsibility of decision making. Heyer could have turned this into a rape fantasy along the lines of The Sheik, but instead she gives Mary a gun, and a determination to find a job. 

Nor is it enough for Mary when she comes to believe that Vidal might love her. She needs his family’s consent to any marriage, for the entirely realistic reason that a family rift is a poor start to a relationship. Vidal in turn has had to come to terms with his behaviour, which he does with surprising honesty - he doesn’t gloss over the threats of rape, and it’s noticeable when the couple finally kiss that he’s paying attention too, and respecting her responses. 

None of this is as black or white as I might have expected it to be, through both the main plot, and the various sub plots around it Heyer is either poking fun at romance conventions, or undermining them. Despite the way the plot unfolds the way the main characters behave rings true in all their stupid decisions, and so the issues at play are surprisingly complex and relevant. 

As a footnote it seems apt that Heyer’s son, the judge Sir Richard Rougier, is on record expressing that women have a right to dress provocatively without fear of being attacked. 

Muriel Dawson, a Phone Box discovery

We're still trying to raise funds for the Lera Voe phone box - there a GoFundMe link here if anybody would like to throw a pound or two at it and I'm still looking into the bits of local history I can find online, which in turn has led me to Muriel Dawson.

Dad has been interviewed for the BBC, you can read about him here, or even listen to him on Radio Scotland here. He is most delighted by having been caricatured by Smirk in The Shetland Times though. A copy should be on it's way to me, which I guess will be framed to go in the toilet in time honoured fashion. But enough about dad for now and on to Muriel Dawson.

Miss Dawson was an artist, born in Canterbury, New Zealand in 1897. Her family moved to England in 1913, and she started studying at the Richmond School of Art. She had a prolific career as an illustrator producing what probably amounts to 1000's of pictures of wide eyed young children (it feels like 1000's when you start trawling through them on google). In the late 1950s she moved to Shetland where she lived until she died in 1974.

The house she lived in was called Backlands and is on the opposite side of Lera Voe to our phone box. It's probably a 10 minute walk and would have been the nearest phone she had access to, especially when she first moved there (I don't know if she eventually had a phone line of her own, but it wouldn't have been a given in that part of Shetland even in the 1970's) so it's safe to assume that she would have used it. Perhaps more to the point it would have been a familiar landmark and part of her view.

I remember hearing about Miss Dawson as a child, a friends mother had some of her drawings (pastels I think) which were charming, but it's a long time since she's been mentioned and I'd more or less forgotten about her. Prints of her work are still easily available, but because wide eyed toddlers in romper suits aren't my thing it's only this weekend that I've discovered that she also did 100's of natural history studies.

When she died she bequeathed the bulk of these to The Natural History Museum, there are very hard to make out scanned images here which are making me want to go to Kensington to search through the real things which look to include several landscapes local to Lera Voe and Dale of Walls, as well as studies of the flora and fauna and even the local regatta. There are also pages of her work here and again the pencil studies show a different artist.

There will still be people locally who might be expected to remember Miss Dawson reasonably well, but not as many as there would have been a decade ago - whatever else this project turns up there's a fair amount of regret on my part that I didn't think to look into any of this earlier.

One thing I have learnt about Dawson which intrigues me though is that she converted to Catholicism, many of her sketches are dates, and frequently they feature a symbol on the top left hand corner that denotes the saints day that she drew them on. Collectively it must turn these studies into a book of days.

This one is in the Natural History Museum collection.

Heyer based Podcasts

After writing about 'A Civil Contract', and trying to concentrate on reading new books rather than going on a Georgette Heyer binge I've sort of reached a compromise with myself. I found a couple of podcasts about Heyer and her work which I can listen to whilst I'm knitting.

I can't say it's really worked for me as I'm currently reading Devil's Cub for the umpteenth time (my copy from something like 1987 which is on the point of disintegration) and not knitting. Both podcasts seem like fun from the episodes I've listened to so far, so if anyone else wants a failed diversionary tactic - here you go...

Heyer Today is here

and The Georgette Heyer podcast is here

there's also Backlisted discussing Venetia here

I'd love to know if there are more and if they're any good.

A Civil Contract - Georgette Heyer

I’ve been feeling a bit low for the past few days (the beginnings of a cold and a diagnosis of arthritis, along with the lack of a job situation have all conspired against me) which really put me in the mood for Georgette Heyer.

I’m not sure why I picked ‘A Civil Contract’, it’s not a particular favourite - I prefer young Heyer where it’s fairly straight romance with lots of swashbuckling, cross dressing, and humour. They’re old fashioned but classic. The later books are more interesting, but they’re also more problematic. References about going to the Jews to borrow money are distasteful in a book written in the 1920s, but much more than that in one written in 1961*.

The biggest problem I find with ‘A Civil Contract’ though is how it exposes Heyer’s ingrained snobbery. It was enough to make me think that I wouldn’t post about this book, but then it seemed better to grasp the nettle and get on with it.

What makes ‘A Civil Contract’ so interesting, especially coming from someone known as a romance writer, as how much of an anti romance it is. It’s written by a woman who is yelling from the rooftops what utter nonsense the whole genre is. A quote from Publishers Weekly on the back of my copy states that ‘Her heroines are all young, beautiful, spirited... the predicaments are romantic, full of suspense, hilarious’. That is not this book.

The heroine (Jenny) is resolutely plain, not ugly, but ordinary. She is however very rich. When the hero (Adam) finds himself inheriting so much debt that he’s going to have to sell everything, leaving at least one sister homeless it’s suggested to him that he marry money. He’s not keen, already in love with a childhood friend (Julia). He can’t marry her because he can’t support her and she’s remarkably high maintenance.

Jenny’s money comes from her father, a phenomenally rich self made man with a taste in interior decoration which is pure Russian oligarch. Adam’s father inherited a fortune and squandered it before  breaking his neck out hunting.

There’s a riff on Sense and Sensibility here, with Adam representing sensibility, and again for a romance he’s an oddly emasculated character - which is most of his predicament throughout the book (which is neither romantic or hilarious).

And this is where the book gets interesting to me, Adam is kind of a shit for much of the book - which he more or less comes to realise. I think Heyer expects us to value his breeding and good manners rather more than I’m inclined too (although to be fair he’s also only about 26 so perhaps not as emotionally mature as he might be). His immediate family, with one exception, is worse.

Jenny and her father are continuously presented as insensitive or vulgar, and again I think Heyer genuinely expects us to despise them a little for it, but at the same time as a more or less self made woman herself she clearly admires that ability to make money. There’s always a tension in how she describes Jenny’s father, and to some extent Jenny herself.

The character of Julia is interesting too. She’s just the beautiful, highly strung, young woman that you might expect an immature young man to fall for. She could be portrayed as a straight out bitch (there are moments) but again, for all her appalling behaviour she’s portrayed with a certain amount of sympathy. She actually reads as someone suffering from depression with fairly extreme mood swings.   The point is that she might be desirable, but it would have been a very unhappy marriage (Heyer pairs her off with an understanding older man with whom she might well be happy).

For the rest of it Heyer goes out of her way to underline that romance is not in and of itself enough to base a happy marriage on. Friendship and shared interests are the glue that holds a relationship together. It’s not particularly exciting but it’s real. Jenny’s love for Adam is romantic, her decisions are a set of sacrifices and compromises which eventually pay off for her but she’s never going to get the passion that she dreamed of.

Meanwhile the climax of the book is Adam betting what money he has in the outcome of Waterloo. We follow him through a tense 48 hours waiting to see if his gamble pays off, and maybe that’s why I chose to read this book again.

Years ago I found a clipping from The Times amongst some family papers. It was the first report of victory at Waterloo. Reading it gave me goosebumps, a part of that was Heyer’s description of the news coming through in this book. More recently poking around one of the regimental museums in Edinburgh castle I saw one of the Eagles that had been captured at Waterloo - and again it was Heyer’s description that came back.

Whatever her faults she was a master at bringing history alive. This book also reminded me of this Post and all the other things she pointed me towards.

*I’m wary about describing Heyer as anti-Semitic, but that doesn’t mean I find her prejudices any less ugly, or forgivable.

3 book covers

A few weeks ago I read this Article, and a few days later bought Darra Goldstein’s ‘Beyond The North Wind. I am never more aware of the cultural differences between America and Britain as I am when I’m looking at American cookbooks (film and tv is so familiar I hardly notice the difference, the books I read old enough to make time more of a changing factor). Cookbooks are different.

Ingredients are not quite the same, nor are measurements - cups will never make more sense to me than grams, and the book covers speak of a different sensibility as well. As it goes I prefer the British covers, but then they’re the ones that I’m conditioned to, and whilst I think they’re objectively better designed, I don’t know if they’re better at selling books in their respective markets

However, I’m currently unemployed,  have plenty of time to think about this kind of thinng, and the cover of ‘Beyond The North Wind’ has been bothering me. Especially when I compare it to Caroline Eden’s ‘Black Sea’ and Alissa Tomoshkina’s ‘Salt and Time’.

‘Black Sea’ is published by Quadrille who have done a series of really strikingly beautiful covers over the last couple of years - the sort of thing that really catches the spirit of the book. ‘Black Sea’ has a good argument for being the best cover of any I’ve seen. ‘Salt and Time’ is the most traditional cookbook of this trio, but it’s cover shows how rooted it is in a sense of place. ‘Beyond The North Wind’ looks like the most traditional cook book but isn’t.

It’s much more like ‘Black Sea’ in that it’s recipes are only half the story. The best part of both books are the essays. The recipes are great, but the writing about the stories and culture of the places they come from is what makes these books special. Once I started reading them the idea that I could cook the food felt like a bonus rather than the point.

I’m guessing that this mixing of history and travelogue with food writing is going to become ever more of a thing. Which works for me on all sorts of levels, not the least of them being that it’s a less frustrating way to read about obscure or difficult to source ingredients* because reading about them has become as interesting as cooking with them.

I’m not really convinced that books like ‘Black Sea’ or ‘Beyond The North Wind’ belong with cookery books. They defy such a simple categorisation, though imperfect as it is at least I’ll find them with food writing. I don’t spend a lot of time in the travel section. But this is also where the cover becomes so important. One of these books has a cover that tells you to expect more than food, the other doesn’t, which I think does it a disservice because it is more, much more, than that.

*Sea buckthorn for example. It’s not available in these parts, I’m not convinced it’s worth the trouble or expense of ordering online, and yet it’s become oddly ubiquitous. I dream of finding bird cherry flour.