The Debt to Pleasure Read online

  Later that evening in St-Malo I went to eat fish soup. (Perhaps I should say later this evening. I’m still in the bath. An adroit manoeuvre with my prehensile right big toe has just satisfactorily topped up the level of hot water.) It was the end of a midsummer day; the rich yellow light at the close of the long afternoon came slanting, sea-scented, across the port like the memory of Cornwall. Perhaps, just as every love stands in some relationship to our first love affair – a relation which holds only if one extends the possible nature of the interdependency to include parody, inversion, quotation, pastiche, operatic recasting, as well as slavish and identical reduplication – no restaurant in later life comes entirely unaccompanied by some associations with our first restaurant. And just as one’s first love is not automatically or necessarily one’s first bedpartner, and just as well, one’s first restaurant is not or need not be one’s literal first restaurant, the place where one ate in public for the first time and paid for the experience (the forgotten motorway service station on a trip north to auntie’s, the first good-behaviour-rewarding, shopping-expedition teashop scone), but rather the place where one first encountered the blinding, consoling hugeness of the restaurant idea. Stiff napery; heavy, gravity-laden crockery; pristine wineglasses, erect and presentable as Guardsmen on parade; an expectant Commando of pronged, edged and expectant cutlery; the human furniture of the other diners and the uniformed waiters; above all, the awareness that one has finally arrived at a setting designed primarily to minister to one’s needs, a bright palace of rendered attention. Hence, perhaps, that tug of the mythic which underlies restaurants, which are after all a comparatively recent institution, evolving out of the travellers’ inn, via the gradual urbanization of Western man, and first appearing in their theatricalized modern lineaments comparatively late, towards the end of the eighteenth century, not long before the Romantic idea of genius (q.v.). There are certain types of conversation, certain varieties of self-awareness, which only take place in restaurants, particularly those bearing on the psychodynamics of relationships between couples, who (frequent solitary diner-out that I am) I notice often eat out apparently with the specific purpose of monitoring the condition of their affair, as if breaking up were something that, by fixed anthropological principle, can only be done by instalments and in public; as if it were reassuring to witness how many others were also precariously aboard the freighted craft of couplehood; as if all couples were by law compelled to take their place in a tableau of relationship-conditions, with every state on display, from the initial flirtatious overextension of eye-contact to one of those silences which can only be incubated by at least two decades of attritional intimacy.

  Perhaps I was sensitized to all this by my mother. It was with her that I underwent my own restaurant rite de passage, and she could be relied upon for very little else as confidently as she could for her sense of occasion. (Of course there had already been other meals eaten out, comparable – to refer back to my previous metaphor – with the rudimentary fumblings and yeti-like gropings of early sexual experience.) The town, Paris; the restaurant, La Coupole; the cast of characters, my mother and me and our Parisian public and an attendant chorus of bustling solicitous waiters; the meal, a fish soup followed by the celebrated curry d’agneau for her, a simple steak–frites for little me, followed by a lemon tart split between the two of us (and this is something for which I am not going to be bothered to give a recipe: simply purchase the relevant pudding from someone authoritative); my mother’s dress, a magnificently expensive, black, scallop-backed item by a named designer, worn with no jewellery apart from the already mentioned pair of earrings; my own outfit an entirely adorable little blue sailor suit with white neckings. (Many were the hot-eyed glances I had no doubt been unheedingly darted – though one was amused to come across, reproduced in a magazine article, a photograph of the original youth who had so affected Thomas Mann, and upon whom he had modelled Aschenbach’s visione amorosa – the child in question could only honestly by described as a lump. Art over life once again.) It may have been in those moments that food crystallized for me as a lifelong passion, and that a commitment to a particular modus vivendi was decided, as she smiled at me across the remains of the tureened soup and devastated rouille and said: ‘One day, chéri, I am sure you will do great things.’

  It will therefore surprise no one to learn that all fish soups and stews have always had an especially high place in my esteem and affections. I have a particularly strong identification with that recipe which fuses the base with the noble, the leftover catch at the bottom of the fisherman’s net (the primary source for the fish in the dish, as in most fish stews and soups) with the highest degree of esculence, delicacy and artistry; that brings together the unsaleable minnows of the Mediterranean with the fabulous luxuriousness of saffron (almost as expensive, pound for pound, as gold, for which it can sometimes seem to be a kind of edible simile); a dish rooted in the solid traditions of peasant cookery – nicely exemplified by the fact that the dish is prepared in a single pot, the totemic single pot of European and indeed global peasant cookery, from the subsistence farmer in Connemara to the muzhik of Omsk – but which also has its noble place in the ramifying, allusive grammar of French restaurant cooking, the cuisine which has in its home country reached the greatest degree of approximation to the full complexity of an articulated language; in short, I have always been especially keen on bouillabaisse. As Curnonsky said, ‘A great dish is the master achievement of countless generations.’ Bouillabaisse’s combination of luxuriousness and practicality, of romance and realism, is one that is positable as characteristic of the Marseillais themselves, who possess in marked degree that habit of seeming to live up to a collective stereotype which is often to be found in the inhabitants of port towns – one thinks of the self-consciously abrasive and warm-hearted vitality of Naples, the self-consciously waggish sentimentality of Liverpool, the self-consciously romantic stevedores of Alexandria or even the self-consciously muscular, rude and truculent dock-workers of old New York. On this spectrum the Marseillais take the place of being selfconsciously romantic about how realistic they are, and just as it can seem as if the whole of Liverpool is constantly engaged in the description, celebration and praise of Scouseness, the Marseillais can appear to be embarked on a permanent project to enumerate, categorize and enact their own particular brand of forcefully realistic méridionalité. Note that even the name of bouillabaisse (from bouillir and abaisser, ‘boil’ and ‘reduce’) strikes a note of swaggering, shrugging, stylized rough practicality, as if to say, it’s a soup – what else are you going to do? It is also present in the story underlying the myth that bouillabaisse was invented by the goddess Aphrodite herself, patron saint and founder of that characterful city; a fiction no doubt superimposed upon the historical truth that Marseille was first settled by the Phoenicians, who were attracted by its conveniently near-rectangular natural harbour (whose heart is still the vieux port); they brought with them their mythology, their lighthouses and their talent for trading. Aphrodite is said to have created bouillabaisse as a way of getting her husband Hephaestos – the crippled smith, patron of craftsmen and cuckolds – to ingest a large quantity of saffron, a then-famous soporific, and so to fall asleep, thus permitting the goddess to set off for an assignation with her inamorata Ares (who has always struck me as being, of all the characters in the Greek pantheon, the most unattractively sweaty). The Greek myths, like the Old Testament, do have the virtue of describing the way people actually behave.

  My researchers have failed to confirm or deny the scientific basis of this folk-belief about saffron, which is, by the way, a flower, consisting as it does of the stigmas (the pollen-trapping parts) of Crocus sativus. It takes more than four thousand of the laboriously (manually) harvested stigmas to provide a single ounce of the spice, the popularity of which is confirmed by the name of the town Saffron Walden, now no doubt a dreary market town with the standard appurtenances of lounging skinheads swigging cider on the step
s of the graffiti-defaced war memorial, and a punitive one-way system. I have never bothered to visit Saffron Walden, notwithstanding the fact that it is not a big detour off the route I usually take from my pied-à-terre in Bayswater to the cottage in Norfolk. This part of England, I often think, must have been at its most comfortable during the period of Roman occupation, when togaed Romano-Britons could stroll through properly laid-out paved streets past clean buildings to the baths, where they could relax with a leisurely dip, a gossip and perhaps a glass or two of locally grown wine, confident in the knowledge that they were protected from their own countrymen by handsome, polite, heavily armed legionaries. The important thing to remember about saffron, from the cook’s point of view, is that it is enough to use just one or two threads; any more will risk imparting a bitter, ‘socky’ flavour.

  There is considerable debate about whether it is possible to make bouillabaisse away from the Mediterranean and the rocky coves which provide this once humble dish with its wondrous variety of what my father used to refer to as ‘little finny blighters’. My own view, which I relate after the consumption of many gloomy so-called bouillabaisses in northern climes, is that the dish does not travel or translate but that, when the basic principles are understood, it can be made to adapt.

  Take two pounds of assorted rockfish, ideally bought somewhere on the Mediterranean in a quayside negotiation with a leathery grandfather-and-grandson team who have spent the long day hauling nets aboard in steep, baking coves, their tangible desire for the day’s first pastis in no way accelerating the speed or diminishing the complexity of the bargaining process. There must be at least five different kinds of fish, including, of course, the indispensable rascasse, an astonishingly ugly fish whose appearance always reminds me of our Norwegian cook, Mitthaug. Also necessary are gurnard, monkfish, anglerfish, lotte, baudroie (the same thing, baudroie being the French word and lotte the Provencal; and another child-frightener it is too), and a wrasse or two, either the girelle or the wonderfully named vieille coquette, which I first ate in the company of my mother. Clean the fish and chop the big ones into chunks. Organize two glasses of Provençal olive oil and a tin of tomatoes; alternatively you can peel, seed and chop your own tomatoes. Personally, canned tomatoes seem to me to be one of the few unequivocal benefits of modern life. (Dentistry, the compact disc.) In a large, handsome saucepan, sweat two cloves of chopped garlic in one glass of the oil, add the tomatoes and a pinch of saffron; then add six pints of what in England would be chlorinated former effluent (also known as ‘water’) and boil furiously. Put in the firmer-textured of the fish and the second glass of oil and boil hard for fifteen minutes. Add the softer-textured fish and cook for five minutes. Serve whole fish and big chunks on large soup-plate-type plates and serve the broth separately with croûtons and rouille. I can’t be bothered to go into details about the rouille, since my fingers are starting to go wrinkly in the bath here.

  Note that bouillabaisse is one of the only fish dishes to be boiled quickly. This is to compel the emulsification of the oil and water; it is in keeping with the Marseillaise origin of the dish that in it oil is not poured over troubled water but violently forced to amalgamate with it. Notice also that bouillabaisse is a controversial dish, a dish which provokes argument and dissent, canonical and non-canonical versions, focusing on issues such as the aforementioned geographically conditioned possibility of making the dish at all, the desirability or otherwise of adding a glass of white wine to the oil-and-water liaison, the importance or unthinkability of including in the dish fennel or orange peel or thyme or cuttlefish ink or severed horses’ heads. (On which my personal verdicts are respectively ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘why not?’, ‘yes, if you wish to make the bouillabaisse noir of Martigues’, and ‘only joking’.) Some dishes seem to be charged with a psychic energy, a mana, which makes them attract attention, generate interest, stimulate discussion, inspire controversy and debates about authenticity. The same is true of certain artists. Again I am not thinking exclusively of myself.

  The conditions and prohibitions with which the making of a successful bouillabaisse is hedged around make it a problematic dish for the home cook, at any rate for the home cook who lives more than an hour or so’s drive from the coastline between Toulon and Marseille. My house in the Vaucluse is an hour and forty minutes from Marseille, assuming the good weather which is necessary on the twisting roads of the Lubéron. Other fish soups are less contentious in their composition, a fact which may make them appealing for those who are less beguiled than I am by what Spinoza called ‘the deep difficulty of excellence’. In any case, over the years at my homes in Provence and Norfolk (less so in Bayswater) I have cooked burrida, the hearty and accommodating Genoese speciality; cotriade, the warming and economical potato-oriented Breton dish (sometimes seasoned simply through the addition of seawater); the soothing matelote normande, of which more very shortly; the exuberant Portuguese fisherman’s stew caldeirada, enough to make any one of us into a lusophile, and graced with the additional blessing of reheatability in the form of the excellent fish hash roupa velha de peixe; the fiery but somehow light, refreshing, life-affirming fish stews of Thailand, spiked with chilli and lemon grass and the glamorous but refreshing exoticism of that suddenly convenient country (only hours away!); the paradoxical red-wine-using matelotte and raito, the former with its disturbingly phallic and alive-seeming eel, the latter with its elusive but comforting taste of cod; the equally coddy Basque ttoro, its origin betrayed by its telltale unpronounceability (my brother was fond of speculating whether, in Basque versions of the game of Scrabble, values were reversed, so that players only won a single point for using letters such as q and x); the crude Greek kakaviá and the egg-and-lemon-enhanced psarósoupa avgolémono; the tasty Provençal soupe de poisson with its punchy rouille and promiscuous willingness to accept whatever is put into it (perhaps the most adaptable and portable of all these national soups); the chowders (from chaudière, stewpot, a word which also refers to the kind of domestic gas boiler whose explosion was to kill my parents) of North America, expressive of that continent in their hearty emphatic blandness; the delicate Bergensk fiskesuppe, which the unfortunate Mitthaug used to prepare with great displays of energy in his attempts to get the freshest possible, indeed the freshest imaginable, cod and coley, rising before dawn to go to Billingsgate and returning with fish which, as my father observed, a competent veterinarian ought to have been able to resuscitate; indeed, our own grey little country is almost the only one which fails to have its own indigenous version of fish soup, even the Scots having their surprisingly edible Cullen Skink.

  An example of one of the most cookable dishes, and one that manages to retain a certain glamour, is bourride, another preparation deeply charged with memories, in this case of my humble abode in the Vaucluse hinterland village of St-Eustache, hardly more than a shack really, with its five bedrooms and the swimming-pool that so added to my popularity with certain of my neighbours. In each bedroom a precarious wicker framework is affixed over the windows, with a mosquito net pinned to it; as an eighteen-year-old paying my first visit to the S. of F. (my brother then and later having a place near Arles), I used to submit his similar netting to obsessively repeated checks lest any fray or rip should betray the room to the invasion of insect life. Not that I had any banal Lawrentian fears of these creatures (though the vision of one of those huge, fluttering, obscenely delicate and hairy Provençal moths flying into my open mouth while asleep would cause moments of nocturnal discomfort). Their size – mosquitoes the size of flies, flies the size of hornets and moths the size of pterodactyls – and their talent for vehement, frustrated buzzings and crashings meant that the ingress into my room of even one of these behemoths (oops) would guarantee me hours of sleepless padding and stalking with a rolled-up copy of Nice Matin or Le Provençal

  Right: bourride. I was taught to prepare this dish by Etienne, a French youth on an exchange scheme who came to stay with us during summer hol
idays, and who educated me in how to make a version of the dish with the local fish available near our Norfolk cottage, using the olive oil he thoughtfully brought with him. Buy and prepare a number of thick pieces of white fish equivalent to the number of guests at table; the fish may be John Dory (engagingly known in French as St-Pierre, from the visible residue on either side of the fish’s peculiarly friendly-looking head – or is that just me? – of the thumbprint of St Peter the fisherman) or brill or monkfish or indeed almost anything, with the proviso that if it is to qualify as a bourride sétoise, the stew must be composed of monkfish exclusively. (A famous village feud occurred after an argument about bourride sétoise between fractious in-laws; tempers were raised, insults exchanged, rolling-pins brandished, cookbooks consulted, opinions vindicated and hotly rebuffed, and a three-decades-long severing of relations was instituted. Now that’s a recipe.) Make stock from fish bones and make an aïoli (recipe later, later); add one more egg yolk per person. Chop two leeks and two shallots and sweat them in oil. Add the fish, pour the stock over and cook until done or just cooked through – about a quarter of an hour. Remove the fish, reduce the sauce by an amount that feels appropriate – one third minimum, two thirds maximum. Then pour in the enriched aïoli off the heat, and return, whisking, to the stove until it achieves the texture of thick cream.