Death in Vienna

Portrait of Ria Munk III, Klimt

In the beginning is Beethoven and in the beginning is the end.

The National Gallery’s new exhibition, Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900, is, on the surface, a look at the portraiture of the cultural centre of fin-de-siècle Mitteleuropa.

This is not, though, a city of Strauss waltzes, but a haunting look at a clash of old and modern, life and death, at Europe’s heart.

We start with the mask of Beethoven’s face taken after his death in 1827.

The cast is not the finest: so scared was he of poisoning that he insisted that his demise should be followed by a postmortem. Both the damage done by that process and by the time lapse between death and the casting mean that the ‘final expression’ – the aim of a death mask – has been blurred.

Yet still it retains power; a face pinched by pain or the fire that always consumed the composer.

This is all context: the absorption with death that becomes pronounced as we encounter later works started long before the works that constitute the core of this exhibition and before Freud, whose own work seems to hang over the paintings.

Contextually too, Beethoven was one of the fathers of German romanticism. Like the artists of the Vienna Secession, whose work follows, Beethoven kicked down the old and created a new artistic language.

The Secession understood this and its 14^th exhibition was dedicated to the composer.

The exhibition has left some critics grumbling about the context of that mask, and about how the exhibition as a whole is arranged – in other words, not chronologically. But this has benefits for the visitor.

For instance, seeing Oskar Kokoschka’s 1909 Portrait of Lotte Franzos hanging right next to Hans Canon’s Girl with a Parrot from 1876, presents an unusual opportunity to grasp what a shock the modern must have been to a public weaned on an art form that was as constrained by convention as society itself.

We move through rooms covering different themes, from initial context to the family to Jewish identity in the city to death.

The Family (Self Portrait), Shiele

Although Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Kokoschka are well represented here, the exhibition has brought together work by a number of other artists, including Jewish and female ones, to create a wider picture

The presence of works by Teresa Ries (a self portrait of great self-confidence), Broncia Koller and Elena Luksch-Makowsky all make the point that women were involved at the highest levels of artist endeavour and were exhibiting as such. It’s subsequently that they appear to have been largely forgotten.

But death is a dominant theme here: so often the outcome as the modern and the old collided; as anti-semitism rubbed against the flowering of secular Jewish artists, intellectuals and businessmen; as Vienna became a magnet for émigrés from central and eastern Europe; as liberalism collided with conservatism; as people started to question religious conventions and social mores, and as individualism warred with the subjugation of the id in the name of society and family.

But to begin with, there is death and convention.

Passing through the rooms, we discover Friedrich von Amerling’s Antonie von Amerling on her Deathbed from 1843, Franz Eybl’s The Artist Franz Wipplinger, Looking at a Portrait of his Late Sister, from 1833, Gyula Benczúr’s Portrait of Empress Elisabeth from 1899 (painted a year after she was assassinated, and representing her some 40 years earlier, portrayed against a stunningly-realised background of gold) and even Emperor Franz Joseph on his Deathbed, by Franz von Matsch from 1916.

There’s work by Richard Gerstl, who killed himself when 25, after a short affair with Schönberg’s wife, and was only later recognised as a seminal Austrian Expressionist.

Of the Klimt works, while two early ones are astonishing for their photographic quality, the latter ones exhibited here all seem connected to death.

A deathbed portrait of Ria Munk (1912), after she had shot herself in the heart, aged 24, following an affair, sets the scene for one of two posthumous portraits of her that is displayed here.

And then a pastel of Klimt’s dead infant son, Otto Zimmermann, together with a photograph of the child in a coffin.

Such postmortem photographs were so popular in the Vienna of the time that the government enacted a law banning the presence of corpses in photographic studios.

Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl was being worked on even as Austro-Hungrary itself was in its death throes, and was unfinished when Klimt himself died in 1918.

As if reflecting those ends, you look at this work and sense that you know where Klimt’s characteristic gold would have gone, but while the spaces are there, they remain ungilded.

But death had not had its fill of this portrait: Zuckerkandl herself would later be murdered in a Nazi death camp.

And then there is Schiele.

Ah yes: this notoriously ‘difficult’ artist.

The Family (Self Portrait) dominates a room – light years away from the chocolate-box sentiment of Alois Delug’s The Markl Family (1907) that hangs just a few metres from it (another illustration of how effective the design of the exhibition is in presenting stark contrasts).

Schiele’s gaunt figures, blank-eyed, stripped almost of flesh and with brushstrokes that could be the underlying muscles; angular, and devoid of what the artist considered to be aesthetic hypocrisy, seem to be the perfect visual metaphors for a Europe brutalised and shattered by the war that was finally grinding to an exhausted halt.

Death mask of Gustav Mahler

Later, there is Schiele’s Portrait of Edith Schiele, dying, from 1918 – just days before his own death, also from the Spanish flu.

And more death masks follow, like a frame of the exhibition: of Klimt, of Schiele, of architect Adolf Loos and of the composer Gustav Mahler.

The latter, made in 1911, is unusual in that it was cast by an artist, Carl Moll, and includes much of Mahler’s head and neck as well as his face. The detail is staggering: eyelashes and pores on the neck: it as though you are looking at the composer himself, sleeping.

There are aspects of this exhibition that seem full of life as opposed to death.

Moll’s Self Portrait in his Study, from 1906, may on the surface be conventional, but it has some interesting touches and is beautifully executed.

Gerstl’s Portrait of Lieutenant Alois Gerstl (1907) seems to have something of both van Gogh and Chagall about it.

Schiele’s Portrait of Albert Paris von Gütersloh (1918) has the same blank look of The Family (Self Portrait) from the same year, but his subject sits, utterly modern, against a red and gold background that recalls to mind the icons of Orthodoxy.

There are other patches of the gold that is so familiar in the work of the Secession, as behind the head of the subject in Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta (1907), but also in Isidor Kaufmann’s Young Rabbi (1910).

Anton Romoko’s portraits of Isabella and Christoph Reisser from 1885 both hint at the same thing in their blank backgrounds, while some of Kokoschka’s earlier backgrounds do something similar, with their mix of reds and golds.

It is the exoticism of the East blurring into the West.

Portrait of Heinrich Mann, Oppenheimer

Max Oppenheimer’s Portrait of Heinrich Mann from 1910 obviously attracted my attention as a fan of Lübeck’s literary family.

There’s the discovery that Arnold Schönberg was not only the creator of the 12-tone scale, but a painter of some note.

Works by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller from the pre-Secession era show, however, that not every artist was trapped completely in conventionality.

Gerstl’s Nude Self Portrait with Palette from 1908 (the year of his suicide) is striking too – not least for its apparent prefiguring of Schiele’s angularising of the human body.

And the exhibition as a whole is fascinating because it offers the chance to see how European artists outside France and Spain (Matisse and Picasso, in other words) explored, dissected and made the anew.

If I have a quibble, it is the odd way in which sex is treated – or rather: not.

It’s skated around: mentions that Klimt fathered a number of children by several mothers, and of painters and subjects and their affairs.

One can, in Schiele’s 1912 Portrait of Erich Lederer (left), even see a harbinger of Weimar androgyny.

Yet Koller’s Nude Portrait of Marietta is the point at which the curator chooses to inform of us that it is ‘different’ from other nudes of the era in being ‘non-sexual’.

Which is one interesting – not least, as, in our time, we seem increasingly to be seeing any nude as sexual: see the moral panics that have been thrown up by pictures of naked children being snatched by the police and the photographers arrested, even when they are the parents.

Yet there seems also in this an attempted rejection of the fact that human beings are also sexual beings. However much some may try to pretend otherwise, we view our fellow humans at least partially in terms of sex.

In fin-de-siècle Vienna, as in so many other places and at other times when conventions were being torn at, the rejection of sexual conformity was a vital part of that. And in a Freudian world, and one where individuality is being explored and old beliefs dumped, this seems even more the case.

In Schiele’s oeuvre it’s impossible to miss this.

In 2007, at the Barbican’s Seduced: Art and sex from antiquity to now, works by both Schiele and Klimt were included.

It’s difficult to see how, for instance, Schiele’s Two Girls Embracing (1915) can be seen as pornographic – the gaze from the two women is a challenge to the viewer as voyeur. And Eros, from 1911, of a male nude with vast, erect penis and, again, a challenging look at the observer, does not seem intended to arouse.

Perhaps, rather, they confuse in their lack of shame, and the frankness and boldness of that challenge.

But if Nude Portrait of Marietta is a portrait, then so, surely, is Eros.

That is, however, a relatively minor quibble.

If you expect a Vienna of gaiety and Strauss, this may not be for you. But Facing the Modern is an intellectually challenging exhibition and one that brings great rewards on that score. Gemma Blackshaw deserves great credit for her work on it.

And it’s also an exhibition that will, I suspect, stay in the mind for a very long time to come.

• Facing the Modern: The portrait in Vienna 1900 is at the National Gallery, London, until 12 January. Find out more here.

Memories of several Bottoms

Sheridan Smith, David Walliams and fairies

On Friday evening, I trotted along to London’s West End down to see David Walliams’s Bottom.

Yes, yes – I know. I know it’s been done before, but apart from one tweet, not by me. So I’m afraid that you, dear readers, have to put up with it being done here.

The fourth production in the inaugural season of the Michael Grandage Company sees A Midsummer Night’s Dream playing to packed houses in the West End – and the main reason for all the bottoms on seats is less that it’s the Bard and more the star casting.

Walliams has been cast as Bottom, while Sheridan Smith takes on the traditional dual roles of Titania and Hippolyta.

The former brings the pulling power of Little Britain to the production, and has been directed to camp up the part for all he’s worth.

Smith brings with her the success of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, plus stints on the Royle Family and Jonathan Creek, and has been directed in such a way that you wouldn’t know about that televisual CV unless you recognised her name or checked out the programme.

My own first Dream was way back in September 1976 at the Bolton Octagon, when a seat in the gallery cost just 50p – the ticket is still pasted into an old scrapbook.

It had been our introduction to Shakespeare a year earlier at school (when I’d read Bottom in class) and this was the first live production of a play by the Bard that I’d seen.

Then in April 1979, it was the Fairfield High School for Girls annual production (tickets 60p – there’s inflation for you), with me donning something like a sackcloth costume as Peter Quince; a performance that the local paper described as being “acted with authority”.

Actually, what I remember most was being able to say “bloody” twice in a speech – in front of the headmistress.

It was the one performance my maternal grandmother ever saw me in, and she and my mother decided that I had a likeness to one of my mother’s brothers. I’m not sure I’ve recovered yet.

But back to that Octagon production. Wilfred Harrison, who was also joint director, played Bottom. The notes in that scrapbook only mention his performance, but although this is an ensemble piece, the Mechanicals are what grabs the attention of most audiences, precisely because of the timeless comedy.

In 1991, for instance, Roy Hudd’s Bottom is just about the only thing I remember of a production at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – apart from the less-than-brilliant weather.

When it's not raining, it’s a play that is superbly suited to outside staging.

In 1987, the Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster staged its first promenade production in the city’s Williamson Park, around and including the Ashton Memorial as a backdrop.

Andy Serkis as Lysander in Lancaster. Puck to the left

That Dream, with a cast that included, as Lysander, Andy Serkis – now best known as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films – was utterly magical.

Of the ones I’ve seen, it remains my favourite production. The lovers were strongly done even if the Mechanicals didn’t make a major impression in the memory bank: Puck was the stand-out, although unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the actor who played him in full faun get up.

But back to the here and now, and Michael Grandage’s new production.

It’s played at F1 pace – just two hours for the whole play to unwind – and that has some benefits and some pitfalls.

Some of the languorous sense of the poetry is lost by charging at it like this – I was mightily relieved when Puck’s closing speech was allowed its necessary time – but it also works well in particular places, not least in the chaotic row between the four lovers in the forest as Oberon and Puck looks on.

Indeed, what Grandage and his company have done is remove any reverential attitude and emphasised the play’s physical comedy – the majority of which is quite clearly there in the text.

And they also haven’t ducked the point that it’s largely not about lurve, but sex – certainly in terms of Titania and Bottom.

Elizabethan audiences would have known, for instance, that an ass had a large penis, so Bottom’s transformation into just such an animal, combined with Titania’s awakening under the spell, is quite clearly about lust.*

Just imagine what would happen if all those bored schoolchildren being introduced to Shakespeare via this play were told that it was about sex?

Anyway, this is very good fun.

And more than that, it was thoroughly enjoyed by an audience that included a great many people who clearly don’t go to the theatre often – and most certainly not for Shakespeare.

The production has had some brief moments of song and dance inserted – and some snippets of pop classics – and where used, they work.

Gavin Fowler as Puck

While the mechanicals are camper than the proverbial row of tents, the fairies are a group of crusty hippies with a bit of edge.

And the lovers are far less insipid and boring than they can be.

Of the cast, Smith was excellent – all husky voice and powerful allure.

Walliams gets to nick the show – there’s more ham on display than in a Spanish deli, and anyone older than a teen will wonder if they’re seeing the reincarnation of Frankie Howerd at one point in particular – but again, in the context of this kind of production, it works.

Of the rest of a good ensemble, special mentions for Gavin Fowler as Puck – he moves superbly – Katherine Kingsley as a fabulously feisty Helena and Pádraic Delaney as Oberon/Theseus.

Christopher Oram’s sets work well, as do his costumes. In particular, I liked Puck’s trousers, which tallied with the attire of the rest of the fairies, but, in the side fringe, just hinted at a faun’s furry legs.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable romp – more Carry On than delicate rom-com – but it’s about time that the Dream got this sort of shake-it-up treatment to rescue it from any perception of it being fey, rather infantile and ‘safe’.

Finally, just to note that we considered ourselves lucky in finding – and being able to get a table without booking – Piazza, an Italian restaurant that almost backs onto the theatre.

An independent amid the mass of chains in the vicinity, it did a very pleasant pomodoro (according to The Other Half) and a very nice diavola pizza for me – excellent, doughy base, with fresh tomato sauce, spiced minced beef, red onions, pepperoni, mozzarella and green jalapeños to get the endorphins flowing.

Really not pricy for London, with very pleasant service. That’s one to remember.

* For which insight I thank Jill Betjeman of Lancaster.

A dish like your favourite cardigan

Pyracantha berries – nearly ready for the birds

We studied a number of the poems of Keats during my schooling, but with the exception of this first stanza of Ode to Autumn, from 1819, they made me gurn at the mawkishness of them.

This, on the other hand, had something sensual about it; something of the voluptuousness of the season.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the mos’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

The third of the stanzas in that Keats ode deals with the dying of the year.

Looking back on it, I can see why I didn’t appreciate that bit of the work as much: for a teenager growing up in a family that was far too absorbed with death and guilt and sin, it was almost impossible to comprehend death as an integral part of life, and to see that the cycle of life and death and life again was what Keats was noting.

Actually, the whole poem is a beautifully evocative description of England at this time of year. Yes – there are even hints of such sights and sounds to be found and experienced in The Smoke.

The weather changed two days ago, with temperatures falling by such noticeable degrees that a scarf was suddenly in order for the mornings.

With the nights having already drawn in, we’ve arrived at the days when the cardi and slippers call.

The cardigan of the food world – the ultimate comfort food – is soup. And this weekend offered the perfect opportunity to get busy creating warming bowls of comfort.

Chopped onions and garlic, softening

Given that La Bouche has Roscoff onions in, it was an obvious leap to opt for the first French onion soup of the season.

You can certainly use other onions (depending on what you can find), but the point is to make sure hat you’re decent. It’s the point of the dish, after all, so you want some quality flavour.

But perhaps most vital of all, this soup needs time: it’s not the business of 20 minutes.

For two people, I took four of the Roscoff onions, peeled and chopped them.

Now Raymond Blanc suggests slicing, but since The Other Half grouches and says he prefers chopped, this is one occasion on which I will ignore the great chef.

I use a Le Creuset shallow casserole dish to cook this – it allows a far better ratio of cooking surface to onion than any other pan I possess and, of course, its heat-retaining qualities work wonders with such a dish.

So, chop your onions, plus some garlic (four cloves for the two of us).

Over a gentle heat, melt a generous amount of butter – and I do mean generous: 50g won’t go amiss.

When the last of the solids have disappeared into a pool of yellow, pop in your onion and garlic and spread it evenly over the base of the pan. And then let everything start to do its magic.

Slowly does it, remember: this is a marathon of love, not a sprint of convenience.

More colours of autumn

It can take a long time to start browning, but don’t be tempted to turn up the temperature beyond what allows the liquid butter to just – and only just! – produce the odd bubble. Quite apart from anything else, you don’t want to burn either the butter or the garlic.

Don’t be tempted to stir it too much either or it won’t brown.

Now if you really want, you can try a bit of a cheat here, although I’m not convinced of its efficacy. A sprinkle of sugar is claimed by some to speed up the caramelisation process. As I said: I’m unconvinced – and it adds a sort of sweetness to the dish that you don’t want. Given the time it needs, this will sweeten up gorgeously all on its own.

Fast forward and the onion has turned golden. Sprinkle a little plain flour over it and stir in gently. Let it cook through for a minute or so, and then start adding some white wine.

To be honest, I don’t have developed enough taste buds to be able to really notice what I use in such a situation, but I stuck with M Blanc’s golden rule and spent less than a fiver on a bottle, the rest of which was destined for further culinary deployment.

Once you’ve got the got the pan deglazed, add a little stock too (chicken or vegetable; fresh or a cube*), then a sprig of thyme and a couple of bay leaves, cover and leave to simmer oh so gently for a good 40 minutes.

And that’s pretty much that. Check the seasoning – if you used a stock cube, you’re unlikely to need to add any further salt, but a grind or three of pepper will hardly go amiss.

French onion soup with gruyere croutons

To serve in the traditional way, you need a ‘crouton’ or two – no, not little cubes, but, to be strictly accurate, slices of toasted baguette.

Dish up the soup, place a crouton on top of each bowl and scatter coarsely grated gruyere cheese on top, before popping it briefly under the grill so that the cheese starts melting all the way off the bread and into the soup.

It goes without saying that there’s nothing wrong with using something like Cheddar if you can’t get gruyere, but the latter does have a nutty taste that matches superbly with the onion in this dish.

Of course, if – like The Other Half – you don’t like cheese, you do without this added treat or have a crouton spread with mustard.

Now sit and wrap yourself in the warm comfort of this wonderful classic.

It’s worth every moment.

* If you use stock cubes, I recommend Kallo’s Just Bouillon. Unlike most other stock cubes, it doesn’t use palm oil in the ingredients, and the production of this oil is doing grave damage to the habitat of orangutans, so it's a good one to avoid.

It's not all bad: how to feel better about Britain

Just some of our amazing fellow citizens

How often do you watch or read the news and feel that it’s only ever bad, and that it leaves you wondering whether you’ve strayed into the Slough of Despond?

And even if you don’t fall into a trap of assuming that the unrelenting drip, drip of crime and corruption and scandal is a mirror of society as a whole, it can still give you a sense of being rather depressed by it all.

Last night’s Pride of Britain awards were, for precisely those reasons, a very good antidote.

Yes, there was a red carpet and yes, there were plenty of celebrities to hand out the awards, but the winners themselves were, for the most part, hardly household names.

Yet each had a story of courage or dedication that had seen them take the stage to receive an award.

There was Margaret Aspinall, the mother of one of the Hillsborough dead, who has never given up campaigning for justice for the 96.

Karin Williams, a lollipop lady from Wales, threw herself in front of an out-of-control car to save a group of children – and remains, for the present, in a wheelchair.

Every Saturday night, 86-year-old Anne Scarfe goes out with a team of volunteers in Plymouth to help young people get home safely after an evening on the tiles.

The members of the RNLI flood rescue team in Devon were honoured for their bravery.

Twins Trevor and Ray Powles, now in their 70s, suffered TB as young men, but then dedicated their lives to becoming doctors, and have made enormous steps forward in the understanding and treatment of breast cancer and leukaemia respectively.

After nine years without a job, Clifford Harding felt that his life was going nowhere, but he developed a way of helping children to learn their times table by using rap.

June Kelly founded and runs a football team in Cheetham Hill, one of the most deprived areas of the country, where she’s helped to keep youngsters off the streets and out of trouble – her team has even been lauded for the politeness of the players.

Sharon Grey was named teacher of the year for turning around a school near Nottingham that was threatened with closure, while 12-year-old Balie Kershaw won for giving CPR as he waited for an ambulance to arrive after his father had suffered a massive heart attack.

An award also went to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager that the Taliban tried to murder because she was campaigning for education for girls. As the possibility has been raised that she might win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Taliban has said that it is committed to trying to kill her again and will be “proud” if it can do so.

And so the stories went on.

It would take a very hardened cynic to have maintained a dry eye throughout – and I happily admit that even I am not that cynical.

So many ordinary (what does that even mean?) people doing remarkable, generous things – or even just overcoming incredible odds. It was a humbling yet uplifting watch.

Good news rarely makes the headlines – audiences seem wedded to sensational and negative stories: or rather, news organisations tend to have decided that that is the case and that that is what they will provide.

And it can warp perceptions. For instance, when did you ever read a report about a social worker who has successfully saved a child from an abusive home?

The answer is that you won’t have: social workers feature in the news when things go wrong, and then there’s a culture in a large section of the news media of vilifying them – often because of a barely-veiled ideological hatred of the public services/state/PC etc.

It’s important to say that it’s not always easy for news media to find good-news stories and give them prominence – I know, having been a duty chief sub editor on a national paper, and having made the sort of decisions that I’m referring to.

In those days, I tried to balance out the usual unpleasant or ‘serious’ news at least a little with, if nothing else, one ‘happy’ picture in an edition. And – I hope it goes without saying – a fact-based, non-hysterical approach to the rest of the news, which can also make a difference.

As Fleet Street Fox rather nicely illustrated in her Mirror column yesterday, the Daily Mail is unlikely to be involved with a Pride of Britain awards scheme any time soon.

But unfortunately, the Mail is believed by many of those who read it: its brand of bile really does inform how many people see this country, even while they somehow continue to think that it is a respectable, honest and truthful organ.

It is none of those things.

I glanced through a copy of the Mail this morning: there was nothing about the Pride of Britain awards. Well, you didn’t really expect there to be, did you?

After all, Paul Dacre and his pack of attack dogs aren’t interested in anything other than serving the whims of their master, the tax exile Lord Rothermere.

And if that means drip-feeding the readership an addictive diet of brutalising, hate-filled paranoia, so be it.

Yet in the last 10 days, the Mail has gone into an overdrive of nastiness, almost as though this will convince some that self-regulation of the industry is working (honest) and should be allowed to continue.

Pride of Britain was a welcome antidote to all the negativity – not least from a publication that really does seem to hate the Britain that we live in today.

On the other hand, if Dacre were to spontaneously combust any time soon – preferably live on TV, facing questions about why he’s such a nasty, hate-sprewing piece of work – it would doubtless make one of the jolliest stories anyone has read for years.

It's all in the game

Autumnal Hackney sunset

The weather has been so all over the place for the second year running that, according to some reports, English apples are only now appearing on supermarket shelves – a full three weeks later than normal.

But while the temperature may yet be clinging to levels that are unusual for October – and even producing an unwelcome mugginess – the days have shortened and, in London at any rate, a certain greyness has been the dominant theme of the last fortnight.

In the carpark at the back of Voluptuous Villas, the slender silver birches are yellowing fast, while leaves are starting to fall steadily.

That it is autumn then, can no longer be in doubt.

If apples and pears are now arriving – actually, I’ll let you into a little secret: English apples have been available on Broadway Market on a Saturday since early September – and if parsnips are but a frost away from adding their sweetness to our plates, then another thing is sure: the game season is upon us.

Back in June, when all anyone cared about was summer, given that spring had gone missing in inaction, a new book landed on my doormat.

Bruno Loubet’s Mange Tout offered a selection of recipes that perfectly fitted the long days and the rising temperatures.

As I mentioned here, the confited salmon with asparagus and green gazpacho is a delight and will be done again when the English asparagus pops its head above the soil next year.

But amid all the excitement over summer food, an autumn dish stood out for me from that early browsing: pigeon with cauliflower done two ways, and a blackberry sauce.

One of the delights with Bruno’s cooking is that, even when you haven’t heard of a dish or a food combination before, they always sound so completely natural.

It’s classic and modern all at once.

And so I’ve been waiting to try this one since we returned from France.

The first problem, however, was that Andy and Wild Game Co have disappeared from Broadway Market.

Not, I should say, of his own volition, but with various summer festivals offering him better seasonal business opportunities, it seems that the market managers said that he couldn’t take a break and then return in the autumn.

All of which is slightly annoying – not least since much game is seasonal. The pheasant season, for instance, only opened on 1 October.

Thankfully, Andy has been incredibly helpful, and we organised a way to get me a couple of bags of game. Most has gone in the freezer, although it won’t be staying there very long.

In many ways, last year was the breakthrough one when I finally learned how to cook some game decently, and I have no desire for that to be halted any time soon.

Anyway, the first dish was venison fillet, seared and served with roast veggies and some of the Balsamico drizzle that I swear by both for taste and making a dish look a bit more artful.

The veg in question were swede, carrot and sweet potato, roasted for 35-40 minutes at 200˚C (fan) with a few (drained and dried) tinned spuds thrown in late; all tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper and dried thyme – a wonderfully earthy background to the meat.

The second dish was pigeon.

Now Andy supplies me with pigeon breast – to be honest, my butchery skills are not that good that I’d particularly like to attack a bird myself: the breasts are small enough that you don’t want to risk losing any.

However, Bruno’s recipe calls for whole birds, the breasts of which are cut off, while the carcass is used to make a sauce.

Bruno also starts his sauce with a shallot and a parsnip, and since we haven’t yet had the first frost, I am avoiding parsnips until they’re really worth eating.

So I didn’t follow the instructions to the letter, in other words, but started with a mirepoix lite of shallot instead of onion, carrot and celery.

You soften those gently - the first opportunity to do this in one of the Le Creuset saucepans, and what a difference that makes – and then add booze.

Bruno's chicken – before cooking

Now Bruno recommends port and brandy. Again, you can improvise a little – a small bottle of red wine isn’t going to cost as much as port and it won’t insult the final dish. And a miniature of brandy is more than enough.

Reduce, reduce, reduce – and then add stock and reduce again. It’s pretty classic sauce stuff. Strain and add the blackberries to cook briefly before serving.

In the meantime, you bring some milk to a simmer, letting it infuse with a few caraway seeds, before cooking cauliflower florets until tender, then draining and blitzing. Add a drop or two of the milk if you need to for a smooth purée. This has the advantage that it can be made early and then warmed gently before serving.

Mash up some juniper berries with salt and pepper, coat the pigeon breasts and leave them to absorb the flavours. The smell of doing all of this, incidentally, is wonderful.

Near the time, you reheat the purée, then slice the remaining florets as thinly as you can and dress.

Again, improvisation, since I didn’t have walnut oil. I used olive oil and, instead of red wine vinegar, some of my thicker raspberry vinegar, plus salt and red pepper.

To cook the pigeon is simple and a brief matter: just a couple of minutes a side in a hot pan with a drop of olive oil.

Now I have to point out, at this stage, that the picture in the book cannot be the real dish: the raw cauli, once dressed, is NOT going to appear as immaculately white. Hey ho – food porn is as generous with reality as the other sort.

But in taste terms there is nothing false.

This dish packs a wonderful punch. It is a superb combination of flavours and textures and, even if I couldn’t manage quite the studied informality of presentation as that photo suggested, it doesn’t look bad either.

Next up was Bruno’s roast chicken with a parsley, garlic butter stuffing.

Not a stuffing in the usual way, but one that is gently pushed between skin and flesh, meaning that the bird, in effect, self bastes. That was about as far as I stuck with that recipe, but again, wonderful tastes and aromas.

It’s a recipe that can also be used for a guinea fowl, apparently.

Which point keeps the game theme going.

It'’s not easy if you don’t have a specialist supplier or a local butcher that does it, but game is a wonderful meat. Well, lots of wonderful meats, to be rather more accurate.

If you’re worried about fat, then game is lean – and still absolutely bursting with flavour.

Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, we tried kangaroo for the first time: bought from the Exotic Meat Company (Gamston Wood Ostrich Farm) at Borough Market a few months ago, it was the result of a cull in Australia and had been frozen at source.

It was fillet and, as suggested above, as lean as anything. All I did was to bring it to room temperature and dry it off, and then sear it in a little olive oil, and serve with pretty standard veg on the side. Game really can be so easy and so quick.

And when flavour is so good and so strong, you don’t have to do a lot with it. It becomes a brilliant midweek meal.

There’s a moral to all this.

If you can, get hold of game in season and learn to cook and enjoy it. It’s plentiful on these islands, and there’s also plenty of variety.

And in spite of the UK’s history of deforestation and enclosure by the ruling elite – or maybe even also because of it – let’s not get caught up in a belief that game is only for them and not us.

As it is in France and many other places game should be for all of us. It’s great food – but not ‘posh’ food.

And before I forget to suggest it – get Bruno’s book.