It was a horrific disaster, but the rest of us couldn't be bothered; lunch was in full swing by then and we were concerned only with getting dishes out of the kitchen. The only problem for us was that we wore clogs—a popular footwear in Italian kitchens—and no socks, so every time you had to cross the kitchen, you would dance over the writhing, struggling eels, feeling their sickeningly slimy skin against your ankles as the juice splashed up against you. Disgusting.
The butcher, meanwhile, was absolutely shell-shocked by the sight of all those eels. He stood there dumbfounded, unsure of how to even begin reining in the mess. Before long, word spread through the entire restaurant and waiters and busboys were scurrying back to get a look at the spectacle, and briefly laugh at the paralyzed butcher, before hurrying back to work.
After about ten minutes of this, the owner of the restaurant, an Italian businessman right out of Central Casting, with a beautiful silk suit, striped tie, and chiseled-looking coiffed hair, appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. Placing great emphasis on each word, he screamed:
"Pick. Up. The. Fucking. Eels."
The butcher looked at him blankly.
So the restaurateur repeated himself:
"Pick. Up. The. Fucking. Eels."
Still nothing from the butcher, who could only shrug in bewilderment.
"Come on," barked the owner, clapping his hands twice. "The eels. Pick 'em up. Whats a matter with you?"
Finally, the butcher figured it out. He ran off, returning a moment later with a snow shovel borrowed from the building's super, and began scooping up eels by the dozen. After deposit ing them all in the Lexan containers, he had to rinse and drain them, reapply the salt, and pack them up again until they died their sorry little death.
He did all of this by the time lunch was done, and we got on with our shift like nothing had ever happened.
But it was an unforgettable moment. To this day, whenever I see an eel, am served an eel dish, or even just hear the word eel, I remember the sensation of that slime against my ankle, the poor butcher being laughed at by all the Italians, and the owner standing there screaming, "Pick up the fucking eels," and I can't help but laugh all over again, as though I were still standing there with them slithering between my bare feet.
Euphoria
TAMASIN DAY-LEWIS
For the last five years Tamasin Day-Lewis has written an avidly followed column for Saturday's Daily Telegraph. Tamasin's cookbooks have covered a range of comforting rural recipes, from the preparation of seasonal dishes and picnics to the art of pie-baking and '"proper" slow cooking. She is the author of West of Ireland Summers and Last Letters Home and is a regular contributor to American Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Country Homes & Interiors. She has directed many television documentaries.
THE COLLEGE BUTLER had been detailed to find fine wines and sherry and to repair to my "set" to serve them. Cambridge University has a language all its own, and when I became an undergraduate there at King's College, I learned pretty quickly that you didn't have bedrooms or studies in your third year, you had sets comprising a sitting room complete with fireplace for toasting crumpets and teacakes from High Street's most-prized patisserie, Fitzbillies, and a bedroom—the two kept self-contained behind a stout pair of double doors. The outside door was traditionally left ajar if you were open to callers, but closed if you were up to no good or trying to write an essay, in which case you were said to be "sporting your oak." There were eight similar sets on "U" Staircase, looking out over the River Cam, where, as all picture postcards show, students spend their summers punting, picnicking, and eschewing their studies.
We had a tiny "gyp" room where we could cook, though its resemblance to a kitchen was not immediately apparent. I had fought hard to secure my room, U4, when booking the staircase with my posse of foodie friends; after all, if people were to ask, "Where's Tamasin?" the reply could only be "in Euphoria!" As luck would have it, my rooms were also closest to the kitchen.
So, the butler had appeared with white-starched linen tablecloth and napkins that would have stood as frostily to attention as anything at Le Cirque or one of the great temples to cuisine; the bottles were on their way, presently being chambreed in the bowels of the college kitchen; all I had to do was prepare a dinner the likes of which no student had prepared in the collective living memories of the dons about to attend it. A Roman feast. Would I have attempted this Everest of a task if I had known that disaster was about to strike? That I cannot say, but I can tell you that this picture of order and organization, of tradition and good taste, was about to be blown apart by my combination of ignorance and ambition.
What had I let myself in for? The confidence of youth, the not knowing what you don't know, the desire to show off and not be like the other students eating pigswill in hall every night or stirring packet soup into chipped mugs in their rooms; spooning cold rice pudding from the tin, surviving on toasted sandwiches from a tiny cafe opposite the austerely beautiful world-famous facade of Cambridge's best known college, founded by Henry VI, who also founded Eton.
Having been accepted as one of the first women at King's when they decided to go coeducational after centuries as an all-male domain, here I was trying to introduce a more female take on its world of entertaining, away from the world of the "top table" that the dons dined ceremoniously at every night in their gowns, sweeping in like great flapping birds for Latin grace, to plunder the college's world-class wine cellar, and partake of its grim, institutional apology for good food.
Here I was, about to preside over a lavish dinner party despite the exigencies of my student grant, with a burgeoning sense that the women in the college should be responsible for transforming this previously all-male bastion into a more homely, civilized place where fine dining and good wines could coexist, and even become de rigueur.
The rampant, politically correct feminist student lobby would have been horrified had they known of my belief in the civilizing effects of a good dinner or the fact that I was prepared to cook for as many boys and girls on my staircase as wanted to dine every night. The feminists were busy trying to get a condom machine installed in the girl's cloakroom on the grounds that it was sexist if there was one only in the boy's. Meanwhile I was learning about budgeting; how to buy cheap cuts of scrag of lamb or choose between the end-of-the-day's fruit and vegetables in the market at a discount, and making sure there was some sort of equal distribution of labor when I cooked; that the boys brought the wine, washed up, even went shopping from time to time.
Hell, I didn't want to pander to the well-known sobriquet of being a "blue stocking," the barely veiled insult that still exists to describe the confirmed spinster in academics whose eccen- tricity, unworldliness, and unforgivingly plain looks only the rarefied and obscure sanctuary of an Oxford or Cambridge college could absorb.
At this point, I should probably explain my suitability for the task ahead. When I left home for university, I could cook an omelet. And that is just about it. It was, however, a very good omelet; my mother had taught me that it took precisely fifty-five seconds to cook THE PERFECT OMELET, exactly how long it took to recite a Shakespeare sonnet. Not so odd a comparison given that my father, C. Day Lewis, was the poet laureate; I have no doubt that my mother probably recited the bard's canon of sonnets by memory as she worried the buttery eggs in the pan with her palette knife and flipped them out with the desired baveuse centres and perfectly pale primrose undersides.
My limited repertoire at this stage was understandable. My mother dominated her tiny kitchen and it was not a place where there could ever be room for two cooks. My experiments were confined to pressing the extra bits of pastry remaining from one of her tarts firmly into small patty tins until they were so overworked and greasy and thick that they came out of the oven half raw, the burnt, bubbling jam—no child ever learns less is more—erupting Vesuvially and stickily and breaching the pastry walls and then eaten so hot by me and my brother that it welded itself to the roofs of our mouths, or els
e scraping the last bits of cake mixture raw from the bowl when she'd made one of her weekly teatime treats and eating it straight from the wooden spoon.
Though I had been brought up in a house with a tradition of good food, I never really wanted to learn to cook. As a child, it didn't occur to me that it might be an interesting or exciting thing to do. Eating was always the pleasure. My grandparents, unusually for the time, kept a marvelous, traditional English table, and their cook, the redoubtable Rhoda Fisher, was still busy turning out three meals if not four a day well into her seventies. My grandmother did what ladies in her position did, which was to know all about good food, to order exactly what she wanted when the cook went into my grandfather's dressing room every morning to discuss the day's menu, to even know the ingredients of every dish she ordered, but to have never actually cooked anything herself.
There was an apocryphal story about her first dinner party when she married my grandfather. She was all of seventeen and had no idea how to address the cook or what to order, but felt she'd better not let on. There were going to be ten people at the party that evening. Quick as a flash, when asked what should be bought for dinner, my grandmother replied "ten pounds of fillet steak."
By the time I was born, she'd had nearly three decades of practice and as long to cultivate the other imperative qualification, greed, a must-have for any serious cook or bon vivant and one which hasn't bypassed anyone in at least four generations of my family, including my own three children.
And so it was that one dinnertime when I had been allowed to stay up, although it was not given to me to actually dine with my grandparents, my grandfather ate his bloodily rare grouse served a Vancienne with fresh peppery watercress, game chips, bread sauce, fried bread crumbs, and gravy and then asked me if I'd like to try it. I was given the carcass and remember only the thrill, the indefinable thrill of a new taste so transporting and beyond the realms of any expectation that for a minute you wonder that something can defy even your imagination. I picked every tiddly bone clean as though it were the last supper and have continued to do so with game birds and bones of any sort throughout my life. That night was like a shaft of light into a secret world, a grown-up world of taste whose discovery was going to alter the way I thought about food from thereon in. Somewhere the thought lodged in my brain that good food was all about good ingredients and good cooking. Perhaps I ought to find out how to cook.
I began the next term at school not even realizing that recipes were there for a purpose, that weighing and measuring were a means to a delicious end, that only the best and most experienced of cooks could cook without paying attention to such trifling little details. I purchased a bottle of Ribena, a stickily sweet blackcurrant cordial that we used to drink with hot water before lights out. I managed to get to the local tuck shop and buy cream, icing sugar, and a lemon. I stuck my head through the school kitchen window and begged Chef for an ice tray, promising to return it and cajoling him into helping me in my mission. Blackcurrant juice, cream, and lemon were stirred into a putrid pink mixture as thick as paint and poured into the ice tray. I carried it gingerly back to Chef, who promised to freeze it for me. That night I collected the frozen pink ice cream and took it proudly back to my dormitory to tempt my dorm mates with. It was toothachingly sweet and sickly with cream, but the funny thing was I didn't see it as a complete disaster; it was an experiment, and that meant critical faculties had to be employed, as did that thing I was unaware existed at that stage, let alone that I might have it, the palate. Next time I would use more lemon, less sugar, and less cream. I might even read a recipe book and find out how to make real blackcurrant ice cream.
My mother, unlike my grandmother, did not have a cook; indeed, she had had a rude awakening on marrying my father coming from this world of cooks and housekeepers, governesses and maids. My father insisted on having a pudding every night. My mother had to rise to the challenge, and on the first night presented my father with pancakes. Child's play, you might think. No one had told her that you didn't use self-rising flour to make pancake batter, so the slim pancakes she'd aspired to flipping and folding and spritzing with lemon juice and sugar were not quite as she'd imagined them to be. My father looked at the sorry, gray leather effigies on his plate and hurled one against the wall, where it stuck, proclaiming that it looked exactly like the poet Keats's death mask.
Perhaps these stories from two generations of women in my family were the things that spurred me on, made me realize that failure, kitchen disaster, was not only an option, it was a given. It didn't mean you should give up, that you were a bad cook; at worst you could dine out on the stories and tell them to your children and grandchildren; at best you would improve as a result.
My only real memory of cooking for my father, who died when I was eighteen, so had no idea that I had any talent at the stove, let alone that I would end up becoming a food writer and cookbook author, was an occasion more disastrous than my mother's first. It was something of a warm-up act and wake-up call for me to finally get down to learning the basics, understanding the importance of technique and how to read a recipe.
My mother had gone away and asked me to cook for my father and I, presuming that there was really no great skill or knowledge required, and oblivious to timing and technique, pronounced I would fry some aubergines to go with the lamb chops that I assumed just needed a little cremating under the grill.
I cut the spongy purple grenades into fat wedges and plunged them into a pan of oil, oil not even hot enough to begin the frying process. It wasn't long before the oily bath seemed to have disappeared and things began to smoke. I poured a further libation of oil into the hot pan. This time the aubergines seemed to be turning dusky brown rather too quickly. I thought I'd better drain them and remove them before it was too late. My father cut into the resistant brown discs. They managed to be as tough and hard as to almost appear raw at the same time as to be leaking oil like a tanker that had struck rock. They were so oily that even with copious amounts of kitchen paper they were inedible; but my father never breathed a word and, like a fellow conspirator, never even let on to me that my burnt offering was unacceptable.
Other than the school cookery lessons that were supposed to teach us the rudiments of good baking and where I excelled only in the greed department, shaking sap green and ink blue coloring into my sponges and meringues to make sure my dorm mates wouldn't want to help me eat them, I had had little experience of proper cooking when I left the fold for the portals of King's. My three strongest suits were my greed, my childhood exposure to really good home cooking—although it was many years before I realized just how good and unusual that was—and my sudden desire to cook, prompted by the fact that this was the first time in my life that the only way of eating good food was if I cooked it myself.
In between Sir Gaivain and the Green Knight, Greek tragedy, the metaphysical poets, Milton, and Chaucer, I read Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, the two seminal food writers of the time: Mrs. David for her prose and her discovery of the great regional, provincial cooking of France and Italy and the Mediterranean, and Mrs. Grigson, the scholar cook, for her more detailed instruction and the inspiration of recipes that always worked whatever your level of knowledge. And I had a boyfriend at King's who was as interested in good food as I was. He showed serious skill and a rather more sophisticated knowledge of food that didn't just amount to having good taste, a good palate, like me, and could conjure up things like the perfect creme caramel with no apparent effort. His caramel would be syrupy and burnt to just the right degree, his tremblingly set creme as silken and eggy as could be, speckled with real vanilla seeds, the whole great burnished moon of a dish turned out and served cool but not too chilled. There was an understanding of the small print, of attention to detail. I would have to raise the stakes.
I'd cooked nightly for a couple of terms for my fellow students from as many Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David recipes as I could afford to buy the ingredients for and as were simple enough
for someone at my level. I felt I had worked my way up to being ready to go for the big one: a serious, grown-up dinner party of the kind my mother and grandmother appeared to give effortlessly. It hadn't occurred to me that this was a whole new thing insofar as the timing and textures and courses and sheer ambition of it were concerned, that there was far more scope for failure and disaster than there ever could be from my usual stew-and-mashed-potato suppers. The reason for holding this, my first proper dinner party, was simple. When I'd arrived at King's, several of the dons had invited a few undergraduates to their homes for drinks. Oceans of sherry were sunk at these bashes, and, not drinking the stuff in those days, particularly served almost warm—unlike the stunning chilled Palo Cortado or Finos one drinks in Jerez—I found these parties a serious ordeal. There had been one exception, however, the avuncular and kindly figure of the senior librarian at King's, Tim Munby, or A.N.L. Munby as he was more formally referred to.
Tim had invited me and a couple of friends to dinner, which his wife, Sheila, had cooked, and we had been entertained as though we were serious grown-ups, not just starved, troublesome students. During the course of dinner, Tim mentioned that in all his years at King's of giving similar dinners to a few select freshmen, and he could have been talking about a tenure of over a quarter of a century for all I knew, not one student had ever returned the invitation. Here was a challenge I could take up.
I decided to meet it with a couple of the friends who had also been so generously entertained. I sent out invitations and decided that if we put the booze on the college bill, at least I wouldn't have to pay for it until the following term. The next thing was the menu. We could hardly serve the sausage and mash, belly of pork and beans, pig's liver with root vegetables, or Irish stew that were our U Staircase staples. A stroke of luck happened the weekend before the dinner.
Don't Try This at Home Page 10