Cooking With Fernet Branca (8 page)

By the time Marta calls round next morning at ten I have long since been up and about. We Sampers bounce back. I have the piratical makings of a black eye, presumably where the edge of the hard hat caught me, and I am covered with raw scrapes and contusions as well as having a large purplish bruise beneath one armpit. But the damage is all superficial and I don’t believe any ribs are cracked after all. I also have a light headache as a reminder that I was knocked silly in the fall. Otherwise I am in fine if stiff fettle.

‘Gerree!’ she cries, and certainly her voice has no connection whatever with music. It goes right through your head like a bullet, leaving a track of gross tissue damage. ‘You are not bedding! Is very good. Look, I bring a break-fast. Yes. Is Voynovian food for dying.’ She produces what looks like a ball of putty wrapped in a sock. ‘Is
kasha
.’

Kasha
, I remember, is Russian buckwheat or bulgur or something. I associate it with that vegetarian restaurant chain in London where the bread is dark and dense, the flans look like coconut matting and flapjacks fall like paving stones to the pit of the stomach where they lie for a week fermenting. For days afterwards one’s underwear smells of silage. I raise the ball gingerly to my nose. It is covered in her fingerprints. Molasses again. And … can that be linseed oil? Maybe it really
is
putty.

‘Is very good with cream. We boil like that.’

Ah. A sort of Voynovian haggis for terminal invalids. Just what I need.

‘It gives very strength to stiff body.’

Once again I would swear there was a leer. Surely she can’t mean …? Even in Voynovia could there be such a thing as an aphrodisiac for convalescents? This woman is terrifying. I am below par this morning and before I can utter a squeak of protest she has barged to the cooker,
plonked the ball in a pan of cold water and lit a burner under it. Then she opens the fridge and appears to make a scornful inventory. Eventually she picks out a pot of cream which she sniffs suspiciously. I admit that its pretty buff colour is deceptive. She is not to know that I have doctored it with cinnamon for a fabulous baked pears in cheese sauce recipe I’m perfecting.

‘You have no good food, Gerree,’ she says, slamming my fridge door shut. ‘Of course you are weak. You not eating food to make you strong with good meats. Is everything delicatessen food.’ This comes with real contempt.

‘Not enough
kasha
and
shonka
?’ I suggest satirically.

‘Is right.’

She nods vigorously and particles of this and that fall from her mop of hair. Insects? Really, it’s all too much. It isn’t right for the survivors of crashed privies to be bullied in their own kitchen. She’ll pay for this, I swear. It’s obvious that to a person with her peasant’s interior a mere gallon of garlic ice cream is like a mouthful of bread or a coffee bean: something with which to clear the palate before going on to the next dish. I shall have to devise an offering that even she will interpret as the cuisine of contempt.
Cuisine
mépriseur
. How can we have managed without this category for so long? But for the moment I’m saved by the bell (‘below par’, ‘saved by the bell’: you can see what writing about sport heroes does to one’s style). I mean the phone rings and it is Frankie, my agent in London. Given they’re an hour behind over there it’s bright and early for him and suggests urgency.

‘Do you know Nanty Riah, Gerry?’

‘It’s an Indonesian scuba resort?’ I hazard. ‘A disease? A dish?’

‘He’s the founder and lead singer of Britain’s number one boy band. Freewayz. Even you must have heard of them. You probably know him as Brill.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Well, he’s a fan of yours.’

‘Surely not.’

‘Apparently so. His agent rang last night to say that Brill has just been reading
Downhill
all
the
Way
! and is, quote, “slammed” by it.’
Downhill
, of course, was the book I wrote for Luc Bailly, the skier with the pop-up flag in his pants.

‘Ah. He wants the recipe for another love potion?’

‘That wasn’t what he said. According to his agent Brill has reached the difficult age, the pop star’s grand climacteric.’

‘Twenty-three?’

‘No, he’s actually just over thirty but keeps it secret. The point is, he’s extremely impressed by the way you made Luc seem a substantial figure even off-piste. A man of stature.’

Twenty-five centimetres, by all accounts, although I do not mention this. I am trying to work out what Brill and Luc Bailly could possibly have in common apart from mountains of money.

‘Basically he’s got an early attack of McCartney’s Syndrome,’ explains Frankie. ‘You know: unlimited fame, unlimited cash, unlimited adulation, but wants to be taken seriously into the bargain.’

‘Don’t tell me: he’s going to write a Requiem for the Human Race to be premièred in St Peter’s, Rome. It will include recordings of whale song. Or else he’s working on a collection of rock sonnets called
Roll
Over
,
Shakespeare
. Or could there be a forthcoming exhibition of artworks made from his body fluids at the Saatchi Gallery?’

‘At this stage I think he wants help with an autobiography as part of a campaign to invest the name of Nanty Riah with all-round artistic gravitas … I know, I know, but there we are. We ordinary mortals can only let our jaws drop at these people’s monumental chutzpah. Meanwhile, remember they’ve also got monumental quantities of dosh, which is why I think you ought to take it seriously that a pop idol wants you personally to help him towards his Nobel prize.’

‘Look, Frankie,’ I say. ‘I nearly fell to my death in a lavatory yesterday, but I don’t want to explain now beyond saying
that I’m feeling a little delicate. I know nothing about the pop world and care less.’

‘That’s why Brill wants you. He was hoping you’d known nothing about downhill skiing, too, and his agent was partly ringing me to check. That’s the whole point. He expressly doesn’t want a pop biography done by one of those authors in Armani leather who come complete with baize scalps and closely-observed mockney vowels. He already has a brace of those, anyway; they go with the territory. No, he wants real writing. You’re very good at the wider picture, Gerry. Which you’ve just done for Per Snoilsson, by the way. I don’t know how you do it but you manage to make these one-dimensional people seem positively Renaissance figures. That’s exactly what Brill’s after. He’s determined to hit middle age as the twenty-first century’s Leonardo, though my guess is he’ll settle for an Order of Merit or even a humble K.’

God’s
piles
. ‘Will I have to start from scratch? I mean, would I be his ghost writer or his editor?’

‘He told his agent he’s already written something but no one has seen it. It may be five hundred pages of dazzling prose or it may be some stertorous jottings on the back of an envelope. No prizes.’

‘Well, Frankie, if you insist, I suppose I’d better see him. I’ll call you back a bit later when I’ve got my mind properly around it.’

I hang up to find Marta prodding the putty-ball in the pan. It has swollen horribly and now looks like an enormous fibroid trapped in stockingette. For a while I had forgotten about both it and her. The thought that I’m about to move in the grand international ambit of a pop icon worried about middle age somehow makes Marta’s bossy importunings less threatening, even slightly touching.

‘You really think I should eat this?’ I ask her, playing cowed patient to strapping nurse (Hattie Jacques in a starched cap).

‘Yes, Gerree, you eat. Very good and stronging, you will see. So – we cut bag.’ She lances the stockingette and, unconfined,
the monstrous dumpling bursts forth. She puts it on a board and bisects it with the bread knife. With a gasp of steam the two halves flop apart revealing a dense, greyish interior with what looks like an engorged prostate at its centre. ‘Very good,’ says Marta judiciously. ‘I make last night.’

Numbly I watch her hack off a sturdy portion and pour sugar and cinnamon cream over it. After that there seems to be nothing for it but to sit at the kitchen table and address myself to this colossal duff.

‘Eat,’ she orders, joining that huge historic chorus of mothers with hairy forearms who stand over small men bellowing
‘Mangia,
mangia!
’
and
‘Don’t
be
shy
!
’

Strangely enough it turns out to be edible, though hardly palatable, its major challenge residing as much in the texture as in the taste. I remember as a child reading the Amazing Facts column of a boys’ magazine that told of the discovery of a star so dense that as much of it as could fit in a matchbox would weigh 32,000 tons. I used to while away boring lessons by imagining winning endless bets (‘Ten quid says you can’t lift that matchbox, Thompson’) and devising ways of preventing it simply falling through the ground towards Earth’s centre. It was intriguing to think of something that was both easily possessible in terms of size and utterly unownable because of its weight. And here I am, a quarter of a century on, eating a similar substance that I can feel falling in a straight line inside me between gullet and rectum. Surely when I stand up there will be a tearing sound and I shall find my trouser seam in tatters and a smoking pile of undigested
kasha
on the chair? Until that happens the stuff is massively filling. If you can imagine a planet-sized marron glacé that has begun to collapse under its own gravity – a sweet chestnut on its way to becoming a Black Hole – you will have an idea of quite how filling this syrupy, mealy, oiled substance is. There are serious calories in every crumb.

‘You must finish, Gerree,’ says Marta, standing over me in her parody of the maternal tyrant. I blame it on
glasnost
, or
was it
perestroika
? Whatever it was, anyway, that allowed
kasha
and Martas to escape from behind the Iron Curtain … Such are the dishevelled mental babblings that accompany the cracking of my maxillary muscles as I chew on and on. The prostate in the middle turns out to be a toffee-like filling based apparently on horse liniment. The linseed oil is loud and clear. ‘Very good,’ she says approvingly as I get the last spoonful down and sag back in my chair. Evidently I now have permission to get down and go out to play. Oh, that ‘twere possible. I debate what to do about Marta but no idea comes. In the face of this
kasha
offensive I now realize how puny my Garlic and Fernet Ice Cream was. I recall the interesting but not well-known fact that several honeys are actually poisonous, in particular – and I shall need to check this – rhododendron and laurel honey. I envisage the gift to Marta of a
bombe
surprise
based largely on meringues and ice cream held together by rhododendron honey. Nice idea, and probably immune from suspicion, let alone criminal conviction (‘“A tragic error on the part of 62,000 bees,” the judge began his summing up’), but too leisurely and roundabout a way of solving the immediate problem of an irritating neighbour. Planting rhododendrons or laurel, waiting for them to flower, learning to keep bees … Hopeless.

Long after my tormentress has left I can do little but loll, sipping weak tea made from some much-touted South African bush that tastes like stewed hay. Slowly the bolus in my stomach dissolves and with it my lassitude. It will do no harm to make a date to see this Brill fellow, or Nancy or whatever he calls himself. It feels neither like advance nor retreat, more of a sideways shift away from the world of the starting pistol and the stopwatch. Oh well, why not? Same old despair but at least a different scene. My bruises ache. Great putty-flavoured farts follow me from room to room.

Days have gone by. I am back on form. Marta has been strangely and agreeably quiet over in her warren, except for a mysterious episode a few nights ago when it briefly sounded as though she were motor racing. It woke me up but faded almost immediately so I gave up thinking about it. None of my business. Maybe one day I shall discover that in addition to everything else she is an expert mechanic and has a secret workshop hidden away at the back. She may even turn out to be a Per Snoilsson fan. Nothing about that woman would surprise me.

I am bustling about my own house, generally straightening it up and getting things into some sort of order for a famous visitor. I have even been creakily down the terraces to inspect the crash site and put a match to the remains of the privy. A faint smell of dry rot and creosote hung over them and they burned briskly, sending up gratifying clouds of fatal tars and dioxins into the Tuscan sky. In a day or two I am supposed to drive down to Pisa airport and collect the great Brill, who will be flying out Ryanair in horn rims and a wig, as I myself have often thought of doing. It seems he is so keen to get this project of his under way he is prepared to take time off in order to see whether we like each other enough to work together. His agent insisted he would do better tucked away in the anonymity of my mountain retreat for a day or two than heavily disguised in a hotel suite in Pisa. Naturally I’m uneasy. I have no idea what it takes to get on with the lead singer of a boy band. Cocaine, possibly, and I seem to be temporarily out of that.

What I can supply, however, is culinary creative genius. I am planning menus in my guest’s honour while ignoring the advice of a streetwise interior know-all who urges me not to bother but just to lay in oven-ready chips and deep frozen
pizza.
Well, Brill can get that sort of stuff anywhere. I shall
make it clear that if he wants to do a deal with eternity he’ll have to do a deal with Gerald Samper first, and that includes expanding his dietary horizons. I debate making my celebrated otter dish but one can never be sure what will be in the market. Tuna stuffed with prunes in Marmite batter? A good old standby but maybe unsuited to a Tuscan summer lunch table on a terrace beneath vines. Deep-fried mice? I sometimes wonder if one is not more seduced by the mellifluous
sound
of a dish than by how it would actually taste. You might think the same went for pears in lavender, but I have discovered that poaching pears in water with a double handful of fresh lavender heads, honey and a cup of Strega makes a striking change from the usual wine-and-cinnamon routine of suburban dinner parties. Don’t be tempted to use Fernet Branca in place of Strega, however. It will taste revolting.

Meanwhile, I have gone right off my beautiful idea of pears in Gorgonzola with cinnamon cream. It’s all Marta’s fault. Had she not drenched that putty ball of hers in the cinnamon cream I was experimenting with the other day it might still be a possibility. But the whole idea now reeks of linseed oil and bullying and has been ruined for me. Imagine Bach busy writing a soulful aria for the St Matthew Passion when in the street outside a butcher’s boy goes past whistling a popular ditty about three jolly swineherds. Suddenly poor old JSB realizes it’s the very tune he’s now writing, only much faster and in a major key. ‘God
damn
,’ he mutters softly to himself as he slowly tears up his manuscript, having unwittingly had a preview of what in a hundred and fifty years will be known as the unconscious. That’s pretty much how I feel about the irreparable damage Marta has done my cinnamon cream.

Since the purging of the privy I have been more attentive to the terrace and the now unobstructed panorama it affords. I sit out there a good deal these days. The funny thing about a coastline when seen from this distance and altitude is that the sea doesn’t look like water at all but, depending on the weather, more like concrete or blue lino or occasionally
smirched tinfoil. It’s much too far away for actual waves to be visible, which is one of the things that recommended this place to me. Instead at evening, as Viareggio leans wearily away from the sun, one can sometimes see frozen frown-lines in opposition to the prevailing breeze. That is all. The quick white scars left by ships and pleasure craft are obviously some kind of sap or latex that the ocean briefly bleeds when its skin is broken and which hardens almost immediately on exposure to air. This is the view from a terrace I have always wanted.

How have I allowed myself to engage for a living with that world down there? (‘That world’ of course refers not to the specific gridded quilt of Viareggio’s sprawl and greenhouses but to the cancerous showbiz ethos that today extends over all horizons.) Ghosting the little lives of famous nobodies – was it for this I passed so many A-levels? Maybe it is not too late to become Nietzsche, a cantankerous visionary or secular monk with a kitchen garden full of exotic international pods and legumes. The man with his finger on the pulses of the world … And there you go again: everything has to degenerate into a joke. But of all things, to be making your living – and not a bad one, either – as amanuensis to knuckleheads! And doing it well, what’s more. Doing it so brilliantly these idiots recognize the persona I’ve invented for them, even to the extent that I’m told that ghastly sprinter who now runs for Parliament in elections firmly believes he wrote his book himself (
Alone
Out
There
– don’t bother to read it) while I merely sat taking dictation like one of Barbara Cartland’s stenographers. I suppose I should be flattered. As he’s planning his new political career on the basis of an entirely spurious personality I ought, if there were any justice in the world, to have the last laugh. But of course there isn’t and I shan’t. In politics as in showbiz, bogus
wins
.

The worst thing is that when I’m working with them – the awful Luc, the unspeakable Per – I occasionally experience the fleeting conviction that I’m related to them, or at any rate
have known them a very long time. This must be the direst legacy of that distant, ever-present day on the Cobb when I grimly saw (‘grimly see’ being only one of Lyme Regis’s anagrams) my adored elder brother gulped like a tidbit by the Atlantic. Oh, poor Nicky, how I worshipped you! You were, at eleven, everything I aspired to be: big and brave and heroically athletic. Nothing my nine-year-old self could do came anywhere close to measuring up to your daunting example. I even failed to learn your trick of tossing the hair out of your eyes with a gesture that looked so wonderfully casual: a jerk of your neat head punctuating your passage through the world as though dismissing the moment and its achievement. On to the next effortless triumph.

Of course the trouble with hero-worshipping an elder brother who dies is that you catch him up and overtake him and leave him there, forever eleven and stranded in a golden pool of promise. And when some of your absurder myths about him have likewise been outstripped by sober accuracy and family photos, you recognize what you probably knew all along: that he was actually quite an ordinary little boy, even a bit timorous and weedy, for whom his teachers were predicting an auspicious academic career. Smile, Gerry (another Lyme Regis anagram, lacking only an ‘r’).

So maybe, by reminding me of a physical prowess I once looked up to, these hellish athletes are a legacy of that rotten day which marked the beginning of a new family regime that looked to me like blackest treason even as my father embraced it with obvious relief. Hardly had the coffinless double funeral been held (I suppose it was more of a memorial service) than my father married my new ‘auntie’, a heavy woman with a spotty bottom. Laura, she was – and is – and from the first her name and very being became confused in my mind with
laurel
: dark, funereal and poisonous, entangling one in its shrubbery. I still have no idea what my father saw in her except perhaps that she was a good ten years younger than Mama. Laura was from the first a woman of dazzling stupidity
who made the awesome mistake of trying to step into her predecessor’s shoes, reading me the same books that Mama had read me, even insisting on finishing a Roald Dahl story Mama had started that fateful day. ‘Continuity,’ I could imagine her saying to my father, ‘that’s what kids need.’ Never the world’s most astute man and anyway at a loss over the tragedy that had overtaken his little family, he must have gone along with her, no doubt bewitched by the shrubbery. Anyway, she soon learned to hate me, which was clearly my intention all along. And it is only now, as I sip Campari and orange juice (try using those resinous Sicilian blood oranges instead of ordinary navels) at dusk on my terrace that I realize how very much Marta’s hair reminds me of Laura’s. Both have the same detestable thick frizziness. I am sorry my carelessness the other day gave Marta an excuse to be neighbourly. A single ill-judged thrust with my crowbar and there she was, invading my kitchen full of demonic virtue, force-feeding me gigantic balls of ex-Soviet putty.

And now this Brill person. Was it going to be worse, going from proto-showbiz sports personalities to the real thing? I know nothing about these people, only the clichés the media purvey. Naïvely I assume superstars either spend most of their time lying in pools of vomit in very expensive hotel suites they’ve just trashed or else flying to Zürich for long, serious meetings with the gnomes in suits who manage their millions … Gnomes. Toadstools.
Mushrooms
. That’s it! Got it at last!

Rabbit in Cep Custard

Ingredients

1
kg
fresh
rabbit
chunks
1
clove
garlic
6
tablespoons
humdrum
olive
oil
No
rosemary
whatever
16
gm
dried
cepslporcini 
Fernet
Branca
3
egg
yolks
125
gm
icing
sugar
48
gm
flour
451
ml
milk
Grated
rind
of
½
lemon
Hundreds-and-thousands
♦

If it’s nearly lunchtime and you’re a housewife who has just had this brainwave that rabbit in mushroom custard is exactly what’s wanted for tonight’s dinner, forget it. You’re already too late. The first job is to soak the mushrooms in the milk overnight in the fridge, and they need at least eight hours’ steeping. In any case, your husband’s gormless business partner who keeps trying to see down your cleavage will be much better off with Kippers ‘n’ Kimchi, a nifty little number that will strain his manners until they creak even as you describe it brightly as ‘a Korean speciality in your honour, Rupert’.

Anyway, soak those ceps. At the same time steep the rabbit overnight in abundant cold water to which you have added a generous dash of the Branca brothers’ nectar. In the morning retain the soaking water and rinse the rabbit under the tap, then pat the chunks dry and roll them in icing sugar. Into your iron Le Creuset frying pan that you need both hands to lift put the oil, crushed garlic, rabbit chunks and the now flabby and expanded ceps that you have meanwhile strained out of the milk. Cover tightly and cook for two hours on a low heat, turning now and then. Uncover the pan, increase the heat and boil off the liquid that has surprised you by seeping out of the rabbit in such quantity. Over the resulting succulent brown nodules pour half a cup of the Fernet-tainted overnight soaking water and boil that off, too.

While the rabbit was slowly seething for two hours you will have busied yourself with the custard, which is more or less a mushroom-flavoured
crema
pasticcera
, although that is
far too offhand a way of describing this grand culinary breakthrough. Beat the egg yolks and remaining icing sugar in a heavy saucepan, adding the flour gradually. Meanwhile the milk in which the ceps were soaked should have been brought to just below the boil. Amalgamate the contents of both pans gradually, using every sauce-maker’s trick at your disposal to prevent lumps forming, cook for five minutes, stir in the grated lemon zest and
voilà!
Mushroom custard. Test for exaggerated sweetness. A drop or two more Fernet to offset it? You have failed completely if you are remotely reminded of Bird’s custard in either texture or taste, even allowing for the absence of vanilla.

When the custard is ready pour it over the rabbit, cover, and finish off over low heat for fourteen minutes or thereabouts. Do not uncover the pan again but let it cool, allowing the flavours to mingle and develop. Serve tepid on an oval dish, preferably one with a deft pattern of hellebores around the edge. A light dusting of hundreds-and-thousands will intrigue. The aim, as always, is to provoke in your diners the aesthetic reconsideration that is such a vital part of all new experience. The perfect offering for visiting boy-band leaders, madly conservative as they probably are in all their tastes that fall within the law.