A good cook – and thus a successful Christmas meal host – will remember all the small but crucial details. For example, that jelly is prohibited to vegans, so the witty jellied salad in festive colours (cherry tomatoes, lebanese cucumber) you had considered making will only be consumed by the vegetarians in your midst. Or that the fish sauce in the Vietnamese dressing for the papaya salad must be omitted. And that you must find a substitute for the sugar in it. That there will be at least one Jewish guest and though they may not be strictly kosher they will not be pleased if faced with meat from a cloven-hoofed beast that has not chewed its cud. For the overall meal you should strive to provide as much from your own garden as possible, however modest this may seem; simple homegrown parsley and spinach and lemons from the tree will have their freshness guaranteed, not to mention a quality of flavour that surpasses any organic grocery store certification.
The best host of all will be the one who accommodates every guest’s preference or allergy, no matter how rare the condition or self-indulgent the food choice may appear, since Christmas is that time for peace, love and reconciliation, and so on. Your uncle who is allergic to seafood always expects to be seated far away from the offending food since even the merest brush with a discarded prawn tail or oyster shell could mean an emergency trip to the hospital. This has happened in previous years and it has meant that he has thereafter been exempted from the washing-up, so as not to risk contamination. Likewise, your Jewish uncle-in-law, who soon after his arrival will remind you that he also does not eat shellfish.
However, on the day you triumphantly announce that your pretty platter of prawns and smoked salmon is made entirely from a potato starch, soy and angelica – not gelatine – compound, and that you have used an organic vegetable dye to paint on the orange-red stripes. The seafood sauce contains neither egg nor dairy. You pickled your own capers from the garden nasturtiums.
As your vegan cousin has brought her new fruitarian girlfriend they must be seated closest to the fruit platter which you have sourced from the organic co-op and selected with imagination: three types of banana, along with star fruit, guava and mangosteens, all far more interesting than the cherries and grapes that anyone can provide at this time of the year. They have brought their dog, Vita, who is not only also a vegan, but has a gluten allergy and cannot eat conventional dog kibble. Vita shall be dining on raw carrot sticks, which apparently she enjoys to such an extent that she will even perform tricks for them.
The remaining vegetarian and vegan cousins, aunts and older nieces and nephews have wanted to be seated at the non-seafood and non-meat end, anticipating that there is probably no easy way to avoid the turkey and ham centrepieces. However, you proudly assure your guests that the former is made entirely from rice and soy, rolled and seasoned to resemble a boned and stuffed breast (gluten-free breadcrumbs for the stuffing), while the latter is actually a cunning mix of breadcrumbs (gluten-free), egg substitute, sweet potato and smoked paprika, tinted pink with beetroot juice. The cranberry sauce is innocent of everything but cranberries. The only person who should not eat that is your younger niece, who is allergic to red berries, in fact to anything red.
The bread in the bread sauce is organic, salt-reduced and gluten-free and the vegetable stock is all vegetable, also salt-reduced. Your grandmother has made the bread sauce for years but you have relieved her of this contribution to the festive meal in deference to her years. She tastes a tiny portion of this sauce with a certain look on her face but then she eats very little these days anyway.
Unexpectedly, the greatest challenge was not the seafood platter, but finding a healthy alternative to roast vegetables, seeing as so many of the guests are cutting down on carbs. Of course carbs cannot be avoided altogether, but you must be seen to have made some effort: your own husband is prone to patting his stomach and ruefully talking about how he has given up beer and now eats salads for lunch, not burgers. The roast vegetable platter you produce might look like roast potatoes and pumpkin but it is artfully not, and you are particularly proud of the way you have slightly burned the corners of the chopped smoked tofu to resemble the way pumpkin caramelises at high heat. This dish is garnished with fresh rosemary from the garden.
Beans are easy. Everyone loves French green beans and you have steamed then blanched them in iced water to retain their vivid colour, then finished them in a light garlic and lemon juice dressing (the lemons are from the garden). Therefore it is something of a surprise when one of the children begins coughing and choking, and your older sister turns and asks you why you didn’t string these beans properly, before taking the child out to be sick in the garden.
This small setback notwithstanding, you smile and refuse anyone’s offer – there are only two – to help clear the main course, and while you busy yourself in the kitchen your husband ensures that the glass of every drinker is refilled. You re-enter the dining room to remind him that the cloudy unfiltered apple juice with no added sugar is in the garage fridge, and find him leaning very close over your younger sister, but when he stands upright it is clear that he has simply been careful not to spill a drop as he refills her glass. He tops up your aunt’s rosé, and then approaches your grandfather with the bottle of port; however, you decide that he will want his cup of tea, which you make, adding two spoonfuls of real white sugar despite knowing your mother is monitoring his diabetic diet with the eye of an eagle. When you return to the dining room with this cup of tea your mother peers at it but you say, very quickly, that you have made it with real tea, not a teabag.
By this stage of the meal your husband is leaning back against the sideboard where you have been careful to place the bowl of dried nuts well out of reach of the children. He is cracking walnuts deftly in one palm. He is very good at this. It is something of a party trick and he smiles at you and winks, while the children gape in admiration from the quarantine of their mother’s side. In front of him, Vita is begging prettily, and the vegan cousin and fruitarian girlfriend loudly and in unison instruct him not to give her so much as a crumb of walnut. You hurry to the kitchen for more carrot sticks. After this treat is administered Vita needs to be ushered outside to pee.
It surprises you at first to understand that washing up by hand rather than dishwasher is actually advised on this occasion, given the volume of dirty dishes and the rapidity with which they accumulate. You do this yourself, even if there are offers of help, for the sake of peace (it is that season, you remember) and because there is at least one member of the family whose rare skin condition means any contact with detergents or perfumes in detergents or perhaps both is catastrophic. You should know which member of the family this is but you are somewhat tired and have now decided to drink a second glass of champagne, which always makes your head fuzzy.
It is because of this, the head fuzziness, that when you go to the linen closet in the hall for fresh tea towels and you see your husband emerging from the bathroom, you imagine he looks furtive, and is wiping his mouth more thoroughly than he probably is.
Back in the kitchen your vegan cousin’s fruitarian girlfriend is standing with the final dirty platters from the table and, fixing you with a gaze through her thick purple-framed glasses, she asks how the papaya in the green papaya salad has managed to fall from the tree naturally, if it is green. The perfect host would have a sound explanation for this; however, you are by now tired (and fuzzy) so you tell her it is from the neighbour’s garden and that you shook the tree very, very gently. That it dropped straight into a bed of fresh straw in a basket. And that you covered it in a pure organic cotton cloth, brought it home and played Sufi music to it for three nights in a row then chanted a Buddhist prayer of forgiveness before you peeled it and put it through the mandoline grater.
Returning to the dining room, you place the pudding, the brandy- and butter-free brandy butter, the Christmas cake and, for the children, the dried-fruit–free White Christmas with reduced sugar on the table, only to notice some
absences. You find Vita out in the back garden licking up the last of the green-bean vomit, as your vegan cousin and her fruitarian girlfriend appear and commence yelling and showing signs of taking their leave, such as coaxing Vita into her mauve diamante harness. You return to the kitchen and start thinking about the coffee situation. Vita’s owners would probably not have wanted coffee anyway, and she certainly does not, and if they do all return next year you shall have had plenty of time to consider appropriate hot drinks.
Your younger sister reappears and, despite looking flushed, reaches for another glass of wine. Your older sister has already packed up her two children’s presents and toys, holding the green-bean choker close and lightly smacking away the hand of the other as he reaches for the White Christmas. No sugar, she explains to you, not even reduced sugar, otherwise I’ll never get him to sleep tonight. You decide not to tell her about the candy canes he took off the tree earlier.
Despite the exertions and frustrations of the day you do not forget you are still the host. You are by now making coffee for those who are not asleep in armchairs (grandmother, uncle) or have decided to move onto exotic liqueurs (sister, husband, two remaining cousins), and this involves, firstly, an espresso for your older sister to scull quickly before heading out the door. You have already ensured you have various combinations of milks and coffees in order to make a long black with a dash of soy milk for your mother, a decaf almond-milk latte for your other aunt, three espresso martinis, and finally a Moccona instant with a dash of rum for your father. After making this last you decide on one for yourself, not holding back on the rum.
With so much thought, care and planning there should not be a single hiccup let alone catastrophe (beyond the bean/vomit incident), but as you are stacking away the best plates a distinct screaming comes from the dining room. Then your younger sister appears, extremely red in the face with visible swelling, and asks what nuts you put into the cake, and when you explain none, she demands to know the full list of ingredients. Handing her a glass of water, which she knocks flying from rage or distress, you list them. The swelling around her lips increases by the second and just before they meet permanently she manages to cry out that coconut oil is from coconuts you idiot which are nuts you fucking idiot and that you have deliberately sabotaged her Christmas you total fucking idiot and this is so typical you think you are so clever that you can not only shame her with her lack of culinary skills but now actually try to kill her, on Christmas Day.
Admittedly, you did consider adding Frangelico to her espresso martini instead of Tia Maria, but as it happened there was no need since you knew it was not the coconut oil but the fact she was in the bathroom kissing your husband, not long after he ate all those walnuts.
At this point you also realise that of everyone’s culinary requirements for this special meal, you have neglected to consider your own. It has been a long and tiring day in the kitchen but a freshness and imagination and indeed keenness for culinary endeavour may be still summoned despite all your earlier fatigue. So much so that when your husband comes in to help your sister administer her EpiPen you commence smacking one hand clean across his handsome face. What you imagine doing next is easy: grabbing that part of his body which has caused so much damage to your festive occasion, and slicing it off with a cook’s knife. Allowing the blood to drain into the sink, you would sear the fresh cut in olive oil in a cast iron pan until browned, then finish off in a hot oven (220 deg) for ten minutes. After resting for a further ten minutes, you could slice this into rounds: the number of slices would very much depend on the length of this cut of meat. You could serve this over a bed of any wilted greens, but a bitter leaf such as endive or rocket would definitely be best. Finish it with a chopped parsley garnish, cracked black pepper, a squeeze of lemon, and smear of hot English mustard. The correct wine would be pinot noir.
How to Mend a Broken Heart
What was never going to happen again does. You are thirty, you are forty, you are forty-five, and you still don’t learn. You are an index of feelings from the deep end of the dictionary. Regret and remorse. Sadness and sorrow. All the feelings that weigh your disappointed heart down. Even aware that you are at risk of becoming a stereotype, you cannot stop the leaden, numbing pain of the oldest story in the book, which you need, for some god-only-knows reason, to tell again, this hackneyed story, this exhausted, dried-up narrative, for which there are no new words, no fresh images, no original metaphors. But there is still this compulsion to find them when you know they cannot be found. You have gone over and over this in your head in the early hours, when sleep remains a stranger outside the door, sniggering just loud enough for you to hear but refusing to enter the room.
Oh, but you said numbing pain, and that is far from true, in fact you wish it were true, for if so your heart really would be numb and then you would not suffer this story to be told. For it may be your heart, your love, your trust, your everything involved here but it is only a story, which means it had a beginning, a middle and will have an end. More than that, it will recede into the narrative of your life, your wry, comical, rather dysfunctional life, the one you unwrap at dinner parties and pass around for light entertainment and laughs in between the sashimi and the salad. Your friends appreciate this. You are such good company. At dinner.
But meanwhile there is the problem of this badly damaged organ, which needs to keep functioning though you wish it were tougher and more durable, to see you through the rest of your loving days. Your broken heart is so very sore. Open, exposed. And while a cold wind blows through it, your heart remains too hot, burning with pain. How could you have been so careless and profligate, to devote so much of yourself to one person? You have squandered yourself. Devotion and loyalty, you assumed, would be repaid in kind. You should have been more restrained. You should have remembered the only rule, the one constant, the thing you can rely on absolutely, even if everything else is a shifting, elusive, phantom set of rules: it will always end in tears.
The problem, as ever, is language. The c word again. No, not the word you think (they love that), but the other one, the one they hate. It’s like a mouthful of sour wine, a bite into a rotten apple. They won’t have it on their tongue. They think it means something else; they shrivel at its sound. They think it means noun: 1. end of fun, or 2. lack of freedom. But get the dictionary, the definition is clear: all it offers are words like trust, consign, preserve, pledge. Commit is a verb. Definition 6. To consign, especially for safekeeping, to commit one’s soul to God. You did exactly this, you consigned something for safekeeping, you handed over your heart, and look at it now, torn and bleeding like the prey of a fox. No safekeeping at all.
Yet now, as you examine your wounded heart (yes, wounded, you are that trite) you find it is not here that it hurts at all, but lower in your body. Your chest, in fact, feels remarkably whole. It is your stomach that registers all this pain. Eat? Not for days. It is part of the script, is it not? You can’t eat. Of course you can’t. Your stomach is a whirlpool. Your bowels feel either too tight or too loose. The idea of eating summons the taste of bile. But it’s not so much the nutrition as the necessary ritual. And, in that, the necessary preparation, all of which adds up to time, concentration, activity. Three vital aspects of the healing process.
So you should eat. You shall eat. But just peering into the pantry, opening the refrigerator, depresses you. There are only so many instant noodles and no-brand cereals that you can live on. And the milk has run out. No, what you need is fresh food, prepared by your own hands. You will need to stock that fridge. It’s empty, lonely. Its cold light reveals nothing but jars of pickles and olives, bottles of water, the tail ends of processed foods, salamis and cheese, dried, hard. Like his heart must be (you will cling to these clichés . . .). Vodka, on ice. The stainless-steel shaker that you keep – kept – in the door to make the cocktails you both love. Loved. Shut the door swiftly again, for its contents, abject as they are, remind you of meals a
nd drinks made for two.
You must shop. And no cheating with on-line shopping, but out there up at the supermarket, along with the elderly and the young mothers and all the other people you have felt you were so far above. With a wonky trolley. A form of punishment but one you need. The frozen vegetable aisle. The meat counter. The hot roast chickens, date and time stamped, cheaper as the day wears on. This is what you need.
But, oh, the ordinariness of it is so hard to bear. The ordinariness rises up like a demon, taunting you as you select a brand of curry paste, a form of pasta. The risible nature of this prosaic activity. Even doing the shopping cannot prevent your eyes flooding again. You reach for a two-pack of paper towels and have to replace them to find a tissue and blot your eyes again. Just the corners of your eyes, discreetly, so the people around you do not know that you are really soaking up that oozing part of you that is the byproduct of your dying heart, again. So that they think you are just watery-eyed from the cold air. You still need to get on with it, for you need to return home with the right ingredients to make a chicken curry or a spinach pie, and start the ritual of peeling, slicing, frying and stirring that will help keep you going.
And there’s yet more ritual. You still need it. The tedium of the checkout queue must be endured. More punishment for your wayward soul. That elderly couple with tiny portions of every loose product being individually weighed and priced. The jar of sauce that has to be sent back for checking. The woman who insists the two-for-ten-dollars offer on the chocolate ice cream hasn’t appeared on her docket. People who laboriously count out coins from tiny purses. Whose last dollar falls in between the counter and the cash register. The old couple with a trolley full of no-brand dog food on special, which you hope really is for a dog. The kicking toddler behind you, perhaps the same one who was screaming in aisle four, and his mother, whose trolley keeps nudging yours as if it’s your responsibility, this long, frustrating queue, and yours to fix. Good for you. You need this form of everyday suffering. After it is over you can take your groceries and depart. Past the staffie cross (a relief to see it) tied up out the front, through the hazards of parking-spot Nazis and parents racing the end-of-school clock. Finally, home to stock the fridge and what about, seeing as it’s so empty, cleaning it up first? How long since you’ve done that? Same with the oven. And then the ritual of preparing a meal.
Zebra Page 5