Of Time and the Kitchen

A few weeks of Finnish spring...

Hello to new and old readers and welcome back to my newsletter The Recovering Line Cook.

This is the place where I, Wil Reidie, share recipes, non-fiction essays, and even a little memoir. This week, something a little different that touches on a few of these things.

All the best to you,

Wil

NOTE: Common Juniper was used in the below recipe. Please be sure of your variety if you try this one at home.

“The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.”

Samuel Beckett in “Proust”

To age a cheap and harsh spirit vinegar at home, as documented by the great Swedish chef Magnus Ek, all you need is a clean jar, some juniper wood, a flame gun, salt, sugar, and the aforementioned vinegar.

Start by making sure your wood pieces aren’t too big, 5 cms wide and 1cm thick will do. Char about 5 such pieces lightly with your flame gun so they have just turned black, we aren’t trying to make coals here. Once you have done this leave them to cool.

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Saturday, March 22

I published the last entry in my “Memoirs of a Line Cook” today. I sent the first of them out well over a year ago now, January 2023. I sent that only to myself. It’s an odd thing to send stories about my life to people I’ve not met before. Most days I talk to no one more than my wife, those two little goblins that share our spare room, and, occasionally, a small spitz dog called Otto. Though I do write about food, it is largely in the context of a life in food. I suppose this gives me an excuse for telling my stories. I say “excuse” because I really couldn’t be less interesting. A neurotic, late thirty-something from England who likes Bob Dylan love songs, Star Wars, and Samuel Beckett books. No, I don’t know why I feel compelled to write about myself. Probably I just haven’t the imagination to write about anything made up.

In that final entry I look back at my last day cooking at a restaurant called Oaxen in Stockholm. It was the day I received one of the most beautiful books I own: Oaxen Adieu. It tells the story of the restaurant, many of their classic recipes, and (my favourite bit) illustrations cataloguing wild Nordic plants. I took it off the shelf recently to photograph it for the newsletter, but I’ve kept it off the shelf because a recipe inside has caught my eye. The recipe is the reason I had some wood delivered in the mail last week. It’s a recipe for, of all things, aging spirit vinegar with charred juniper wood.

I’m not a patient person. I think that’s why I love cooking so much. You make something, it is either good or not, you try again. Aging vinegar, like gardening or trying to get a six pack, would normally be the kind of thing I don’t have the patience to wait for.

That said, I’m excited to give this one a try.

Later in the evening, once the sun had set, I took my son, Sam, to the astronomical observatory at the back of our apartment block. No this isn’t normal for Finnish apartment blocks, I promise. We got lucky. It opens on Fridays to the public and, typically, the weather has been cloudy all but once since we moved here in January. Today was the last show of the season and the sky was finally clear. I hoped my boy might get the chance to see the Moon or Jupiter or anything to make him smile really.

We moved to Finland when Sam was 1. He is 5 now. Within a year of being here my Finnish had got pretty good for your typical blinkered Englander whose second language skills extended to knowing how to ask for a beer in very bad French. Now, inevitably, Sam’s native Finnish is already more fluent than mine.

As we walked up toward the group of amateur astronomers babbling in whispered Finnish words heavy with Ks and double vowels, knowing he could talk to them better than likely I could, left me with a strange sense of my own dependence on him, not the other way round, for what must have been the first time. That might sound ridiculous, misplaced even. But it didn’t feel it then, nor now. It felt like a glimpse into another time. A time I find myself looking forward to. A time when Sam is grown and we are still a part of each other and are equals. Being a stranger in a strange land, forever in a position of vulnerability due to pitifully tenuous grasp of the strange language, funny things happen to you, from time to time.

I suppose looking to my 5 year old for protection from the locals is now one of those funny things.

We soon get back to the natural way of things. I take him to the entrance of the observatory and a woman says something to me that could mean anything from “right this way” to “we don’t serve your kind in here.” I tell her, like I often do to Finnish people that have started talking at me, that “your Finnish is a bit fast for me.” I always hope that they’ll repeat what they’ve said but slower, maybe with simpler words. When they change to English I feel I’ve let myself down. This time she simply told me to go inside. I knew that’s what she said because she did so in delicately accented and perfect English.

By the time we had got inside, huddled in the icy, unheated dome-shaped building, a rectangular slot of roof opened for the telescope to peak deep into the cosmos, the clouds had passed over. The moon as defined as bum cheeks seen through a plastic shower curtain. I tried to explain the problem to Sam, and we moved outside once again.

“We can wait to see if the clouds pass, or we can go back home. It’s up to you,” I told him. It was already gone 8pm. Past his bed time.

“We can wait,” he said.

And so we sat on the rocks outside the observatory, the only light reaching us that of the windows from our apartment building and the terracotta-tinged clouds passing slowly overhead. Sam asked me where the planets came from and I did my best to answer. Then he asked me what came before time and I struggled even further to do the question justice. If there is a favourite part of being a father it is being asked such things. I will put up with the hundred times a week he asks why he needs to go to daycare and why mummy can’t put him to bed tonight, if it means these wonderful questions come my way as well.

The clouds did pass. We saw the moon, which Sam described as milky and full of holes. We saw the so-called “devil-comet” as well that you might have even heard of recently. Even through the large telescope it was pretty grainy. Sam wasn’t impressed.

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With your pieces of wood charred, we can prepare the vinegar. It should be 10% acidity spirit vinegar. To 1 litre of this, add a tablespoon of salt and sugar and mix to dissolve. Put this into a mason or kilner jar and add your wood pieces. Leave it somewhere dark.

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March 27

We’ve had a report from Sam’s daycare. It describes him as quiet, not good at concentrating, withdrawn. These are things we would never describe him as. He’s been at his new daycare over 2 months and my wife Silja and I understand this must mean he hates it there. If his teachers can describe him so differently to how we would, then he must be miserable. My reaction is to want to fix it immediately. I feel so powerless. I need to go there and stay with him and convince the other children of how wonderful he is and how much they’re missing out on not playing with him and adoring him and listening to his wonderful questions about planets and time and “where mens first came from”. I feel panicked. I want to fix it right away, to rid my life of the feeling that I’ve failed him somehow. I’m just not very good at waiting for things. Certainly nothing as important as Sam.

April 6

After something close to 4 years I’ve had my first shift in a restaurant kitchen. Though my return to chef life and new job isn’t for a few weeks, I volunteered to join the team I’ll soon be a member of for the night to get a feel for how they work. I hate that I found myself looking to the clock at one point, regretting how much my legs were hurting. Clearly the transition to standing on my feet all day having worked on my couch for years won’t be easy. But I’m still excited. I also know it could be a terrible mistake, giving up my easy work from home job for that of a restaurant cook. What leaves me feeling confident in the change is the knowledge that what I’ve been doing has started to feel like a mistake as well. The same mistake day after day. And I’m ready, after 4 years, to start making some new mistakes again.

I have been checking my vinegar daily. I really don’t have the patience for this kind of project. What’s more, I taste it every day with the child-like expectation that it will have spontaneously started tasting like something that doesn’t function as a good limescale remover.

I try to talk to Sam as well, but anytime I mention school he says he doesn’t want to talk about it.

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After 3 weeks the vinegar will take on a pale whisky colour from the burnt wood. The flavour will mellow and the added aroma of juniper and vanilla will permeate the vinegar. Filter it with a very fine sieve or cheesecloth. In flavour, so Magnus Ek says, it can rival that of a good wine vinegar. To use as a normal vinegar, add equal parts water to get 5% acidity.

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April 12

It is the last day of my exceptionally comfortable working life spent sending emails, writing Powerpoint documents, and having phone meetings from my living room. That also means it’s my last day taking Sam to daycare for a while, too. I stopped forcing my questions on him. For someone who struggles with having unresolved problems hanging over overhead, not forcing the subject wasn’t easy. What has happened, these past weeks, however, is he doesn’t seem so distraught when I leave him at daycare anymore. Sometimes I even see him head off in the direction of other little ones. He has started mentioning their names at home, from time to time. He still doesn’t like it when I ask him more about them or if he is making friends, but I hope it means he is getting somewhere.

April 21

It’s been a month and, hard as I tried to convince myself otherwise this morning, the vinegar still tasted like something I’d choose to clean the kettle with over dress salad. But why wouldn’t it, I reminded myself, it’s acidity percentage is twice that of the white wine vinegar I have in the cupboard. And so I diluted some with water, one part each and tasted again. It was smoky in the way the burning firewood from our summer sauna is smoky. Clean and smooth. A delicate juniper perfume runs through it as well, only noticeable now the acidity has been tempered. A tannic edge hits the back of the mouth after a few moments. It’s no Pinot Noir, but I think it is something.

What I want to do is use it in a hollandaise. I want to reduce it down with some shallot and peppercorn and add a teaspoon or two to the yolks before whipping them up over a low heat and adding the butter. I want to think that smoky, woody note would be wonderful against the rich butter. This is what I’ll be doing when I get the chance next.

I’ve been on the lunch shifts for my first week at the restaurant. With a week of evening shifts coming up I’ve been putting Sam to bed every night. We were half way through his book about how to be as brave as a Jedi when he asked where the big bang happened. I told him it happened everywhere, that it started in the tiniest point and got bigger and bigger. Isn’t that cool, I asked him, that it happened, in a way, right where we are? He didn’t respond to that. Then he turned from me where he sat in his bed, tapped his little Star Wars book, and we got on reading again.

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I meant to send a version of this last week, though a nasty illness got in the way of that. This little newsletter of mine was featured by Substack on their homepage recently and I want to say thank you for being here and reading, it wouldn’t have happened if not for you. And because of that I was also planning to offer a little discount on paid subscriptions to celebrate.

I plan to send 2 extra essays to paid subscribers a month in the future as a thank you for supporting the newsletter. These will include more personal essays and my upcoming Diaries of a Line Cook series that will give a first-hand look at daily life as a restaurant cook (which I’m really looking forward to starting next week!)

If you’d like to get in on that, here’s a belated 50% discount accessible through this newsletter only.