The Debt to Pleasure Page 2

  We then sat down to a meal which Dante would have hesitated to invent. I was seated opposite my parents, between a spherical house matron and a silent French assistant. The first course was a soup in which pieces of undisguised and unabashed gristle floated in a mud-coloured sauce whose texture and temperature were powerfully reminiscent of mucus. Then a steaming vat was placed in the middle of the table, where the jowly, watch-chained headmaster presided. He plunged his serving arm into the vessel and emerged with a ladleful of hot food, steaming like fresh horse dung on a cold morning. For a heady moment I thought I was going to be sick. A plate of soi-disant cottage pie – the mince grey, the potato beige – was set in front of me.

  ‘The boys call this “mystery meat”,’ confided matron happily. I felt the assistant flinch. Other than that I don’t remember (I can’t imagine) what we talked about, and over the rest of the meal – as Swinburne’s biographer remarked, à propos an occasion when his subject had misbehaved during a lecture on the subject of Roman sewage systems – ‘the Muse of history must draw her veil’.

  There is an erotics of dislike. It can be (I am indebted to a young friend for the helpful phrase) ‘a physical thing’. Roland Barthes observes somewhere that the meaning of any list of likes and dislikes is to be found in its assertion of the fact that each of us has a body, and that this body is different from everyone else’s. This is tosh. The real meaning of our dislikes is that they define us by separating us from what is outside us; they separate the self from the world in a way that mere banal liking cannot do. ‘Gourmandism is an act of judgement, by which we give preference to those things which are agreeable to our taste over those which are not’ (Brillat-Savarin). To like something is to want to ingest it and, in that sense, is to submit to the world; to like something is to succumb, in a small but contentful way, to death. But dislike hardens the perimeter between the self and the world, and brings a clarity to the object isolated in its light. Any dislike is in some measure a triumph of definition, distinction, and discrimination – a triumph of life.

  I am not exaggerating when I say that this visit to my brother at St Botolph’s (not its real name) was a defining moment in my development. The combination of human, aesthetic and culinary banality formed a negative revelation of great power, and hardened the already burgeoning suspicion that my artist’s nature isolated and separated me from my alleged fellow men. France rather than England, art rather than society, separation rather than immersion, doubt and exile rather than yeomanly certainty, gigot à quarante gousses d’ail rather than roast lamb with mint sauce. ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less travelled by – and that has made all the’ (important word coming up) ‘difference.’

  This might seem a lot of biographical significance to attribute to a single bad experience with a shepherd’s pie. (I have sometimes tried to establish a distinction between cottage pie, made with beef leftovers, and shepherd’s pie, made with lamb, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on, so I have abandoned it. They order these things differently in France.) Nevertheless I hope I have made my point about the importance of the cook’s maintaining a proactive stance vis-à-vis the problem of the winter diet. Winter should be seen as an opportunity for the cook to demonstrate, through the culinary arts, his mastery of balance and harmony and his oneness with the seasons; to express the deep concordances of his own and nature’s rhythms. The tastebuds should be titillated, flirted with, provoked. The following menu is an example of how this may be done. The flavours in it possess a certain quality of intensity suitable for those months of the year when one’s tastebuds feel swaddled.

  Blinis with sour cream and caviare

  Irish stew

  Queen of Puddings

  Of the many extant batter, pancake and waffle dishes – crèpes and galettes, Swedish krumkakor, sockerstruvor and plättar, Finnish tattoriblinit, generic Scandinavian äggvåffla, Italian brigidini, Belgian gaufrettes, Polish nalesniki, Yorkshire pudding – blinis are my personal favourite. The distinguishing characteristics of the blini, as a member of the happy family of pancakes, is that it is thick (as opposed to thin), non-folding (as opposed to folding) and raised with yeast (as opposed to bicarbonate of soda); it is Russian; and, like the Breton sarrasin pancake, it is made of buckwheat (as opposed to plain flour). Buckwheat is not a grass, and therefore not a cereal, and therefore does not fall under the protection of the goddess Ceres, the Roman deity who presided over agriculture. On her feast day, in a strangely evocative ceremony, foxes with their tails on fire were let loose in the Circus Maximus; nobody knows why. The Greek equivalent of Ceres was the goddess Demeter, mother of Persephone. It was in Demeter’s honour that the Eleusinian mysteries were held, a legacy of the occasion when she was forced to reveal her divinity in order to explain why she was holding King Celeus’ baby in the fire – no doubt a genuinely embarrassing and difficult-to-explain moment, even for a goddess.

  Blinis. Sift 4 oz. buckwheat flour, mix with ½ oz. yeast (dissolved in warm water) and ¼ pint warm milk, leave for fifteen minutes. Mix 4 oz. flour with ½ pint milk, add 2 egg yolks, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tbs melted butter, and a pinch of salt, whisk the two blends together. Leave for an hour. Add 2 whisked egg whites. Right. Now heat a heavy cast-iron frying pan of the type known in both classical languages as a placenta – which is, as everybody knows, not at all the same thing as the caul or wrapping in which the foetus lives when it is inside the womb. To be born in the caul, as I was, is a traditional indication of good luck, conferring second sight and immunity from death by drowning; preserved cauls used to attract a premium price from superstitious sailors. Freud was born in the caul, as was the hero of his favourite novel, David Copperfield. Sometimes, if there is more than one sibling in the family, one of them born in the caul and the other not, the obvious difference between them in terms of luck, charm and talent can be woundingly great, and the fact of one of them having been born in the caul can cause intense jealousy and anger, particularly when that gift is accompanied by other personal and artistic distinctions. But one must remember that while it is disagreeable to be on the receiving end of such emotions, it is, of course, far more degrading to be the person who experiences them. To claim that one’s five-year-old brother pushed one out of a tree-house, for instance, and caused one to break one’s arm, when in fact one fell in the course of trying to climb higher up the tree in order to gain a vantage from which one could spy into the nanny’s room, is a despicable way of retaliating for that younger brother’s having charmed the nanny by capturing her likeness with five confident strokes of finger paint and then shyly handing the artwork to her with a little dedicatory poem (‘This is for you, Mary-T., / Because you are the one for me’) written across the top in yellow crayon.

  When smoke starts to rise out of the pan add the batter in assured dollops, bearing in mind that each little dollop is to become a blini when it grows up, and that the quantities given here are sufficient for six. Turn them over when bubbles appear on top.

  Serve the pancakes with sour cream and caviare. Sour cream is completely straightforward, and if you need any advice or guidance about it then, for you, I feel only pity. Caviare, the cleaned and salted roe of the sturgeon, is a little more complicated. The surprisingly un-German, Wisconsin-born sociologist Thorstein Veblen formulated something he called ‘the scarcity theory of value’ to argue the thesis that objects increase in value in direct proportion to their perceived rarity, rather than to their intrinsic merit or interest. In other words, if Marmite was as hard to come by as caviare, would it be as highly prized? (Of course, there is an experimentally determinable answer to this because we know that among British expatriate communities commodities such as Marmite and baked beans have virtually the status of bankable currency. When my brother was living near Arles he once, in the course of a game of poker with an actor who had retired to run a shop targeting itself at nostalgic Englishpeople, won a year’s supply of chocolate digestive biscuits. In the ensuing twelve months he put o
n a stone which he was never to lose.) Lurking in this idea is the question of whether or not caviare is – not to put too fine a point on it – ‘worth it’. All I can say in response to that is to point to the magic of the sturgeon, producer of these delicate, exotic, rare, expensive eggs, and one of the oldest animals on the planet, in existence in something closely resembling its current form for about a hundred million years. The fish grows up to twelve feet in length and has a snout with which it roots for food underneath the sea bed; when you eat caviare you are partaking of this mysterious juxtaposition of the exquisite and the atavistic. And spending a lot of money into the bargain, of course. Caviare is graded according to the size of its grains, which in turn vary according to the size of the fish from which they are taken, beluga being the biggest, then ossetra, then sevruga; ossetra, whose eggs span the spectrum of colours from dirty battleship to occluded sunflower, is my roe of choice. Much of the highest-grade caviare carries the designation malassol, which means ‘lightly salted’.

  The process by which the correct level of salting is applied to Volga caviare is insufficiently well known. The master taster – a rough-and-ready seeming fellow he is likely to be, too, with a knitted cap on his head, a gleam in his eye and a dagger in his boot – takes a single egg into his mouth and rolls it around his palate. By applying his almost mystically fine amalgam of experience and talent, he straight away knows how much salt to add to the sturgeon’s naked roe. The consequences of any inaccuracy are disastrous, gastronomically and economically (hence the dagger). There are analogies with the way in which an artist – I am not thinking only of myself – can judge the quality of a work of art with a rapidity that appears instantaneous, as if the act of visual apprehension and of critical estimation are simultaneous, or even as if the judgement infinitesimally precedes the encounter with the artwork, as in one of the paradoxes of quantum physics, or as in a dream one constructs an elaborate narrative, expanding confidently across time and space and involving many fragmentations of person and object – a deceased relative who is also a tuba, an aeroplane flight to Argentina which is also one’s memory of one’s first sexual experience, a misfiring revolver which is also a wig – before coming to a terrifying climax with the noise of the siren ringing out across London to announce the imminent outbreak of nuclear war, a sound which resolves itself into the banal but infinitely reassuring domestic event which somehow contained within it the whole of the preceding story: the happy jangling of an alarm clock, or the arrival at the front door of one’s favourite postman, carrying an inconveniently large parcel.

  Caviare is sometimes eaten by chess players as a way of rapidly consuming a considerable quantity of easily digestible protein without any of the stupefying effects of a bona fide meal. It is an excellent cold-weather food. It is not available on cross-channel ferries such as this one, though in many respects it would be an ideal mid-journey picnic. There is, however, a deliriously vulgar ‘caviare bar’ at Heathrow Terminal Four, just to the right of the miniature Harrods.

  The chemistry of yeast, incidentally, has not yet been entirely deciphered by scientists. I take this to be a reminder that there are still some mysteries left, some corners and crevices of the universe which are still opaque to us. For me, this dish, perhaps because of its connection or non-connection with Demeter (for, as Buddhism teaches us, non-connection can be a higher form of connection) is irrevocably bound up with the idea of mystery. I must confess to taking some pleasure from the fact that if it is not possible to diminish the magic of rising yeast, then perhaps there are one or two corners of poetry left in a world which at times seems depleted and diminished by explanation. I myself have always disliked being called a ‘genius’. It is fascinating to notice how quick people have been to intuit this aversion and avoid using the term.

  With liberal additions of sour cream and caviare the above recipe – I prefer the old-fashioned spelling ‘receipt’, but it was pointed out to me that ‘if you call it that, nobody will have a f***ing clue what you’re talking about’ – represents adequate quantities for six people as a starter, providing several blinis each. Perhaps I have already said that. It is only sensible to construct an entire meal out of blinis if one is planning to spend the rest of the day out on the taiga, boasting about women and shooting bears.

  Irish stew is uncomplicated, though none the less tasty for that. It is for ever associated in my mind (my heart, my palate) with my Cork-born, Skibbereen-raised nanny, Mary-Theresa. She was one of the few fixed points of a childhood that was for its first decade or so distinctly itinerant. My father’s business interests kept him on the move; my mother’s former profession – the stage – had given her a taste for travel and the sensation of movement. She liked to live not so much out of suitcases as out of trunks, creating a home that at the same time contained within it the knowledge that this was the illusion of home, a stage set or theatrical re-description of safety and embowering domesticity; her wall-hung carpets and portable bibelots (a lacquered Chinese screen, a lean, malignly upright Egyptian cat made of onyx) were a way of saying, ‘Let’s pretend.’ She would, I think, have preferred to regard motherhood as merely another feat of impersonation; but it was as if an intermittently amusing cameo part had gruellingly protracted itself, and what was intended to be an experimental production (King Lear as a senile brewery magnate, Cordelia on rollerskates) had turned into an inadvertent Mousetrap, with my mother stuck in a frumpy role she had only taken on in the first place as a favour to the hard-pressed director. To put it another way, she treated parenthood as analogous to the parts forced on an actor past his prime or of eccentric physique who has been obliged to specialize in ‘characters’. She was ironic, distracted and self-pitying, with a way of implying that, now that the best things in life were over, she would take on this role. She would check one’s fingernails or take one to the circus with an air of someone bravely concealing an unfavourable medical prognosis: the children must never know! But she also had a public mode in which she played at being a mother in the way that a very, very distinguished actress, caught overnight in the Australian outback (train derailed by dead wallaby or flash flood), is forced to put up at a tiny settlement where, she is half-appalled and half-charmed to discover, the feisty pioneers have been preparing for weeks to put on, this very same evening, under wind-powered electric lights, a production of Hamlet; discovering the identity of their newcomer (via a blurred photograph in a torn-out magazine clipping brandished by a stammering admirer), the locals insist that she take a, no, the starring role; she prettily demurs; they anguishedly insist; she becomingly surrenders, on the condition that she play the smallest and least likely of roles – the gravedigger, say. And gives a performance which, decades later, the children of the original cast still sometimes discuss as they rock on their porches to watch the only train of the day pass silhouetted against the huge ochres and impossibly elongated shadows of the desert sunset . . . That was the spirit in which my mother ‘did’ being a mother: to be her child during these public episodes was to be uplifted, irradiated, fortune’s darling. But if this, as has recently been observed to me, ‘makes her sound like a total nightmare’, then I am omitting the way in which one was encouraged to collude in her role-playing, and was also allowed great freedom of manoeuvre by it. With a part of oneself conscripted to act the other role in whatever production she was undertaking – duet or ensemble, Brecht or Pinter, Ibsen or Stoppard or Aeschylus – a considerable amount of one’s own emotional space was left vacant, thanks to her essential and liberating lack of interest.

  So travel and the condition of itinerancy did not bother my mother, which is just as well, as it was a fundamental aspect of my father’s business activities. I therefore had a mobile childhood in which the rites of passage were geographically as well as temporally distinct. Thus I have somewhere a maltreated red leather photograph album with a picture in it of me holding my mother’s hand; I am looking into the camera with an air of suppressed triumph as I proudly model
my first-ever pair of long trousers. The proliferation of out-of-focus yacht masts in the background gives less of a clue than it should: Cowes? Portofino? East Looe? Another picture shows a view from the outside of the high-windowed, difficult-to-heat ground-floor flat in Bayswater (still in my possession) where my father provided the first external reflection of the inner vocational light I felt glimmering within me: he picked up a watercolour I had made that afternoon (hothouse mimosa and dried lavender in a glass jar) and said, ‘D’you know, I think the lad’s got something.’ That memory brings with it the smell of the parquet flooring which, on otherwise unoccupied afternoons, I used to dig up with my fingers, less for the pleasure of vandalism than for the heady and magically comforting odour of the gummy resin which bound the oblong blocks in place. When you’d dug up a tile, however carefully you put it back, it somehow never looked the same again. That parquet pattern, arranged so that the four-tile squares were aligned with the corners of the room in the shape of a squat diamond, had an air of interpretability, of cabbalistic significance; as if, gazed at long enough or hard enough, it would be bound eventually to yield a meaning, a clue. Or our flat in Paris, off the rue d’Assas in the 6ème, still vivid to me as the location for my first encounter with the death of a pet: a hamster called Hercule, who had been placed in my brother’s charge by our sinister concierge’s grandson during their August visit to relatives in Normandy. My father wore a black tie when he went downstairs to break the news.