Here’s the fourth and final installment of Jim Carroll reading “The Basketball Diaries.” It took me longer than intended to share all four segments with you. Thanks for your patience.
“Time sure flies when you’re young and jerking off.”
Previously on DM, Jim Carroll reading “The Basketball Diaries” :
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron
On the heels of his current release Sleepwalkers
Spencer Kansa: Time travelling back to the mid-70s, you went from getting kicked out of school straight into management and then you were signed within two years, that’s really phenomenal isn’t it?
David Sylvian: Yeah, I didn’t think of it as being phenomenal at the time, I took it all rather for granted (laughs). I thought “I’m owed this,” for some ungodly reason. But looking back, I realize, yes, that I was obviously very blessed, and am very blessed. I mean the difficulties that I’ve had in my life don’t compare to the difficulties other people face. But that I’ve been able to pursue music is obviously a gift.
SK: You grew up in Lewisham. What was it about that part of South London that produced all these glamorous pop stars, cos Boy George also came from Lewisham didn’t he? And you also had the whole “Bromley Contingent” –the Bowie punks like Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol—just down the road.
DS: I think the only way I can view it is that it was so unbearably dull (laughs). It was a place of such convention. There was no colour, and it was an incredibly insensitive world. You couldn’t be different. You weren’t allowed to show certain sides of yourself, y’know. It was tough.
SK: Was it the Bowie influence or do you think the council put something in the water?
DS: (Laughs) I think the whole glam rock thing was a big influence. I mean it was Marc Bolan who first opened the door and it was just a release. I think there was a whole generation there just waiting to stick the pancake make-up on.
SK: Well, you may not be aware of this, but do you realize that because of your influence if you were a schoolboy in the early to mid-80s and you went to school without wearing make-up, you risked being bullied or even expelled.
DS: (Laughs) Yes I know! I always think it’s hilarious ‘cos I remember when we were like 13 or 14, and Mick (Karn, Japan’s bassist,who recently passed away) and I getting our ears pierced at that time, and oh the grief we got for it, y’know, from everyone! The traditional, usual places, building sites and what have you. Now you can’t go past a building site without some guy with earrings (laughs). I find it hilarious. It’s amazing how things change over time and such a short time too. But superficial things like that may change, but deep down people still harbour the same prejudices and they look for different signs to express that prejudice. That is truly amazing to me.
SK: I know you don’t like an awful lot of your early material, and you’ve said that “Ghosts” was really the kind of launch pad into your solo career, but can a case be made that there is a through-line from say “The Tenant” to “Despair” to “Nightporter” to “Ghosts” and then into your solo work.
DS: Sure, sure yeah. There’s a development and it’s very, very apparent. You could say that the first two Japan albums were an act of concealment, and from that point onwards the act of creating those albums was trying to pare away all of that, and trying to let something of myself come through, to allow myself to be that vulnerable. And I reached that point with “Ghosts,” that was the breakthrough. But getting there, there was “Nightporter” and there were other bits and pieces that spoke of emotional states that were very, very real to me. But they were dressed up in other storylines or ideas that I came up with.
SK: At that time you were far more interested in the New York punk scene, like Patti Smith and Richard Hell, than you were with the Kings Road punks that were happening back home. Was that because it was far more literary than what the Sex Pistols and others were doing?
DS: Yeah, for sure. You could recognise an intellect at work, particularly in Patti’s early work like Horses which was quite an important album at that time. Actually, I was never attracted to the British punk movement at all. I celebrated the spirit of it. As unlikely as it seems we were very much part of that spirit at that time. It was a matter of ‘well we can do that, pick up our instruments and go’ and I’m still drawn to the non-musician cos I really love that spirit of exploration, normally as a result of not having the technical expertise to work otherwise. So how do you work around your lack of ability? You’re forced to be more creative. Holger (Czukay) and I are always laughing at the fact that the two of us create music together, two non-musicians! It’s entirely inspiring.
SK: Cos you’re pulling something out of yourself that you didn’t know you had.
DS: Yeah, or you come up against a problem; ‘well if I was a proficient pianist I would put in a piano solo here, but I’m not so what can I do?’ So you manipulate the studio to work to your own ends. There are no rules in that respect. You’re basically trying to break them. You’re cheating. ‘I can’t do that so what can I do instead?’ So you become far more inventive, and I really enjoy working with people with that mind set.
SK: Talking of collaborations, how did the idea of Japan working with Giorgio Moroder come about? Did you like the stuff he’d done with Donna Summer, or was it purely to see if you could go in another musical direction?
DS: Yes, in a sense. I think we were ready to move into an area of music that was more electronically based, and at the time I’m not sure whether it was management or the record company that was pushing Moroder. He had just produced an album for Sparks which we thought was interesting so we thought we’d give it a go.
SK: There’s a great photograph of you two in the studio, where you’re looking very bemused by everything, and he looks like Inspector Clouseau with his bushy mustache.
DS: That’s right! That’s who he used to remind us of, Clouseau. He was this kind of funny, little, slightly bungling character. It was an odd little experience, and I just think it set the ground for Quiet Life. It was almost like being a songwriter for hire. It was one of those experiences: “we’ll throw you into a studio in LA with Moroder” and he dishes out some old demo from his stack and says “Try working with this” and it’s like “Okay.” It was odd but not unpleasant.
SK: Throughout your work you’ve incorporated influences from outside music, from literature, painting and cinema. The work of Jean Cocteau has been very important to you, was that because he was so wonderful at evoking the dream state?
DS: Yeah, he made the invisible world tangible, and I’ve existed in that world (laughs). I had existed in that world a long time but it was always denied by those around me, as a delusion. So to find somebody writing about it and exploring it in film was like finding a friend. And to be honest, I think I’ve incorporated too many references in my work to other writers and artists. But the reason for doing so was that it was my community. I didn’t have one in the physical world. So I found like-minds through the work of others and I drew them into my work as a result. As a band of like-minded individuals, dead or alive, it didn’t matter. I sort of bonded with them.
SK: Like soul brothers.
DS: Yeah, and I felt a very close connection with Cocteau for a while. I really felt his presence and the same happened with Joseph Beuys. I mean, Beuys is still one of the most important artists for me. I was actually trying to make contact with him when I made the Gone to Earth album. I used a quote from him on it as you know, but I was actually gonna try and get Beuys to come in and record throughout that whole instrumental side, just quotations coming in and out, which would’ve been amazing. But as I was driving back from the studio one evening I heard that he’d died. But he’s been so present in my life at different points in time. He’s turned up in dreams and his presence has been very tangible. So often times in my life the presence of these dead artists have been more tangible then some of the people living around me.
SK: I always assumed you were a big Dirk Bogarde fan too, because you cribbed a song title from his film Nightporter.
DS: (Laughs) You’re right! Actually I did like some of Bogarde’s work, particularly the films he did with Visconti and Joesph Losey, I really enjoyed those.
SK: You’ve used a lot of paintings on the covers of your albums over the years, starting with the Frank Auerbach portrait on the cover of Japan’s live album Oil on Canvas. How did that come about initially?
DS: Well, I had a problem looking at visual art up until I saw that painting of Auerbach’s. I would walk around galleries, and I would appreciate the beauty of some of the work, the abstract nature, blah, blah, blah, but I was never moved. Not like a piece of music would move me or a poem. So I was quite unprepared for the experience that I had with the Auerbach, and I can’t tell you what I did or if I did anything to prepare me for that experience. I was just open to that moment. I must have been in a very open state of heart and mind, and was just blown away by one particular image. And the experience was as intense as any experience I’d had in music, and that was exciting cos I just didn’t think it possible. And since that time I’ve had that experience on a number of occasions with a variety of different artists. And it’s just a matter of being open to the work and also giving the work time. If you’re gonna go down to the Tate Modern, don’t try and see it all. Just think “Well I’ll walk through all these rooms but I’ll stop in front of three works and spend some time with three that appeal to me and see how I get on” and you’ll be amazed at what happens.
SK: Some spiritually minded people believe that rock ‘n’ roll is bad for you because the path to spiritual life means quieting the mind and rock ‘n’ roll is all about stirring the visceral. Has that had a bearing on your music? Did your music have to become more meditative in some sense?
DS: I think it had that quality to begin with, particularly once I moved into the solo work, it started to take on a quieter form for me. I just had the confidence to go there. I guess working with Japan, the band was uncomfortable working with the quieter material. They always wanted to do something a bit harder, something they could get their teeth into. I was being more and more drawn to these quieter compositions, and when I got the positive response to “Ghosts,” and that being something of a breakthrough to me as a writer, I realised ‘well I can pursue this avenue and it’s OK,’ every album doesn’t have to have these power pieces on them. And so I think I naturally fell into that style of writing because it so much suited my own nature. But there was a spiritual search going on that accompanied that which enabled the work to actually get quieter and quieter in some respects. But I don’t necessarily agree with the people that think about rock ‘n’ roll in the way you just described. To me, Robert Fripp is an intensely spiritual man and makes work that conveys that. There’s a powerhouse there, a very powerful music. So I don’t think that runs true. It’s so much to do with the heart and mind of the creator of the music. What are his or her motivations behind making the music? What emotions are you trying to stir in your listener? Where are you trying to take them? Those are more important issues than the genre of music in general.
Sleepwalkers
In 1970 Charles Bukowski flew from L.A. to the state of Washington to read his poetry before a bunch of students at Bellevue Community College. It was only his fourth public reading. Students videotaped the event but it was largely unseen until the late 80s when it began circulating among Bukowski’s fans. Titled “Bukowski At Bellevue”, the video is crudely shot and the tape itself damaged and battered with age. But the technical deficiencies (and a case of the nerves) don’t obscure Bukowski’s sardonic humor, wiseass growl and diamond-hard imagery. Here’s Buk before he became an international literary superstar.
Part of the pleasure for me in watching “Bukowski At Bellevue” is seeing the students in the audience and recalling what it felt like when I first discovered Bukowski in my mid-teens. His words hit my frontal lobes like a syntactical blackjack, slapping me out of my suburban stupor and propelling me into the life of a poet and provocateur. For that, he will always be my hero.
While the video occasionally freezes like a drunk wondering where the fuck he’s at, the audio is not affected.
Hunter S. Thompson portrait by Curt Makes Pictures
BBC Omnibus documentary from 1978.
A fascinating, 30 year old BBC documentary on the Good Doctor and Ralph Steadman, five years after Nixon’s resignation, and on a road trip to Hollywood (to work on what would become “Where the Buffalo Roam“).
Includes an interesting scene of John Dean chatting with Hunter about his Watergate testimony (at about 32 minutes), the birth of the “Re-Elect Nixon Campaign” (with a Bill Murray cameo), and a remarkably eerie scene with Hunter and Ralph planning Hunter’s final monument and his ashes being shot into the air, long before the actual fact.
Poet, pilgrim, spiritual warrior and prisoners’ rights activist, Janine Pommy Vega has passed on.
Janine Pommy Vega, a poet and intimate of the Beat generation luminaries Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky whose lifelong quest for transcendence took her to San Francisco in the 1960s and on a pilgrimage to neolithic goddess-worship sites in the 1980s, died on Dec. 23 at her home in Willow, N.Y. She was 68.”
In the early 1970s, I was involved in a literary scene in Boulder, Colorado revolving around the Jack Kerouac School Of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. At the time, I was managing the Hotel Boulderado, a funky century old building in the middle of downtown Boulder. Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs were staying at the Boulderado and it was through Ginsberg that I came to know the poetry of Janine Pommy Vega. While visiting Allen, I noticed a copy of “Poems to Fernando” by Vega sitting on the desk in Allen’s room. It was a City Lights publication and I was reading everything that Lawrence Ferlinghetti published. Plus, the fact that Ginsberg had it in his possession was more than enough to make me immediately seek the book out. Reading it was the beginning of my being enthralled by Vega’s poetry and prose and an awakening to the beauty of the goddess unleashed.
In addition to being a stellar writer, Vega was one of the few women of the Beat Generation who held her own in a male dominated scene. Along with Diane di Prima, she would break down walls that existed even in the so-called counter culture. Vega opened up pathways that Patti Smith, Lydia Lunch and Exene Cervenka would later walk.
Poet Anne Waldman writing about Vega:
Peter Orlovsky was her first lover at a tender age. They lived together and she confronted the complicated sexuality and male chauvinist ethos early on when Allen took Peter off to India, with nary a thought to her feelings. “Is this the way it is with the poets? This is my first lover and this is the way it goes? Fuck those people, man, I don’t want to know about the writers. I rather meet the painters, the musician, the magicians, let’s get to the street.” And meet them and the street she did. Janine was a populist, a street fighter, a survivor, a world traveler and hugely prolific writer many decades. Tracking The Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents is an amazing account of an adventuresome life. She spent the last 11 years with poet Andy Clausen, tending her garden when she wasn’t traveling the world performing her magnetic and politically engaged poetry, and doing the scholarly work as well, burning the midnight oil. Even after being hampered with debilitating arthritis she was out on the road, her uplifted voice and spirit cutting through anyone’s gloom.”
Sister, shaman and a Jersey girl.
Read her obituary in the NY Times here.
Abe Books has published part of a transcript from an interview with William S. Burroughs, conducted by Conrad Knickerbocker for the Paris Review on New Year’s Day, 1965. In it, Burroughs discussed “why the visions of art and the visions of drugs don’t mix.” Other interviews available at Abe Books include Ernest Hemingway and P.G. Wodehouse - now that’s a mix to get any Hogmanay party started. Have a great New Year.
INTERVIEWER: When and why did you start to write?
BURROUGHS: I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn’t seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.
INTERVIEWER: Why did you feel compelled to record these experiences?
BURROUGHS: I didn’t feel compelled. I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me something to do every day. I don’t feel the results were at all spectacular. Junky [sic] is not much of a book, actually. I knew very little about writing at that time.
INTERVIEWER: Where was this?
BURROUGHS: In Mexico City. I was living near Sears, Roebuck, right around the corner from the University of Mexico. I had been in the army four or five months and I was there on the GI Bill, studying native dialects. I went to Mexico partly because things were becoming so difficult with the drug situation in America. Getting drugs in Mexico was quite easy, so I didn’t have to rush around, and there wasn’t any pressure from the law.
INTERVIEWER: Why did you start taking drugs?
BURROUGHS: Well, I was just bored. I didn’t seem to have much interest in becoming a successful advertising executive or whatever, or living the kind of life Harvard designs for you. After I became addicted in New York in 1944, things began to happen. I got in some trouble with the law, got married, moved to New Orleans, and then went to Mexico.
INTERVIEWER: There seems to be a great deal of middle-class voyeurism in this country concerning addiction, and in the literary world, downright reverence for the addict. You apparently don’t share these points of view.
BURROUGHS: No, most of it is nonsense. I think drugs are interesting principally as chemical means of altering metabolism and thereby altering what we call reality, which I would define as a more or less constant scanning pattern.
INTERVIEWER: What do you think of the hallucinogens and the new psychedelic drugs - LSD-25?
BURROUGHS: I think they’re extremely dangerous, much more dangerous than heroin. They can produce overwhelming anxiety states. I’ve seen people try to throw themselves out of windows; whereas the heroin addict is mainly interested in staring at his own toe. Other than deprivation of the drug, the main threat to him is an overdose. I’ve tried most of the hallucinogens without an anxiety reaction, fortunately. LSD-25 produced results for me similar to mescaline. Like all hallucinogens, LSD gave me an increased awareness, more a hallucinated viewpoint than any actual hallucination. You might look at a doorknob and it will appear to revolve, although you are conscious that this is the result of the drug. Also, van Goghish colors, with all those swirls, and the crackle of the universe.
INTERVIEWER: Have you read Henri Michaux’s book on mescaline?
BURROUGHS: His idea was to go into his room and close the door and hold in the experiences. I had my most interesting experiences with mescaline when I got outdoors and walked around - colors, sunsets, gardens. It produces a terrible hangover, though, nasty stuff. It makes one ill and interferes with coordination. I’ve had all the interesting effects I need, and I don’t want any repetition of those extremely unpleasant physical reactions.
INTERVIEWER: The visions of drugs and the visions of art don’t mix?
BURROUGHS: Never. The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts, and feelings. They are painkillers, pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers - the whole spectrum of sedative drugs. As for visions and heroin, I had a hallucinatory period at the very beginning of addiction, for instance, a sense of moving at high speed through space. But as soon as addiction was established, I had no visions - vision - at all and very few dreams.
INTERVIEWER: Why did you stop taking drugs?
BURROUGHS: I was living in Tangier in 1957, and I had spent a month in a tiny room in the Casbah staring at the toe of my foot. The room had filled up with empty Eukodol cartons; I suddenly realized I was not doing anything. I was dying. I was just apt to be finished. So I flew to London and turned myself over to Dr. John Yerbury Dent for treatment. I’ve heard of his success with apomorphine treatment. Apomorphine is simply morphine boiled in hydrochloric acid; it’s nonaddictive. What the apomorphine did was to regulate my metabolism. It’s a metabolic regulator. It cured me physiologically. I’d already taken the cure once at Lexington, and although I was off drugs when I got out, there was a physiological residue. Apomorphine eliminated that. I’ve been trying to get people in this country interested in it, but without much luck. The vast majority - social workers, doctors - have the cop’s mentality toward addiction. A probation officer in California wrote me recently to inquire about the apomorphine treatment. I’ll answer him at length. I always answer letters like that.
INTERVIEWER: Have you had any relapses?
BURROUGHS: Yes, a couple. Short. Both were straightened out with apomorphine, and now heroin is no temptation for me. I’m just not interested. I’ve seen a lot of it around. I know people who are addicts. I don’t have to use any willpower. Dr. Dent always said there is no such thing as willpower. You’ve got to reach a state of mind in which you don’t want it or need it.
INTERVIEWER: You regard addiction as an illness but also a central human fact, a drama?
BURROUGHS: Both, absolutely. It’s as simple as the way in which anyone happens to become an alcoholic. They start drinking, that’s all. They like it, and they drink, and then they become alcoholic. I was exposed to heroin in New York - that is, I was going around with people who were using it; I took it; the effects were pleasant. I went on using it and became addicted. Remember that if it can be readily obtained, you will have any number of addicts. The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure. People, generally speaking, will take any intoxicant or any drug that gives them a pleasant effect if it is available to them. In Iran, for instance, opium was sold in shops until quite recently, and they had three million addicts in a population of twenty million. There are also all forms of spiritual addiction. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved. Many policemen and narcotics agents are precisely addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk, I call it - rightness; they’re right, right right - and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms. The picture we get of the whole Russian bureaucracy, people who are exclusively preoccupied with power and advantage, this must be an addiction. Suppose they lose it? Well, it’s been their whole life.
Previously on DM
William S. Burroughs ‘The Junky’s Christmas
Via Abe Books
For the past few days, I’ve been reading Lorre Rackstraw’s fascinating book, Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him
Above a delightful letter posted at the terrific Letters of Note blog.
June, 1998: Kurt Vonnegut writes a light-hearted letter to Avatar Prabhu - pseudonym of the author Richard Crasta - in response to Crasta’s controversial novel, The Revised Kama Sutra, being dedicated to the Slaughterhouse Five novelist. Vonnegut closes the missive by amusingly taking a swipe at Salman Rushdie who, whilst in hiding years previous, had written a less-than-glowing review of Vonnegut’s 1990 novel, Hocus Pocus.
Alison Van Pelt’s oil on canvas portraits look like giant faded and scratched Polaroids. Or in the case of her paintings of William Burroughs, the Shroud Of Turin.
See more of Pelt’s “blurry photorealism” here.
Cover of Catalog for Burroughs Retrospective, LACMA, 1996.
Via
The best advice on writing is to write about what you know, and few writers have done this as well as Harry Crews, author of The Gospel Singer, Childhood and Scar Lover. He’s a legendary figure with a brave and exceptional literary voice. The playwright and author, Max Frisch once wrote, “A writer never betrays anyone but himself.” By that he meant a writer never reveals anything in his writing but himself, and this is true of Crews, a man who has revealed his heart, mind and soul as a brilliant writer.
I decided a long time ago—very long time ago—that getting up at four o’clock to start work works best for me. I like that. Some people don’t like to get up in the morning. I like to get up in the morning. And there’s no place to go at four o’clock in the morning, and nobody’s gonna call you, and you can’t call anybody. Back when I was a drunk, at least in this little town, there’s no place to go buy anything to drink. So it was just me and the writing board.
“So, I write until eight or eight-thirty, then I go over to the gym and work out on the weights for a couple hours, then I go to the karate dojo and, as a rule, spar with a guy who consistently whups my ass. It’s point karate—we’re not going full force, we don’t wear pads on out feet and hands, but—even then—when you’re just touching a guy, and you think a guy’s gonna move one way and you kick, and he doesn’t move that way, he moves the other way, he moves right into your kick, you can get hurt. Well, not hurt bad, as a rule. Maybe bloody a nose or something like that. But you can end up pretty sore.
“Then I come home, eat a light lunch, then just go straight back to the thing. I might work till three o’clock . . . there comes a time of diminishing returns. You’re just jerking yourself off thinking you’re doing some good work, then you go back to it the next day and you think, ‘Oh, my God,’ and you have to throw away two or three pages. But the way I do it—I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anyone doin’ it quite this way.
“I write on a great big square board. sit in a big overstuffed chair with this board on my lap, put a legal pad on top of that and write long hand. After that’s done, at some point I run it through a typewriter that’s older than I am—but it’s a beautiful machine, great action, huge keys, I love it—and then when I get through with that, I put it through the computer to revise, which is the only thing . . . I dunno . . . the only thing a computer is good for is to revise. Because, as you very well know, none of us need to go faster, we all need to go slower. I first among them.
“But the computer is a godsend for revisions. I don’t quite understand how we did it before we had the computer. I seem to remember a lot of tape and scissors.”
“If you’re crazy enough to read yourself, and almost no writer reads his own novel once he finishes it. He never looks at it again. I’ve never read a novel of mine, a whole novel that I did, after it’s published. Never. Why would you?”
“Graham Greene—you’ve probably heard me quote before, because god knows, it’s true—“The writer is doomed to live in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.” There it is. There it is. Nah, you write things and write things—write a book for instance—and write and write and write and write and write, and you know, it’s not—every writer writes with the knowledge that nothing he writes is as good as it could be. Paul Valery: “A poem’s never finished, only abandoned.” The same thing with a novel. It’s never finished, only abandoned. I’ve had any number of novels where I’ve just at some point said to myself, well, unless you’re going to make the career out of this book—spend the rest of your goddamn life chewing on it—you might as well just package it up and send it on to New York. Go on to something else. Because between conception and execution there is a void, an abyss, that inevitably fucks up the conception. The conception never gets translated to the page. It just doesn’t. I don’t think it ever does.
I think [Gustave] Flaubert kept Madame Bovary for nine years. Took him nine years to write it, well, he didn’t write it all in nine years. He could have written it in nineteen years, and he would still have felt the way he felt, and that was that it was a fine piece of work, but it was not as good as it could be. Same old same old.
“There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.”
More from Harry Crews plus bonus clip after the jump…
In 1946 George Orwell was commissioned by the British Council to write about food in Britain. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Britain was in the middle of a period of severe food rationing and Orwell’s manuscript, “British Cookery,” was seen as being a celebration of culinary extravagance at a time of enforced austerity. It was never published.
In this excerpt from “British Cookery,” Orwell shares a recipe for Christmas pudding. Suet is a critical ingredient in this particular pudding and there’s really no substitute for it. Butter or lard just won’t do. Unfortunately, obtaining suet may be difficult in your neighborhood. You can find it at some butcher shops. Good luck.
In the second half of the midday meal we come upon one of the greatest glories of British cookery—its puddings. The number of these is so enormous that it would be impossible to give an exhaustive list, but, putting aside stewed fruits, British puddings can be classified under three main heads: suet puddings, pies and tarts, and milk puddings.
Suet crust, which appears in innumerable combinations, and enters into savoury dishes as well as sweet ones, is simply ordinary pastry crust with chopped beef suet substituted for the butter or lard. It can be baked, but more often is boiled in a cloth or steamed in a basin covered with a cloth. Far and away the best of all the suet puddings is plum pudding, which is an extremely rich, elaborate and expensive dish, and is eaten by everyone in Britain at Christmas time, though not often at other times of the year. In simpler kinds of pudding the suet crust is sweetened with sugar and stuck full of figs, dates, currants or raisins, or it is flavoured with ginger or orange marmalade, or it is used as a casing for stewed apples or gooseberries, or it is rolled round successive layers of jam into a cylindrical shape which is called roly-poly pudding, or it is eaten in plain slices with treacle poured over it. One of the best forms of suet pudding is the boiled apple dumpling. The core is removed from a large apple, the cavity is filled up with brown sugar, and the apple is covered all over with a thin layer of suet crust, tied tightly into a cloth, and boiled.”
Recipe after the jump…