Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  I spent the rest of the morning wandering from room to room addressing remarks variously to a sugar sifter, a patch of sunlight on the floor, a row of very unimaginative cookbooks and finally to Gazzbear. He was the only one who replied, responding to a probing thumb with his usual expression of wisdom. ‘Piero Pacini?!’ I kept exclaiming. ‘Marta?! A film?!’ And each time Gazzbear made brief acknowledgement. After a meditative sandwich lunch (home made bread, pecorino cheese and a fabulous rhubarb & sardine chutney of my own – who else’s? – devising), I had spotted the silver lining. I reflected on the curious coincidence that not so many weeks ago I had actually thought of Piero Pacini myself as a possible subject for a biography. At least, his was one of the names I had come up with as someone who could lift me out of my ‘sporting heroes’ rut and get my intellectual pleasure centres working again. That, of course, had been before Nanty Riah entered my life. I could now see it was altogether less of a coincidence that, when I had idly proposed Pacini’s name to Marta as an example of the sort of subject I should ideally like, she pretended she’d barely heard of the man and then flattered me with all that stuff about how someone of my musical talents would be better off writing about a musician like that alleged pianist friend of hers, Pavel Taneyev. With calculated meanness she had obviously been trying to keep Pacini to herself, though for what purpose I could not imagine.

  However, now that the truth was out and we had all been introduced to each other I could take steps to ensure there would be life after Brill, so far as my own career was concerned. It struck me that once I had finished helping Nanty get to Base Camp on his ascent of Parnassus, a biography of Piero Pacini would be the perfect next project. Certainly that would be the averagely smart thing to try for. The extra ingredient of Samper wiliness would surely guarantee it happened, but for the moment I had no idea how to bring it about. What I needed was leverage, and I could think of no suitable lever. I knew these Oscar-winning celebrities. One needed to persuade them that no extant biography did them justice, that everything written about them so far was pitifully inadequate, lightweight and sensational; that the story must be right for posterity’s sake. Step one, therefore, would be to find out if there already was a Pacini biography. Step two was to rubbish it. Step three was to suggest the promising young author Gerald Samper as the ideal person to undertake the biography. This proposal would be made with bewitching modesty; the crucial lever would clinch the deal. Step four was to find that lever.

  As always when faced with a puzzle I turned to cooking as therapy, flicking through that sadly unpublished compilation of culinary and even erotic wisdom, The Boys’ Reformatory Cookbook. Budgies in Overcoats? Popular, of course, since children are unused to food that makes them laugh. Unfortunately I didn’t have the ingredients to hand. Tripe & Meringue Pie? This was not an unqualified success when I invented it; afterwards I had learned either to leave all the sugar out of the meringue mix or else to cut it with a little Fernet Branca. If one is to reform boys one needs to begin with their expectations and modify those with a touch of sternness. Tripe & Meringue Pie is quite stem, especially in its Fernet version. At other times, of course, a little cajolery is helpful and one turns to something more seductive like Kidneys in Toffee. This bears no relation to that coarse concoction known as ‘banoffee pie’, as irresistible to popular taste as urban legends are to a journalist. ‘Banoffee pie’ was invented by a Sussex publican in the seventies, I think, and anyway the ‘toffee’ in it is – and I shudder to relate this – condensed milk boiled in the can until it becomes brown and rubbery. In my far more adventurous dish the kidneys provide the protein the boys need after an afternoon spent breaking rocks. Mere bananas and condensed milk never built muscles. And to answer a question from the Mirabelle in Curzon Street, the toffee in my dish is nearer to fudge.

  I spent several happy hours emptying my mind of mundane affairs and filling it instead with dishes: dishes sublime, dishes disgusting; classics and near-misses and even (a gastronomic category I have myself invented) non-starters. I would rather experiment and fail than slavishly follow someone else’s recipe and produce someone else’s dish. And there, in that single sentence, you have the Samper philosophy of life. So what about Marta’s cuisine? What about her admirably dire shonka and mavlisi, that kasha dumpling of hers with the gravitational field of a dead star? Don’t those also qualify as essays in culinary imagination? Don’t they speak eloquently of a cracked but original mind? No, I’m afraid not. Marta, like the food she serves, isn’t cracked but merely foreign. Her food is traditional. That it tastes to you and me like a deliberate assault on our most intimate membranes is incidental. That is simply the way they are in Voynovia, a testament to historical harshness: generations of their peasant bodies being lashed by landowners and their various orifices scarified with red pepper.

  The trouble with thinking about food, and especially with thinking about Marta’s food, is that it left me nearly without an appetite. A snack, then. But what? My listless eye fell on the last recipe for the boys’ reformatory and was immediately rekindled:

  Lychees on Toast

  Ingredients

  Lychees (tinned)

  Olive oil

  Peanut butter

  Hard cheese

  Toast

  Anchovies

  Tabasco sauce

  ♦

  This was specifically designed to cheer them up after a hard day being reformed: a bedtime snack to tickle their palates and give them energy for whatever rigours lay ahead in the long hours of dormitory darkness. Do you remember, years ago, the slogan an advertising agency came up with to sell some massively calorific slop or other? It involved the concept of ‘night starvation’, a brilliant idea that suggested life-threatening affinities between a suburbanite’s slumber and the months-long hibernation of a bear in its cave. ‘Night starvation’ implied a portly man retiring to bed and waking up eight hours later with the physique of a famine victim, a mere collection of bones and hanging skin barely able to totter down to breakfast. The underlying message was clear: each moment spent not putting something into your mouth is a step nearer starvation. Ah, spin! They were not about to say that each moment spent not putting something into your mouth is a step nearer to losing weight. Lychees on Toast was designed to render it unnecessary from the nutritional point of view for the boys to put anything in their mouths until breakfast next morning.

  A simpler dish there never was. I planned it with institution cooks in mind in the hope that they, too, might have reformed since my day. The tinned lychees should be drained and their scented syrup put aside, possibly for my Quails in Sponge bonne bouche. The anchovies and peanut butter should be mashed together to a smooth consistency and enlivened with a few drops of Tabasco. Then the lychees should be gently, sympathetically stuffed with the compound and arranged in beguiling patterns on slices of lightly toasted bread that have been sprinkled with finely grated hard cheese or (better) spread sparingly with Gorgonzola. Drizzle olive oil over them and pop them under the grill. If the boys’ reformation is still at an early stage a gram or two of a good proprietary benzodiazepine makes a sensible addition to the lychees’ stuffing.

  I had finished preparing several slices of this tempting snack and had just put them under the grill when, with the punctuality of the inevitable, the phone rang. It turned out to be Filippo Pacini, owner of the best haircut in Tuscany, the nicest profile, the most absurd car. I was at once all ears. He said that, quite independently of our ‘fascinating’ meeting at Marta’s house that morning (‘affascinante’, eh? Doubters of the Samper charisma please note), his father had been considering a small addition to the film. Towards the end of Arrazzato there was apparently a scene where some young members of a hippie commune or something go to town for a night out and then return to their beach, whereupon the film reaches its climax of dissent and mayhem. I hadn’t the faintest idea what Filippo was talking about, I just liked listening to him saying it. It seemed that the hippies’ night
out on the town was supposed to provide an ironic contrast between their comfortable bourgeois roots and the radical discomforts of their beach-squatting Greenery, something I would scarcely have thought needed emphasis. But Piero Pacini had now decided to add a further twist by having them briefly attend some sort of pop concert. The idea of this was to show the brainless seduceability of modern youth. More specifically to the film, it would illustrate the ubiquitous siren song of postmodern capitalism undermining whatever idealism has been left in some young minds already worked on by insidious fascist influences. Crikey. At this moment my lychees burst quietly into flame beneath the grill and I had to dash over and extinguish them in the sink, where they floated on a series of charred rafts. Too sad.

  ‘And?’ I prompted, returning breathless and apologetic to the phone.

  ‘And my father wonders whether your friend Brill would consent to have the band make a brief appearance in this scene. Well, to be honest, it was my suggestion that it might be Brill. You sort of put it into my head this morning. We’d been thinking of an Italian group but Alien Pie would be better. Just a guest appearance, you know. Of course they’ll be booked up for months ahead but we thought there would be no harm in asking. We could make do with very few shots just so long as we get a good chunk of their soundtrack to lay underneath. What do you think, Gerry?’

  Suddenly flattered to be ‘Gerry’ after all that respectful ‘Lei’ stuff, I assured him I would put it to my friend Brill and sound him out. We ended the call with mutual expressions of goodwill, mine being more sincere than his, I suspect, but there we are. I was left feeling strangely excited in a kitchen it was hard to see across, thanks to the black fallout of my supper. In every other respect the lychee moment had passed, so I made myself more toast and spread it thickly with a terrine I’d long kept sealed in the larder and which seemed not to have suffered for it. I well remembered making it. Jack Russells are absolute buggers to bone, notoriously so, but yield a delicate, almost silky pâté that seems to welcome the careworn diner with both paws on the edge of the table, as it were. A scratch meal, but delicious. As I ate I mulled over the implications of Filippo’s call. Might this not be the very lever I had been looking for? Being able to arrange the right band at short notice would surely put me in Pacini’s debt and make it that much more likely he would agree to my becoming his biographer. For the moment I had to pigeonhole the disturbing incidental thought that to judge from the scene Filippo had just been sketching out Arrazzato sounded like being a real clunker. Could this be the man who brought us Mille Piselli? Green communes and politics in the twenty-first century, for pity’s sake? What was he doing? Have faith, I told myself, removing lead shot from my mouth. One never gets them all out.

  As for what would be in it for Nanty, that was easy. An appearance in a film by Piero Pacini would afford exactly the right association with high art he needed so badly to foster. I tried to phone him there and then but got only a recording of his voice suggesting in impeccable Califockney: ‘Like, leave yer number an’ that.’

  The next day I went messing about on the internet and discovered there were dozens of academic studies of Pacini’s work (Visual Signsponge: The Derridean element in the post-structuralism of Piero Pacini’s later films) but only one biography, Piero Pacini, now seven years out of date. Good. That was step one completed. Step two was to get hold of a copy and be shocked by its triviality. Amazon.co.uk would no doubt provide me with one in due course. The Samper plan was whizzing along nicely. Full of energy I walked down to Casoli. Happening to be in the bar I asked for my mail which the indolent postino would have left in blithe expectation that the letters would sprout wings and complete the journey themselves. But there were no letters for me, only one for Marta. Feeling a sudden burst of neighbourliness for her, I walked back up the hill with it in the brilliant sunshine. I looked at the postmark and wondered who she knew in Venice; but these days I shouldn’t have been surprised if it was the Doge himself. Once one was over the shock of discovering Marta to be well connected the possibilities were legion.

  It turned out that I couldn’t hand her the envelope with a graceful bow after all. She was out and her rat-coloured car gone. Her house, of course, was unlocked so I left the letter propped on the music stand of her electronic keyboard next to an almost full bottle of Fernet, the one place amid the kitchen’s clutter where I could guarantee she would find it.

  I spent the rest of the day working on a plan of campaign for Nanty by which he might achieve some street credibility in the thoroughfares of mainstream British culture. Nobody else would want such a thing, of course, a reflection that lent the whole project a somewhat surreal air. Then, taxed by what the Japanese call the shokku of the last few days, I went to bed early and fell instantly into hibernating bear mode. I awoke in darkness with a pang, not of night starvation but of fear. It took the usual blurred few seconds to focus on the sound that had woken me and to separate it from the remnants of a dream. There could be no doubt: in the night outside a helicopter was approaching. For the love of Pete, I thought, sinking back on the pillow and following its course in the dark with sightless eyes. As before, the machine missed my house by what sounded like inches and clattered and moaned to a standstill in Marta’s field. Oho! I thought (though with a pang of a different sort). We can guess who that is, can’t we? A little midnight visit from the boy racer, h’m? How does she do it? That’s the question. What has Marta got that I – I mean, what has she got ? Well, perhaps it isn’t him after all. Maybe it’s one of the Branca family whom she has urgently summoned from his bed in Milan with emergency supplies of Fernet. Voynovia’s St Cecilia calls for refreshment in the small hours. I see it as an allegorical painting.

  Marta

  40

  I’m assuming it was Gerry who delivered Marja’s letter, given that our postman seldom calls. That was kind of him. I wouldn’t have returned home so late had I not impulsively decided to stay down in Camaiore and have dinner after doing the shopping. I had gone to see that smarmy little house agent, Benedetti, to tell him he should ignore the letter of complaint about my neighbour I wrote to him, oh, weeks ago now, and which needless to say he has never even acknowledged. Once the sale is through they wash their hands of you. Anyway, he was out of his office and I certainly wasn’t going to wait. Probably it doesn’t matter now. It was just that after this surprise discovery that Gerry is perhaps serious after all, or at any rate interestingly connected, I felt I’d been a bit hasty and mean to complain about him to a maggot like Benedetti. From now on, thanks to the discovery that underneath that pose of inflexible Englishness Gerry actually speaks amazingly good Italian, if I have complaints I can make them directly to his face. Anyway, enough of him. Let’s see what my darling sister has to say. Venice, ek ni? I smell drama.

  Dearest Matti

  Well, that’s that: Mekmek & I have eloped! We just got the hell out. The fact is that since Timi got back from America he’s been making a perfect pest of himself & I couldn’t bear it any longer. I didn’t ring you because I was scared you’d try to talk me out of it. Mekki’s being just great. He’s a computer programmer, did I say?

  Heaps to tell you. I got away without telling a soul, not even poor Mili, & we flew direct from Voynograd to Vienna & then on to Venice. By the time you get this we’ll probably be heading slowly in your direction. I expect Timi & Father will have set Captain Panic on my trail but it’ll be way too late. Once we were in Venice I e-mailed Ljuka so he’d know I was safe. With any luck he’ll head Father off from drastic action.

  Sorry, Matti, this is in haste. Will call in a day or 2 when we’ve decided what to do. Making straight for you would be feeble as well as being the first place they’ll think to look so we’ll probably linger, either here or on the way. Venice is a first taste of real freedom at last & boy does it feel gooood! I don’t have to explain, do I?

  Can’t wait to see you. You’ll know what to tell them when they call. Oh, and you’re going to love Mekki,
I just know it. He’s cuddly & mmm!

  Tons of love

  Mari

  Well, I was right to smell drama. No doubt my phone has been ringing these last several hours. Thank God I haven’t got one of those answering machines yet. So that’s that. She’s made the break and we’ll just have to see what happens. Tonight’s meal has left me very mellowed and much inclined to go to bed, to be honest. Time enough to worry about Marja tomorrow which, as we Voynovians so wisely say, is another day. (I wonder if other nations have these devastating insights?) I’m also beginning to wonder if that second bottle of wine wasn’t a mistake, especially with the Fernet over coffee; but what the hell, it was just the once. I surely have a long way to go before I risk becoming like Gerry, poor fellow.

  I’m cleaning my teeth and trying to ignore that perennial sneaky worry about exactly what my next job of work is to be. Pacini hasn’t so much as hinted what he intends doing after Arrazzato’s in the can and it’s time I was thinking seriously about the future and an income if I want to keep my independence. Nothing in the universe will make me run to Father to ask him to bail me out, not now. (What an independent tearaway this studious elder daughter has become!) I’m just about to pour myself a tiny nightcap of Fernet when a familiar sound begins to steal into the house. Of course! Dear Ljuka wouldn’t wait for phones to be answered at a moment of family crisis, bless him. Action men act. His helicopter approaches and I’m ready outside the back door with a torch when he lands. Up here on the otherwise silent mountainside the noise seems cataclysmic and I’m briefly conscious that Gerry’s complaint about disturbance was not unreasonable. Then my attention is distracted when I notice it’s a different helicopter, but I’m quite sure the pilot’s my baby brother and so it proves. We embrace beneath the still-whirling main rotor.