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The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Boiling an Egg with My Grandfather (A Recipe)
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here for news of all of my latest writing. My Grandfather is dead. He died of lung cancer when I must have been about seven or eight. My memories of him are vague, much as I try to recall them. But one memory I had with him sticks vividly in my mind: having a boiled egg and soldiers with him at the little foldable formica table by the window which looked out onto a very standard, quite small garden, commensurate with all of the other semi-de
Andrew Jamison
Dec 30, 20254 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Taking Friedrich Nietzsche to Beefeater at Milton Interchange
Subscribe here for my weekly newsletter for all my latest writing. Friedrich Nietzsche at Beefeater, Milton Interchange (image created via ChatGPT) ‘ Intellectually productive and emotionally intense natures must have meat’ remarked Nietzsche. Despite the fact he said this, my gut feeling (and I might be wrong) is that he wouldn’t have loved Beefeater. Then again, Friedrich was partial to a bit of beef. For Nietzsche deciding to become a vegetarian – even though he did try
Andrew Jamison
Dec 27, 20256 min read
The Hungry Poet: My life in Food — Scrunching Oyster Shell in Bristol with Chekhov
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all of his latest writing. 1903 illustration of a moment from Anton Chekhov's 'Oysters' by Alexander Aspith All at once I began biting something hard, there was a sound of a scrunching. “Ha, ha! He is eating the shells,” laughed the crowd. “Lit- tle silly, do you suppose you can eat that?” from ‘Oysters’ by Anton Chekhov You’d think that eating oysters would be a Proustian moment for most food writers. Maybe they were stan
Andrew Jamison
Dec 17, 20255 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — A Bag of Chips with Roland Barthes
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all of his latest writing. Match told us that after the armistice in Indo-China 'General de Castries, for his first meal, asked for chips'. From ‘Steak and Chips’ by Roland Barthes in Mythologies There is something victorious about chips. Barthes in his essay Steak and Chips from his collection of essays Mythologies, goes on to suggest that in eating chips after his victory, the General de Catries was asserting his Frenchness
Andrew Jamison
Dec 17, 20254 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Eating Hake with Herman Melville
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all his latest writing. A painting of a Hake. "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me," reflects Ishmael in Moby Dick. While Ishmael was referring to the sublime – in the Romantic sense – and terrifying enormity of Moby Dick, for me there is nothing quite like the soft, flaky whiteness of a perfectly pan-fried piece of fish – it is among the most brilliant versions of the colour white we can hope
Andrew Jamison
Dec 16, 20254 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Chefs and Poets
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here to learn all about his latest writing. What do you get when you cross a poet with a chef? I dread to think. A poety chef? A cheffy poet? How different are poets and chefs anyway? Earlier today I listened to Pierre Koffman: A Life Through Food (The Food Programme). This is the umpteenth episode of this BBC Radio series I’ve listened to and by now I’m starting to see quite clearly that perhaps poets and chefs are a very similar type
Andrew Jamison
Dec 16, 20253 min read
Introduction to The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food
Subscribe here to Andrew's weekly newsletter and stay up to date with his latest news and writing. In this video Andrew introduces this category of his blog and explains the appeal of food writing to him, as well as some of his inspirations.
Andrew Jamison
Dec 15, 20251 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — A Ham and Cheese Sandwich in a Dublin Pub with My Dad, the Day of the European Rugby Cup Final, 1999
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all of his latest writing. A ham and cheese sandwich in a back street Dublin pub (courtesy of ChatGPT) This never was my town, I was not born or bred Nor schooled here and she will not Have me alive or dead But yet she holds my mind With her seedy elegance, With her gentle veils of rain... From ‘Dublin’ by Louis MacNeice The otherness of the Ulsterman in Dublin has been well documented by some of Ireland’s greatest writers, b
Andrew Jamison
Dec 15, 20256 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Sausages, Chips and Peas with Yeats and the Boys Every Thursday Night
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all the latest writing from his bog. W. B. Yeats with a plate of sausages, chips and peas (image courtesy of ChatGPT) Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. from 'The Stolen Child' by W. B. Yeats Every Thursday night we have sausages and chips. And by every Thursday night I mean every Thursday night. It started out as a b
Andrew Jamison
Dec 14, 20256 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — A Baked Ham with John Keats
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all of his latest news and writing. John Keats with a Baked Ham (AI generated image... in case you were in doubt) A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. from 'Endymion' by John Keats Was John Keats really thinking of a baked ham when he wrote Endymion? If we
Andrew Jamison
Dec 14, 20256 min read
Death of an Artisan: A Poem
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all of his latest writing. The following poem charts part of the fictional life of an apprentice baker, Georges Bertrand. THE BAKERY GIG It was my teenage summer job, the last resort. I left it late and all my friends had nabbed the waiting jobs, the bar jobs, in short the jobs with tips and regular hours. Nobody wanted the bakery gig. Ridiculously early starts, long shifts, in a basement, leaving you too knackered to go out d
Andrew Jamison
Dec 14, 20259 min read
A Short History of the Potato: A Poem
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all of his latest writing, or upgrade to The Jotter Premium Plan here for access to all past and future writing. Boiled, it steams into the world on a plate on a Sunday at the head of the table with butter after church before a man a father of five in a shirt and tie and polished brogues and Old Spice with rough hands from dairy farming stock near the north coast with a glass of red and carrots and beef who has a separate dis
Andrew Jamison
Dec 14, 202512 min read
Radar: Rowley Leigh - A Life Through Food
Subscribe to Andrew's blog here for weekly updates on his writing. 'A Long and Messy Business' is the name of Rowley Leigh's latest cookery book, and it alludes to how describes his life as a chef. Attending Clifton College, he went on to study English at Cambridge before heading to London and working his way up from burger bars, through Le Gavroche, to opening his own restaurant 'Kensington Place' in 1987. While it may appear on the surface that Leigh lived something of a c
Andrew Jamison
Dec 13, 20252 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — In the Canteen Queue with Le Corbusier
Subscribe to Andrew's blog here for weekly updates on his latest writing. If the house is ‘a machine for living in’ , as Le Corbusier claimed, then the canteen must be a machine for eating in. Although, for some reason, I struggle to imagine Le Corbusier waiting in line for ‘sausage and mash Monday’, or ‘fish and chips Friday’, let alone navigating the intricacies of the salad bar. However, I’m sure he would have approved of how the canteen prizes function over ornamentation
Andrew Jamison
Dec 10, 20258 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Going for a Greggs with Seamus Heaney
Subscribe to Andrew's blog for weekly updates here or upgrade to The Jotter Premium Plan for access to all posts. ‘Your ordinariness was renewed there’ wrote Seamus Heaney in his love poem ‘Night Drive’ as he recounts driving through France and thinking of his wife. Heaney was someone whose poetry revelled in finding the extraordinary in the ordinary; he even coined the phrase ‘universal ordinariness’, referring to the common experiences we all go through in life, no matter
Andrew Jamison
Dec 9, 20254 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Beckett, a Banana, and a Couple of Soggy Chocolate Bourbons at the Sixth Hole
Subscribe to Andrew's blog here for weekly updates about his latest posts. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett never played pitch’n’putt as they do in this video . However, it’s well known that Beckett was more than proficient at hacking his way around 18 holes, and it’s alleged that he had a 7 handicap, and it wasn’t uncommon to find him at Carrickmines gold club near Dublin. Indeed, it’s rumoured that when he was losing his sight in old age he would play the first holes mental
Andrew Jamison
Dec 9, 20254 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — The Poetry of the Packed Lunch
Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here and don't miss out on his latest writing. The sonnet is one of my favourite forms of poetry. Don Paterson, among our greatest living sonneteers, once wrote of this ancient fourteen line poetic form ‘it is a box for [our] dreams, and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take.’ Shakespeare was one of the most famous exponents of the form, writing 154 of them, all centred around the idea of love. In som
Andrew Jamison
Dec 3, 20254 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — Oranges from Spain... from Tesco, and Louis MacNeice
Subscribe to Andrew Jamison's weekly newsletter here for more updates and articles from The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food . I love clementines at Christmastime. Who remembers two cricket ball lumps at the bottom of their Christmas stocking? One an apple, and one an orange. These were the staples of the stocking, but somehow it would never have been a stocking without them. Perhaps we felt they were some kind of healthy counterweight to the chocolate Santas full of palm oil a
Andrew Jamison
Dec 2, 20252 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — A Chocolate Mallow in the Tesco Car Park with Gus
Read another chapter of Andrew Jamison's food writing. You can read the rest here . Wordsworth and UPFs ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ wrote Wordsworth. When he wrote these words I can’t imagine he ever thought they’d be recalled by someone wolfing down a Tesco own-brand chocolate mallow from the packet, with his son perched on the trolley at the end of a shopping trip, one early Friday afternoon in late November at a supermarket car park near the M
Andrew Jamison
Dec 1, 20255 min read
The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — In Praise of Parmesan (POEM)
Read an exclusive poem from Andrew Jamison's third collection of poetry, Swans We Cannot See , and buy a signed copy here . In Praise of Parmesan The cheesemakers of Parmigiano Reggiano employ a special silver hammer to tap, precisely, each straw-coloured wheel with a rat-a-tat-tat, beat the bottom, the top, the sides, testing in totality its tones, its tune, to locate, listen out for any imperfections, decipher if it’s ready, to gauge its age, adjudicate whether this one pas
Andrew Jamison
Dec 1, 20251 min read
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