A rose by any other name

Has anyone been watching 'Harlots'? I've watched a few (episodes), but I have a low tolerance for cod historical  dialogue, and when someone was offered a slice of sultana sponge with the words, 'Have some seed-cake', I got up and went into the kitchen to read H.V.Morton. I used to love seed cake.

When one of the lesbian harlots suddenly morphed into a Keith Richards/Johnny Depp character as a land-locked pirate, that put a strain on my suspended disbelief too. It was hanging by a thread. I can't help but think the series is piggy-backing on the wonderful  (I would say inimitable, but didn't Phoebe Waller-Bridge give the second series to her friend to write?) 'Fleabag', and I can't help but make the comparison. Sorry.

So, here's a recipe for seed cake like my mother used to make... only joking. I haven't quite turned into Miles Jupp in 'In and Out of the Kitchen' yet, although I am going to make another pair of quince tarts this weekend - one for the allotmentier who grew them.

I was teaching a young mason how to carve a large stone panel depicting one of the four seasons that I had designed recently, and we moved onto the part which had a pair of quince dangling suggestively from the stylised branch arrangement which framed it.

He had never even heard of quince let alone seen a fruit, so I had to talk him through the little differences between them and pears when it comes to a three-dimensional representation in stone. I had photos, but when you get down to it there is very little useful information to be gleaned from a photograph. It was the wrong season for quince, so I couldn't show him one in the flesh.

"The underneath of the quince has a deep depression where the flower used to be, and as the fruit swells and develops, it forms creased lumps and nodules around it which are much more pronounced than a pear".

Eventually it was decided I would carve one fruit while he was at lunch, then he could simply copy it when he got back. The German word for sculptor is Bild Hauer - literally 'picture hewer'. 

When he returned we talked about the fat quince I had chopped from the block, and I suggested that he get a picture in his mind of what the various shapes reminded him of, then say the word out loud occasionally as he was carving to keep the image in his mind. This is a good trick which aids concentration when transposing thought into form.

He stared at the underside of my quince for a few moments then said, "I'm sorry, but all I can think of is that it looks like an arsehole".

So he carved a perfectly good quince into the stone whilst mumbling arsehole... arsehole... to himself all afternoon.

The trouble is that I am now cursed with spending the rest of my life thinking about arseholes whenever I look at a quince. The tarts still taste good though.