Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Quite close. And now, Gerry, if you will excuse me, I simply must do a bit more work. My little songs, you know.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. Frightfully sorry, taking up your time with my problems. But it’s been nice chatting to you, I must say. Pavel Taneyev? Yes, I can see distinct possibilities. Wonderful pianist, exotic – not to say dramatic – background. Er, wife and family? Would they be tricky to work with, do you think?’

  ‘No wife, Gerry,’ I say, looking him straight in the eye. ‘Pavel’s not married, you can be quite confident of that. You’ll have no problems there. You may even have much in common.’

  ‘I see. H’m. I see. Something to think about, all right. Thanks for the drink. Must be getting back.’

  And off he goes again through the trees, lurching a bit. Well, Pavel dear, I think grimly as I pick up my pen again, sorry to throw you to the wolves like that. But you’re a big boy now and you can easily refuse the Geralds of this world. And if you can’t, then it just serves you right for spending so much time crying on my shoulder back in Sverdlovskaya Street. The main point is, I will do anything to ensure that Gerry forgets all about Piero Pacini.

  10

  Thanks to working through lunchtime, pausing only for a cup of strong coffee to counteract that involuntary glass of Fernet, I manage to get most of my Pisorno Studios ideas down in short score. If I fall under a bus tomorrow nobody will be able to decipher my squiggles, no doubt, but then it will no longer matter. A blessed silence has fallen from the direction of Gerry’s house and I imagine him sprawled across a double bed poleaxed by drink: eyes shut, mouth open and the matelot shirt plastered with sweat to his unmuscular chest. There is a certain pathos about this neighbour of mine but I refuse to dwell on it.

  In mid-afternoon, not thirty seconds after I have put a double bar-line at the end of my sketch, Piero Pacini himself rings from Rome, newly returned from America. Filippo has told him that the proposed set meets with my approval and he hopes this is true. They are due to start shooting there in six weeks’ time and am I feeling inspired? I tell him that not only am I feeling inspired but I have already written something that I hope captures the place’s sinister, derelict atmosphere. Piero is – or affects to be – ecstatic and promises to despatch by courier a copy of the script as it stands so far with the music requirements marked and roughly timed. I ought to get it tomorrow and should begin to think in terms of an overall leitmotif, the same technique I used so effectively in Vauli Mitronovsk.

  ‘But I don’t have to tell you, Marta darling,’ he says. ‘You know I can’t bear those scores that make films sound like an American TV series. Those style-less bridge passages to stuff up the cracks between the scenes are anguish to me. My films never subordinate the aural to the visual. Now, when can I hear what you’ve written?’

  ‘Well,’ I say, a little flustered, ‘I’ve only sketched out some pages to establish the film’s characteristic sound. It’s just in short score at present.’

  ‘Fine. Send me the disc.’

  ‘I’m sorry …? Er, disc? It’s written on paper – you know, music manuscript. Score paper?’

  ‘You mean you write in ink?’

  ‘It’s the only way I know,’ I say stiffly, managing to stop myself adding that it was a method that had served both Beethoven and Stravinsky quite well. ‘What did you think?’

  ‘Oh my,’ says Pacini. ‘I naturally assumed you work on a keyboard with a computer. I thought everyone did these days. You play something, it automatically notates it, and then you fiddle around with the instrumentation until you get the sounds you want. Then you put it on a disc and send it off.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve never used a system like that,’ I tell him, feeling a hick. ‘I just do it the old-fashioned way. I know the sounds I want and write them like that from the start. I don’t need to “fiddle around”.’

  ‘Of course you must stick to the method you know,’ says Pacini encouragingly, managing to imply that I pluck my quill pens from the nearest goose, ‘although it’s inconvenient if I can’t hear it immediately. I like to shoot with the music ready. I am not like other directors,’ he adds disdainfully, ‘who shoot a film and then bolt some music onto it. For me the aural and the visual are concurrent and influence each other at the moment the film is made.’

  Clearly he has used these words hundreds of times in as many interviews. All of a sudden I’m conscious of standing in a centuries-old kitchen filled with my own private disorder, an ex-Soviet-bloc composer who was trained in a traditional way in threadbare circumstances. I feel shame at being so far behind the times. I even begin to panic lest the great Piero Pacini loses faith in me as too untechnological to work with.

  ‘I’m sure I could learn,’ I offer gamely.

  ‘Of course you could. I may courier a system up to you with the script. I’ll get my people onto it. Now I must leave you. Even this late we’re still having casting difficulties with one of the minor roles, can you imagine that?’

  He rings off, leaving me obscurely chastened like a student who has unaccountably disappointed her favourite teacher. Still, I tell myself, he’s not going to change his composer at this stage, not the way the great Pacini works, not unless he reschedules the shoot and everything. And besides, my music is going to make his film … But now I’ve caught a little of his fretfulness and am anxious he should hear what I’m doing as soon as possible to give us both confidence. Maybe after all I need to become computer literate. How horrid! Surely these electronic crutches are for people who don’t know what they’re about, for amateurs and the musically illiterate? They are not for proper composers who have been brought up to be able to sit in a corner like Mozart or any other professional, scribbling down the full score of the overture even as the dress rehearsal is proceeding onstage.

  At that moment, right on cue, Gerry starts up again in the distance. Not so much nessun dorma as nessun lavora, frankly. He is repeating the same florid little passage I was notating earlier. Because his voice sounds louder I resignedly go to the door to see if I am about to be honoured with yet another visit. It seems not, however. I catch glimpses of him between the trees in full DIY mode carrying a hefty-looking crowbar. He is wearing boots and one of those thick belts that telephone linesmen wear from which dangle various steel implements. He also has on a yellow hard hat to complete the picture of construction-site chic. He neither looks nor sounds like someone who only a few hours ago drank three-quarters of a bottle rated at forty-five per cent alcohol, which is the same as the grappa on my mantelpiece. This is evidently the butch Gerry, the effect spoiled only by the high tenor singing which sounds like a pinched puppy. The words seem to approach the edge of decipherability but stop short, reaching my ears as a most unlikely entreaty for a despairing lover: ‘Vedi, vedi, vedi il fondo del barattolo!’ See the base of the container? Whatever else he set, Puccini never set those words.

  But where can this jaunty workman be headed? I lose sight of him but can still track him by an upward scale ending on a high F sharp. Then there is an ominous creaking, topped by a wailing E flat in alt to which Maria Callas herself could only vainly have aspired. This fades and is followed by a far-off sound like that a wooden Potemkin suburb makes when enthusiastically flattened by many pairs of feet. Then silence. Intrigued despite myself, I hurry over.

  Gerald

  11

  The good thing about the commercial trash I write is that because there’s seldom much lead-time my submitted text always gets speedy feedback in case they want to make changes. I admit to having been cheered by Hot Seat!’s initial reception. At least they liked it. Mind you, editors and agents and publishing folk hardly constitute a representative slice of the reading public. For a start, few people in publishing these days are able to read at all, it being a largely superfluous skill in a business that depends more on feel and image and marketing.

  So it was good that Per Snoilsson’s dreary life story had been well received by those who commissioned it, thoug
h naturally my pleasure was short lived. Who cares to have written a non-book? Not that I have the slightest desire to leave any lasting mark, of course. One barely casts a shadow even while the sun’s out. But I shouldn’t mind doing something that temporarily engages me. Actually, I should like to lose myself totally in a piece of work, but I can’t imagine what it would be. And whatever it is I’m damned sure nobody would pay me to do it. In the meantime, then, is one to go on tossing fanciful recipes and fanciful arias into the face of despair? Is one to go on writing asinine books about asinine people with a few felicities thrown in to relieve the private torment? Answer: Yes. Keep bearing in mind that tunnel at the end of the light, Samper, the one that goes on for ever. How I wish I’d been born in 1865 instead of 1965. I also wish I’d been born with a clearly defined talent for something, or else stupid. Come to that, I wish my mother and elder brother hadn’t walked to the end of the Cobb in Lyme Regis on that early September afternoon while my father and I went to buy another film for my camera. I wish that we hadn’t seen them turn to stroll back and then be swept off the face of the earth by a freak wave that spared some children trying out the Cobb’s whispering-gallery effect, a watercolourist sitting on a canvas stool, three couples, a dog and a man selling Jane Austen souvenirs. They all got a fright and a good soaking, whereas Mama and Nicky vanished utterly, leaving behind a vast and empty expanse of salt air that has surrounded me ever since. It’s easy to see why it would always have been necessary to invent a God, if only to account for the sardonic humour of these playful and arbitrary acts. On with the farce. I wish … I wish I could stop drinking Fernet Branca in the middle of the day.

  Truthfulness leads me to blame the ghastly Marta for starting and fostering this Fernet habit. I merely describe what happens. The writer’s eye, like the surgeon’s, is indifferent to what it sees. It has an insatiable accuracy while aiming to serve up a dish consisting of plain ingredients perfectly in balance. It is for the diners themselves to add their moral garnish, salt it with tears, pepper it with outrage etc. Still, I will editorialize as far as to say Marta is a fat slattern from the Pripet Marshes and I dislike nearly all of her and fear the rest, ‘the rest’ being made up of her bottles of Fernet Branca and her clumping seductiveness. I fear her seductiveness not because I feel threatened by it but because sooner or later it will force me into the corner of having to say NO!, and I was brought up among civilized people who make a point of never cornering anyone. I fear her Fernet because it forces me into a corner where I hear myself saying YES! Faiblesse oblige.

  It is true that the other day I took her a bottle as a social lubricant. I went over to her dingy dwelling with the idea of delicately broaching the matter of her piano playing, which quite frankly is driving me mad. But somehow she managed to sidetrack things in a way Stephen Potter could hardly have bettered had he written a book on musical one-upmanship. She must have guessed I was coming since she had cleared the kitchen table of its usual bundles of dank laundry and crusted plates and spread it instead with music manuscript paper. Brilliant! Having heard enough of her piano playing to know she is about as musical as Beethoven’s ear-trumpet, I had to be impressed by her ostensible ‘score’: several sheets of paper liberally covered in scrawls. Of course she was eager enough to abandon this piece of humbug once I’d drawn the Branca brothers’ cork – or rather, had induced liquor to flow through their patented plastic pourer. Personally, I hate drinking in the middle of the day, especially in a hot climate. One simply gets nothing done thereafter. I did manage to slip away on the truthful pretext of having left a cake in the oven: an oversight that will give you some idea of how thrown I’d been by her sonic pollution. I’m really quite a spur-of-the-moment sort, despite my mild-mannered Clark Kent exterior, and had gone across to her house fully prepared to read her the riot act, only to be distracted by the princely cake whose muffled cries in my oven I suddenly heard all the way from her kitchen. And just as well, too, because by the time I had got back I could detect the beginnings of that bitter, caramelized smell of exposed sultanas turning to carbon. I will give you the recipe shortly.

  When I returned to her hovel Marta had already passed the point where I might usefully have broached any topic, let alone a delicate one like complaining about her piano playing. None of my business, of course, but I swear she had drunk half the bottle: a quantity that would have put me in line for pronto soccorso, stomach pumps and a night in Viareggio Hospital but which merely left her leering wetly behind her hair. She is evidently one of those whom drink makes cunning, because she shamelessly pre-empted any airing of my grievance about her piano by introducing the musical motif herself and then flattering me. When one’s voice is compared to Pavarotti’s and one is urged, as a like mind, to write his biography, there is not much a gentleman can do but blush prettily and make ritual protestations of general unworthiness. Marta then had the brass face to claim intimacy with none other than Pavel Taneyev, with whom she implied she had been a fellow student at Moscow Conservatory. Oh, sure. And Mrs Beeton was my aunt. I mean, do us a favour. High time for that recipe:

  Fish Cake

  No – we are not talking about exquisite fish and potato patties rolled in breadcrumbs and fried, that classic of English cuisine. This is a good deal more exotic, a Gerald Samper creation designed, as any work of art must be, to remind us that the world is an unexpected place full of unfamiliar challenges. I perfected it while compiling a small volume provisionally entitled The Boys’ Reformatory Cookbook whose witty asides proved too much for the fifteen hidebound UK publishers I tried to interest before I lost faith in the project. (The typescript joined many others in my bottom drawer that together constitute the graveyard of my literary hopes. These include the libretto for a delightful and lubricious operetta, Vietato ai Minori, that I now despair of ever seeing set to music, ditto my ballet Jizzelle.) ♦

  Ingredients

  377 gm self-raising flour

  151 gm semolina

  62 gm cornmeal

  149 gm granulated sugar

  83 gm unsalted butter

  1½ eggs

  1 tinned mackerel (about 74 gm)

  Grated peel of 1 lemon

  99 gm freshly ground almonds

  26 gm sultanas

  Pinch of black pepper

  2 tablespoons plain yoghurt (optional)

  ♦

  Stir the flour, semolina, cornmeal, sugar, eggs and almonds together. The mixture will be severely crumbly. Now use your fingers and work in the butter and the fish. Don’t despair: after five minutes or so it will confound you by taking on the correct fatty consistency. Add the sultanas, pepper and grated lemon. Still on the stodgy side? The optional yoghurt will cure that. Go on working until the dough is uniform, with no individual flecks of mackerel. Your fingers may ache but you can console yourself with the thought that your nails will be all the cleaner (also one of the hidden benefits of making one’s own bread). Set the mixture aside to rest for an hour. Meanwhile pre-heat the oven to 190 °C – what used to be Regulo 5 in the dear dead days of the Radiation Cookbook – and oil a baking tin. When the hour is up transfer the dough to the tin and bake for forty minutes, or forty-four minutes if you become distracted by a drunken slut in a neighbouring cottage.

  To taste GS’s Fish Cake at its best it should be left to stand for twenty-four hours. This enhances both texture and flavour, though don’t ask me how. On the grounds that lilies are much improved by gilding, this cake benefits from an austere icing: 226 gm icing sugar mixed with 2 tablespoons Fernet Branca. This will top off your masterpiece with a toothsome cap of an interesting ginger shade.

  For incurable R&D; types, a word of warning. You would be amazed by how few varieties of fish are really suitable for this recipe. I have found by far the best to be ‘Pinocchio’ brand tinned sgombri al naturale, readily available in most Italian supermarkets. Flaked salmon runs them a close second. In the past I have also tried eel, baked halibut and kippers. This last was not a success and I
gave it to the birds. There was something a little too fantastic about fish bones in an iced cake, though it may be just that I’m getting old. Once upon a time my bird table in the Home Counties was an oasis of cuisine expérimentale in a desert of dull fare. Birds must surely be bored by an unrelieved diet of worms, bacon rind and burnt toast. My slow path to culinary mastery was marked by offerings that became the height of avian fashion – the dernier cri, one might say, which occasionally they proved to be. One of the victims, a green woodpecker, was in turn converted into a tasty mouthful by glazing and truffling.

  12

  The more I see of Marta’s place, the more I’m reassured she can’t have bought it and will just be renting it. That little rogue Benedetti must have split his sides at finding an idiot foreigner actually willing to pay hard cash to take the place off his hands. I suspect her of having an acute lack of funds so it can’t be very much, but the house’s lack of Position is the clincher. Those fifty-odd metres make all the difference and render it very much less advantageously placed than mine. No doubt there’s less incentive for her to get out there and create a garden to make the most of what view there is, although I notice she or someone has laid waste to a football-pitch sized area at the back with a brush-cutter. Meanwhile, I can only assume it was written into the terms of the lease that she should leave the interior looking like a Beatrix Potter illustration: damp brick floors, rusty iron range, cobwebby windows. One expects to see Mr Tod sidling down the flagged passage to the back door, glancing over one shoulder with a cocky grin of bared teeth.

  I was enjoying such reflections having returned to my own bright kitchen, now smelling so agreeably of newly baked Fish Cake. Although the way she lives is none of my business, I still find there’s nothing like a visit to Marta’s to inspire me to fresh zeal. The view from the window of my own terrace is enough to remind me that the only thing standing in the way of a perfect panorama is that veteran privy: unreconstructed relic of a peasant past. Suddenly I can bear it no longer. I don suitable gear, collect a few stout tools and set off to deconstruct it.