Celebrating Coleridge

Today is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's birthday and mine, I've always felt that the first, one of the greatest poets in the English language should be celebrated . This writer - not too much.

Birthdays now are hollow to me. No matter how much I celebrate, with all the dinners out and cake in , it's not the same without my Mom. I miss those days when she would make my favorite  - risotto Milanese , the creamy Milanese dish of arborio rice, mushrooms and, of course, saffron. Nothing will ever come as close as her delicious pot of sunny yellow rice. Imagine molten sunshine and that's what the dish looked like. One day I will make it. My cooking and baking is getting to be as good as hers - I am trying - not to brag. It's a tough legacy to handle and surpass.Yet  I am trying, Some of it is coming out good and I can imagine her saying "What a good cooker" a phrase  she took her her aunt, my great aunt who knew a  thing or two about Piedmontese cooking and was an excellent cook herself.  However back to Coleridge who , unlike his latter Romantic counterparts, Byron, Shelley, and Keats never went to Italy. They probably dined on risotto, Mr Coleridge may have had only a rice pudding. the closest he'd ever get to anything with rice.

 He did come from Devon which had excellent dairy and beef along with lamb and mutton.Maybe soon I'll celebrate STC with a proper cream tea. There's clotted cream to be had, this I can easily get from either Amazon or Myers of Keswick in New York's West Village. It's a thick cream created by heating full cream cow's milk over a hot water and steam bath. The result is a lovely, thick, yogurt , (its' origins may have come from yogurt, the Phoenicians ate during their trips to ancient Britain. They traded goods for tin mined from Cornish mines).It's mild tasting and delicious on hot English muffins and then topped with any jam or jelly. A variation of it is "Thunder and Lightening" , bread topped with it and a layer of honey. I'd go with the jam, preferably blackberry or the cherry one I bought from Cherry Republic, in Traverse City Michigan. That to me is the perfect way to celebrate this famed Devon author.

Another birthday for Coleridge and myself. I've celebrated him for years, with cream teas and clotted cream. It's time to bring out the last again and slather it on a hot , toasty English muffin.