The Debt to Pleasure Read online

  In these early years Mary-Theresa was a constant presence, in the first instance as a nanny and subsequently as a bonne or maid-of-all-work. Although cooking was not central to her function in the household, she would venture into the kitchen on those not infrequent occasions when whoever was employed to be our cook – a Dostoevskyan procession of knaves, dreamers, drunkards, visionaries, bores and frauds, every man his own light, every man his own bushel – was absent; though she had left our employ by the most memorable of these occasions, the time when Mitthaug, our counter-stereotypically garrulous and optimistic Norwegian cook with an especial talent for pickling, failed to arrive in time to make the necessary preparations for an important dinner party because (as it turned out) he had been run over by a train.

  In these circumstances Mary-Theresa would, with an attractive air of ceremonial determination, don the blue-fringed apron she kept for specifically this emergency and advance purposefully into the kitchen to emerge later with one of the dishes which, after extensive intra-familial debates, she had been trained to cook: fish pie, omelette, roast chicken and steak-and-kidney pudding; or alternatively she would prepare her spécialité, Irish stew. As a result the aroma of this last dish became something of a unifying theme in the disparate locations of my upbringing, a binding agent whose action in coalescing these various locales into a consistent, individuated, remembered narrative – into my story – is, I would propose, not unlike the binding action supplied in various recipes by cream, butter, flour, arrowroot, beurre manié, blood, ground almonds (a traditional English expedient, not to be despised) or, as in the recipe I am about to give, by the more dissolvable of two different kinds of potato. When Mary-Theresa had to be dismissed it was perhaps the smell and flavour of this dish that I missed most.

  Assemble your ingredients. It should be admitted that authorities differ as to which cut of meat to use in this dish. I have in my time read three sources who respectively prefer ‘boned lamb shanks or leftover lamb roast’, ‘middle end of neck of lamb’ and ‘best end of neck lamb chops’. My own view is that any of these cuts is acceptable in what is basically a peasant dish (a comment on its history, not its flavour). Mutton is, of course, more flavoursome than lamb, although it has become virtually impossible to obtain. There used to be a butcher who sold mutton not far from our house in Norfolk, but he died. As for the preference expressed by some people for boned lamb in an Irish stew, I can only say that Mary-Theresa used to insist on the osseous variation, with its extra flavour as well as the beguiling hint of gelatinity provided by the marrow. Three lbs of lamb: scrag or middle of neck, or shank, ideally with the bone still in. One and a half lbs firm-fleshed potatoes: Bishop or Pentland Javelin if using British varieties, otherwise interrogate your grocer. One and a half lbs floury potatoes, intended to dissolve in the manner alluded to above. In Britain Maris Piper or King Edward. Or ask. There used to be a very good grocer at the corner of rue Cassette and rue Chevalier in the 6ème, but I don’t suppose he’s there any more. (Science has not given us a full account of the difference between floury and waxy potatoes. If the reader is having a problem identifying to what category his potato belongs, he should drop it into a solution containing one part salt to eleven parts water: floury potatoes sink.) One and a half lbs sliced onions. A selection of herbs to taste – oregano, bay, thyme, marjoram; if using dry varieties, about two teaspoons. Salt. Trim the lamb into cutlets and procure a casserole that’s just big enough. Peel the potatoes and slice them thickly. Layer the ingredients as follows: layer hard potatoes; layer onions; layer lamb; layer soft potatoes; layer onions; layer lamb; repeat as necessary and finish with a thick layer of all remaining potatoes. Sprinkle each layer with salt and herbs. You will, of course, not be able to do that if you have been following this recipe without reading it through in advance. Let that be a lesson to you. Add cold water down the interstices of meat and vegetable until it insinuates up to the top. Put a lid on it. Cook for three hours in an oven at gas mark 2. You will find that the soft potatoes have dissolved into the cooking liquid. Serves six trencherpersons. The ideological purity of this recipe is very moving.

  The broad philosophical distinction between types of stew is between preparations which are given an initial cooking of some kind – frying or sautéing or whatever it may be – and those which are not. Irish stew is the paladin of the latter type of stew; other members of the family include the Lancashire hotpot, which is distinguishable from it only by the optional inclusion of kidneys and the fact that in the final stages of cooking the British version of the dish is browned with the lid off. The similarity between the two dishes testifies to the close cultural affinities between Lancashire and Ireland; it was in Manchester that my father ‘discovered’ Mary-Theresa working, as he put it, in a ‘blacking factory’ – in reality through a business colleague who had hired her in advance of his wife’s parturition, going so far as to employ a private detective to check her references, and then dismissing her when it turned out that his spouse was undergoing a phantom pregnancy. Boiled mutton is a cousin to these preparations, and an underrated dish in its own right, being especially good when eaten with its time-honoured accompaniment (‘It gives an epicure the vapours/ To eat boiled mutton without capers’: Ogden Nash); one should also take into account the hearty Germano-Alsatian dish backenoff, made with mutton, pork, beef and potatoes; soothing blanquette de veau, exempted from initial browning but thickened by cream at the last moment; and, of course, the twin classic daubes, à la Provençale and à l’avignonnaise. In France, indeed, the generic name for this type of stew – cooked from cold – is daube, after the daubière, a pot with a narrow neck and a bulging, swollen middle reminiscent of the Buddha’s stomach.

  In the other kind of stew, whose phylum might well be the sauté or braise, the ingredients are subjected to an initial cooking at high temperature, in order to promote the processes of thickening and binding (where flour or another such agent is used) and also to encourage a preliminary exchange of flavours. As Huckleberry Finn puts it: ‘In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and things go better.’ Notice that the initial cooking does not ‘seal in the juices’ or anything of the sort – science has shown us that no such action takes place. (I suspect that this canard derives from the fact that searing often provides a touch of browned, burnt flavour gratifying to the palate.) Stews of this sort include the justly feared British beef stew, as well as the beery Belgian carbonnade flamande; the gibelottes, matelotes and estouffades of the French provinces; navarin of young lamb and baby vegetables, with its sly rustic allusion to infanticide; the spicy, harissa-enlivened tagines of North Africa; the warming broufado of the Rhône boatmen; the boeuf à la gordiane beloved of the Camargue cowboys, after whose job it is named; the homely international clichés of coq-au-vin and gulyas; surprisingly easy-to-prepare Beef Stroganoff, so handy for unexpected visitors; all types of ragoût and ragù; stufatino alla Romana; stufado di manzo from Northern Italy; estofat de bou from proud Catalonia. I could go on. Notice the difference between the things for which French aristocrats are remembered – the Vicomte de Chateaubriand’s cut of fillet, the Marquis de Béchameil’s sauce – and the inventions for which Britain remembers its defunct eminences: the cardigan, the wellington, the sandwich.

  One authority writes that: ‘Whereas the soul of a daube resides in a pervasive unity – the transformation of individual quantities into a single character, a sauté should comprehend an interplay among entities, each jealous of distinctive flavours and textures – but united in harmony by the common veil of sauce.’ That is magnificently said. One notes that in the United States of America the preferred metaphor to describe the assimilation of immigrants is that of the ‘salad bowl’, supplanting the old idea of the ‘melting pot’, the claim being that the older term is thought to imply a loss of original cultural identity. In other words the melting pot used to be regarded as a sauté, but has come to be seen as a daube
.

  My choice of pudding is perhaps more controversial than either of the preceding two courses. Queen of Puddings is an appropriately wintry dish, and considerably easier to make than it looks. Mary-Theresa would always serve it after the Irish stew, and it was to become the first dish I was ever taught to make for myself. Breadcrumbs, 5 oz. thereof; 1 tbs vanilla sugar, 2 oz. butter and the grated rind of a lemon; a pint of hot milk; leave to cool; beat in four egg yolks; pour into a greased shallow dish and bake until the custard is barely set. Gently smear two warmed table-spoonfuls of your favourite jam on top. Are you a strawberry person or a blackcurrant person? No matter. Now whisk four egg whites in a copper bowl until the peaks stand up on their own. Mix in sugar, whisk. Fold in a total of 4 oz. sugar with the distinctive wrist-turning motion of somebody turning the dial of a very big radio. Put this egg-white mixture on top of the jam. Sprinkle a little more sugar on top and bake for a quarter of an hour. One of the disappointing features of this pudding is that it is almost impossible, in writing about or discussing it, to avoid the double genitive ‘of’ that used so to upset Flaubert. But one of the charms of Queen of Puddings (see!) is that it exploits both of the magical transformations which the egg can enact. On the one hand, the incorporation of air into the coagulating egg-white proteins – the ‘stiffening’ of egg whites up to eight times their original volume, as exploited in the soufflé and its associates. On the other hand, the coagulation of egg-yolk proteins – as in custard, mayonnaise, hollandaise and all variations thereof. Always remember that the classical sauces of French cooking should be approached with respect but without fear.

  The first time I made Queen of Puddings was in the cramped, elongated kitchen of our Paris appartement. The almost untenable lateral constriction of space in the scullery (which is what it really was) was compensated for, or outwitted by, an ingenious system of folding compartments for storing crockery and utensils. Beyond this room was a small larder from which Mary-Theresa would emerge red-faced, lopsidedly carrying a gas canister, like a milkmaid struggling with a churn. She always insisted on installing a full canister before she began to cook, the legacy of an earlier incident in which she had run out of gas half-way through a stew and had to change canisters in the middle of the process. In the course of doing so she made some technical error, which led to a small explosion that left her temporarily without eyebrows. There was known to be a gremlin in that kitchen who specialized in emptying canisters which by all logic should have been full: the supply had a tendency to run out in the middle of elaborate culinary feats. My father once remarked that all you had to do to run out of gas was merely utter the word ‘koulibiac’.

  ‘It’s time for you to learn about cooking,’ Mary-Theresa said, pressing a metal implement into my palm and holding my hand as we together enacted the motions of whisking, at first using my whole arm and then isolating the relevant movement of the wrist; I experienced for the first time the divinely comforting feeling of wire-on-copper-through-an-intervening-layer-of-egg, a sound to me which is in its effect the exact opposite (though, like most ‘exact opposites’, in some sense generically similar) to those of nails on a blackboard or of polystyrene blocks being rubbed together. (Does anybody know what evolutionary function is served by this peculiarly powerful and well-developed response? Some genetic memory of – what? The sound of a sabre-toothed tiger scrabbling up a rockface with unsheathed claws? Woolly mammoths pawing the frozen earth as they prepare their halitotic and evilly tusked stampede?)

  It was my mother, oddly, who was most upset by the revelation of Mary-Theresa’s criminality. I say ‘oddly’ because relations between them hadn’t been entirely without the usual frictions between employer and employee, added to which were elements of the war (eternal, undeclared, like all the hardest-fought wars – those between the gifted and the ordinary, the old and the young, the short and the rest) between the beautiful and the plain, an extra dimension to this conflict being supplied by the fact that Mary-Theresa’s looks, slightly lumpy and large-pored, with the ovoid-faced, sluggish solemnity of the natural mouth-breather, were perfectly calibrated to set off my mother’s hyacinthine looks: her eyelashes were as long and delicate as a young man’s, her subtle coloration was thrown into relief by the over-robust blossoming of Mary-Theresa’s country complexion, and the expressive farouche beauty of her eyes (more than one admirer having blurtingly confessed that until meeting her he hadn’t understood the meaning of the term ‘lynx-eyed’) was only emphasized by the exophthalmic naivety of Mary-Theresa’s countenance, which had a look that never failed to be deeply bullyable. Furthermore, there was also a tension of the type – mysterious and uncategorizable but immediately perceptible, as present and as indecipherable as an argument in a foreign language – which occurs between two women who do not ‘get on’. This was apparent in the certain ad feminam crispness with which my mother gave Mary-Theresa instructions and issued reprimands, as well as Mary-Theresa’s demeanour, with just the faintest bat-squeak of mimed reluctance as she acted on my mother’s ukases, her manner managing to impute an almost limitless degree of wilfulness, irrationality and ignorance of basic principles of domestic science on the part of the spoilt chatelaine of the chaise-longue (perhaps I paraphrase slightly). All this was underscored by the contrast with Mary-Theresa’s attitude to what my mother would call ‘the boys’, meaning my father (never boyish, incidentally, not even in the blazered photographs of his youth, which admittedly record a period before most people felt entirely unselfconscious in front of a camera) and me and my brother: Mary-Theresa’s manner with us always having a friendly directness that my mother, with finer perceptive instruments than we possessed, I think saw as not being wholly free of all traces of flirtatiousness. (Has any work of art in any medium ever had a better title than Women Beware Women?) All this, of course, would be apparent (or not apparent) in dialogues which, if transcribed, would run, in full, as follows:

  MOTHER: Mary-Theresa, would you please change the flower-water?

  MARY-THERESA: Yes, ma’am.

  —the live flame of human psychology having flickered through this exchange like the sparrow flitting through the hall in Bede’s history. (There is an erotics of dislike.) Anyway, notwithstanding that, my mother reacted badly to what happened. It began one sharp morning in April. My mother was at her mirror.

  ‘Darling, have you seen my earrings?’

  Remarks of this nature, usually addressed to my father but sometimes absentmindedly to me or my brother, more one felt as local representatives of our gender than as full paternal surrogates, were a routine occurrence. My father was in the small dressing-room next door which opened off their bedroom, engaged in the mysteries of adult male grooming, so much more evolved and sophisticated than the knee-scrubbing, hair-combing and sock-straightening that my brother and I would quotidianly undertake: shaving (with a bowl and jug full of hot water, drawn from the noisy bathroom taps and then thoughtfully carried to his adjoining lair in order to make way for the full drama and complexity of my mother’s toilette), eau-de-cologning, tie-tying, hair-patting, cuff-shooting and collar-brushing.

  The earrings in question were two single emeralds, each set off by a band of white gold, in my view possessing the unusual quality of being vulgar through understatement; they were the gift of a mysterious figure from my mother’s early life, the love-smitten scion of a Midlands industrial family, who (in the version that emerged through veils of ‘This weather reminds me of someone I was once very fond of and ‘I always wear it today because it was a special day for someone I’d prefer not to speak about’) had refused to accept the earrings back when she attempted to return them and had subsequently run away to join the Foreign Legion. His relatives only managed to catch him in time because he was struck down in Paris (in the course of what was supposed to be his last meal as a free man) by an infected moule. In later life he was knighted for services to industry before dying in a Caribbean seaplane crash. The gleaming banks of seafood on display at the gr
eat Parisian brasseries are like certain politicians in that they manage to be impressive without necessarily inspiring absolute confidence.

  ‘Which earrings?’

  ‘No, darling, maman is busy’ – this to me – ‘the emeralds.’

  ‘Not in the morning!’

  ‘I wasn’t going to wear them, darling – I’m looking in the box.’

  ‘Have you tried the box?’

  The formulaic, litanic quality of these exchanges is perhaps perceptible in that reply of my father’s.

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t wear them now. I’m not an idiot,’ said my mother.

  The discovery of the earrings hidden under Mary-Theresa’s mattress in the traditional little attic room of the bonne was, to my mother especially, a shock. It was the gendarmes who found the cherished jewellery – the gendarmes whom my father had called, reacting to my mother’s insistence at least partly in a spirit of exhausted retaliation, a cross between an attempt to show up my mother’s as-he-said hysteria and an après-moi-le-déluge desire to give up and let the worst happen (the worst being, in his imagination, I don’t know quite what: I think he thought either that the emeralds would turn up somewhere where they had been irrefutably left by my mother – beside the toothpaste, down the side of a chair – or that they would have been stolen by the concierge, an especially grim widowed Frenchwoman du troisième âge, about whom my father observed that ‘It’s very hard to imagine what Mme Dupont’s husband must have been like, once one accepts that circumstances can be shown to rule out Dr Crippen’). But I think my father had underestimated the French seriousness about property and money. The young gendarme to whom he made the initial report, filling out a form of great complexity, was genuinely and visibly affected by news of the value of the missing item and turned up at our flat the next day, good-looking and polite, with his képi clutched in front of him in a gesture which made him look like a schoolboy apologizing for being late. The policeman, very fair, with the flaxen hair of some Normans, had the air and the manners of being too nobly born for his job – a vicomte’s younger son, perhaps, putting in his year or two on the beat (noblesse oblige being one of those expressions whose Frenchness is not accidental) before leapfrogging to some glamorously deskbound job in the apparat, tipped for the top. He first sequestered himself in the drawing-room with my mother, who ordered tea. And then, before beginning his search, he spoke to my brother and me, first together, with our mother present, and then separately (this arrangement, and my mother’s scented departure, smiling and glancing reassuringly and perfect-motherishly backwards, being conveyed between the two of them with an apparently wordless complicity that in another context would have seemed tinglingly adulterous). The general overwhelmingness of the occasion was augmented by the feeling that the imputation of theft, once aired, had somehow taken on a life of its own – as if the allegation, when voiced, was, like sodium, spontaneously combustible when exposed to oxygen. As indeed it turned out to be, though, as so often happens with adult dramas that take place in front of children, the first stages were hidden and off-stage, perceptible only through the distortions that affected our day. These began when, after potterings and meanderings around the flat on the part of the gendarme – while we sat by the drawing room with Mary-Theresa and our mother, my brother as usual daubing away with an indoor easel and myself reading, I happen to remember, Le Petit Prince – he came back into the room and, avoiding all our gazes, asked my mother if he could speak to her alone for a moment.