Cooking With Fernet Branca (19 page)

As I keep saying, Marta’s life is her own. We’re both grown-ups and what she gets up to is none of my business. On the other hand, that’s easier to say than to act on. All my life I’ve been interested in things that are none of my business, as well as bored by all the supposedly important things the good citizen ought to know (football scores, the name of the current Home Secretary, what ‘DNA’ stands for, where Voynovia is). None of my interests adds up to anything as dignified as knowledge, if only because in a world where knowledge is an infinite regression you may as well resign yourself to dilettantism. So I know lots of jolly recipes and spoof arias and can change a tap washer without either wringing my hands or ringing a plumber.

But the things that really interest me are other lives and
gossip.
I find the doings of my fellow humans irresistible. I
suppose that’s why I’ve always been able to manage even the least promising of literary hack work (Luc Bailly, Per Snoilsson). It’s the mortal contingency that fascinates: the real deal beneath the public exterior. It’s the only way I know to write the world – or scribe my globe, if I want an anagram of Lyme Regis Cobb. The thoroughly indecent bleak detail I collect along the way makes it diverting. The day I discovered about Luc’s enemas (
Uphill
all
the
Way
) was joyous and set me off on those idle speculations with which the civilized can so pleasurably fill their time. Such as why Christopher Columbus is known in Spanish as Cristóforo Colón, a name I’d encountered constantly in that gap year of mine in Latin America. Since to English speakers his name suggests the lower intestine, I was obliged to wonder about a port city in Panama being called Colón until further research revealed that when it was founded in 1850 it had been named Aspinwall after an American railway magnate. So which address would you prefer? One also wonders if, other things being equal, there might have arisen a therapeutic pastime known as Columbic irrigation. In any case I shall remember the erstwhile city of Aspinwall to my dying day; but until someone can associate a ‘blind carbon copy field’ with anything more interesting than computers I shall never remember or care what it is, regardless of the number of times it is explained to me.

The question of which Greek god is currently driving my frumpish neighbour about in a scarlet wingèd chariot is therefore of maximum fascination. That he has weak eyesight seems unlikely; it’s not the sort of car the partially sighted drive. My next thought is that he and the pilot of the helicopter might be one and the same. In one respect Nanty was right: I never did get a clear impression of Marta’s visitor’s features that fateful night. Generically, he had looked in much the same mould as this dashing chauffeur of hers. Surely she can’t possibly be on intimate terms with
two
such handsome boys, both manifestly younger than herself? Is
there no justice? What was that frightful, though somehow unforgettable, expression she used? ‘Close muscle’. I badly want to know which muscle, and how close. In short, I need to get to
el
cólon
of all this.

Unfortunately it begins to look as though I may have to keep my curiosity on ice for a bit. Scenting dosh, Frankie has rung to ask whether I can meet Nanty again at his request, this time in Munich. Freewayz is shortly to give its last concert there before being born again as Alien Pie: an exercise in re-branding whose breathless news is already filling the teen mags. Frankie has just speedmailed me the latest issue of
Heart
Beat
. Its PaceMakers column, which in the trade has far more authority than a
Times
leader, opens:

After yards more discursive nonsense in the same vein the column is artlessly signed ‘Kelly’ in blue felt tip pen in the handwriting of a girl of eleven and embellished with drawings of hearts. I immediately picture a steely harridan of forty wearing a suit. She is at her desk in a publisher’s office knee deep in samples of the teen cosmetics that manufacturers shower copiously on such offices in the hope of keeping their products Where It’s At. Twenty years ago she would have had a fag hanging out of the side of her mouth and one eye screwed up against the smoke as she pounded out deathless copy for her little sistahood on an IBM golfball machine. These days both her eyes are wide open but the pupils are shrunk to pinheads.

Flicking through the rest of
Heart
Beat
I can see we are in a world where spellcheckers are switched permanently off. But really, it’s pretty harmless stuff. Most of the fanzine consists of ads for clothes, shoes, CD players, cosmetics and all the other products so vital to a painless passage through this vale of tears. The rest is just pictures of celebrities like Brill and his group, together with interviews.

I hadn’t expected public acknowledgement for his casual theft of my title for a private recipe I haven’t yet perfected, so I can’t say I’m disappointed. I’m more intrigued by flicking through
Heart
Beat.
It’s all on such a simple, guileless level it
makes the contrast with the multimillion dollar business it serves all the more vivid. I like the huge, cynical gulf between this month’s eager little adolescent faces and last year’s identical but vanished teen celebs who never made it despite wearing Skechers Sport trainers and distressed jeans by Ralph Lauren. What went wrong? Should they have worn Lugz slip-ons and jeans by Fubu instead? They will never know, poor darlings, having been overtaken by oblivion. Come to that, I like the huge, cynical gulf between Brill in his blond wig (and surprising baby-faced good looks) and the hairless Nanty Riah talking confidently on his mobile about offshore negotiables. In fact, just give me a decent cynical gulf and my interest always begins to quicken. Suddenly I think Nanty’s autobiography might after all yield some quite interesting stuff even apart from the orgies. The precise problem with Per Snoilsson was there was no gulf whatever, cynical or otherwise, between what he did and how he was presented. What you saw was, all too depressingly, what you got: a nasty dim bloke who made a rich living driving in circles. By contrast Nanty/Brill operates on several levels at once.

For a couple of days I drift about the house in relaxed fashion, tidying up and mentally clearing the decks before embarking on this new project. Despite initial misgivings I have managed to talk myself round. Normally there’s nothing I so much enjoy as sidestepping a challenge but in this case my interest is just about piqued enough. Will it really be possible to extract anything as consistent as a worldview from Brill’s fried little brain? If he does want to follow in Paul McCartney’s footsteps and in twenty years’ time turn into Sir Antony Riah he’ll certainly need all the high seriousness I can invent for him. Some decent songs would help, too. A pity we can’t enlist Marta’s help here; but from what I’ve heard her ‘songings’ would put him out of business inside a week.

Now, what clothes to take to Munich? Laid-back elegance is the note to strike, with the emphasis on laid-back. I must
finally resist my natural inclination to dress up the more my client dresses down. In the past it has always been enough to know a client will be wearing nylon sportswear that hisses when he sits to make me reach for a severe black linen suit from Agnès B. with a reproachful tie by Ermenegildo Zegna. It was this outfit that cowed Luc Bailly’s manager into paying over the odds for my outline treatment of
Downhill
all
the
Way
. He could see at once he was not dealing with some casual hack but with a businesslike man of letters: a misjudgement I’m happy to say cost him dear.

But having already met Nanty and secured generous terms for the next six months’ work I don’t have to play that game. The Homo Erectus jeans will do very well: I’m really rather pleased with them. Their cut emphasizes a feature of which I’m discreetly proud … Is ‘proud’ too vain a word for someone of my age to use about his own body? I suppose it is; but I can’t help noticing that when I compare my derrière with that of certain of my contemporaries – who shall remain nameless until they do something to deserve naming – it still has pleasingly rounded and youthful contours.

How self-assertive I feel today! If I’m a bit high it’s surely justified. A very respectable income now looks assured for the forthcoming financial year – something that we
auteurs
can never take for granted, living as we permanently do on the edge of a financial precipice in whose depths it is all too easy to visualize a gyre of vultures funnelling down to peck over our poor remains. Just as cheering is that I shall be briefly going away and leaving this house newly secluded from my irksome neighbour by forty metres of stout beechwood fencing. I feel sorry for Marta, of course, corralled in her alcoholic gloom with her electronic plinkings and plonkings, but no one is exempt from the crumblings of life’s cookies. It is sad she should not have a marketable talent but there are other ways to be happy. One of them might very well be driving around with gigolos in red sports cars. I do hope so, for her sake. If I cared about casual sex I’ve no
doubt the circles in which I shall shortly be moving could provide it in abundance. That’s presumably what happens to those little teen faces that fail to cut the musical mustard.

At last I am in a position to set down the recipe for Alien Pie.

Have you ever embarked on something that looked completely straightforward but which has turned out to be bafflingly technical? For instance, I was completely flummoxed some time ago in a dentist’s waiting room when trying to kill time with the crossword in the current number of
JAPEDA,
the
Journal
of
the
American
Pedophilia
Association
– a scholarly magazine I had not encountered before. The trouble with these academic journals is that even their crosswords tend to be slanted towards their respective disciplines, with the result that what looks like an ordinary puzzle turns out to have highly specialized clues. I suppose this is what university professors like in their hours of relaxation. Personally, I would have thought a complete break with ‘shop’ might be preferable. I laboured in vain for half an hour, although it did occur to me later that Americans may spell ‘pyjamas’ with an ‘a’ in place of our ‘y’.

This same principle sometimes holds good for recipes, and what may look like a familiar set of easy-to-follow instructions for preparing a dish in an averagely equipped kitchen turns out to be the blueprint for a procedure that would tax an industrial chemist. Unfortunately this could be the case here. Alien Pie, unlike all my other recipes, may be better treated by the non-specialist cook as a theoretical text, more of a thought experiment than an actual dish. This is a pity because, although to prepare the dish adequately requires a week (a month if you include smoking the cats), it will open up a universe of taste you never dreamed existed. It is partly for this reason its name is so appropriate.

However, as we already know, this is also a commemorative dish: the direct outcome of what Nanty Riah and I were eating that fateful night of the helicopter and our subsequent conversation. As I mentioned before, at least three of the ingredients must be cat, beetroot and potatoes. Now, any cook knows that a subtle and delicate meat like cat will not easily blend with the stolid, Calvinist flavours of root crops. Had I not spent years trying like an alchemist to achieve this magical fusion I would not be able to give this recipe. But six months ago I triumphed unexpectedly with oyster and turnip profiteroles – creations light as butterflies whose gauzy wings waft you the merest ghosts of disembodied flavours. Who until then could have imagined the spirit of the oyster bed and the spirit of the turnip field tiptoeing out to meet clandestinely by night in a frivol of choux pastry? It required the invention of a process I have modestly named ‘sampering’. Sampering is somewhat analogous to the technique of enfleurage with which essential oils are extracted from flowers by aromatherapists (New Age charlatans who always come up smelling of roses). Sampering involves using fat to leach out delicate flavours. It is quite unnecessary to do it at midnight by the light of the full moon where seven ley-lines meet. I also doubt if it helps to be a virgin, whatever that is. All you need is a proper old-fashioned larder: a cool place where the French kept the
lardier
or bacon tub, since lard is what sampering requires.

Might I just mention in passing that lard also forms the basis of a stupendously successful weight-loss diet I pioneered for a women’s magazine, now sadly defunct? It was called the LFM diet after its three ingredients: lard, Fernet and multivitamins. Half a bottle of Fernet Branca a day, plus a single multivitamin pill and
all
the
lard
you
can
eat
. Just that! And the weight, ladies,
rolls
off. Hard to believe? Try it for yourself in the privacy of your home. But do be sensible and remember, as when starting any new diet, not to consult a member of the medical profession. For obvious reasons
doctors are dead against your becoming healthy. Older readers will probably remember that the LFM diet became famous mainly because if you followed it faithfully you always lost weight but never suffered hunger pangs. Indeed, the only disadvantage that occurred in a small minority of cases was grease stains on the underwear. Otherwise it was wholly free of side effects. In view of her new romantic status it might be neighbourly of me, before I go, to introduce Marta to the LFM diet. All part of the Samper service.

All right, then,

Alien Pie

Ingredients

1
kg
smoked
cat,
off
the
bone
500
gm
baby
beet
1
tbs
puréed
prunes
50
gm
kibbled
peanuts
Nasturtium
leaves
250
gm
green
bacon
250
gm
lard
300
gm
flour
Pepper
1
single
drop
household
paraffin
500
gm
old
potatoes
500
gm
rhubarb
4
pomegranates
1
baby
hawksbill
turtle
Fresh
ginger
1
buzzard
feather
Fernet
Branca
White
wine
Salt

♦

As I hinted earlier, securing and preparing the correct ingredients can be quite time-consuming. Alien Pie is as good a test as I know of
punctuality
: that innate sense of timing without which no one ever becomes a cook worthy of the name. The best commercially available smoked cat comes from just inside Italy, up by the Swiss border near Solda (or Sulden, if you’re feeling Germanic). It is purveyed by the Ammering family in the little village of Migg and they run an efficient mail-order service. Those high cantons of the Alps long ago developed ways of preserving meat against the long, cold winters when communities might be isolated by snow for months on end. Some uplanders in Switzerland still eat dog, but sadly this noble tradition has lately been reduced to a hole-and-corner ritual like early Christians celebrating communion underground. It is even unclear how much longer the Ammerings can remain in business. Last year’s production was interrupted by a dastardly attack made on their smokery by members of QI, the
Quadrupedifili
d’Italia
. I am determined this distinctive taste be not lost to gastronomy and Claudio Ammering has now agreed to pass on to me his family’s secret in order to keep the art alive. It ought to be something one can easily learn. Cats are plentiful enough, God knows. According to the Mammal Society in the UK alone they kill 300,000 birds every two days. If nature can be so unashamedly red in tooth and claw even when obese with Whiskas, no ethical cook should hesitate to redress the balance in the birds’ favour. Cats are skinned and paunched like hares; it is the smoking process I have yet to learn.

Meanwhile, the baby beet should be lightly boiled and, when quite cool, thinly sliced and laid on a tray of cold lard before being covered with more shavings of lard topped off with a bread board on which is a brick. This is sampering. Over a period of ten days in the coolest place available short of the fridge, precious flavour leaches out of the beet into the lard. The pomegranate rinds, cut into thin julienne strips, should likewise be sampered.

Now the busy cook can relax and take himself down to the local fishing port for the turtle. These creatures are not as readily available as they used to be, apparently, and now only turn up from time to time as by-catch in fishermen’s nets. If spotted they should be snapped up at once, killed by cutting the throat, bagged and popped into the freezer. For Alien Pie no more than 500 gm of turtle meat is required. The flesh of even baby turtles can be tough, so marinade it first in white wine, sliced fresh ginger and crushed nasturtium leaves.

The great day arrives when these carefully assembled ingredients can be translated lovingly into a rare repast. Prepare yourself. Rise early. Think pure thoughts. Ensure your neighbour – who these days looks more and more as though she has taken to sampering her hair – is safely battened away in her frowsty gloom behind the fence. Put on a clean apron. Choose an aria worthy of the dish, for the chef who cooks without a song on his lips cannot hope to infuse the right carefree improvisatory note into his art. Today the future looks as bright as the Tuscan sunlight striking mottles from the cliff face visible beyond the kitchen window. I break into ‘Nuoce gravamente alla salute’, Orazio’s light-hearted warning to his friend and rival in love Ovidio that to fall in love will be the death of him. As indeed it proves to be in Act 3 when Orazio drowns him in a vat of cyanide: a perfect example of overkill and one unrivalled until the morbid excess of the much later opera
Rasputin
. I sometimes think
I
Froci
di
Firenze
has to be my all-time favourite opera to cook by. Today I seem in fine form, melodramatically inspired, carolling away as with my terrible swift sword I chop the washed rhubarb stalks into one-inch lengths before subjecting the defenceless peanuts to the hammer blows of fate.

Soon the bacon and the crushed (but not ground) peanuts are frying in a generous lump of lard from the sampered beet and pomegranates. They are joined in our best iron casserole by the pussy fumé, the tortue marinadée and the rhubarb
choppée. The puréed prunes should be thinned with a glass of Fernet and added to the pot. Then the pomegranate rinds and the beet are retrieved from the sampering. You will notice how pale the beet have become, the rich flush of their childhood having transferred itself to the lard over the preceding days. They can now be discarded, having served their purpose. The pomegranate rinds, though, are added, together with the peeled and diced potatoes. A tad dry, you feel? A glass of the marinade will rectify that; but remember there is a lot of moisture locked up in the turtle meat and the rhubarb. In my view pies should not be awash in that all-purpose brown soup the British call gravy. With a meat as delicate as cat we are aiming at a casket of disarming savours rather than a rugged stew a-swill beneath an iron roof of pastry. Add a pinch or two of salt and pepper and then – supremest masterstroke in all modern cuisine – the single drop of paraffin (or kerosene as the Americans call it).

You blench? Just a bit leery, are we? But listen: I have discovered that this single drop transforms the dish from merely very interesting into an unblushing classic. In such a tiny quantity paraffin is completely harmless, if that’s what’s worrying you. Nor can you taste it as such, any more than you taste the chocolate in that Mexican classic, rabbit in chocolate. It simply becomes something else, something inimitably itself. It is, well,
alien
, like the hint of industrial processes somewhere in the background of Knize Ten eau de cologne. Just be courageous!
Coraggio!
as I sing in the character of Orazio (who is trying to steel himself to cut out the heart of his poisoned friend and turn it into a paperweight by marmelizing). Add that drop, stir everything together, cover the pot and cook for two hours in a low oven (170°C).

In the meantime you can sift the flour into a bowl and work in 100 gm of the bright pink lard from the sampered beet and 100 gm of the faint pink lard from the sampered pomegranate rinds. You will need to add just enough Fernet to make it all cling together in a ball that can be briefly kneaded and rolled
out into a half-inch-thick sheet of the oddest pastry you ever did see. Frankly, it looks like pink marzipan, for all the world like something that might be stockpiled by a Battenberg cake factory. Put it hastily into the fridge for half an hour. Then transfer the contents of the casserole (resist the urge to taste it but admire that deep smoky, plummy, geological smell like processes taking place deep inside a star) to a large, round, ovenproof dish. Lay a strip of the pastry on the pie dish’s moistened rim; place a tall cake ring in the centre of the dish with a saucer laid upside down on top and carefully drape the pastry over all, sealing it well around the edges. The shape should resemble a UFO; it is very much up to the cook’s individual ingenuity to add verisimilitude. I use small embedded olives for a ring of portholes. Then back into the oven with it for another forty minutes at 190 °C until it is the dark pinkish-brown of an unknown alloy heated to glowing by entry into a planet’s upper atmosphere.

Beyond this point we enter the realm of the sacramental, and words all but fail me. All I can say is that Alien Pie, hot from the oven and with a jaunty buzzard feather stuck in the top, should be eaten on a terrace overlooking a distant ocean above which the remnants of sunset brood like old wounds seeping through a field dressing. It is one of those experiences poised exquisitely between sorrow and oblivion.