Acquired Tastes

by Peter Mayle

  It is not as Norman Rockwell used to draw it. Little Billy, who has been furtively stuffing himself with candy canes all morning, threatens to be sick. The parents can already feel the first faint twinges of eggnog headaches. The grandparents think longingly of a nap. No such luck. This is a family Christmas, damn it, and we’re going to enjoy ourselves, despite first-degree exhaustion, frazzled nerves and the promise of indigestion and afternoon hangovers. Vast reserves of patience and fortitude are required to prevent the day from ending in silent and ill-tempered torpor round the TV.

  And there we might leave it, except that Christmas isn’t really over until the closing days of January, when, with ghastly inevitability, the bills arrive. As you sit amid the financial wreckage, you think fondly of one of the most underrated figures in literature. Dear old Scrooge, bless him. He would never have allowed you to get into this mess, and he would have just one word for the Man Who Has Everything: bah!

  Happy New Year.

  11

  How The Rich Keep Warm

  Winters in Mongolia are brisk. The winds howl over the permafrost, jogging is an undiscovered treat, and most of the locals need regular tots of rum and hot yak’s milk to keep from icing up. It is cold enough to freeze the ear flaps off a fur hat.

  There are, however, some native Mongolians who thrive on the sub-zero temperatures. A bracing nip in the air means nothing to them because they are, in effect, walking sweaters. Swathed from nose to hoof in one of nature’s most efficient forms of antifreeze, they are perfectly insulated. You will never see a Mongolian cashmere goat shivering.

  Pure Mongolian cashmere, generally acknowledged to be the best, is warmer in relation to its weight than is any other natural fibre, and the goat has two layers of it to keep out the draughts. The first is a coarse outer coat of guard hair, the second a much finer coat of under hair. It is this finer hair that will one day take its place in your wardrobe. In addition to its lightness and warmth, it has a softness that is irresistibly tactile and instantly recognisable. You can pick out a cashmere sweater with your eyes closed, simply by using your fingertips.

  It is also reassuringly expensive. Ounce for ounce, only vicuña—which comes from a family of privileged camels who live in the mountains of South America—costs more, and there is little chance that the price of cashmere will ever be less than steep. This is partly due to the quality and rarity of the fibre and is partly a result of the mediaeval methods that are still used to get the hair off the goat’s back and on the way to yours.

  The whole process of turning goat’s hair into gentlemen’s clothing is inconvenient, labour-intensive and subject to all kinds of imponderables—one of the most imponderable being the sex drive of the suppliers. Cashmere goats cannot be cooped up and made to multiply like battery chickens. Rather like us, they need space and privacy for romance, and it is impossible to predict with any accuracy how much cashmere there will be from year to year. It is a natural commodity, and, like all commodities, its price will fluctuate. More often than not, upward.

  It would be easier and cheaper if the goats could be sheared like sheep, but they can’t. The fine under hair moults and becomes tangled up in the coarse outer coat. The only way of getting at it is to comb it out by hand, one goat at a time, yielding only a few ounces of hair per goat. First, of course, you have to catch the goat. Already you can see that this is not simple, quick work.

  After combing, the untreated cashmere is transported by a variety of ways and means that would give the president of Federal Express nightmares. By yak, by horse, by raft, by sampan, it dawdles down to one of the depots that will ship it overseas. So far, so slow.

  At the warehouse, the cashmere is sorted to separate the grey from the brown from the white, a job that sounds straightforward but requires up to five years of training. It is then blended, scoured to remove the grease that has accumulated during its years with its previous owner and de-haired to pick out any strands of the outer coat that have clung to the batch. By the time this has been done, there may be as little as half of the original quantity left, but what wonderfully comforting and extravagant stuff it will be—the raw material for thousand-dollar sports coats and scarves that feel like a warm massage.

  All woven cashmere is not created equal, and you will find it in a range of weights and thicknesses that differ according to use. I imagine that it is technically possible to outfit yourself in everything from a cashmere fedora downwards, but there are some practical limitations to consider. Much as I love cashmere, one or two of my experiments with it have taken their toll in money and disappointment.

  The idea of cashmere socks, for instance, is altogether delightful, a well-deserved treat for the feet. What could be more pleasant than walking around with our toes cocooned in warm, comfortable money? And pleasant it certainly is. But not for long—or, at least, not for me. It may be that I have unforgiving and abrasive heels or a savage and destructive tread, but I find that a pair of cashmere socks might, if I confine walking to the absolute minimum, last through the day intact. If they do, the next time I wear them they will undoubtedly develop premature baldness. Either a toe will impudently pop out of the front or a heel will emerge from the back. I have reluctantly decided to abandon cashmere socks.

  The problems with trousers are not as extreme or revealing, but similar. Even when fully lined, they have a tendency to bag at the seat and the knees, giving the wearer a slightly droopy lower profile. Short of standing upright all day, the only solution, if you’re determined to have some form of cashmere covering your bottom half, is to choose a blend of cashmere and wool or cashmere and silk. It’s not quite as soft, to be sure, but it is more likely to stay in shape.

  Your upper half is where you can indulge yourself with more layers than a goat’s. A cashmere overcoat, with its dense nap and its texture somewhere between velvet and fur, is proof against the Madison Avenue wind-chill factor and the Eskimo winters of Minnesota but without the heaviness of clumsier overcoats that make you feel as though you’re wearing your grandmother’s armchair. And, as your tailor will tell you, cashmere is a joy to cut.

  Peeling off your outer layer, we come to your sports coat, where warmth is less important than is appearance. Practised cashmere spotters—and it doesn’t take long to become one—can tell a pure cashmere sports coat from ten feet away. Even at that distance, it is visibly soft. There are no hard edges. Women, who have an instinctive eye for these things, often have great difficulty keeping their hands to themselves when a cashmere sports coat comes within touching distance. If you wear cashmere, you must be prepared to be stroked from time to time. There are worse fates in life.

  For all but the most coldblooded, that should be enough cashmere to have on at any one time, although there are sweaters fine enough to wear under a sports coat. These are single-ply, which is the most widely used weight. Two-ply is twice as heavy, twice as warm, nearly twice as expensive. And for the sweater of sweaters, the one you will keep under lock and key, well away from light-fingered women, there is four-ply.

  I have a weakness for four-ply cashmere sweaters, a terrible weakness that I try to justify on the feeble grounds that I rarely wear a sports coat. In fact, it would be impossible to wear a sports coat that wasn’t cut like a marquee, because four-ply cashmere is so warm, so lush and so preposterously thick that wearing anything over it is out of the question. It is worth ten ordinary sweaters—and costs about the same as all ten put together. (For those of you who doubt the wisdom of plunging immediately into a sweater investment of such daunting proportions, I can recommend the four-ply cashmere scarf. Wrap it round you neck and get out in the coldest weather you can find. The rest of you may turn blue, but from chin to chest you won’t feel anything but snug.)

  Now that demand for the cosy pleasures of cashmere is increasing, it is becoming more widely available: every good men’s shop (particularly the kind that describes itself as a ‘purveyor of gentleman’s furnishing’) will have a selection, displayed
under glass, in the high-rent corner of the store. But sooner or later, if you take your cashmere seriously, you and your American express card will have to make a pilgrimage to London and investigate the temptations of the Burlington Arcade.

  It runs at right angles off Piccadilly, about 250 yards long and barely wider than a couple of scarves laid end to end, with a glass roof and immaculately buffed display windows. It is patrolled by beadles, resplendent in a kind of Ruritanian policeman’s uniform, whose job is to keep the peace and enforce the gentlemanly regulations that preserve the dignity of the arcade: no whistling and no running.

  In this short but opulent alley, you will see cashmere in a glorious, luxurious glut, piled up in the windows and on the counters, any colour you want, any thickness you can afford. The territory is divided among four principal retailers, the cashmere barons—Berk, Fisher, Lord and Peal—each of whom offers his own variations on the classic styles. Prices differ a little—but nothing to get excited about. Cut-rate cashmere doesn’t exist.

  The only time you might find a glimmer of a bargain is during cashmere’s off-season, during what is optimistically referred to in Britain as high summer. In August, if you’re lucky, there might just be a certain amount of restrained stock clearing—nothing as vulgar as an everything-must-go sale, but a distinctly more sympathetic look to the price tags. August is the time of year I buy sweaters, and Mr. Fisher is the man I go to see. I like the styles he has, and I like him.

  This year, his news was not good. The price of untreated cashmere, straight off the goat, is nudging £300 a kilo. A four-ply sweater, weighing in at just over half a kilo, leaves very little change from £550. Next year’s prices could be higher still, but what can you do if those damned goats won’t perform?

  12

  A Mouthful of Black Pearls

  Very few single words in the English language are instantly evocative of wealth, privilege, and a taste of bliss all at once. (Phrases don’t count—not even ‘oysters Rockefeller’ or ‘Peel me a grape.’) It is a select gathering, a verbal hall of fame, and one of the oldest established and least likely members is the oily, processed fish egg.

  Caviar. You see? The very mention of the word has you mentally rubbing shoulders with the rich and knees with the beautiful as you sample the most consistently popular luxury food in the world. Caviar has been receiving superb reviews for more than 2,000 years. Aristotle wrote about it in the fourth century BC, and writers have been salivating in print every since, from Rabelais and Shakespeare to Evelyn Waugh and every cookery expert who has that redeeming streak of extravagance that saves us from a life filled with meatloaf recipes.

  Unlike many ancient titbits—larks’ tongues, flamingo brains, roasted swan, peacock breasts, and dozens of other dishes that have become extinct as a result of changing tastes or changing laws—caviar has survived to be with us still. Not with many of us, it’s true, but then if it were as available and inexpensive as spareribs or hamburger, half the pleasure of eating it would be lost: an order of caviar on a sesame-seed bun, hold the relish, is somehow lacking in cachet and would certainly take away from the delightful, almost guilty feeling of elitism that adds so much to the enjoyment of every slippery spoonful.

  A great deal of what is optimistically classified as caviar is, strictly speaking, nothing of the sort. It may be processed fish roe and it may have an agreeable taste, but it will have come from lumpfish, salmon, white fish, cod, or one of several other pregnant members of the fish family. In the United States, as long as the name of the parent fish appears somewhere on the can or jar, the processed roe can be sold as caviar. In France, where matters of the stomach are treated with the utmost gravity, the definition of caviar is as precise and rigorously enforced as the definition of champagne: only the roe of the sturgeon qualifies as caviar.

  Fate and man have not been kind to the sturgeon. Until the turn of the century, it was still swimming in the Hudson River and in rivers throughout Europe. Since then, overfishing and pollution have practically wiped it out, and with a few isolated exceptions, the only bodies of water where it is still found in significant numbers are the Caspian and Black Seas and the Gironde River in France. And to add to the sturgeon’s misfortunes, the Caspian Sea is shrinking. (The Russians, who eat more caviar than anyone else, are trying to do something about it, but refilling a sea is a lengthy business.)

  Of the surviving sturgeon, the two best known are the beluga and the sevruga—the largest and smallest members of the species and the names to look for when you’re feeling sufficiently prosperous. The beluga can reach a length of fifteen feet and weigh over a thousand pounds, and twenty percent or more of its body weight can be made up of roe. Beluga eggs are the largest and are a long time in the making; it takes twenty years before the female is mature enough to produce them. The sevruga weighs in at about fifty pounds, matures in seven years and produces the smallest eggs.

  If it were enough simply to catch the sturgeon and extract the eggs, caviar would be considerably less expensive, but it would taste nothing like it does. Roe, even sturgeon roe, is fairly bland stuff. What transforms it into caviar is the way it is processed, and that takes enough dexterity and knowledge to justify calling it an art.

  More than a dozen separate operations have to be carried out within the space of about fifteen minutes: any longer, and the roe will deteriorate beyond the stage at which it can be made into caviar. First, the sturgeon is knocked out—not killed, as this would make the deterioration take place even faster—and then the eggs are removed, sieved, washed and drained to prepare them for the attentions of one of those mythical figures who, like great wine makers, can improve dramatically on nature’s raw materials.

  The grader, or taster, or, as he should properly be called, the master of caviar, has literally minutes to make decisions that will determine the taste and the price of the eggs heaped in front of him. He sniffs, he tastes, he looks, he feels with the tips of his fingers. He grades the eggs according to size, colour, firmness, bouquet, and flavour, and finally makes the most important decision of all: how much, or how little, salt is needed to ripen the roe into caviar without overpowering the subtle combination of taste and texture.

  The highest-quality eggs receive the minimum amount of salt, less than five percent in relation to the amount of roe, and can be described as malossol caviar. (Malossol means ‘little salt’ in Russian but can mean considerably more than a little in the USA, where, once again, the laws of description are less stringent.) After salting, the eggs are shaken on sieves until dry and packed in cans that are small enough—two kilos, or just over four pounds—to prevent the weight of the eggs on top from bursting those on the bottom. And then the caviar starts its refrigerated journey from the Caspian Sea to the small number of favoured establishments around the world whose clients can afford to pay $5 or more a mouthful.

  In fact, when you consider the scarcity of sturgeon, the years it takes for the female to produce her eggs, the enormous skill required for processing and the difficulties of transportation, it is easy to see why caviar is one of the three most expensive edible items in the world (saffron and truffles being the other two). Looked at in terms of dollars and ounces, it should be given the serious consideration of a major investment, the difference being that this will taste better than your holdings in IBM or the Monet hanging in your bedroom.

  As with anything natural, delicate, and perishable, it is critically important to find a supplier you can trust, and one who sells enough caviar to take the trouble to store it properly. There are no special offers on caviar and it always pays to buy from the best houses, such as Petrossian in New York or Fortnum’s in London. Providing you look like a genuine purchaser and not someone in search of a quick snack, you might be allowed to taste before you buy. Ironically, the suppliers who are confident enough about their caviar to offer this pleasant service are the ones whose advice you can trust without the free trial.

  Buy only as much as you’re going to eat,
and once you’ve bought the caviar, don’t go back to the office, drop into a bar, or dawdle through the park to look at the girls. Go straight home and put your caviar in the fridge. In its sealed container, it will keep for about four weeks. Once opened, it will, in theory, keep for a couple of days; in practice, however, there are never any leftovers.

  You now have to make a series of choices. They may seem small, but they will make the difference between your caviar being the treat it should be or an expensive disappointment, and at the top of the list is your choice of companion.

  Some people can be ruled out at once. Gastronomic philistines who have ketchup with everything are best left to wallow in their vice at a hotdog stand. Your boss and your friendly IRS inspector should be excluded because they will both assume you’re making far too much money. Business contacts will think you’re trying to impress them, and will eat more than their fair share. Relatives don’t deserve it. The choices narrow down to an intimate friend, or the one person in life you love above all others, who is, of course, yourself. Dinner for one when caviar is on the menu is a dinner you will remember.

  And what should you drink with it? The tradition is Russian or Polish vodka, the bottle frozen in a block of ice so that the vodka is so cold it stings. But don’t be tempted to experiment with the flavoured vodkas; they will fight with the taste of the caviar and usually win. Personally, I prefer a very dry champagne. There is something nicely symmetrical about not only eating bubbles but drinking them as well.

  The preparation and serving of the caviar itself is often absurdly complicated. You will frequently see people piling their plates with ingredients that will either disguise or obliterate the very flavour they have paid for so dearly in the first place. On go the dollops of sour cream, the slivers of anchovy, the chopped capers and onion and hard-boiled eggs, and what are you left with? It might taste good, but it won’t taste of caviar.