The Reluctant Cannibals

by The Reluctant Cannibals (mobi)

  The meeting was already underway by the time Augustus reached the kitchen cellars. George Le Strang was at the stove holding forth on mushrooms and chopping parsley fner than seemed humanly possible. The girolles were being pan-fried in butter with fnely sliced garlic and towards the end, needed only a light dusting of chopped parsley and lemon juice to bring them to their peak.

  ‘Can I help?’ asked Augustus.

  ‘Only by trying some of these,’ said George, tilting the pan to show the contents. Ar-thur was walking around the table, flling glasses with a white wine.

  ‘Evening Augustus. A drop of Condrieu?’

  Plates and glasses were flled and Le Strang had a forkful of mushrooms poised on his lips when Theodore Flanagan tried to bring order and decorum to the meeting. ‘Gen-tlemen, Gentlemen. Aren’t we forgetting something?’

  They all looked around rather blankly with the exception of George Le Strang whose ire was rising with each cooling wisp of steam that left his girolles.

  ‘Grace? Charles will you do us the honour?’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. Pro hoc cibo, quem ad alimonium corporis nostri sanctifcatum es largitus, nos Tibi, Pater omnipotens, reverenter gratias agimus; simul obsecrantes ut cibum angelorum, panera verum coelestem, Dei Verbum aeternum Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum nobis impetiare, ut eo mens nostra pascatur, et per carnem et san-guinem Ejus alamur, foveamur, corroboremur. Amen .’

  The chaplain delivered grace with his eyes shut. This helped both to enhance the sense of solemnity and helped his often erratic memory. He was as a result, more than a little peeved to discover when he opened his eyes that the rest of the party, Flanagan included, were already tucking into the mushrooms and uttering collective grunts of de-light akin to those of pigs routing out truffes.

  George Le Strang was elated that his girolles were so well received. He was in full fow, recounting the exact time and place when he had frst eaten these forest delights, a small restaurant in Les Halles, Paris, when Hamish McIntyre introduced a note of dis-cord.

  ‘Excellent George, but I think they could be improved a little.’ ‘Nonsense,’ retorted Le Strang, emphasising the point by shoving a few more mush-

  rooms into his mouth with an uncharacteristic lack of fnesse. ‘Taste great to me,’ said Arthur, spraying a fne miasma of mushroom and parsley

  across the table. It fell to Augustus to arbitrate the matter. ‘In the spirit of gastronomy we should hear Hamish’s suggestion. So Hamish, how

  could George’s marvellous girolles be improved?’ Le Strang’s wounded Gallic pride was soothed by the compliment, which was of

  course its intention, and all their eyes turned on Hamish. ‘These would be fantastic with black pudding. A little spicy saltiness would be great.’ A cacophony of outrage and laughter flled the small vaulted room accompanied by

  a muttered torrent of French insults.

  Augustus was forced to stand to get anyone’s attention. ‘Gentlemen, please. Why don’t we settle this with our taste buds rather than our

  tongues? Theodore, do you still have any of that fabulous Irish black pudding your aunt sent you?’

  ‘There should be some in the cold store, I’ll go and check.’ Theodore Flanagan headed off, ignoring Le Strang’s bitter complaints that the girolles would be ruined by the time he returned. The mood was restored by Arthur Plantagenet who, after a noisy slurp of Condrieu, embarked on an exploration of the delightful fruit end-notes of the wine. He offered peach, apricot and honey, but couldn’t place the fnal aroma as the wine slipped gracefully down the gullet. Flanagan had returned while this debate was still in full throe and had six slices of Patrick McSweeny’s secret-recipe black pudding in the pan before anyone noticed his return. It was rare that he got the chance to pro-mote Irish produce, so he was delighted for Hamish’s suggestion. He felt sure that it was made primarily in the spirit of devilment, but was equally sure that Hamish was onto something. The delightful change in colour from a dark brick to shiny black, along with the sound and smell, took him back to his childhood in Cork. He was roused from his daydream by Hamish bellowing in his ears.

  ‘Good God, man, what are doing, cooking it or cremating it?’ ‘I think it’s just about done now.’ Theodore circled the table sliding a piece of black

  pudding on each plate.

  ‘Scoop the girolles on top, the pudding will heat them up.’ After taking his seat, Theodore obligingly donated some mushrooms to Le Strang who had childishly tried to avoid the experiment by eating all of his. Hamish led the charge only to be rebuffed by the searing heat still coming off the black pudding, much to Le Strang’s delight. After a soothing glass of wine and some frantic blowing, the experiment commenced.

  ‘Mmm… ’

  ‘Bloody marvellous.’

  ‘Well done, Hamish.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Another great leap for mankind.’

  After the others had all passed judgement, it came to Le Strang. He slowly lifted his laden fork and, with a look of distaste, delivered its contents to his taste buds. He chewed slowly, trying to keep the rest of his features immobile. Then one of his exuber-antly bushy eyebrows lifted. Hamish leapt to his feet and danced around the table.

  ‘He likes it. I knew it. Come on, admit it, Le Strang, not everything has to be French.’ ‘I agree it tastes… agreeable, very good in fact, but don’t forget black pudding was

  invented in France.’

  ‘What?’ Poor Flanagan was almost speechless with outrage. ‘Of course, boudin noir . It was probably the Normans that brought it here and most

  likely Ireland too.’

  ‘ Boudin noir is just blood, so it’s nothing like black pudding. It’s all the other inter-esting bits of pig that makes black pudding so much better,’ said Hamish.

  Arthur Plantagenet broke up proceedings by banging his fork on the table. ‘Complete twaddle, you’re both wrong. The ancient world invented nearly

  everything that matters while the Celts and Gauls were still running around half-naked. I’m afraid to disappoint you, but Homer described blood sausages in The Odyssey around 2700 bc but I doubt he ever tasted this exquisite combination.’

  Lifting his glass frst to Hamish and then to George, Arthur continued. ‘A toast to our new dish.’

  They raised their glasses and in a motley chorus gave their toast in direct quotation from Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

  ‘The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.’

  It would no doubt have been as galling to Brillat-Savarin as it was to the assembled faculty that almost one hundred and ffty years after the death of the man in whose memory the faculty was created, astronomy with one less letter was an accepted science and gastronomy still struggled to escape from the kitchen.

  Hamish McIntyre then rose to his feet.

  ‘Gentlemen, may I propose another delicacy?’ Hamish lifted the large bucket he had brought along onto the table. ‘Squills… ’

  The others all peered forward to see the creatures. They were in fne fettle having been nurtured back to health and happiness in one of the large saltwater aquariums that Hamish maintained in his rooms for scientifc and culinary reasons. Squills are curious back-to-front looking creatures that look like a monstrous pre-Cambrian combination of shrimp and earwig. Arthur Plantagenet seemed particularly impressed.

  ‘Excellent work, Hamish. Are these the same squills the Romans used to eat? They are defnitely mentioned in Apicius but I had no idea what a squill actually was.’

  ‘A fne delicate creature designed by our creator to be eaten.’ ‘Hamish, I’m sure God had some purpose for these creatures before he created your

  stomach,’ said Charles Pinker.

  ‘Wait until I show you their secret, then you might change your mind, Charles.’ Hamish turned to increase the heat under a large pan of water that had been simmer-

  ing on the cooker behind them. Before he could launch the squills into the pan, Augu
stus Bloom interceded on their behalf.

  ‘Hamish, could I offer you a little chloroform to ease their way into the afterlife?’ ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Augustus. They’re crustaceans. There are probably more

  nerve fbres in my little fnger than in these little critters’ brains.’ ‘That may indeed be true, Hamish, but I doubt you would volunteer to stick your little

  fnger in boiling water for four minutes or have it cut off without an anaesthetic.’ ‘Well put, Augustus,’ said the chaplain, who was not particularly attached to the ugly-

  looking creatures but felt obliged to join the moral high ground when it was presented to him.

  ‘It will ruin the taste, Augustus old boy.’

  ‘Nonsense, you know as well as I that chloroform is so volatile that within a minute or two there won’t be a molecule left in the pan. Go on Hamish, humour my foibles.’

  A look around the table showed Hamish that he was on his own. Even George Le Strang, who had no truck for this sort of English sentimentality, was in no mood to stand by Hamish after his black pudding stunt.

  ‘All right, hand me over the bottle.’

  Augustus pulled down the dusty dark brown bottle he kept for cooking lobster and put a few anaesthetising drops into the bucket. He covered the top with the discarded wooden lid of an empty wine box. By the time Arthur had opened the next bottle of wine, a fne white from the Loire valley, the bucket was silent and Hamish was allowed to continue with his demonstration.

  After a few minutes he scooped them out of the boiling water into a colander. He picked up one of the steaming crustaceans and then started bouncing it between his hands, blowing hard to cool it to a manageable temperature.

  ‘Now, Gentlemen. What’s the only problem with crustaceans?’ ‘Too bloody hard to open. If God was kind he’d have designed lobsters with zippers

  down their backs.’

  ‘Exactly, Theodore, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Now watch this.’ Taking a pair of scissors, Hamish made two cuts along the edges of the body. Then,

  with a deft movement, he cracked the tail end and lifted the entire top half of the shell, revealing a wondrously presented morsel of crustacean fesh. He picked this up with a small fork and, pausing only to dip it into a bowl of hollandaise sauce kindly provided by the college chef, delivered it to his mouth.

  ‘Charles, I rest my case. A crustacean designed for consumption.’ At that point, gastronomic imperative eclipsed theological debate and within minutes

  the table was awash with the exo-skeletal remains of the marvellously designed little creatures.

  Arthur then rose to his feet.

  ‘Gentlemen. To squills.’

  After the toast, Arthur remained standing and waited until he had their undivided at-tention.

  ‘Gentlemen, I have something important to share with you. My physician has in-formed me that I have but a little time left within this mortal coil. So I shall soon be leaving you all.’

  Arthur raised his hands to quell the rising tide of outrage at this injustice. ‘I have just one hope when I die; that I may be as appreciated in my passing as much

  as these exquisite creatures have been tonight. Then we both shall have died well. I also have one wish while I am still alive; to partake of as many of the culinary wonders in the world that I have so far missed. With this excellent start I’m sure this wish will be fulflled at this term’s dinner. A toast to you all.’

  As each man rose and lifted their glasses, any sense of premature grief was washed away by the beaming visage of Professor Arthur Plantagenet and his extraordinary en-thusiasm for life, or at least food, even in the face of death. If only he’d left it at that, Arthur Plantagenet could have saved his colleagues a considerable amount of strife and anguish over the coming months. But it had never come naturally to Arthur to say just a few words, so he remained on his feet and when his audience fell quiet again he contin-ued.

  ‘Sadly I have to recognise that if my doctor’s morbid predictions are accurate, then this term’s dinner with the shadow faculty of gastronomic science may be my last,’ again he motioned to stife protestations.

  ‘I haven’t yet seen gastronomy take its rightful place in the pantheon of the sciences, but I am convinced this noble society will see that momentous day even if I don’t. To further this cause I have come to a decision. When I do pass on I have decided to donate my body not to medical science but to the science of gastronomy.’ The others took this fnal announcement as a turn of levity after all the serious talk of death. They were cheer-ing and clanging spoons and forks on plates, glasses and even the table. It was Augus-tus who was the frst to broach the subject again once some semblance of order had re-turned, happy to humour Arthur in one of his typically outrageous diversions.

  ‘Good man, Arthur. Now, what aspect of gastronomy will your body illuminate?’ ‘Ah, well I do have a few ideas of my own but what do you think would be of most

  gastronomic interest Augustus?’

  ‘We could examine your brain to see if there is a part that is unusually enlarged. We may discover the gastronomy lobe. Like that Einstein chap, they looked at his brain.’

  ‘I’d say his liver would be more revealing,’ said Hamish, leaning over to affection-ately pat the good professor’s protuberant stomach.

  ‘I had a rather different thought in mind,’ replied Arthur. ‘Sometimes, in the interest of gastronomic science and adventure, you have to eat things that at frst thought seem grotesque or inedible. I propose to you that this road leads much further to the ultimate gastronomic question: what do humans taste like?’

  The poor chaplain was unlucky enough to be the only person at the table to have his mouth full as this extraordinary pronouncement was made. The quite involuntary cough sent a small piece of squill across the room at a velocity it could never have experienced in life.

  Chapter 10

  ‘Good God, Augustus. Try and keep it straight.’ Arthur bellowed into the battered brass megaphone. The pair of them cut a curious shape along the riverbank. Augustus was at the front of the tandem in charge of direction, and, in the interests of Arthur’s heart, all the propulsion. Arthur, with his feet resting above the pedals, was at the back shouting instructions, encouragement and a few words of abuse to the rowers who were competing for places in St Jerome’s frst VIII for next term’s bumps races or ‘Torpids’ as it is gen-erally known. The curious reference to slowness supposedly refects the fact that the very best oarsmen are prevented from rowing for their colleges in the Lent bumps as they are busy preparing for the Oxford and Cambridge boat race.

  In Torpids, the racing boats of the various colleges line up at different positions along the bank. When the klaxon sounds for the start, each boat careers off under the partial control of the cox with the aim of hitting the boat in front to secure a bump and to move up one place in the rankings for the next day’s races. In these winter races the unfortunate boat that is bumped must complete the course while the victors pull over to the side for celebrations. The ultimate indignity in Torpids is to be bumped a second time, an over-bump. This disastrous fate befell St Jerome’s frst VIII on the fnal day of racing last year when the cox came too close to a sunken willow tree while steering in pursuit of their own bump. They ended up limping home with only seven oars and the man in the bow entertaining the crowds on the banks with curses and expletives of extraordinary origin-ality. The two crews following them had shown an ungentlemanly eagerness in taking advantage of their plight and bumped them.

  Keeping in a straight line was the least of Augustus’ worries as Arthur’s large form shifted back and forth on the back saddle. The towpath was pockmarked with puddles and crowded with other coaches. At least Augustus could look ahead, most of the coaches on more conventional singleseated bicycles had to ride while spending nearly all their time watching their crews on the river. Collisions and inelegant headlong dives into the river were not uncommon. Taken together with the drizzle and excoriating north wind,
this was not one of Augustus’ most pleasurable afternoons. At the end of this last run down the towpath, cold, wet and exhausted, he found it hard to agree with Arthur ’s verdict.

  ‘Well that was an excellent outing. Very enjoyable all together. Now let’s get down to the Head of the River pub and buy some drinks for the lads.’

  Augustus stood with one leg on either side, trying to balance the sturdy old tandem while the wind caught Arthur’s full fgure side on.

  ‘Would you mind if we walked down, Arthur? I’m just about done-in with riding this contraption.’

  ‘Oh come on, Augustus. Young ft man like you. The tandem was your idea after all. We’ll leave it up at the pub so it’ll be there for tomorrow’s session.’ Then Arthur pointed down the towpath and shouted into the megaphone, ‘ Lay on, Macduff, And damn’d be him that frst cries, “Hold, enough! ”’

  It was true that Augustus, in a moment of concern about Arthur’s plans to take to the riverbank on a bicycle, had suggested a tandem as an alternative for the sake of Arthur’s health. The cursed tandem felt three times heavier than it had a few minutes earlier. Augustus stood on the pedals to get some forward momentum and they trundled down the last part of the towpath with Arthur moving from Shakespeare into a quixotic rendi-tion of Gilbert and Sullivan with the aid of the megaphone.

  A British tar is a soaring soul

  As free as a mountain bird

  His energetic fst should be ready to resist

  A dictatorial word

  It was past ten o’clock at night when Augustus headed back to college, leaving Arthur and the members of St Jerome’s boat club engaged in increasingly complicated drinking games. Patrick Eccles was still there in the thick of things. Augustus was delighted to see that this young man was fnally fnding his feet. Augustus stepped through the small door within the massive wooden gate. Wishing Mr Potts a good night, he headed back to his rooms. Thinking back on the evening, he had changed his mind. It had turned into a rather enjoyable outing.