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At the beginning of April, during the Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival, a little marquee in the main square of Kilfinane, a small mountain village, saw a steady stream of visitors enter. They would put on a pair of headphones, listen for a few minutes, and come out beaming a big smile. They had just heard one of the stories in a specially curated installation called Table for One.

After listening to one of the stories myself, I was inspired to reflect on my own thoughts about eating alone, and that prompted me to buttonhole people as they came out of the marquee.

This is the result.

Notes

1. Huge thanks to Lucy Dearlove for creating the Table for One stories. You can easily hear the four of them on Audioboom, and they were also part of her regular food podcast, Lecker.
2. In addition to Lucy Dearlove, the voices included those of Marije Schuurman Hess, Aislinn Stembridge, Mair Bosworth, Tom Fisher, Mike Williams and Diarmuid O’Leary. Many of them make wonderful audio themselves. Thanks to them all.
3. I really mean it about wanting to hear your thoughts on eating alone. WikiHow offers outline instructions for iPhone, Android and Windows phones, and there are lots of other tutorials around.

   Huffduff it

Beer-drinkers in the UK who thought that consolidation and “crafty” brews were an evil to be found only in the USA will be distressed by news in today’s Guardian: British craft beer boom stalls as big drinks companies muscle in. The paper says that only eight new breweries opened in the UK in the past 12 months, compared to 390 in the year before. And, of course, small breweries – Camden Town Brewery, Dark Star and Beavertown among them – have been bought for big sums. Buyer beware.

• World Idli Day
• Ancient pee can tell us about the early domestication of sheep and goats at Aşıklı Höyük, in case you’re wondering about the press release’s A??kl? Höyu?k.
• The World Resources Institute weighs in on questions of beef and climate change.
• How hipster eggs with pretty coloured shells can sell for $1 each when eggs are also available in supermarkets at one twentieth of that price.
• A reader sent me a link to a really interesting article in The Wall Street Journal: The Pastas You’ve Been Missing Out On…And Where to Find Them. Unfortunately, it being the WSJ, unless you subscribe, or get someone who does subscribe to share the link with you, there’s no way to read it. I continue to dream of an effective, efficient micro-payment system so I could pay to read single items.

Longer version here (and while you’re there, consider subscribing).

We eat a sort of jam called charoset . … There are a lot of different recipes. … It’s made with dates, figs, walnuts, olives, and bitter herbs. Anyway, the last dish is charoset, boiled egg, bitter greens, lettuce, a piece of celery and a prayer is said for everyone.

That’s from Karima Moyer-Nocchi’s book The Eternal Table: a cultural history of food in Rome, in her treatment of Roman-Jewish cuisine.[1] Of course I’m seeing haroset everywhere I look these days, not just because of the time of the year; it is a traditional – although not required – dish on the Passover table. The recipe is clearly Sephardic in origin, although I have not heard olives mentioned in this context before. And no mention of ground terracotta or bits of brick, which at one time Italian Jews did include.

A friend used Facebook (yeah, I know) to post a picture and list of ingredients for what he calls charoses; a list of ingredients, rather than a recipe, because, as he says “I have never made charoses the same way twice. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

Fair enough, although I suspect all the learned rabbis who endlessly debated the matter are spinning quietly in their graves. What particularly struck me about the discussion it detonated was that there was almost no reference to the make-up of his haroset, which is definitely rooted in Sephardic tradition, and a whole lot of theorising about why Jews of different traditions have different ways of pronouncing different words.

I’m flattered that his decision to add wine was prompted by the podcast, even though at least one rabbi advised Jews not to do that for fear of what the gentiles would do. We live in more enlightened times, mostly.