Three Pears

Paul Cézanne, French, 1839–1906: Three Pears (Trois Poires)

ca. 1888–90. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on cream laid paper

The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum

Paul Cézanne was living in Aix-en-Provence when he painted Trois Poires.  He was isolated from his fellow impressionist and post-impressionist artists.  It must have been autumn or early winter when he selected his three perfect even-sized pears.  He arranged them on a plain dish set upon a table spread with a patterned cloth of curling blue flourishes echoing the fullness of the fruit.  The still-life was painted around 6 years before the Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard held Cézanne's first one-man exhibition which featured this work in 1895.  Both Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir wanted to own Trois Poires and settled the matter by drawing lots - Degas was the victor. 

Around the mid-20th century the painting was in the hands of Henry Pearlman, a New Yorker who made his fortune in the cold storage business.  Pearlman's passion for late 19th and early 20th century art ran deep and over three decades he amassed works by artists such as Soutine, Modigliani, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renior, Manet, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec and lesser known artists.  I love the sound of Henry Pearlman.  His art collecting genuinely seems to have been based on true appreciation rather than sheer acquisitiveness.  The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection is on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum and fifty artworks from the collection are in the touring exhibition Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection.  You can catch the exhibition, as I did, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford until 22 June 2014.  It then moves on, appropriately, to Aix en Provence before returning across the Atlantic to Atlanta, Gerogia and Vancouver, Canada, before ending its tour at the Princeton University Art Museum.  The stars of the show, for me, are undoubtedly the Cézannes; the still-lifes and landscapes in particular.

Pyrus communis "Jargonelle"

In London, the pear blossom came and went in the blink of an eye this spring.  Pink-tinged buds quickly opened to present pure white cups with delicate deep-red anther topped filaments. All too soon they faded, but what the blossom lacked in longevity it made up for in abundance.  A promising number of acorn-sized green fruits, tinged with russet-brown, jostle for position.  Espaliered against a south-facing brick wall, it's labelled Pyrus communis 'Jargonelle' - derived from the European or common pear.  I like the fact the gardener broke the planting rules with this pear - "A tip bearer, not suitable for training into cordons or espaliers".

Sadness at the withered blossom is replaced by the hope for a basket of ripe, juicy pears come September - even if they will be enjoyed by someone else.  By the 17th century 300 pear varieties were recorded and the French were the fruits main champion.  The Jargonelle, or Gergonell, is one of the few survivors of the wave of pear varieties which arrived in the UK from France in the early 17th century. It's an early pear, and the first to ripen are the worst keepers.  Decay in pears starts from the core so a perfectly good looking fruit may be hiding a shrivelled, brown heart.

The chances of seeing a Jargonelle pear on the fruit counter today are slim, I think, though you might come across one in a private orchard.  The mighty Doyenné du Comice, twice as weighty, is much more likely to end up in your shopping basket - but the Comice is undeniably superior.  Edward Bunyard in his Anatomy of Dessert writes on the storing of Comice pears "When the green colour begins to change to yellow the moment of watchfulness arises, and when the whole fruit is an even yellow the moment has arrived....... no day should pass without inspection, but not handling."  Cézanne's curvaceous trio of pears may well have been comice.  Bearing just a touch of green, Bunyard would doubtless have pronounced them not quite ready to eat.

Here are my favourite simple instructions from Jane Grigson for cooking pears.  Quantities are imprecise. It's intuitive cooking, the kind of dish you feel your way into, and in my view, the best kind.  According to Grigson "any ripe but still firm ... fragrant eating pear will do".  

Buttered Pears 

Allowing one pear per person, peel, core and cut into wedge-shaped slices, sprinkling them with lemon juice to stop browning as you work.  Fry them gently in clarified unsalted butter until golden brown then turn and sprinkle with caster sugar.  Cook until the juices caramelise.  Remove the pear pieces to serving dishes. Deglaze the pan with a little water, and a splash of pear brandy if you have it, boil down a little and stir in some cubes of unsalted butter.  Pour the sauce over the pears.

I cook apples similarly to this, adding a little cream at the end after taking the pan off the heat.  Worth a try with pears too, I think, when the "moment" arrives.


Sources and further reading:
Paul Cézanne
Three Pears ca. 1888-1890
Ashmolean Museum
FT article: Cezanne and modern masterpieces from the Pearlman Collection by Jackie Wullschlager
Princeton University Art Museum: The Pearlman Collection
The Pearlman Foundation
The National Fruit Collection, Brogdale
Jane Grigson's Fruit Book

Muffin Dish

Dish and lid
Bawden, Edward
after 1960
© National Maritime Museum Collections   

I cannot contemplate arriving in Greenwich except by boat.  This World Heritage Site is forever linked to its maritime history and arriving by any other means of transport just seems wrong.  On this day I jump aboard the Thames Clipper at Bankside Pier for the 25 minute trip down river, passing the Tower of London, ducking under Tower Bridge, past Dickensian alehouses and the, admittedly, less picturesque complex of flats looking a little like a Tuscan hill village - but maybe it's just me who sees this resemblance.  Soon the magnificence of Greenwich starts to unfold.

I'm really here for the *Turner & the Sea exhibition at The National Maritime Museum but, en route, my eye is caught by the unmistakable hand of Edward Bawden.  Surprisingly, it is decorating a Wedgwood dinner service.  It's the dish lid that I notice.  Purple petals radiating out from the centre of the white dome, echoed in soft grey on plate, saucer and cup.  An unexpected touch of domesticity in a temple to heroic maritime history. A ship's menu from the 1960's is placed alongside. The white bone china 'Heartsease' service is lithographic transfer printed in purple, grey and black using Bawden's 1952 design for Josiah Wedgwood and Sons Ltd.  It's here because it was supplied to the Orient Line, now part of P&O, though this lovely service was confined to First Class.  Tourist Class passengers had to make do with a much more utilitarian, grey-on-white design.

Wedgwood commissioned a number of other 20th century British artists to design ceramics including Eric Ravilious, Rex Whistler and John Piper.  Born in Essex in 1903, Edward Bawden (C.B.I., R.A., R.D.I.) studied illustration, book design and mural painting at the Cambridge School of Art and then the Royal College of Art where he was taught by Paul Nash.  His first commission was to paint the murals in the dining rooms of Morley College in south-east London, along with fellow students Eric Ravilious and Charles Mahoney. Bawden was allocated the one uninterrupted wall on which he painted scenes from Shakespeare's plays. His work included landscapes, book illustrations and cover designs for publishing houses, posters and advertisements, including for London Transport. He also served as an Official War Artist in the British Army. Later he returned to mural painting and graphic design.  I know him best for his distinctive linocuts, such as those depicting London Monuments and London Markets.

I'm not usually drawn to heavily patterned ceramics but Bawden's 'Heartsease' design is undeniably beautiful. The plate and cover I initially take to be a soup dish with lid - visions of weaving waiters battling high seas - turns out to be a muffin dish. A dish for muffins seems a quaint idea today but the Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians all loved a silver or silver-plate muffin dish.  A reservoir in the base of the dish was filled with hot water to keep the muffins desirably warm and soft at table.  Later a warmed, covered china dish sufficed. Clearly a muffin dish was still deemed necessary in the 1950/60s where standards for first class passengers could not be allowed to slip.

English Muffin recipes started to appear in print the mid-18th century.  From Hannah Glasse in 1747 to Florence Jack in 1914, muffin recipes were considered an essential part of the cook's repertoire. By 1954 Dorothy Hartley was writing of muffins being "usually obtained from the bakehouse" but long before this the 'Muffin Man' peddled his wares on the city streets.  Elizabeth David devotes a chapter to Crumpets and Muffins in her English Bread and Yeast Cookery and points out that although they are "among the most famous of English specialities", by the 1970's they "are more talked about than actually experienced".  We revisit them only when "the spasmodic wave of nostalgia for bygone popular specialities breaks over the British press and its cookery contributors".  So here we are again, for in 2014 crumpets and English muffins are enjoying a revival.

"Many a muffin-man regards warm flour as his No. 1 secret."

Walter Banfield, Manna, 1937

Master baker John Kirkland, in 1907, described muffins as "thick, extremely light, fermented dough cakes, not holey or tough, three inches across and almost two inches thick".  This recipe for muffins is based on one in The Bread Book by Linda Collister & Anthony Blake (first pub: 1993) which references John Kirkland.

English Muffins
(makes 8)

340g (12 oz) unbleached white bread flour
110g(4 oz) unbleached plain white four
10g (¼ oz) salt
15g (½ oz) fresh yeast
½ teaspoon sugar
230ml (8 fl oz) lukewarm water
140ml (5 fl oz) lukewarm milk
Flour for dusting
Rice flour or cornmeal for dusting

Mix the flours and salt in a large mixing bowl and warm in a 150C (Gas 2) oven for a few minutes.  Crumble the yeast in to a small bowl, add the sugar and half the lukewarm water and mix to a cream.
Make a well in the flour and add the yeast liquid, the rest of the water and the milk.  Mix with your hand to a soft, slightly sticky dough.  With floured hands, either knead the dough against the side of the bowl or turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and work for 10 minutes until it's no longer sticky but soft, elastic and smooth.  Put the dough into the bowl, cover with a damp cloth and leave to rise in a warm place for about 1 hour or until doubled in size.
Turn out the dough and knead again for 5 minutes (John Kirkland recommends dipping your hands in lukewarm water first).  Return the dough to the bowl, cover and leave for a further 30 minutes.
Divide the dough into 8 pieces and, using rice flour to dust, form gently into rounds.  Place on a baking tray dusted with rice flour and sprinkle over more rice flour.  Place a second light baking tray on top, then a damp cloth and leave to rise in a warm place for a final 30 minutes.
Heat an un-greased griddle or cast-iron frying pan until moderately hot.  Put the muffins onto the griddle topside down.  Cook for 10-12 minutes on each side until golden brown.  They are cooked when the sides spring back when pressed.

English muffins do not keep well.  If you don't eat them straight from the griddle you may need Mary McNeill's advice from The Book of Breakfasts published in 1932, "Muffins should not be split and toasted.  The correct way to serve them is to open them slightly at their joint all the way round, toast them back and front, tear them open and butter the inside liberally.  Serve hot."

I'm not sure muffin dishes will have a revival any time soon but I would certainly say yes to that Edward Bawden 'Heartsease' dish.  As if the design were not enough,  there's the choice of subject, Heartsease, Viola tricolour, the wild pansy, symbol for thoughts and faithfulness, Oberon's "... little Western flower".

Edward Bawden
1903-1989

Sources:
The National Martime Museum, Greenwich
Josiah Wedgwood Museum
edwardbawden.co.uk 
Tate
The Morley College Murals by Elaine Andrews
English Bread and Yeast Cookery by Elizabeth David
The Bread Book by Linda Collister & Anthony Blake

* The Turner and the Sea exhibition has now moved on to The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem MA, USA and runs from 31 May - 1 September 2014

Tintype Tomatoes

Green Tomatoes
Tintype photograph
© Tif Hunter

Until now I've concentrated on how food influences ceramics - from special pots for buttered char or ones for sweet and savoury custards to a jug for pouring vitamin C-laden lemonade.  It's time to broaden the scope of Take One Dish and this month I want to look at food's influence on the art of photography.

We live in an age when everyone is a food photographer.  Snapping away at our dishes with phone cameras and sharing the results with people who may, or may not, be interested.  Sometimes the shot is just to prove we've been there, done that; sometimes it's because the 'dish' we've been presented with is just so beautiful we couldn't help ourselves.  I plead guilty, though I hope I'm discreet.  For the professional photographer, food is a tasty market.  This post is about someone whose passion for food photography is far removed from his commercial work.  It's where he gets the shot he wants, and there isn't a stylist in sight.

Tif Hunter's studio is a calm, sparsely furnished space, with a mix of exposed brick and grey plaster walls, in the 'not yet fashionable' part of Bermondsey.  Housed on the ground floor of a unremarkable mews property, the light is muted and the atmosphere conducive to study.  Yes, I could see myself working here.  On entering the studio you can’t miss the beautiful 10x8 wooden camera with antique brass lens.  Tif had this camera specially made and it is the one he uses to shoot with Polaroid 55 film and to capture Tintype images like the one above.

Dating from 1856, Tintypes are a variant on the wet-plate collodion method invented by Englishman Frederick Scott Archer in 1851.  Although the process was not widely taken up in the UK, tintypes were valued in the USA into the early 1900’s, particularly for portraiture.  Tif was influenced by the work of John Coffer, the father of Tintype photography in the USA.  A unique photograph could be produced almost immediately which was affordable and durable.  A blackened sheet of metal is coated with collodion, sensitised in silver nitrate, and, whilst still wet, the sheet is placed in the camera.  Developing and fixing follow immediately after the picture is taken and the image is then washed, dried and varnished.  Each Tintype is a one-off.

These days the dominant 87 storey 'Shard' skyscraper towers over this part of South London.  Smart restaurants, bars and flower shops co-exist with market stall traders and independent butchers, bakers, greengrocers and cheesemakers who occupy the run of railways arches out of London Bridge Station.  Tif's weekly shop from these traders have provided him with some inspirational subjects.  The butchers, bakers and coffee roasters he has encountered have been immortalised on scarce Polaroid Type 55 film, whilst the produce they sell is captured using the Tintype process.  

"After a number of years of shooting only digitally I felt that I 

needed to return to the magic of the analogue and the darkroom.  

Embracing both the craft and the unexpected in these methods was 

how I had started in photography.  In the Tintype medium, the alchemy 

and physical textural qualities of the results is that much more amazing 

than the black and white methods that I had already known."

Tif Hunter

Since the Tintype is a camera-original positive, all the images appear reversed (left-to-right) from reality.  This is most obvious where the subject includes some text.  Then there's the colour deception.  The tomatoes in this photograph appear lusciously ripe, yet are quite the opposite being an unripe green.  The camera picks up the red pigment which is present even in unripe fruit.  The eye is unable to see it as the colour is at the UV end of the spectrum rather than the red.  These stunning Tintypes, and the Polaroid portraits, culminated in a Tif Hunter exhibition 'On Maltby Street 2011'  Do take a look.

Inspired by Tif's 'Green Tomatoes" how could I not give you a recipe using the fruit.  This recipe appears in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David.  She takes care to attribute it to the wonderful Edouard de Pomiane whom she called "Master of the unsacrosanct".  A biologist specialising in food chemistry and dietetics, Pomiane lectured at the Institut Pasteur in Paris for some 50 years, dying in 1964.  The recipe is simply tomatoes, cream and butter, and it's perfect.  A hunk of bread to mop up the juices is all you need with it.  Just make sure your tomatoes are ripe!

"… de Pomiane's … method makes tomatoes taste so 

startlingly unlike any other dish of cooked tomatoes that any 

restaurateur who put it on his menu would, in all probability,

 soon find it listed in the guide books as a regional speciality."

Elizabeth David 

Tomatoes a la Crème

"Take six tomatoes.  Cut them in halves.  In your frying pan melt a lump of butter.  Put in the tomatoes, cut side downwards, with a sharply pointed knife puncturing here and there the rounded sides.  Let them heat for 5 minutes.  Turn them over.  Cook them for another ten minutes.  Turn them again.  The juices run out and spread into the pan.  Once more turn the tomatoes cut side upwards.  Around them put 80 grammes (3 oz near enough) of thick cream.  Mix it with the juices.  As soon as it bubbles, slip the tomatoes and all their sauce onto a hot dish.  Serve instantly, very hot."

Special thanks to Tif Hunter for his time and for allowing me to use his Tintype'Green Tomatoes' to illustrate this piece.

Sources:

Tif Hunter is an award-winning advertising and editorial photographer who has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, London. His extensive body of work includes a collaboration with Stephen Bayley on “Cars – Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything”.

In October 2012 Tif Hunter’s Tintype of a Romanesco won Best in Category for a Non-Commissioned Object at the Association of Photographer (AOP) Awards

Elizabeth David