Overwhelmed with guilt about wasted food: a bunch of parsley and half a box of passata went off before I could eat them all. Meanwhile I can’t get soap or eggs.
So in a fit of anxiety, I am making a confit of on-the-turn red peppers and aubergine, with onion and garlic and basil, to use with pasta later this week, probably when I’m completely fuckfaced on Friday night, as I intend to be.
Meanwhile, I have learned a lot about myself in the last week, which has been a bit more depressing than the last.
1) a cheese toastie is never not amazing, no matter how often you eat it.
2) cheese toasties makes things better without exception even if they are still not ideal. This is also true of a cold bottle of Birra Moretti.
3) I am quickly turning into a Second World War housewife, with constant anxiety about providing for husband and children, and a near fanatical fear that waste helps the Hun.
Except - have you seen the actual lives of people in WWII, and especially in austerity by 1947? I mean, okay they were allowed out, but take a look at the food they were eating...
Still, they probably had soap. They probably had to eat it.
On the subject of WWII, can we ditch the Boomer rosiness about how everyone pulled together in WWII. Um, no they fucking didn’t.
The newsreels and GPO films and newspapers said they did, because they were under the control of the Government. In reality, the black market was everywhere, and viciously gouged everyone - while everyone took part. A whole new class of exploiters grew up (the famous ‘spiv’), the wealthy lorded it over the poor and resented the fact that working class people’s standards slightly improved, while the upper classes now had to struggle to get a pheasant for the weekend.
And crime, especially petty theft, went through the roof, especially immediately after the war when there were fewer police and people in authority around.
In other words, baby boomers (and those who would use them), who of course don’t even fucking remember the war, know about it from the rosy second-hand memories of their parents, and dim childhood viewings of the nostalgic ideological apparatus from the war itself of an experience they never had. And then of course, post-war ideological deployments of appeals to a togetherness that never happened.
Well, that was bracing. It started off about aubergines.
And yes, I know it’s not a real caponata. I couldn’t get fucking celery.
Caponata: our greatest weapon against Adolf Hitler.