Is My Cherry Clafoutis Life Imitating Art?

I can feel the cries of "Is she serious?" against a backdrop of looks that ring with a unanimous truth, "Hun, you need to get over yourself!"

Likely, I do. However, it is not arrogance nor an overstated belief in my cookery credentials that has led me to ask this question. The above-pictured Cherry Clafoutis was created purely out of necessity. We had no dessert last night, and on a cold and frosty Lancashire evening, nobody was up for a trek out for supplies. The house was warm, each of us were engaged in an activity of our choosing, a good, carb rich, moreish pudding would really put the icing on our snug little cake. However, understandably, nobody wanted to be wrenched away and flung out into the moorland wilds at below freezing, to hunter-gather a pud.

I mean... who would?

Thankfully, I always have store cupboard ingredients, so it was not a big stretch to knock something up. Sure, I could have made a sponge with custard or a milk pudding or similar, but I saw the bag of cherries lurking in the arctic wasteland of my freezer and, having just finished reading the latest Vocal Book Club read "Tom Lake by Ann Patchett" which is set on a cherry farm, x plus y resulted in Clafoutis!

Then, the more I thought about it, the more fitting it became. Cherry Clafoutis is a generously succulent and down-to-earth pudding; it was a fitting tribute, a sort of culinary ode to Tom Lake.

For those who have not read it, Tom Lake is a long novel, 11 hours and 22 minutes of narration (I listened to it on audible), with an undulating bounty of sojourns woven through. I will be honest; it takes some dedication to get through. It has countless side stories and character explorations, which I confess nearly saw me abandon it seven hours in. But, by the eighth hour, my determination to stay the course paid off. All of the tributary pathways that had felt like narrative dead ends began to flow and harmonise, creating a beautiful panorama of one person's fascinating life. It was like finding myself in an empathetic landscape, looking at another person's whole world. The gift of such clarity was exquisite (I cried) and a testament to the narrative skill of Ann Patchett. In my book club commentary (see below), I compared her to George Eliott; the sentiment and style were reminiscent of Middlemarch in many ways.

So, you see, a tribute or an ode to that journey felt right.

As I put together the simple ingredients needed to make my ode, my mind drifted, as is its tendency, and I thought about how my life and the creation of this clafoutis was imitating art. As I put the batter on to beat for a few minutes, I googled that often quoted saying by Oscar Wilde: "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." My search took me to Wikipedia and to the anti-memesis philosophy underpinning Wilde's quote. The philosophy is based on the argument that people only notice the wonder of the world's mundane because artists have taught them "the loveliness of such effects..." According to Wilde, the poeticism we see in the oblique, he cites London's fog as an example, "did not exist till art invented them."

As I lay my cherries out in the dish I will use to bake my clafoutis, I take a picture because they look so pretty, all laid out and glistening in the dewing frost. I think about the character Lara, the narrator in Patchett's Tom Lake. Lara, like me looking at my ruby red frosted cherries, sees beauty in mundanity. She finds the humdrum of everyday life to be harmonising rather than harrowing. No artist, I reflect, has shown her this; she didn't even finish school, yet she sees it, lives it, and breathes it. She is the art, and she is surely the embodiment of mimesis. I pour the batter over the cherries and think that Wilde and the anti-mimetic crew are, perhaps, wrong. I think that they may be overly crediting themselves and that art, as Aristotle believed, is wholly about the reflection of nature. Nature, I think with some certainty, speaks to us all.

As I stand by the oven, lost in my thoughts, watching my Cherry Clafoutis bubble up in the heat, admiring how it is crisping beautifully at the edges and rising evenly and golden, my mind swims back over the conviction to mimesis that I had just moments before figured through, and I backtrack. It dawns on me that Patchett, in Tom Lake, has pulled off the most artful trick of all; she has made me believe her fictional characters are real. I am seeing myself in her creation. Lara is fictional. Lara is art, and I am connecting with the beauty of nature, as seen through Lara's eyes because an artist has facilitated that connection.

I conclude that nature speaks to us all, but it takes an artist to imbibe it with a collectively personal and poetic translation.

... Or perhaps I just fancied cherries for dessert.

If you would like to make a Cherry Clafoutis and perhaps dwell a while in mimetic philosophy, this is how I made mine:

Recipe:

This will take around ten minutes to prepare and between twenty and thirty minutes to bake (twenty if you use fresh cherries and thirty if they are frozen). You will need an ovenproof dish that is around 25 - 30 cm wide and around 5cm deep. The clafoutis will fluff up as it bakes and then sink back down as it cools. It is best eaten straight out of the oven with a scoop of vanilla ice cream if you have some, or on its own is good.

I had a cold slice for breakfast this morning, to be honest, and it was lovely with my coffee.

This is a basic recipe; there are others online. Raymond Blanc advocates using cream in the mix as well as amaretto. This will make the clafoutis deeply decadent. Mine is simple, joyously so. My one piece of advice is to make sure you grease your dish well before you start and cover the butter in sugar (caster or granulated) to help release it once cooked. Serve straight from the dish.

This is what you need:

3 cups of pitted cherries

1/2 cup of plain/all-purpose flour

1tspn baking powder

3 room temperature medium eggs

1/4 cup sugar

1 cup of milk - type entirely up to you.

1tspn vanilla extract

Heat the oven to 180/360. Place the cherries in the base of your greased and sugared dish. In a separate mixing bowl put all the dry ingredients in and then all the wet ones. Mix for a good few minutes with an electric beater. The batter will be thin and smooth. Pour it over the cherries, place in the oven and leave. You will know it is ready when it is golden brown top and risen. A skewer will emerge clean. Slice and serve and prepare to want a second helping!

If you want to join in with Vocal's Book Club, all the details are here:

Hope you enjoy, CJ xx

***

Author's Note:

If you are reading this and wondering why this was not simply added to the Book Club Community on Vocal, the truth is this was first published on my new WordPress blog, but I thought it was worth sharing here too. The blog:

I am hoping (wanting... pleading!!!) that now the holiday madness has passed; more Vocalites will be joining in with the next Book Club. Selfishly, I really do love discussing books. Not only do I learn so much from other people's opinions I think exploring a book as a collective makes me a better writer and reader.

Erica Wagner said something that really grabbed my attention during the conversation about the book "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin"; she said that readers are responsible for opening themselves up to what has been written (I paraphrase). That advice stayed with me, and it is part of the reason I stayed the course with Tom Lake. She was correct; I opened up and embraced a book that I may have previously dismissed, and in doing so, I have learned so much. Ann Patchett is a spectacular writer; even if the story is not your bag, if you want to see what good looks like, I would get your eyes on some of her work. I know that I will be reading more.

Here endeth my unsolicited (and unusually convoluted) sell of Vocal's Book Club.

Peace out!