The Incident of the Rhubarb Tarte Tatin

It was Friday the 13th, and I quipped to Andrew by email, "I hope I don't burn the dinner!" Hmmm. I had chosen a fancy dessert recipe from Olive to wow our dinner guests, and also to use up the last batch of rhubarb from K's parents' garden. First problem - I haven't cooked with rhubarb much before, and had never made a tarte tatin, and found upon reading the recipe closely that this was supposed to be done in blini pans or in a Yorkshire pudding tray with four indents, neither of which I had. So a single tarte tatin in a cake tin it was going to be. Then came the issue of making the caramel base. I discovered the hard way (er, literally) that when the recipe says butter and granulated sugar, one should not use caster sugar to make caramel.

After two attempts (the first with golden caster sugar, the second with normal refined caster sugar, just in case its goldenness had been the problem), K was dispatched to the local corner shop to procure granulated sugar, and hurrah! all proceeded satisfactorily with caramel production. I made a nice arrangement of the rhubarb bits on top of this, and I must say the tarte tatin did look beautiful when it was turned out. I don't have a photo unfortunately. Andrew was presented with the first slice and we all waited for the verdict - poor man, having been put on the spot, he did a valiant job of keeping a straight face. I tried a bite of mine - decidedly sour!! What happened to all that sugar in the caramel??? Plus the recipe suggestion of serving this with mascarpone was not a good choice.

With lashings of caster sugar, the dessert was eaten, but lesson learned - always test a new dessert recipe before serving it to one's dinner guests!! Alas, I feel this episode might go down in personal legend - "remember when you did that rhubarb tarte tatin for Alison and Andrew....?"

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The nice thing, however, was that we had a dinner party at all. It has been far too long since we had people over for supper, and this is one of the very nice outcomes of the time I have off work at the moment. Five whole weeks! I had so much annual leave to use up, having taken almost no holiday over the busy last few years, that I decided to take a big batch of time off in the middle of the summer - when it is usually quiet anyway - and spend it in the library, finally starting to focus on how to turn my PhD thesis into a book... I get two different reactions to this:

1) "Don't work too hard / Make sure you actually give yourself some time off!"
2) "Five weeks in the library! What bliss!"

I fall into the latter category myself. Two weeks in, and I am feeling immensely relaxed! I have said before that I don't really know how to relax like normal people - I actually really enjoy going to the library, and it is wonderful just to have the time to read things. I made a list of books and articles that have been published since I submitted my thesis in 2002 - not too long fortunately - and have been working my way through that, but also reading the odd other article, which I'm interested in but isn't directly relevant... Plus - I have space in my brain! And time to get round to things I have been meaning to do for months! Like write emails, send people photos or references I said I would send them, and just see people and be sociable!

The British Library is a pretty sociable place, as I have noted before, and I have been meeting friends for lunch and coffee and a post-library drink. Now Juliette has joined me in Rare Books, on her own PhD sabbatical, and we're getting into a habit of taking our packed lunches outside at 1, to sit in the sun for half an hour or so, and debrief... K will be off work too soon, so the 3 of us will be chilling out together...

And two weeks in, I have nearly a complete first draft of a book proposal! Reading the thesis again after 8 years was an interesting experience, and I was gratified to discover that it wasn't too awful, and that mostly I still agreed with myself... It's a bit dry and in some places overly defensive, but that's what makes a PhD different from a book, and that's what I have got to work out how to tackle. I've even had some positive feedback from the professor who supervised me for the beginning of the process, but didn't see it through because he went off to the States to be a hot-shot museum director - amazing to have some actual feedback as the viva was such a let-down... But water under the bridge an' all.

So - the next dinner party is planned for just over a week's time, and I'm already plotting the menu. I'm starting with the dessert first this time...!

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And finally...

Signpost, Chenies © KR

Our calendar picture for this month. A very English country road sign, but for K one which conjures up the places of his childhood. Chenies was where his grandparents lived, both now passed away. It was exactly this time last year that we were in Hereford for the 3 Choirs Festival, unknowingly spending our last days with his grandfather Robert... Perhaps a little sombre for the kitchen calendar, but it prompts some happy memories.

Henry Moore and the Jets

K ponders the Harrier, one of the two fighter planes in this year's Duveens Commission

That title might suggest this posting might actually be about Henry Moore, whereas the only link is Tate Britain - and I just couldn't resist the rock'n'roll title, Henry Moore being possibly the person I least associate with rock'n'roll....!

James commissioned us to go along to Tate and assess this year's Duveens Commission, Harrier and Jaguar, by artist Fiona Banner - so we thought we would combine it with going to see the Henry Moore exhibition before it closed. Nothing much to say about that - apart from, as K observed, grouping a whole load of Henry Moores together in an enclosed space does nothing for one's appreciation of his wonderfully abstract creations. Each one needs to be contemplated on its own terms, the way you do when you stumble across them as public sculpture, but in an exhibition environment, after a while you get fatigued by the requirement to give each one an equal share of your intellectual capacity...

The most memorable thing for me was the room dedicated to the series of drawings he made during the Second World War, especially of coal miners in Yorkshire, and of sheltering women and children in the tunnels and platforms of the London Underground. Inevitably the hundreds of sleeping figures take on the ghostly feel of Moore's signature 'recumbent forms'...

But to the Jets. As an aviation journalist who appreciates art and museums, James was keen to know what we - as two curators - thought of the current installation of two fighter planes in the neoclassical surrounds of the Tate's Duveen gallery, the implication being they had become art objects rather than objects of destruction. I am going to attempt to get my thoughts on all this in some sense of order for him here.

The first thing is that it is completely awe-inspiring. You see the jets first as beautifully-designed objects, and then you remember that they are designed that way in order to be more effective killing machines. This creates a sense of tension and awkwardness inside you which is the essence of the artist's intention, I think. This is especially so with the Jaguar, cleverly shown upside down, so you find yourself admiring the sleek engineering of its under-carriage, and then discover you're face-to-face with its gun ports.


I don't know if I'm using the correct terminology to describe any of these bits of the plane, and in fact my utter ignorance of this type of object was also part of what disconcerted me about their display. I didn't know if what I was looking at had been 'interpreted' by the artist in any way (and the text on the wall panel didn't clarify that for me, even when I finally read it) - I didn't know if the suggestion of feathers painted on the wings, nose and tail of the Harrier Hawk were put there by the artist or whether they were part of the original design of the planes; I didn't know if a Jaguar normally looked that shiny. Having watched an interesting short film about it on the Tate website (what a joy, may I say, to listen to an artist being so articulate about their work), I now know that the Jaguar was stripped back and polished for the exhibition, but there was something unsettling about my ignorance at the time I was looking at them.


I wonder if this is a female response? Most of the men visiting the galleries seemed inexorably drawn to the planes and seemed to want to 'explain' them to the women they were with - I suppose a symptom of making Airfix models as boys, and all wanting to grow up to be fighter pilots... One man - and this was extremely perturbing - posed for several photographs standing astride the long nozzle projecting from the front of the Jaguar, so blatantly phallic. These photos were being taken by a female friend or partner who seemed to think it all very amusing, but you felt you were intruding on something too intimate - not to say vulgar and rather pathetic - to be out in the open like that.

I felt the planes were poised as if they had just come to land - crash landed in the case of the upside-down Jaguar, though obviously there was no damage to it. The Harrier was just hovering with its nose a few inches off the ground, as if it had just plunged through the roof and caught in the branches of a tree or something - though the curator in me wanted to know more about the superstructure supporting it in that position... There was something slightly sinister about the 'greyed-out' appearance of both cockpits - I felt if I looked too closely I'd see someone in there, a dead pilot perhaps.

I suppose that was the tension surfacing again, the fact that you are so strongly aware of these objects' original function - these are both actual decommissioned planes which have seen action in recent international conflicts: the Jaguar was in Desert Storm. I felt happier - if that's the word - comforted even, that this meant they were authentic - that we were not just looking at them as gratuitous symbols of conflict, they had actually been there. Though, again, the tension, the unsettling awkwardness...

The polished, seemingly silver-plated, precious-metal surface of the Jaguar now reflects the architecture of the galleries enclosing them, and more than one person was taking photographs of this artistic reflection. This is deliberately part of Fiona Banner's effect - the Tate built with the funds from slavery, in the neoclassical style that was the symbol of empire at the time it was built, now housing these modern symbols and tools of empire. The display works because of its environment, in a more successful way than I have seen for a long time - seeing the planes in that space generates thoughts and feelings which I can't imagine thinking if I saw the planes in a airplane hangar or in an aviation museum. Perhaps I would, but there is something about the creative intent behind stripping and decorating them in this way, the whole idea that they are now art, that makes you look at them in a completely different way. Well, it provokes thought, and that has to be a good thing in an art installation.

So thanks James for our own commission! My head was so deeply buried in the ground during the last few months that I didn't even know about it, so I'm grateful for the excuse it gave me to start to reopen my eyes to the outside world.