Cooking With Fernet Branca (3 page)

Things are looking good. Two days have now gone by since our dinner and nary a squeak out of Marta. I’m counting this as a culinary triumph: the ingenious use of food as an offensive weapon. Garlic ice cream with Fernet Branca may lack subtlety but it is highly effective and I feel that by giving you the recipe I have placed a pacifist’s version of Clint Eastwood’s famous .44 Magnum in your hands. ‘Make my evening, Marta,’ I might have said. And to my amazement she did, taking not one but three massive helpings. If I were a good neighbour I would have dropped in on her by now to make sure she is still alive. But I’m not, so I haven’t.

I was somehow unsurprised to discover that she lives in a pigsty. You never did see such a mess. She seems to have bought or rented the house in the condition it was in when its last peasant inhabitants emigrated or else died on the premises. For a start, it has that damp smell of bricks and flagstones laid on bare earth. There are several huge old chests designed for storing bread, blankets and flour. Stuffed in among these is an upright piano with one of those names no one has ever heard of: Petrof, or something. All her living seems to take place in the kitchen, a low cave with a beamed and blackened fireplace big enough to roast a yeti. It is also full of burst chairs with clothes on them. I was glad to notice she appeared to have no cats about the place. I have nothing at all against these animals but in my experience if there’s one around, roguish girls like Marta may make compulsive pussy jokes. One is embarrassed for them.

‘For you, Gerree, all Voynovia fooding tonight,’ she said as we eventually reeled to our seats at the kitchen table, having first pitched off bundles of sheets. By then we had finished most of a bottle of Fernet Branca and even the electric light was beginning to have a brownish tinge. With a flourish she plonked before me a gross sausage the colour of rubberwear and as full of lumps as a prison mattress. It was a little larger than those things in Bavaria that just fit into bowls the size of chamber pots.

‘Is
shonka,’
I think she said, resting her breasts on the table on either side of her own plate. Smiling weakly, I made the good guest’s obligatory
‘mm’
noises and gingerly poked it with the point of my knife. There was the sound of a boil being lanced. A spurt of boiling fat shot across the table and even on that late June evening my spectacles misted over. The contents of the sausage, bright fed with paprika, lay there before me like an anatomy lesson. ‘My sister Marja she send from Voynovia. We eat like this, Gerree.’ Cheekily she speared one of the lumps on my plate with her fork, dipped it into a pot of black treacle and held it playfully to my lips.
Mechanically I opened my mouth and allowed it entry but thereafter there was nothing mechanical about my chewing. It was exactly like trying to cross a hot beach barefoot. When I say black treacle I only mean that was what it looked like, though I’m damned if it really wasn’t mainly molasses. What the rest was, I cannot say, but my impressions included saffron, pickled walnuts and lavender, with perhaps a pinch of plutonium. The only thing missing, surprisingly, was Fernet Branca.

Once one mouthful of
shonka
and sauce was down a kind of local anaesthesia set in and the next forkful was marginally less lethal. And you know how it is,
I’appetito
vien
mangiando
and all that, it wasn’t long before I had eaten a good two inches of the thing, with a mere yard to go. My attention was nearly monopolized by the food so maybe I was less careful than I’d intended to keep the conversation firmly on small talk. Middle-sized talk (i.e. more than the weather and less than Life) accompanied much of my
shonka
which, as I progressed, increasingly resembled in its effects the hemlock they gave poor Socrates to drink. A curious numbness began in my extremities and slowly converged on the heart. I wanted very much to lie down and found myself musing about famous last words. It was clearly out of the question on all counts to ask Marta to remember to sacrifice a cock for me. Irrelevancies came and went in my mind like brilliant little plankton drifting in and out of a tide pool. I suddenly realized
The
Bends
would be rather a good title for Snoilsson’s autobiography, especially since he’d told me he was going to take up championship depth-diving when he quit motor racing.

‘I’m sorry?’ I said through a knobbly mouthful of cysts.

‘You are funny man, Gerree,’ she replied. I noticed she had hardly touched her own
shonka
which anyway was a fraction the length of mine. ‘I am saying I hear you singing from here in your house.’

‘Oh? Well, yes, I suppose I do like to sing as I work. Here a bit of Rossini, there a snatch of Bellini, you know how it is.’

‘Very loud your voice. I am thinking is strain.’

‘Trained? My voice? Oh no. Just as it always was, I’m afraid. Most kind of you, though.’ Judging by the general peasant mess of her house, to say nothing of the
shonka
, it was safe to assume she didn’t know Italian opera from a hole in the ground. I wondered idly what sort of music she was used to in Voynovia. No doubt wild knees-up stuff with zithers and balalaikas and drunken whoopings when at the end everyone bursts into tears and hugs each other, full of vodka and nameless Slavic melancholy.

‘And your work, Gerree, what your work?’

‘I’m a writer, Marta.’

‘Writer murder?’

‘Not murder stories, no, although I
am
getting an idea for one. Biographies mainly.’

‘Ah, Gerree, you and me artists.’

‘Well …’

‘But yes. I am songer.’

‘A singer?’

‘No. I am making songs.’

She shoots me such a look of mischief through the general frizz hanging in front of her face that a plump tumour I was about to dunk in the treacle remained in mid-air, arrested and quivering on my fork. My imagination leaped forward like a pricked hen and I could foresee the loom of
intime
evenings around her Iron Curtain upright. The tumour was jerked off my fork and fell into my glass. A great splash of Fernet Branca drenched the salt, the table, a pile of books, my shirtfront and her frizzy mane. It was like one of those cutaways from Jack Hawkins’ face on the bridge as we catch the sea astern of his destroyer erupting in a massive tuft of blasted water as the first depth-charge explodes.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ I said, trying to hoik the lump out of the glass. But my manual dexterity had gone haywire, paralysed by
shonka
and drink. I shot a nervous glance at the hair with the gleaming nose poking through it. It was quivering, shaking,
suddenly blown apart by a great woof of laughter. She wiped her hair and her face with a blotched napkin and slumped back in her chair, helpless.

‘Very funny man,’ she repeated when she could speak. ‘I want to see more and more of you.’

Oh God.

‘And now, Gerree, we try your ice cream. Is very special fooding.’

‘Cuisine,’ I said curtly. ‘We say “cuisine”, not “fooding”. “Fooding” doesn’t exist in English.’ For I was reckless now, determined that my natural good manners shouldn’t let me in for whatever designs she had on me. Still, those very manners oblige me grudgingly to admit that she not only downed her garlic ice cream like a trooper but promptly called for more. By that stage our taste buds were surely dead and between us we polished it off. Thereafter I remember nothing except an achingly Socratic sensation of coldness which was explained only when I woke myself with a series of awesome farts to find that I was lying on the ground by my front doorstep with dawn breaking all around.

There is something radically wrong with Tuscan bread. Frankly, it’s a disgrace: the one thing to disfigure an otherwise classic cuisine. Even Italians from other regions make ribald remarks about it – like for instance that it’s the only bread in the world to emerge from the oven already stale. This is merely a slight exaggeration. Tuscan bread is non-fattening once it is over three hours old because cutting a slice requires energy equal to the slice’s calorific value. (This is henceforth known as Samper’s Law.) It is a feature the Italian slimming industry should do more to promote. It now occurs to me that when Robert Graves coined his appallingly sentimental image of ‘women good as bread’ he may have had Tuscan
bread in mind, in which case he meant the far more likely women hard as nails.

The reason I mention this is because in the days following that first dinner with Marta I had a great craving for bland nursery food and found a good use for Tuscan bread in bread-and-milk: little bowls of pap I ate slowly with a spoon that trembled. My complacent simile that had likened Garlic and Fernet Ice Cream to a .44 Magnum had been wrong. One never saw Clint Eastwood incapacitated by his own gun’s recoil.

For several days I poke listlessly through the typescript of
The
Chequered
Fag
, correcting typos and still trying to think up an acceptable title. Like all racing drivers Per Snoilsson is constantly besieged by girls he laconically refers to as ‘pit bunnies’ or ‘screwdrivers’: part of the perks of hi-glam living. The readership wants plenty of detail about that, of course, and I have dutifully packed the text with titillating vignettes of post-race celebrations. These include the obligatory showers wearing nothing but the victor’s wreath, also the champagne-soaked knickers draped over silver ice buckets. There is even a description of the Pit Stop Game as played by three Ferrari drivers in a Monaco hotel suite. This had involved each driver pretending to be a car coming into the pits and being besieged by a team of girls whose duty was to attend to various parts of his body and have him away (
aliter
dictum
‘back in the race’) in record time. Pointless to apologize for such unedifying episodes, they’re what readers want. But they don’t help with the title. I rack my Fernet-damaged frontal lobes. Why couldn’t this stupid Swede have had the enterprise to be something unusual, like that American driver who is an evangelical preacher between races and for whom the title
Rev
would have been a natural? Then I remember Per’s having once allowed some medical researchers to cover his body with electrodes which transmitted intimate physiological details during a race in Brazil. He informed me proudly that his buttocks had reached a temperature of 41 °C Bingo!
Hot
Seat!

Oh yes, I like that. It suggests the weight of responsibility, danger, even lethality, as well as gruelling conditions. At a more private level it brings to my mind indentations made in quick-setting foam at a Surrey works. The phrase is so familiar I wonder if it’s already in use as a title but then think the editor can worry about that.
Hot
Seat!
is good enough for me. Exclamation marks sell books! so I make some copies of the disk and take one down to Camaiore, where I consign it to the post office. Another job jobbed. In the market I find some plump and yearning langoustines and on another stall a refrigerated tray containing pieces of
lontra
. Farmed, of course: you can’t get wild
lontra
these days for love or money and I have tried both. Still, irresistible. I buy one and a half kilos for a sum that will appreciably dent my next advance, but what the hell. On the way back I pick up my mail from the bar and by the time I’m home my spirits have soared. Not only have I finished the book and got it out of the house but up here among the trees and crags the summer’s day that was sweltering at sea level is cooled by altitude to a pleasant warmth. I also realize my headache has gone, the last traces of
shonka
having been purged from my body.

This calls for some celebratory cooking. The chance proximity in the market of the two major items I have bought prompt my culinary ingenuity to come up with an ideal marriage between river and sea, as it were. I see … yes … a
cold
dish, a race-day picnic-out-of-the-Bentley’s-boot sort of dish, a perfect complement to mood and weather. I come up with an inspired variant of a little something I once pioneered in the water meadows near Oxford:

Before you rush off to try this dish for yourself, a caveat. Otter is a far subtler meat than rabbit (for instance), as no less an authority than Gavin Maxwell attested – and he was referring to sea otter at that. It should be cooked with the greatest care
to preserve its uniquely delicate riverine flavour: like that of kingfishers fed on watercress. It is easily ruined by brutal treatment. Banish Clint Eastwood metaphors to another universe. Imagine a dish prepared by the Water Rat in
The
Wind
in
the
Willows
in a mood of wistful hyperaesthesia and you will have some idea of the sensitivity you will need to bring off this masterpiece:

Wash the otter well in cold running water and pat dry with paper towels. Ironically, given the animal’s natural habitat, otter is a dry meat and to keep it succulent it needs to be cooked in just enough liquid as will cover it. The chunks are put into an iron pot together with the oil, nasturtium leaves (2 medium sprigs of watercress are nearly as good), the sliced shallot, saffron, sugar and white wine. Add as much water as required to cover the meat.
Now
remove
the
meat
and bring the remainder of the ingredients to a boil with the lid on. Add the otter chunks and, when it has all come back to the boil, put the lid back on leaving a crack the thickness of a credit card. Reduce heat to a slow simmer for twenty-six
minutes. Remove pot from stove, close lid tight and allow the otter to cool in its own juices until it can be put in the fridge.

Meanwhile prepare and boil the langoustines in the usual way. When cool enough to handle, shell them. Put the shells, claws and legs into a blender together with the anchovy, capers, Fernet and olive oil and reduce to a fine paste. Reserve. Then make about half a pint (300 ml) of mayonnaise. Incidentally, this is the only recipe I know that is associated with a curse. Two acquaintances who tried to make the dish died within the month, one in Buckinghamshire and the other in Somerset. By the quirkiest of mishaps both fell into rivers in spate and vanished into mill-races. The cleric’s body was found three weeks later, much disfigured. The drama teacher was never seen again. On enquiring I discovered that each had used commercial mayonnaise purchased in a supermarket for this recipe, so there is some justice in this world after all, even if a bit on the lenient side. Certainly the Bishop should have known better. No decent cook gets to heaven by way of Hellman’s. For present purposes you should use half olive oil and half grape seed oil (mix them beforehand) because we don’t wish to drown the flavour of the otter. Use the yolks of two eggs – ducks’ for preference because they add richness without pungency. Now fold the langoustines’ meat together with the paste from the blender carefully but thoroughly into the mayonnaise. You may need to add a smidgin of salt, depending on how salty the capers and anchovy were.

When everything is cold doff the otter’s hat and you will find him sitting happily in a little savoury jelly. Bone his meat gently and lay it on your finest serving dish together with the jelly. Around it spread the mayonnaise mixture and garnish in a suitably restrained fashion. Slices of hardboiled thrush eggs, though fiddly to peel and cut, look exquisite arranged in shell patterns. Dedicated foodies with patience, eyesight and steadiness of hand may do the same using kingfisher eggs,
as I did in the prototype of this dish. (I here salute my friends in Thames Conservancy, without whose help I should never have established – let alone obtained – the right ingredients). Then pop the dish in the fridge for at least six hours. Serve with reverence, a panoramic view and a crisp white wine.

So cheerful do I become while preparing this wondrous dish that I break into song – Ennio’s exhilarating aria ‘Non disperdere nell’ambiente, cara’ from
Lo
stronzolo
segreto
. It’s when Nedda is threatening to throw away the little flask of tears she has wept for him and he begs her not to. By all means the tears (he sings), for roses will spring up wherever they fall to earth; but not the antique Venetian bottle I bought for you … This may, in fact, be the earliest example of environmentalism in opera. As I whip the mayonnaise and sing away in my newly painted kitchen I become aware from time to time of some jarring noises off. Finally, I pause to listen. There is no mistaking that discordant plonking: Marta is taking her piano for a trial gallop. My hand freezes aloft, mayonnaise falling from the fork in disregarded clumps. ‘Aha,’ I think. ‘So that’s it, huh?’ Grimly I resume beating. The plonking continues too, distant though quite intrusive, as no doubt intended.

That damned house agent, the weaselly Mr Benedetti. My ‘quiet foreign neighbour’ was to be here just one month a year, eh? It is a situation that calls for immediate investigation.