The Debt to Pleasure Read online

  And now I have to admit to feeling a considerable degree of relief. (There is no more powerful emotion.) These meditations on winter food have been written – and I set down these words with a sense of rabbit-brandishing, curtain-swishing-aside, non-sawn-through-female-assistant-displaying bravura – as the introductory note attested they would be, in mid-summer, at the start of my ‘hols’. To disclose the truth in full, I have been dictating these reflections on board a ferry during an averagely rough crossing between Portsmouth and St-Malo, a journey I must admit to having often found frustratingly intermediate in length – neither the hour-long hop to Calais, allowing time merely for a cup of bad coffee, the crossword and a couple of turns of the deck, nor the day-long full-dress crossing of Newcastle to Gothenburg or Harwich to Bremerhaven, which at least offers a gesture in the direction of a proper sea voyage. Portsmouth-St-Malo does, however, have the benefit of depositing oneself in one of the most satisfactory, or least unsatisfactory, of the French port towns (an admittedly uncompetitive title, given that Calais is unspeakable, that Boulogne has seen the planners finish what the Allied bombardment began, that Dieppe involves an unthinkable departure from Newhaven, that Roscoff is a fishing village and that Ostend is in Belgium). With the aid of a seductively miniaturized Japanese dictaphone I have been murmuring excoriations of English cooking while sitting in the self-service canteen amid microwaved bacon and congealing eggs; I have spoken to myself of our old flat in Bayswater while sitting on the deck and admiring the dowagerly carriage of a passing Panamanian supertanker; I have pushed through the jostling crowd in the video arcade while cudgelling myself to remember whether Mary-Theresa used jam or jelly in her Queen of Puddings, before it struck me (as I tripped over a heedlessly strewn rucksack outside the bureau de change) that she had indeed used jam but had insisted on its being sieved – a refinement which, as the reader will not have been slow to notice, I have decided to omit. In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.

  The sea’s summer glitter is made tolerable by my newly acquired pair of dark glasses, a proprietary brand of which you have almost certainly heard. Today’s breeze is a degree or two cooler than one might in all justice expect it, though the chill is kept off by the unfamiliar warmth of my new deerstalker, which I am currently wearing with the flaps lowered but with the chinstrap untied. I now feel the need to take a stretch around the promenade and inhale deep draughts of sea air through the slight tickle of my false moustache.

  Another Winter Menu

  Seasons, times of the year, can be strongly evocative of place. Perhaps this is most apparent in spring, which attracts associations with particular periods of youth – especially with the time when an individual feels himself starting to emerge sexually from the bud of childhood, experiencing preconscious urgings and inchoate stirrings which seem to have a parallel in the beckoning mildness of the air and the fructifying, insouciant, shamelessly suggestive unfoldings and emergings of nature herself. These recrudescences bring with them the memory, the associative baggage, of the original irruption: the landscape on which the neiges d’antan once fell. A young woman with whom I recently had the pleasure of conversing admitted that, for her, the onset of spring always brought back the sensation of a particular canalside walk she used to take on her way back from school in the evenings; the incipient summer-hung stillness of the water; the midges; the heat-retaining reeds; the (very) occasional passage of a barge in its bright new livery of spring paint; the bench where she knew she would first be kissed – and this in Derby!

  For my own part, the smell of spring air – that smell which is more a texture than an odour, a sense of the atmosphere’s near-palpability, and yet a smell as well, the smell of things above the threshold of sensory perception but below the level at which a name may be given to that which is perceived (just as some children, myself once among them, can hear the faint, elusive musical tintinnabulation produced by the Brownian motion of air molecules, an ability lost as the bones of the skull and tympanum thicken into adulthood – an irrecoverable, irreparable loss, the loss of something which can never be restored or reduplicated or recovered; as soon as one once cannot hear the Brownian motion it is lost, lost for ever, surviving only as the sense of ghost noise, of sounds too delicate and fine to be real, disturbing the perceived with a memory of what can no longer be perceived); similarly the smells of spring duck below the border of nameability and definition. It is the smell of possibility, of imminence and immanence. For myself, this almost sexual sense of renascent possibility transports me back to the South of France, on my first solo visit there at the age of eighteen; it brings with it the smell of wild herbs (with thyme dominant), the silvery underside of wind-stirred olive leaves, the plasticky sheen of new-picked lemons, the texture of a pebbled driveway felt through the rope soles of one’s espadrilles; nights spent under a single sheet with the moon huge and proximate. In later, fuller summer the sense of smell is more acute at either end of the day, before or after the full suppressing heat of the afternoon; the onset of evening brings with it, not only that renewal of human movement and busyness and the physical expansiveness and spaciousness which accompanies the remission of great heat, but the rebirth of the odours which, in some mysterious way, are locked up by the sun, to be released by the cooling airs of evening – the smell of trees, of settling dust, of water.

  Winter brings with it a comparably strong sense of place, transporting me back to our flat in the rue d’Assas. The first serious snowfall of the year would always be the occasion for great excitement: I would demand the attendance of Mary-Theresa and my brother, and the three of us – nanny, older sibling and thoroughly mufflered and mittened, duffel-jacketed and balaclavaed protégé, so protected from the elements that I was practically spherical – would head off into the Luxembourg Gardens to build the first snowman of the season. There would be flurries and eddies of snow as we waddled through the as yet uncleared streets; then, as we reached the gates of the park, Bartholomew would give a yell, drop my hand and whoopingly construct a snowball which, after first miming a throw of life-endangering velocity, he lobbed towards Mary-Theresa, who would gigglingly half turn away and allow the missile to explode on her shoulder.

  ‘I can fly!’ Bartholomew would shout, running through the park with his arms outstretched as he mimed an aeroplane waggling its wings and banking from side to side. Mary-Theresa and I would hurriedly fabricate our own snowballs and aim them at my transported sibling; my throws childishly underpowered but cunningly timed and precisely aimed, Mary-Theresa’s wild, blind and with that curious double-jointed ungainliness that even beautifully coordinated women manifest when they throw things. Then Bartholomew would tire of his more strenuous cavortings and join us in the construction of a snowman, built on the classic model of big lower blob for stomach-and-legs, smaller blob for upper body, smallest blob for head, apples for eyes, carrot for nose, laterally wedged-in slice of cake for mouth, discredited saucepan for headgear.

  ‘A fine figure of a man,’ Mary-Theresa would say, every year, as we stood side by side in front of our handiwork, panting and steaming like racehorses. Then we would trudge back to the flat. A snowstorm that had been in tentative remission when we went out would now have entirely abated, leaving the stars, seen from the unlit park, hallucinatorily bright and clear; when I first heard the biblical expression ‘breath of life’ I instantly saw again the pouring clouds we would exhale on our walks home through the Paris night.

  It is against this background that I imagine a winter meal, which should of its nature depend on the piquant juxtaposition of darkness, cold, unhousedness, exclusion (and by implication, fear, disorder, madness) with light, wa
rmth, indoorsness, inclusion (comfort, order, security, sanity). In this sense a winter meal is paradigmatic of the talismanic function of the menu one mentioned in one’s Preface; and though the act of eating has other ceremonial aspects – celebratory of emotions as divergent in intensity as outright triumph and simple familial well-being – the basic opposition of order and disorder which underlies all structured eating is more keenly apparent in winter, when the hoot of the owl is so easily mistaken for the wail of the banshee, and impossible monsters lurk in the wavering shadows.

  Goat’s-cheese salad

  Fish stew

  Lemon tart

  It is a common fallacy to assume that winter food should partake of the obvious associations evoked by winter: large, viscid stews, unspillably thick soups, colossal puddings. One wants to be warmed, true, but one also wants to be reminded of better times; to feel the onset of dawn in the darkest hour which immediately precedes it. This menu is designed and intended to give a sense of warmth, sunlight, the same feeling of opening out of the year ahead that one gets when encountering one’s first glimpse, in January, of the upthrusting, tenacious, insouciant, virginal snowdrop. In this process it is essential to give the necessary attention to the selection of salad leaves. (In themselves the availability of these leaves even in the depths of winter testifies to a kind of modernity and belatedness; our ancestors would have been profoundly disturbed by the thought of January lettuce.) The best procedure is to select your greengrocer with care and then to fling yourself on his mercy. Remember to mix leaves from a variety of different lettuces (Cos, Webb’s, Romaine, not the appropriately named Iceberg) and leaves (radicchio, chicory).

  Make a vinaigrette. My preferred portions are a controversial seven parts olive oil to one part balsamic vinegar; the same proportions as in the ideal dry martini. In what I subsequently came to think of as my aesthetic period, during my early and mid-twenties, I used to serve a seven-to-one martini of Beefeater gin and Noilly Prat vermouth, stirred with large ice cubes and then poured into chilled cocktail glasses; twist of lemon on top, releasing a fine invisible spray of citric juices. As a subsequent refinement I borrowed W. H. Auden’s technique of mixing the vermouth and gin at lunchtime (though the great poet himself used vodka) and leaving the mixture in the freezer to attain that wonderful jellified texture of alcohol chilled to below the point at which water freezes. The absence of ice means that the Auden martini is not diluted in any way, and thus truly earns the drink its sobriquet ‘the silver bullet’. In his autobiography the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel says that the correct way to make a martini is simply to allow the light to pass through the vermouth on the way to striking the gin, in a method analogous to the Immaculate Conception. (He means the Virgin Birth – a common mistake.) I have to admit to never having found that particular vein of intensely Catholic irreligiosity at all amusing.

  While it is true that a dry martini should be served unbruised – i.e. still translucent, hence the traditional emphasis so self-consciously defied by James ‘Shaken Not Stirred’ Bond – a vinaigrette should be lightly agitated with a fork until it becomes cloudy and emulsified, the work of a few seconds. It is striking that the Slavic word for the locally distilled spirit, vodka, is an affectionate diminutive of the word for water, voda, and hence a term cognate to that used in France (eau-de-vie), Scandinavia (akvavit) and Ireland (usquebaugh, the water of life). Those old-timers certainly knew a thing or two.

  Arrange the leaves around the sides of the plates on which they are to be served. Luxuriantly nap them with your vinaigrette. Toast a number of slices of bread, one per person, and then put a tranche of goat’s cheese on each slice and pop them all under the grill. Remove just as the cheese starts to bubble and brown. Place toast and cheese in the middle of the dressed plates and serve. A simple dish but one with pleasant contrasts of heat and coolness, the freshness of the salad and the gamey warmth of its proteinous counterpart.

  Cheese is philosophically interesting as a food whose qualities depend on the action of bacteria – it is, as James Joyce remarked, ‘the corpse of milk’. Dead milk, live bacteria. A similar process of controlled spoilage is apparent in the process of hanging game, where some degree of rotting helps to make the meat tender and flavoursome – even if one no longer entirely subscribes to the nineteenth-century dictum that a hung pheasant is only ready for eating when the first maggot drops on to the larder floor. With meat and game the bacterial action is a desideratum rather than a necessity, which is what it is in the case of cheese – a point grasped even in Old Testament times, as Job reveals in his interrogation of the Lord: ‘Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?’ The process of ripening in cheese is a little like the human acquisition of wisdom and maturity; both processes involve a recognition, or incorporation, of the fact than life is an incurable disease with a hundred per cent mortality rate – a slow variety of death.

  Still, there are a lot of very good cheese shops in France, as I had occasion to remark earlier this very day (I am dictating these words in the bath of my acceptable little hôtel in St-Malo. If one drops a battery-powered object into the bath are the results potentially fatal? Memo to myself to check). I was walking down the rue Ste-Barbe when an unexpected movement a few yards ahead in the street caused me to duck into a small épicerie that managed the paradox of being of higher-than-usual standard but still typical. The grave-demeanoured white-coated propriétaire, with a manner that would have been considered reassuringly serious if encountered in an airline pilot or consultant neurosurgeon, was whisking a nine-inch chef’s knife over a Carborundum stone, apparently in preparation for tackling the ham that lay silently in front of him on the marble work surface. Four customers, from whom in my flustered state I derived nothing but an impression of shopping-basket-carrying bourgeois decorum, turned to register my entrance and then turned away. (One should note that to be bourgeois is not at all the same thing as to be middle-class; the former word connotes a precise set of attitudes, prejudices, preconceptions, life-options, and political views. Styles of self-satisfaction vary from country to country, just as to be bored is not the same thing as to suffer from ennui. The condition of feeling einsam is not identical with being lonely, and Gemütlichkeit is to be distinguished from comfiness.) On my left was a formidable battery of tinned goods, from a definitive brand of asparagus tips to those tinned petits pois which have, to more than one palate, intermittently seemed to present a cogent argument for immediate emigration. Behind the counter was arrayed a world-beating selection of hams and prepared pork goods: tasty jambon à l’américaine, moreish jambonneau, reliable jambon de York (how mournfully seldom encountered in York lui-même), shoulder of pork, jambon fumé, jambon de Bayonne, prosciutto crudo di Parma, jambon d’Ardennes, three types of jambon de campagne, saucisson à l’ail, triple-cooked andouille, saucissons d’Arles, de Lyon, a rogue chorizo or two, a carefully spelled kaszanka, andouillette (so importantly different from its near-namesake), subtle boudin blanc made to a secret family recipe, hearty boudin noir, luxurious crépinettes, pâté d’oie, pâté de canard, pâté de foie gras in a hand-labelled tin decorated with what looked like a not especially talented child’s drawing of a goose, terrine de lapin, pâté de verglaze looking a little triste and leftover, terrine de gibier, assorted quiches and galantines, gâteau de lièvre, a gallimaufry of other pies and tarts. To the right of the counter, in a chilled cabinet fronted with plastic strips creating the effect of a deliberately unopaque and titillatingly penetrable Venetian blind, were the cheeses. No fewer than five different versions of the chief Norman glory, Camembert, an example of the profitable ideas sometimes born during periods of historical ferment, as the cheese was invented due to a cross-fertilization between the ingredients of the Norman regions and the cheese-making techniques of Meaux, as they were exported to Camembert by the young Abbé Gobert, fleeing the Terror in 1792. Also Livarot, Pont-l’Evêque, Neufchâtel, a Brie which to my perhaps hypercritical eye looked a little
chalky at the centre, and a rich array of small local cheeses which I would have liked to stay and enumerate were it not that the coast now seemed to be clear, and it remained only for me to tip my baseball cap complimentarily to the épicier and duck back out of his shop, considerably restored after my unpleasant alarm of a few seconds earlier by my contemplation of his wares.