CARROT CAKE REVIEW No 14 ~ Too Bad It Was Left Out To Dry

Burnham Market, North Norfolk.

This has a narrow frontage with the cafe going back a long long way, like an ever narrowing tunnel. On a windy and wet day in February it had a very local feel. Similar to wandering into a local people's pub, where all eyes swivel to look questioningly at you the moment you entered - 'Ah, here be foreigners.' Apart from the clientele something in the whole cafe layout and ambiance just felt uncomfortably wrong.

For Burnham Market, usually a beacon for the high end and expensive, it as what can only be described as a 'homely scruffiness.' You need to descend further into its darker recesses in order to view the cakes. I dimly peered at them, everything looked dark brown, and it was hard to discern what the labels said. So I ordered what I believed to be a carrot cake, along with my usual flat white.

Now, I have a word or two to say about flat whites. If you order a flat white and they ask you at the counter if you want a regular or large, you wont be served a flat white, just a strong latte - in a Big Cup! A flat white should be served in a small cup, one size up from an espresso, and be strong and creamy with a rich rounded flavour. So if your flat white turns up in an ordinary tea cup, as here, prepare to be disappointed.

A flat white has the unique ability to lay bare the quality of coffee a cafe uses, and highlights, for good or ill, the skill level of their barista. I've had some shockingly bad flat whites in my time, burnt, bitter, dry and destined to give my stomach a lining of brown acidic dust. Confusion is widespread over these 'new fangled' coffee varieties, what are they supposed to be like?  In North Norfolk they've taken decades to hardly grasp the difference between a cappuccino and a latte. I presume they're just waiting to see if the fad passes.

Anyway, I digress, back at the cafe and to the carrot cake. Well, I was quite taken by surprise, it wasn't actually that bad. It had that recognisably strandy textured look that tells you this has got a goodly amount of carrot in it. The taste was actually moderately rich, had just the right amount of sultanas,walnuts and spice, with a light zesty aftertaste. Also a generous and fair sized wedge to get your molars snapped around too. Quite a traditional carrot cake, neither too weighty, worthy nor wonderful.

The frosting was largely icing sugar and distinctly on the sparse side. Whoever had applied it was super skilled with the spatula, skimming the cake and leaving only a millimetre of frosting in its wake. This was a cake made by the mean spirited for the calorie conscious.There were signs it had once borne a gravel lorries worth of chopped nuts. Somewhere between the cake display and my plate they'd shuffled off their stratified layer.. All that was left was an imprint and a few stray nut nuggets miraculously clinging to the fore skin of frosting.

And finally, well, it was dry. This cake had either been left out overnight or been in and out the fridge one too many times. For it was well on its way to becoming sedimentary rock.


CARROT CAKE SCORE - 3/8

BOOK REVIEW ~ The Beauty of Everyday Things ~ Soetsu Yanagi

The Beauty of Everyday Things has emerged as an odd sort of sequel to the first compilation of Yanagi's writings - The Unknown Craftsman.  The latter has been such an influential book for me in how it defined Beauty, Art and Craft and creativity in all its forms as a spiritual practise. So I approached this new book with anticipation of a richly rewarding experience, but also wondering whether anything could really compare well against The Unknown Craftsman.

Comparisons don't allow things to be what they are. So what is this book? The title itself, The Beauty of Everyday Things, sets you up with an expectation of  being helped to appreciate the objects in your home in a new light. It is inconsistent in this aim and frequently covers the same ground as The Unknown Craftsman but with less clarity and succinctness in its explication. In fact whilst reading some chapters you really do wonder what on earth all this has got to do with appreciating The Beauty of Everyday Things.

For example, there is a long chapter near the end which is a transcript of a letter he wrote to the Korean people to apologise for the way the Japanese had treated them. and in it he extols the qualities and achievements of Korean culture at great length. But this doesn't relate back to the books purported subject matter at all. Similarly, the concluding chapter about how the Japan Folk Museum was founded.

Soetsu Yanagi  1889-1961

The first quarter of the book contains its better written chapters, the peak being for me the essay on What Is Pattern?  This had me jumping up and down with delight and underlining the sentences that somehow got to the nub of why ordinary things could be a source of beauty. Discussing how pattern presents to you the essence of an object.That there are three qualities that combine to make a pattern beautiful - utility, materials and technique. He then broadens out his argument to extend the beauty of patterning beyond just being a feature of craft making to patterning in pictures.  It is classic Yanagri at his most insightful and inspiring.

"A pattern is thus not a depiction of an object as it exists in nature, not a realistic rendition. It is an image of the object as it appears to the intuition."  

" it is only with the advent of pattern that we truly come into touch with the beautiful. Pattern is the conveyor, the transmitter, of beauty."

"Good pattern is pattern that belongs to all the people"

The chapters which follow immediately after this are on particular forms of Japanese folk craft, bashofu, kasureru and kogin  textiles, ceramics, woodblock prints and Otsu-e  painting. Which though informative about the techniques and history of their making, again enlighten you little about what makes these ordinary things beautiful. They are more folk art history, a record of a dying craft.

As a book on the beauty of everyday things this is not a good one, its a very thin affair. One really excellent chapter followed by what could be seen quite frankly as a lot of filler. However, this was not a book written and conceived by Yanagi, its really an editorial compilation of articles he wrote. They were never written with a book with this title in mind. For the title is pure marketing that fits it into a certain contemporary publishing zeitgeist.

It makes you appreciate all the more the editors of The Unknown Craftsman, who expertly wove their compilation into such a seamlessly cohesive book. That its taken several decades for this book to emerge means that was a truly hard act to follow. The compilers of The Beauty of Everyday Things being left with only a few scraps of Yanagi's genius to sweep up and make something of. If you've never read any Yanagi before, read The Unknown Craftsman, before this.