Poetry Extra: What Sweetness Touched your Tongue?

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BBC Radio 4 Extra

Poetry Extra

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly opportunity for listeners to revisit the riches of the BBC radio poetry archive

A brand new poetry slot on Radio 4 Extra gives listeners a weekly opportunity to revisit the riches of the BBC radio poetry archive

Poetry Extra: What Sweetness Touched Your Tongue

What Sweetness Touched Your Tongue

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Poetry Extra, What Sweetness Touched Your Tongue

Daljit Nagra selects the best programmes from the BBC's poetry archive.

Daljit Nagra selects 'What Sweetness Touched Your Tongue?' - a culinary biography in verse. With Alison Brackenbury.  From 2018.

Daljit Nagra revisits the BBC's poetry archive and selects 'What Sweetness Touched Your Tongue?' inspired by Edwardian recipes written by poet Alison Brackenbury's grandmother. 

The poet Alison Brackenbury came across a black oilskin notebook that had belonged to her grandmother, Dorothy Eliza Barnes.  

The notebook is full of her recipes, for 'Aunt Margaret's Pudding', 'Flamberries Pudding' and other steamed delights, but also bramble vinegar, pork pie filling, wines, even embrocation.

Dot, born in 1894, was a cook to an Edwardian family. Later she married a Lincolnshire shepherd, moving from one remote cottage to another. Her role, her life, was to sustain her family - and feed men.

Brackenbury was inspired to write a sequence of poems in response to the recipes. 

In this programme we hear the poems and The Kitchen Cabinet's food historian, Dr Annie Gray, cooks, following the recipes.  These dishes are very evocative of Dot's era and her life. Helped by notes in the family Bible, family reminiscence and her own memories of her grandmother (read by the actor Emma Hands), Brackenbury uncovers a life that was full, marked by losses, long and fascinating. 

In the 1930s hungry itinerants came to the farm, looking for work, and Dot fed them.  Dot kept cooking to the end, dying with her shelves well stocked. She once remarked to her grand-daughter that what they said about the summer before the Great War was true, it was unusually beautiful.     

'What Sweetness Touched Your Tongue' is a culinary biography, a radio sketch of an era - in verse. A century on Alison Brackenbury, maginatively establishes a relationship with her grandmother through the recipes and the poems they evoke.   

Producer: Julian May

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2018.

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