Cooking With Fernet Branca
Page 2
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.