Pulse

Some atavistic wintery impulse has had us both digging packets of dried pulses from the depths of the cupboard. We had a red lentil soup the other day, a green pea soup for the Professor and Olga’s lunch (I was in Aberdeen saying ‘you may now turn over your paper’ at the time), and a more or less Tuscan kale and cannelini beans number this evening. I make a fair bit of dal and so on through the year, but it’s at this late winter season that beans really come into their own. As do onions, and the sort of dish where you peel about three pounds of onions and cook them very slowly into a brown sticky goo. One thing which has added considerably to the general jollity is that the Professor has come to enjoy small quantities of prosciutto and the nicer varieties of bacon: a pea soup with a little bacon in it is a very decided improvement on a pea soup without. The weather is improving. It’s not so cold, and what is falling seems to be more or less rain, so I am hoping we’ll see the last of the snow before too much longer. I have started dreaming over plant catalogues, which, like beans, are a great solace at this time of year: whereas beans answer the needs of the moment, plant catalogues feed the soul, by reminding one that there is such a thing as summer, and that the year is tipping over, little though it may feel like it just at the moment. I’m looking for dark red alstroemeria,  which may take a bit of finding. We had some as cut flowers this Christmas and not only were they lovely, they went on being lovely for just over a month, and since they’re perfectly hardy, I want them in the garden.  Most growers list alstroemeria as ‘mixed’, because like primulas, they are promiscuous, but they come in a range of colours individually nice but collectively revolting. I’m on the track of a specialist alstroemeria dealer, who sounds, from his website, bonkers, but perhaps you have to be a bit bonkers if your life’s work is guarding the chastity of alstroemeria.