by John Baxter
Such a culturally tone-deaf building could only have been constructed under an administration that, like the British raj, believed in the indisputable correctness of its actions, and the civilising influence of its own language and art. True, almost every Indian still spoke English. And there was no nation where the game of cricket was played more enthusiastically.
But around the market, in a vivid, living denial of the political philosophy that created it, eddied the mob that congregates in every open space in India. All entrances were obscured by a jostling mob of buyers, sellers, porters, beggars, children, and dogs.
As we hesitated, unsure whether to plunge in or flee, a tall, middle-aged Indian gentleman in a once-white dhoti spotted us and headed in our direction.
“Lady and gentleman!”
In England, his resonant baritone would have won him a job as town crier a century earlier. Six o’clock on a winter’s evening and allll’s welllll!
“You wish to visit the market?”
A large brass badge pinned to his chest read OFFICIAL GUIDE. Official, according to whom? It didn’t say.
“What is there to see?” I asked cautiously.
“What to see?” he boomed in incredulity. He waved an arm. “Is everything to see. Meat market. Animal market. Chicken market. Fruit market. Clothing market.”
I had an inspiration. Indian food owes its unique flavours to a mixture of dry spices, different for each dish, called a masala. We in the West often fall back on that one-size-fits-all masala sold as “curry powder”, but the serious cook pounds and grinds his or her own, depending on the recipe.
“Spice market?” I inquired.
“Of course spice market,” said our guide. “Very excellent spice market.”
Waving us to follow, he plunged into the maelstrom.
“Shouldn’t we …” I began lamely.
Every book on visiting India gave the same advice: always negotiate a price beforehand. But this only worked if the guides and drivers cooperated, and none did. “Get in,” the cab drivers would say, grinning at our naïveté in imagining they hadn’t read those same books. “We talk.”
To his credit, our guide gave good value. Once I mentioned the fountain, he led us to the core of the market, where Kipling’s ornate creation of red sandstone squatted, half-buried in fruit crates and cardboard cartons. In its basins, dry for generations, dogs and children drowsed.
The deeper we were guided into the market complex, the more it seemed like a sunken ship colonised over centuries by sea creatures. Arcades that, under the raj, had been lined with neat merchants’ offices were now engulfed in gimcrack stalls. Everywhere matchboard partitions supported toppling shelves, bulging sacks, cages in teetering towers, and people, people, people—their noise, their smell, and yet more noise.
We passed an alley stinking with guano, and raucous with squawks and cocks’ crows.
“Bird market,” our guide said, unnecessarily, and, at the next, “Drug market.”
“Drugs?”
“Many fine Indian drugs. All types. Codeine. Valium …”
So he meant medicines. Because of a loophole in the patent laws, thoughtfully kept open by the government, Indian pharmaceutical companies can produce medications without paying the foreign companies that developed them. Mumbai is this industry’s capital.
We pressed on to the next alley, shouldering through the mob.
“Snake market,” said the guide.
“Snake market?” Marie-Dominique shuddered.
Through high windows, unwashed since Lord Curzon was viceroy, slabs of dusty sunlight fell across the long corridor. Everywhere—in the shadows, at the corner of the eye—one sensed languid movement, the ripple of light on skins that flowed like oil. That narrow space concentrated all India’s strangeness. It was the portal to another, and alien, world.
“You like?” asked the guide, sensing my interest. He started to lead us in.
“I don’t think so.”
The next alley exuded a pungency as strong as the others, but this time not of chicken manure, rotten cabbage, or human sweat. Clove, pepper, cinnamon, and bay stung the nostrils and caught at the back of the throat.
“Spice market,” said the guide.
The next hour was an education. Who would have thought there wasn’t simply one variety of pepper but dozens? Why had I never seen these giant black cardamom pods the size of beetles, their wrinkled shells hiding clusters of moist, aromatic seeds? Fenugreek, doled out in tiny cellophane packets by Indian grocers in Europe, could be bought here by the kilo. I bent to sniff tubs of vivid yellow turmeric, dusky red paprika, sour-smelling grey-green cumin … and chillis! Yellow, black, crimson, purple, each ready to explode like a firecracker in your mouth.
I left with a bulging paper sack. For the fabled spices of India, with which fortunes had been won and over which wars had been fought, and the search for which had powered the discovery of America, I paid less than twenty dollars.
This included the fee for our guide, who, as a bonus, led us to some fictitious cousin or nephew who ran up a suitcase-full of silk clothes for Marie-Dominique and Louise in the time it would take in Paris for a vendeuse in one of the rue Bonaparte boutiques to even acknowledge their presence.
My elation about the spices lasted until we were about to land in Sydney, and the cabin staff handed out cards demanding that we declare “cereal grains, popping corn, raw nuts, chestnuts, pinecones, birdseed, unidentified seeds” and all herbs and spices, under pain of instant imprisonment.
Oh, well, it had been fun to contemplate the great curries one could have made with my Mumbai purchases. I showed my bag to the customs officer and explained its contents.
“Go to gate seventeen,” he said.
To my delight, the officer manning gate 17 was an enormous Sikh, made even more towering by his turban.
I held up my sack. “I bought some dried spices in Mumbai …”
A huge grin divided his mass of facial hair. He didn’t even bother to look.
“No problem!” he rumbled, and waved me through.
• • •
Now, a year later and on the other side of the world, I took out my mortar. Into it went Indian peppercorns, long and cylindrical, like insect pupae. Once they were crushed to dust with the pestle, I added a poblano chilli, its glossy skin a red so near black it looked burned, and the seeds of three big Mumbai cardamoms. Next, paprika, sugar, dry mustard, and a spoonful of the dust-like salt from the topmost layer of the salt pans at the medieval town of Brouage that its harvesters call fleur de sel—the flower of salt.
Two cloves of Provençal garlic lubricated the mix, turning the black powder to a paste. Lastly, a little olive oil bonded it into a gritty sludge that looked like industrial waste but in its fragrance evoked memories of half a dozen different cuisines—Cajun barbecue from the bayous of Louisiana; the chapati-wrapped scoops of dry beef curry Mumbai market sellers call a franki; aioli eaten by the slow stream that runs through the village of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, where a tiny mound of raw minced garlic on the edge of the plate, deceptively white and innocent, can burn the tongue like chilli.
As I massaged this granular paste into his skin, Pascal turned from pallid pink to dusky brown. So did my fingers. Soon, as pork is the meat that most resembles human flesh, it became impossible to tell the two apart.
Marie-Dominique wandered into the kitchen.
“Meet Pascal,” I said.
She bowed slightly. “Ravie de faire votre connaissance, M’sieur.” Then to me, “Smells good.”
“I think I may say modestly that this will be one of my masterpieces.”
“Don’t be so sure.” She held up a tape measure and ran it along the body. “Sixty-two centimeters.”
“So?”
“Mother’s oven is sixty centimeters wide. I told you. He’s too long.”
“We’ll work something out.”
No meal of this magnitude would fail over a few centimetres of snout. P
roperly propitiated, our kitchen gods would see to that. The shade of Philip Harben hovered, ready to intervene.
Even before I wrapped Pascal in cling film, the aroma of the marinade was circulating through the house, just as it penetrated the meat.
I hope you appreciate the attention you’re getting here, I thought. Yesterday, you were just another piglet. Today, you’re the beneficiary of the cooking traditions of four continents and a thousand years.
I opened the fridge and cleared a shelf.
You’re going in a youngster, I thought as I put him in place, but you’ve got to come out a star!
19
Christmas Eve
’Twas the night before Christmas
When all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring,
Not even a mouse.
—CLEMENT CLARKE MOORE
The sailor’s child swims up out of sleep if the wind freshens in the night, and the apple grower’s when he senses a touch of frost. But as my father was a baker, I wake every morning at four a.m.
As a boy, I would hear him moving about the house, dressed in his whites, preparing to go to the bakehouse where, after dividing up the pillowy dough that had been “proving” all night, he’d start baking the day’s bread.
On Christmas Eve, a lifelong in-built alarm clock woke me as usual at 3:55 a.m. I put on slippers and sweater and walked through the bathroom to the salon that runs the length of our sixth-floor apartment on rue de l’Odéon.
To the east, half a kilometre away over a landscape of roofs, floated Notre-Dame, still flood-lit, as it would remain until the sun rose behind it in one of Paris’s theatrical dawns.
Outside the long windows, on the terrace, the box of La Tremblade oysters glimmered on the metal table where, in warm weather, we sometimes ate breakfast, or enjoyed drinks in the afternoon. After three days out of the water, they would be reaching their best.
In the kitchen, I made coffee, buttered some crackers, and turned on the radio.
Like my father, I mostly eat breakfast in the kitchen, standing, the radio tuned low—in my case to the BBC—half-listening to programmes created for professional early-risers: storm warnings for fishermen, stock and grain prices for farmers, and prayers for us all. This is radio stripped back to bare fact, all entertainment sliced away, exposing the bones of information. Listening to the announcer detailing the state of the seas around Britain and Ireland always calms me.
Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger,
West or Southwest Five or Six,
increasing Seven, perhaps gale Eight later.
Slight or moderate.
Becoming rough in Forties and Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.
His litany means as little as the Latin mass I heard a thousand times as a boy. And as much.
Opening the refrigerator, I removed the plastic-shrouded Pascal. A spicy wave accompanied him, becoming even stronger as, placing his bulk on the kitchen counter, I opened the plastic bag that enclosed him, and peeled back the cling film. The marinade was working, the spices penetrating the flesh, carrying their tang into the very cells of the meat, where it would remain until cooking released it back into the juices.
With my sharpest knife, I made a series of parallel cuts about half an inch apart across the pig’s back and ribs, taking care only to penetrate the skin and the thin layer of fat, not the flesh below. The cuts would speed the absorption of the spices. They also prepared the skin to blister and brown into crackling.
There would be sixteen people, fewer than usual, at Christmas dinner this year. Marie-Do’s newly married niece Laure would be spending her first married Christmas with her new in-laws. And Uncle Jean-Paul, whose acceptance of me had been so important at that first dinner, was in poor health. He and his wife, Françoise, might not be able to come. On the other hand, we might be joined by their daughter Cecile, who had lost her husband during the year and moved back into the parental home until his chaotic business affairs could be sorted out.
Fortunately, in planning my menu, I didn’t face those niggling pre-meal discussions of the “I don’t eat …” variety so common in Anglo-Saxon homes. If you’re invited to dine with a French family, you’re expected to leave your dietary tastes and restrictions at home. I took my lead from the chef in Jean Renoir’s film La Règle du Jeu, who has to cook for the guests at a large country house party. He shrugs off the demand of one lady that her meals be seasoned with sea salt only.
“I don’t mind diets,” he tells her servant, “but fads? Forget it.”
In Roughing It, Mark Twain tells of
… the traveler who sat down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard. He asked the landlord if this was all. The landlord said:
“All! Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was mackerel enough there for six.”
“But I don’t like mackerel.”
“Oh—then help yourself to the mustard.”
This is a very French response. If your religion forbids pork, or peanuts send you into shock, there’s no point in explaining it to a French hostess. She’ll just suggest you might be happier staying home with some Chinese takeaway in front of the TV.
On the other hand, there were expectations.
In fifteen years, the family had come to expect something special at Christmas. Though politesse would ensure that not a discouraging word was heard at the table, news of a disaster could spread as swiftly and as fatally as bird flu.
A friend attending a wedding in a remote corner of France was startled when a distant cousin murmured at the post-ceremony coctel, “Terribly sorry to hear about that bêtise with the beurre nantais at your niece’s First Communion breakfast. Whatever possessed you to use a powdered fish fumet?” No wonder some husbands, presenting a new wife to the family, bought everything pre-cooked from the traiteur or, in extreme cases, hired a professional chef to produce that crucial first meal.
On the whole, I’d been lucky with cooking in France. I’d never mistaken sugar for salt or had a soufflé fail to rise. Periodically, a bottle of wine is corked, but one learns to open everything beforehand and take a discreet glass before serving it.
But thinking of wine just reminded me that we still had not solved that particular problem. Scouring our cellars and those of friends, we’d accumulated a dozen adequate bottles, but the quality would be alarmingly variable.
“Nobody will notice,” Marie-Do said consolingly.
“I will,” I said.
• • •
I stood in the kitchen, listening to the BBC and drinking my second cup of coffee as the sun came up behind Notre-Dame. Once the markets opened, I’d walk down to rue de Buci for fresh fruit and mascarpone for my—I hoped—dramatic brûlé. Since there’d be no time to buy bread on Christmas Day—assuming we could find a good baker open—I’d pick up a few baguettes and freeze them overnight. Then, in the afternoon, a little last-minute shopping for gifts, after which I’d return to prepare the stuffing …
And then the phone rang.
20
The Ghost of Christmas Present
Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.
—FRANCIS PHARCELLUS CHURCH
“But it’s Christmas!” I protested.
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t an emergency,” Fiona said.
A BBC TV producer and old friend, Fiona had been sent from London to film a piece about The Phantom of the Opera and wanted to interview me in front of the building where the story’s set: Charles Garnier’s flamboyantly decorated opera house.
“Why today?”
“Oh, you know: Christmas, ghost stories. And they’re running the film of Phantom on Boxing Day.”
“On Tuesday I’m cooking Christmas dinner for sixteen. I’ve got this piglet …”
“If you can’t help me,” she said, her voice cracking, “I don’t kn
ow what I’m going to do.”
“And anyway,” I added, “I haven’t even seen this version of The Phantom of the Opera.”
Even as I spoke, I knew this was ridiculous. Freelance journalism taught one to speak with authority on all subjects, whether you knew everything about them or nothing at all. You could always bone up on it before the date. There was only one rule to freelancing: get the gig.
“Wing it,” Fiona said decisively. “I just need a short stand-up. We’ll cut in some clips from the film.”
I hesitated. It went against my nature to turn down work. And I could always do my shopping later.
“All right. Come on round.”
She turned up an hour later, trailed by a French cameraman and sound operator, neither looking any happier than I did about working at Christmas. Still, they should have learned, as I had, that unsocial hours came with the territory.
Paris even had a tradition of this. Marcel Proust, since he slept by day, would sometimes summon people in the middle of the night, when he was at his freshest but they were in bed. These included the musicians of the Poulet Quartet, who visited his apartment a number of times in 1916 to refresh his memory of a particular phrase by playing César Franck’s Quartet in D.
The musicians came because the money was good, and he provided supper—a dish of heavily crèmed and buttered potato purée, fetched by his chauffeur from the kitchens of the Ritz Hotel.
In Alan Bennett’s play about these incidents, 102 Boulevard Haussmann, the viola player comments on the acoustic properties of Proust’s cork-lined bedroom.
“We’ve never sounded so good,” he says.
“Especially not at three in the morning,” growls the cellist.