‘Fifty!’ he witters on blithely. ‘Fancy that. It’s been at the back of my mind for ages. For the last ten years, actually.’ Okay, so maybe my harmless deception hasn’t deceived anyone but me. ‘I shall have to find something appropriate for you.’
‘Too kind, Derek. But do bear in mind you’re not so far behind yourself. I shall be waiting.’
‘No you won’t. You’ll be too busy heading for sixty. Sixty. Imagine! It will be like living in one of those black and white Movietone news films where everyone wears hats.’
All of which is our way of being quite pleased that he will be coming for the weekend in early December.
Those of you who have kept up with the Samper chronicles so far will know that mine is a rough-and-ready approach to social events. We tend not to stand on ceremony up in these regions off the beaten track. Pot luck is the normal order of the day for visitors here, although even I can see that in the past certain guests faced with some of my more experimental dishes may have considered themselves pot unlucky. I would be the first to admit – although as it happened I was the third to admit – that the cuckoo sorbet I once dug out of the freezer for stepmother Laura and my father was a culinary failure on the nitpicking grounds that it was inedible. It’s possible that the cuckoo had been off or else that I had burst its gall bladder while preparing it. Even so, the fuss they made seemed out of all proportion to the dish’s sheer inventiveness. These things happen. No doubt even in the sunny, food-is-fun world of the TV cheffies the aproned idiots must occasionally find themselves stuffing burnt quiche down their waste-disposal unit and hoping the extractor fan will clear the fumes before their guests arrive. None of it need have happened had not Laura, in a burst of geriatric energy, insisted on coming to Italy to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa before either it or she collapsed irreparably. At the age of seventy-seven my father, faced with the alternative of a severe pussy-whipping (to borrow an appalling but apt American expression), wisely acquiesced. They used Le Roccie as their base shortly after I’d bought it a few years ago. I suppose over the decades I have grown almost fond of my father in a distant sort of way, as fond as I’m able while despising him for having imagined he could replace my mother with a creature like Laura. People generally do what they’re going to do but in the case of family there’s the additional burden of having to pretend one approves of their action. The scriptures, as so frequently quoted by Laura, claim that many waters cannot quench love. Obviously tsunamis don’t read the Bible, and nor did the wave that swept my mother and elder brother Nicky off the Cobb at Lyme Regis some forty years ago. It certainly quenched any possibility that I would love my mother’s stand-in. Meanwhile the Good Book remains Laura’s daily helpmeet for making sense of her world. This antique compendium of jokes will form a fitting accompaniment to her final years in a hospice for the terminally bewildered.
In any case, soi-disant experts on the human unconscious will naturally claim I quite deliberately fed my father and stepmother with a less than top-hole cuckoo sorbet as a way of showing the aggression I felt, Laura quite clearly being the cuckoo in our family nest. As usual with such smart-arse diagnoses this is hopelessly over-determined. Actually, there had been two polythene tubs in the freezer marked ‘CS’, the other one full of the sumptuous cashew sorbet (with hints of caraway and cardamom) I was intending to serve and which was of a more or less identical mottled beige colour. By the time it was thawed enough to be scooped I realized I had picked the wrong tub but deemed it too late to bother about. Within minutes we all wished I hadn’t. Certainly I was not doing my unconscious any favours by sampling it myself and even gaily persevering for several spoonfuls while eulogizing its fascinating flavour and digestive properties. The upshot of this unhappy episode is that I am determined nothing of that nature will happen at my forthcoming birthday dinner. When grandees like Max Christ are guests it behoves the host to produce something rare and memorable without being remotely hazardous. A sorbet that induces projectile vomiting is no gracious way to end a meal, as Gayelord Hauser cogently observed. This means I am already giving careful thought to the menu.
I am also giving careful thought to accommodation. Adrian will share my room, naturally, and Max Christ will have the main guest room. There is a third bedroom in the house which under normal circumstances would be quite good enough for Derek. I am now very glad I had the barn converted this summer. Knowing him of old I’m familiar with his habit of turning up with some unexpected creature of the night in tow, so it will be far safer to segregate him in the barn. He’ll have a brand-new bedroom with all mod cons so he can hardly complain. Mind you, if he does bring some uninvited partner I shall probably never speak to him again, but we’ll face that if and when. He’s better than he used to be, I will say that for him. Old age, I suppose. He went a little wild after seeing his proctologist through the gates of Putney Vale but has since calmed down considerably. Maybe it’s the sudden influence of classical music on his life or else a general withering of the glands.
The more I consider the menu the more convinced I am that badger Wellington will fill the bill most admirably. Here we have a meat that I already know to be excellent, recently killed and ready to hand. Why go to the expense of buying pounds of dreary old fillet steak in a Camaiore butcher’s? There’s no doubt we shall be needing a sturdy main course. We will be a minimum of four or five sitting down and who knows what the weather will be like in early December? In the past we have had early snow up here in November, and even without snow it can get pretty cold. I also have to take logistics into account because it’s not clear how the various guests’ arrivals can be synchronized. All in all it will require a substantial dish that will stand keeping warm while meeting the minimum Samper criterion of novelty. Since we’re on the subject I may as well impart the secret even as I remind you that it remains my intellectual property.
Badger Wellington
Ingredients
1.53 kg badger fillet
249 gm sliced mushrooms, button if nothing better available
40.5 ml decent olive oil
51 gm unsalted butter
321 gm gun-dog pâté
38 gm foie gras
Several juniper berries
Small clove fresh garlic
403 gm frozen puff pastry, thawed
6 fresh bay leaves
Pepper
11⁄4 beaten eggs to glaze
1 boiled empty shotgun cartridge (optional)
This is a very straightforward dish indeed and I hardly know why I bother explaining it to any cook worth his or her salt (which incidentally should be the ordinary granular kitchen variety. Don’t let the organic brigade dupe you with faddist nonsense about sea salt, as though in some mysterious way it’s more healthy or flavourful. It’s merely evaporated seawater, which is exactly what all salt deposits are, duh. In fact, regular salt mines tap into prehistoric salt deposits laid down by long-ago seas unpolluted by human fallout, and therefore have claims to be considerably healthier than modern salt. Kitchen salt is the same stuff as sea salt even when that comes in flaky crystals in packets including the words ‘Nature’ or ‘Neptune’ and costing eight times as much as ordinary salt. It is ordinary salt: no more, no less.)
Anyway, what you do is thaw out and bone both your badger and gun-dog haunches, remembering to remove any whitish pieces of tendon. Marinade the badger overnight in salted water (not too strong) together with the half-dozen bay leaves. This will remove any faint vestiges of its late owner’s musky scent while not interfering with the characteristic flavour. Pat it dry, trim it up and tie it into an oblong with string. Heat the oil. Season the fillet with pepper and fry it briskly to seal the meat. Then roast it for 25 minutes at 220°C. Let it cool and remove string.
The dog, too, should be briefly fried and roast for 29 minutes. When it is cool you should mince it as finely as possible, continuing to pass it through the grinder until eventually it attains a pâté-like consistency. Then blend it with the pounded ju
niper berries, the pounded garlic and the foie gras. Only you can say how you like your canine pâté. Personally, I favour it velvety smooth and not too highly seasoned so that an educated palate might even make a good guess at the breed. As to the breed of this particular hound, I should think a single sperm from a springer spaniel blundered into its ancestry round about 1876. The rest of its inheritance was the genetic emulsion that leads to leggy, vaguely liver-and-white Italian hunting dogs with the eager intelligence of toadstools, an attribute they generally share with their owners.
Now slice the mushrooms and fry in butter until soft. I only specified button mushrooms out of pity for urban cooks without access to anything better than those overpriced scabby brown Japanese fungi with the risky name. The truth is, and despite a global conspiracy to pretend otherwise, button mushrooms have no taste. None. Zero. Nada. They are empty texture. What you really need for badger Wellington are fresh chanterelles or blewits. This is an autumn or winter dish and ought to taste as though it has spiritual roots in the rich loam of damp woods rather than in the bins of an all-night deli. Anyway, once your interesting fungi are soft, cool them and blend with the doggy pâté.
The rest is easy. On a floured surface roll out the pastry (if you’re cooking this in Italy, puff pastry is known as pasta sfoglia and is easily obtained). Aim for a rectangle 35 x 30 cm and 0.5 cm thick. Transfer it to a baking sheet. Spread the dog down the centre of this pastry strip. Align Mr Brock on top of it and brush the edges of the pastry with the beaten egg. Fold the pastry over lengthways and turn the entire parcel over so that the join is now underneath. Tuck the ends under the meat on the baking sheet and if you can be bothered decorate the thing with leaf shapes cut from the pastry trimmings. Bake at 220°C for 50 minutes, covering with foil after half an hour. The thoroughly cleaned and boiled cartridge case – it should be 12-bore but 20-bore will do at a pinch – can be cut down and inserted cap uppermost in the top of the pastry just before serving if desired. It strikes a suitably venatorial note. On no account allow the cartridge to go in the oven. Modern ones are made of plastic which will melt disgustingly and ruin everything. What one is aiming for is the brightly polished brass cap embedded in dog pâté and sticking jauntily up through the lusciously browned puff pastry.
On this occasion I am preparing the main dish several days in advance, half-cooking it and putting it into the deep freeze to await the day. It’s always a great relief to be that much ahead of the game. It gives one time to assemble the dinner’s lesser elements. These, I decide, will be strictly conventional, consisting of the sort of things visitors to Tuscany expect to find. We will start with assorted crostini – and I may even cheat and buy the various spreads made by my favourite grocer although I shall certainly mix some hound pâté crostini in with the normal fegato ones. After that I feel we might skip the obligatory pasta course owing to the substantial nature of the main course. An intricate salad will do quite well instead. With the Wellington I shall serve rosemary-roasted potatoes and broccoli spears. Frozen peas, I’m sorry to say, are common. Even cheffies will only reach for the mushy variety. To add a thawed block of peas to a carefully crafted dinner is an admission of failure. You might just as well add monosodium glutamate.
*
As the day approaches I seem to be spending inordinate amounts of both time and money on what are essentially my own birthday celebrations. This feels wrong. On the other hand, having Max Christ to dinner feels right for both social and professional reasons. Once again it looks plausible to think of myself as his future biographer. Still, a mood of brainless bonhomie does not come naturally to me. I’m not fond of playing host at the best of times but the background rumbling of the wingèd chariot’s wheels makes it that much worse. No doubt I ought to be pleasantly surprised that anyone wishes to visit me and celebrate my birthday; but it all feels too ironically like being thrown a lifebelt from the deck of the Titanic. Consequently, I’m finding it hard to enter into the spirit of the thing. What exactly is the spirit of turning fifty that any mortal could possibly enter into with rejoicing? These days the years succeed one another like quick, identical drips from a diminishing icicle.
But this is familiar territory to the last and most philosophical of the Sampers. I suppose watching one’s mother and brother being swept to oblivion by a freak wave adds a sobering note to any nine-year-old’s life. But I am certain that even before that memorable incident I could never really suppress bleak thoughts, especially the most inopportune ones, a habit that has persisted. For instance: called upon to view a friend’s new-born baby, the precious bundle from which protrude adorable bits of infant anatomy, I always find myself wondering (even as my voice supplies the requisite pleasantries) whether it will grow up to be force-fed human excrement and drowned in a barracks latrine, as uncounted Russian Jews were in the Second World War. Or else is it destined to die of a drug overdose at seventeen, choke to death in a restaurant in its thirties or fall victim to a hit-and-run driver while walking the dog? In short, there is nothing like the sight of new life to make me wonder how it will end. This must be one of those yardsticks of a person’s basic character, like the one that supposedly distinguishes optimists from pessimists (is the glass half full or half empty?) Is this baby alive or merely laggard in its dying? It does add a dimension of pity to what is otherwise a flat and goofy spectacle of unapprehensive love. And I am powerless to stop it.
I am also powerless to stop the sudden phone call that adds a new dimension to my dinner-party plans. It is Nanty Riah, and there are five days to go.
‘See, Gerry, thing is we had this gig on Saturday, right? In Oslo, right? Turns out the Danes, or are they Swedes, are like really fussy about communicable diseases and they’ve postponed it. Prolly after Christmas, now. So what I was wondering, suppose we have a go at starting this book? Few sessions with a tape recorder, know what I mean?’
‘You have a communicable disease, Nanty?’
‘Nah, not me, just the boys. Nothing to ping off the walls about. Just a bit itchy.’
‘How revolting. What have they got?’
‘Scabies. I mean, whoever made a fuss about scabies? It’s like having nits, right? Which half the school kids in Britain have got. Not me, of course. One of the few perks of alopecia. No lice, no crabs. So these Swedes or Oslogians are saying it’s an EU health directive or some bollocks ’cos scabies can lead to something else.’
‘Like scratching?’
‘Dunno. Anyway, are you up for this or what?’
And before long Nanty, too, is on my guest list together with whatever of Alien Pie’s parasites are able to hitch a lift on his body. When I tell him Max Christ will be there he knows exactly who he is, which is a good sign. A few years ago he either wouldn’t have known or would have affected not to know. I think he must be taking this image facelift seriously. He can have the third room in the house. He seems unbothered about returning to the very place where a couple of years ago he was so terrified by imaginary UFOs that he fled to London the very next day. He says it will be all right if there are other people there besides me. This is possibly not much of a compliment but he can stay on after the others have left and see how his nerves stand up to it.
Apparently Max’s concert is on Thursday and he will be staying that and Friday night with friends close by in Empoli, enabling him to spend a whole day free in Florence, plus most of Saturday. Then he will come on to me by car. I shall myself collect Adrian and Nanty from Pisa airport. Derek havers mysteriously over the phone and can damn well make his own arrangements. This is typical of him and I shan’t waste time worrying. No doubt I shall get an excited call from him just as we’re moving from the festive prosecco into the crostini course, saying he’s in Barcelona with this fabulous boy and not to worry. Worry? Me? With a birthday meal to prepare and the nightmare of arranging the roughly simultaneous arrival of at least four guests at an obscure house somewhere up a pitchdark mountainside in Tuscany? Absurd.
But heavy sarcas
m doesn’t become me. Even as I buckle to, making beds and rounding up those curious balls of dust that grow in the darkness beneath them, I have to admit I’m now beginning to feel more chipper. I’m still registering what a huge relief it is at last to be free of Millie and her preposterous entourage. The thought that I shall never again have to write another book with her is a tonic to the soul. In addition – and to satisfy the inquisitive – I can reveal that I have had no further manifestations of a priapic nature and I really think my body has finally shed the last residues of Mr and Mrs ProWang’s magic toxins. I instinctively sense that the internal storms have subsided along my hormonal coastline. An uncanny peace has fallen over my ravaged endocrine system and my islets of Langerhans are once again sunlit offshore jewels set in an ocean of dimpling blue. Feeling that these days a tourist brochure might represent my interior more accurately than an MRI scan, I bustle about the house making it minimally salubrious.
23
Adam and Eve, the world’s first householders, had their lease on Eden rudely foreclosed and were obliged to relocate to one of Mesopotamia’s less fashionable parts, of which – then as now – there was no shortage. Eve later remarked that aside from the occasional snake Eden hadn’t been a bad place to live. ‘The fruit was fabulous. Basically, though, just too many trees. We weren’t that sorry to leave, actually. If you wanted any sort of social life, well, forget it, the place was dead. But dead. We couldn’t throw even the smallest dinner party for a few friends because we simply didn’t have any. There was literally no one else to invite apart from some old gardener with no conversation who turned nasty at the end.’
Amazing Disgrace Page 29
