Cooking With Fernet Branca (2 page)

Next morning I awake in a spirit of mischief, more than a little goaded by the thought of having let myself in for dinner with the ghastly Marta while under the influence of Fernet Branca. Being properly brought up, I’m unable to go out even on unwelcome social occasions without bearing a gift of sorts, so I shall have to think of something. Thank goodness I’m going by myself. Sometimes in the company of others I find a disagreeable spirit of competitiveness kicks in and each person is shamed into spending rather more than he would have wished. This is a historically established syndrome, of course. One Magus going to Bethlehem would probably have sprung
for a box of After Eights. Three Magi on the same trip found themselves laden with gold, frankincense and myrrh and bitterly contemplating their overdrafts.

So to the mischief. What shall it be? Rossini – come to my aid! And he does, bless him. Only a few bars into ‘Vedi la data indicata’ I remember he was himself an excellent cook who invented several original dishes (Tournedos Rossini being only one) and had a predilection for ice cream. Ice cream, eh? It being hot in Tuscany in late June, even up here in the mountains, I reason one can’t go far wrong bearing homemade ice cream to a dinner. I further reason that Marta requires something punitive to remind her not to make a habit of these neighbourly invitations. So what better than

Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream

Ingredients

15
large
cloves
of
garlic
150
gm
granulated
sugar
4
tablespoons
cold
double
cream
¼
pint
Fernet
Branca
♦

Put the garlic and the sugar into a blender and empty over them the remains of a bottle of Fernet Branca with paint splashes on its label. This will yield a curious compound the colour of Iodex, which older readers will remember as an embrocation made from seaweed extract that sporty schoolboys used to rub on their little stiffnesses. Whip the cream, but only until it starts to thicken. Then stir in the Iodex mixture. An attractive tawny shade emerges while the garlic note brings tears to the eyes. Excellent. Pot it and leave in the fridge for an hour. Then turn it into your ice cream freezer and proceed as usual. When going out to dinner with someone you would be relieved to learn had died during the course of the day, remove the ice cream as you leave the
house. It will have the consistency of a brick but by 10 p.m. will have softened just enough to become the evening’s
pièce d’occasion.
If after that she ever invites you round again, you are in very much worse trouble than you thought. Oh, and a spray of fennel embedded in the surface looks well.

By now I am in an ice cream sort of mood so with the fennel right to hand on the chopping board I knock up a batch of Fennel and Strawberry Ice Cream for myself. This particular
glace
à
la
Samper
is definitely one of my entries for the immortality stakes. It is a sensational combo and I urge you to try it out on friends and make them guess what it is. They may think of Pernod because of the aniseedy taste, yet if you do make Pernod and Strawberry Ice Cream it tastes quite different. Fennel and Strawberry actually tastes
green
, while looking puce (use the stalks and foliage rather than the bulb).

All these preparations have made the morning whiz by. Marta’s fault, of course. Not only did she cause me to lose most of yesterday but much of today has now vanished on her behalf. A light lunch is called for, with a pause for reflection. This leads to the discovery that the kitchen ceiling is still not finished so at two o’clock I reluctantly pick up my brushes and once more drag myself up the ladder. It is appallingly hot up there among the beams and rafters and it takes all my resolve not to have a little nap and wait for it to cool down. But being made of stern stuff I doggedly paint on until, by around five-thirty, the ceiling is finished and resplendent. The work has also had the effect of making me feel entirely on top of the Marta situation. You know how it is with DIY and circular thought. Either an irritating fragment of tune keeps repeating itself in time with your brush strokes or else you become fixed into long, protesting sorts of argument with absent people. The increasing acerbity of these one-sided conversations is surely due to fury at having to waste yet more hours of one’s rapidly dwindling stock of time on a job one would cheerfully pay a menial to do if only one had the money. In any case, by the time the ceiling is
finished I have inwardly shown Marta the door out of my life some sixty-three times. Sometimes she went with a set, tense face and at other times she flew out in a storm of tears and hair. In every case, though, she left. Somewhere in the middle of these harangues I remembered another ingredient that I might have included in tonight’s ice cream. Bullied cooks, from the grandest hotels to army cookhouses, are traditionally rumoured to include various bodily secretions in the food as a way of asserting themselves and having the last laugh. I can quite see that a glimpse through the kitchen door of some sniffy old tyrant in bombazine tucking into a beautiful creamy mayonnaise that contains a dash of one’s own sperm could well bring satisfaction. However, for the moment Marta is safe. Poor woman – I only wish to discourage her. Such excesses will be held in abeyance for use only when the situation has degenerated considerably.

At seven-thirty on the dot I present myself at her back door bearing my patent (and uncontaminated) ice cream.

‘Gerree!’
she squeals in welcome. Her abbreviation of my name is something else I am going to have to correct PDQ. Meanwhile she plants Voynovian kisses on both my cheeks and forehead, leaving a dreadful smell. She must have bought her cologne off a barrow in Viareggio. It is the exact female equivalent of Brut aftershave and I have to go and wash it off immediately on the pretext that the ice cream container has made my hands sticky. When I return to her kitchen she presses not a mere glass but a stoup of Fernet Branca into my hands and folds my nerveless fingers around it.

Well, all right – I can see I’m going to have to come clean about my source of income. It’s pretty humiliating but at least I can console myself with the thought that the Queen makes a living out of cutting ribbons while the Archbishop
of Canterbury is paid to address the Supreme Ruler of the Universe publicly in a loud voice as if they were old friends. In comparison with them, being a successful ghost-writer for sporting heroes seems positively intellectual.

How I came to take up this career is not a long story but it’s a very sad one, so I shan’t tell it. As for the books themselves, things get steadily worse. My present commission is definitely grislier than the previous one, which was the autobiography I wrote for a recent downhill skiing champion. It is grislier even though the procedure remains identical. Their agents fix it up, you see. All I have to do is follow these champions around trying to get them to talk sense for ten minutes at a stretch in between their practice sessions, advertisement shoots, magazine interviews and copulations. The most ironic phrase in this ghosting business is ‘in-depth’. In order to talk to the skier I had to hang around the foyers of chalet-style hotels in places like Klosters and somewhere in Colorado whose name slips my memory. That was bad enough, given
Glühwein
and
raclette
, but young Luc turned out to be the sort of person who actually wore the brands he advertised. Can you imagine someone who believes his own endorsements? He was always festooned with chunky action watches and après-ski outfits in nonexistent colours with his own name on them. I kept wanting to tell him that at school even I had been obliged to wear clothes bearing my own name but we had been well-enough bred to have the tags sewn on inside. In addition he wore an aftershave that made me faint, something I had never done before. His manager put it down to the heat in the room.

Anyway, it was grim, although the resultant book sold very well indeed. This was partly because I invented for this skier an aphrodisiac to account for his legendary off-piste (and several times on-piste) behaviour. The recipe is now too well-known for me to repeat here. All I will say is that Luc Bailly eventually came to believe that this potion was indeed the secret of his prowess. Inevitably, he consumed so much it brought on gravel and the end of his career. But at his peak he
did have sensational thighs that ballooned out above the silly little knees that skiers have, worn to mere bony hinges with all that flexing.

Yet as I said, my present job has turned out even worse. The subject is the thrice World Champion Formula One racing driver Per Snoilsson, better known as ‘The Flying Swede’, if you can visualize such a thing. Snoilsson is a vicious young man who unquestionably caused the death of François Bidet at Monaco two years ago when the Flying Frenchman sailed off into the harbour, stopped flying abruptly and drowned in his cockpit right beneath the keel of a standby rescue launch. (Very sad. Charming smile.) All Snoilsson got was a caution and some points knocked off, which didn’t matter a jot to him since he had a lead of forty championship points over his nearest rival, who by a strange chance happened to be François Bidet.

Apart from being vicious Per is a consummate cretin. How could it be otherwise when he makes a living out of driving round in circles at breakneck speed? Still, I would rather he didn’t kill himself until after my book comes out. Then we can have an updated memorial edition with pictures of the fatal crash. Those
really
sell, probably because the tragic thing about modern motor racing is that fatalities are becoming all too rare. In any case, we have now had six sessions together and I have learned all there is to know about young Per that is printable. No sense in going on milking the same cow in the hope that one day it will fill your pail with champagne. Our sessions included one in a private jet and another in a factory on an industrial estate near Weybridge where he sat in a puddle of chemical foam to make a mould of his hardbitten little bum, surely the first time it had ever made any sort of impression. They said it was for a driving seat. I ask you. Anyway, my job is to turn all our taped sessions into a book, hence my need to buy a remote, quiet house with a view and access to some good delicatessens. I’ve already written practically all of it; over the next week I just need to come up with a good title. Oh dear, oh dear, these are not ironic people. The more brainless a book’s
intended readership, the more rib-nudgingly cute the title has to be. Christmas shoppers – the trade my publisher brazenly aims at – prefer ‘titles they can relate to’, in the words of the editor. ‘What you want is a
Life
in
the
Fast
Lane
sort of thing,’ she suggested with her usual deadpan originality. Obviously, most of these gruelling clichés have long since been used for the autobiographies of previous world champions and one has to hunt around for leftovers. Off the top of my head (as we say in the trade) I proposed
The
Absolute
Pits
and
Pistons
at
Dawn
and was a little hurt by how coolly they were received. Maybe they, too, have already been used. Ever since the factory episode when I was able to observe young Per and an even younger mechanic moulding each other’s bottoms I have thought of him as ‘The Chequered Fag’, and this is now my working title.

It’s not that I’m snobbish about these sports personalities, you understand. Not in the least. They, too, have a living to make. No, I’m sceptical about the leech industry that clings to them and demands biographies of people who are far too young to have done any real living yet. How can you make someone of twenty-four sound interesting when nothing has happened to him except years of punishing training supervised by a ruthless parent? These kids are just money-spinning automata whom beady people have spent the last decade winding up, and now their sole duty is to go buzzing along their allotted tracks generating headlines and excreting piles of gold for their backers. One feels distantly sympathetic but it does make them less than dazzling company. In fact, my mention of champagne just now reminds me that the only interesting thing I have learned in the last eighteen months of following in the dusty wake of the Flying Swede has nothing to do with him at all. Had you ever wondered why one of those famous houses like Moët et Chandon would permit what looks like a jeroboam of its Premier Cru Brut des Bruts to be shaken up and squirted to waste from a podium by spotty boys who clearly prefer Coke? Well, I have. It’s hardly
an advertisement for the precious exclusivity of their product. I mean, ‘The Champagne Top Drivers Squirt’ is not an upmarket selling image, is it? In order to satisfy my curiosity on the point I have now managed to gain entry to several of those hallowed
caves
where cobwebs lie thick and ancient acolytes move slowly through the cool hush with candles, deftly turning the bottles in their productive slumber. My great discovery was that nowadays there is a small concrete bunker near the entrance, an annexe labelled
Dernier
Cru
Grands
Prix
Réserve
containing specially large bottles kept exclusively for sporting events. Carefully guarded to ensure that none gets out onto the open market and into the hands of serious champagne drinkers, they contain very sweet Asti
spumante
imported from Piedmont with further addition of carbon dioxide and chemicals to produce the right explosive gush of bubbles for the cameras. I’m glad to have got to the bottom of that little secret.

I beg your pardon? What other little secret? Oh, last night’s
dinner
. I had completely forgotten. Of course it went without a hitch. Why shouldn’t it? Though I must say Voynovian cuisine is pretty peculiar and I do have a slight headache today.