Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Eat,’ she orders, joining that huge historic chorus of mothers with hairy forearms who stand over small men bellowing ‘Mangia, mangia!’ and ‘Don’t be shy!’

  Strangely enough it turns out to be edible, though hardly palatable, its major challenge residing as much in the texture as in the taste. I remember as a child reading the Amazing Facts column of a boys’ magazine that told of the discovery of a star so dense that as much of it as could fit in a matchbox would weigh 32,000 tons. I used to while away boring lessons by imagining winning endless bets (‘Ten quid says you can’t lift that matchbox, Thompson’) and devising ways of preventing it simply falling through the ground towards Earth’s centre. It was intriguing to think of something that was both easily possessible in terms of size and utterly unownable because of its weight. And here I am, a quarter of a century on, eating a similar substance that I can feel falling in a straight line inside me between gullet and rectum. Surely when I stand up there will be a tearing sound and I shall find my trouser seam in tatters and a smoking pile of undigested kasha on the chair? Until that happens the stuff is massively filling. If you can imagine a planet-sized marron glacé that has begun to collapse under its own gravity – a sweet chestnut on its way to becoming a Black Hole – you will have an idea of quite how filling this syrupy, mealy, oiled substance is. There are serious calories in every crumb.

  ‘You must finish, Gerree,’ says Marta, standing over me in her parody of the maternal tyrant. I blame it on glasnost, or was it perestroika? Whatever it was, anyway, that allowed kasha and Martas to escape from behind the Iron Curtain … Such are the dishevelled mental babblings that accompany the cracking of my maxillary muscles as I chew on and on. The prostate in the middle turns out to be a toffee-like filling based apparently on horse liniment. The linseed oil is loud and clear. ‘Very good,’ she says approvingly as I get the last spoonful down and sag back in my chair. Evidently I now have permission to get down and go out to play. Oh, that ‘twere possible. I debate what to do about Marta but no idea comes. In the face of this kasha offensive I now realize how puny my Garlic and Fernet Ice Cream was. I recall the interesting but not well-known fact that several honeys are actually poisonous, in particular – and I shall need to check this – rhododendron and laurel honey. I envisage the gift to Marta of a bombe surprise based largely on meringues and ice cream held together by rhododendron honey. Nice idea, and probably immune from suspicion, let alone criminal conviction (‘“A tragic error on the part of 62,000 bees,” the judge began his summing up’), but too leisurely and roundabout a way of solving the immediate problem of an irritating neighbour. Planting rhododendrons or laurel, waiting for them to flower, learning to keep bees … Hopeless.

  Long after my tormentress has left I can do little but loll, sipping weak tea made from some much-touted South African bush that tastes like stewed hay. Slowly the bolus in my stomach dissolves and with it my lassitude. It will do no harm to make a date to see this Brill fellow, or Nancy or whatever he calls himself. It feels neither like advance nor retreat, more of a sideways shift away from the world of the starting pistol and the stopwatch. Oh well, why not? Same old despair but at least a different scene. My bruises ache. Great putty-flavoured farts follow me from room to room.

  14

  Days have gone by. I am back on form. Marta has been strangely and agreeably quiet over in her warren, except for a mysterious episode a few nights ago when it briefly sounded as though she were motor racing. It woke me up but faded almost immediately so I gave up thinking about it. None of my business. Maybe one day I shall discover that in addition to everything else she is an expert mechanic and has a secret workshop hidden away at the back. She may even turn out to be a Per Snoilsson fan. Nothing about that woman would surprise me.

  I am bustling about my own house, generally straightening it up and getting things into some sort of order for a famous visitor. I have even been creakily down the terraces to inspect the crash site and put a match to the remains of the privy. A faint smell of dry rot and creosote hung over them and they burned briskly, sending up gratifying clouds of fatal tars and dioxins into the Tuscan sky. In a day or two I am supposed to drive down to Pisa airport and collect the great Brill, who will be flying out Ryanair in horn rims and a wig, as I myself have often thought of doing. It seems he is so keen to get this project of his under way he is prepared to take time off in order to see whether we like each other enough to work together. His agent insisted he would do better tucked away in the anonymity of my mountain retreat for a day or two than heavily disguised in a hotel suite in Pisa. Naturally I’m uneasy. I have no idea what it takes to get on with the lead singer of a boy band. Cocaine, possibly, and I seem to be temporarily out of that.

  What I can supply, however, is culinary creative genius. I am planning menus in my guest’s honour while ignoring the advice of a streetwise interior know-all who urges me not to bother but just to lay in oven-ready chips and deep frozen pizza. Well, Brill can get that sort of stuff anywhere. I shall make it clear that if he wants to do a deal with eternity he’ll have to do a deal with Gerald Samper first, and that includes expanding his dietary horizons. I debate making my celebrated otter dish but one can never be sure what will be in the market. Tuna stuffed with prunes in Marmite batter? A good old standby but maybe unsuited to a Tuscan summer lunch table on a terrace beneath vines. Deep-fried mice? I sometimes wonder if one is not more seduced by the mellifluous sound of a dish than by how it would actually taste. You might think the same went for pears in lavender, but I have discovered that poaching pears in water with a double handful of fresh lavender heads, honey and a cup of Strega makes a striking change from the usual wine-and-cinnamon routine of suburban dinner parties. Don’t be tempted to use Fernet Branca in place of Strega, however. It will taste revolting.

  Meanwhile, I have gone right off my beautiful idea of pears in Gorgonzola with cinnamon cream. It’s all Marta’s fault. Had she not drenched that putty ball of hers in the cinnamon cream I was experimenting with the other day it might still be a possibility. But the whole idea now reeks of linseed oil and bullying and has been ruined for me. Imagine Bach busy writing a soulful aria for the St Matthew Passion when in the street outside a butcher’s boy goes past whistling a popular ditty about three jolly swineherds. Suddenly poor old JSB realizes it’s the very tune he’s now writing, only much faster and in a major key. ‘God damn,’ he mutters softly to himself as he slowly tears up his manuscript, having unwittingly had a preview of what in a hundred and fifty years will be known as the unconscious. That’s pretty much how I feel about the irreparable damage Marta has done my cinnamon cream.

  Since the purging of the privy I have been more attentive to the terrace and the now unobstructed panorama it affords. I sit out there a good deal these days. The funny thing about a coastline when seen from this distance and altitude is that the sea doesn’t look like water at all but, depending on the weather, more like concrete or blue lino or occasionally smirched tinfoil. It’s much too far away for actual waves to be visible, which is one of the things that recommended this place to me. Instead at evening, as Viareggio leans wearily away from the sun, one can sometimes see frozen frown-lines in opposition to the prevailing breeze. That is all. The quick white scars left by ships and pleasure craft are obviously some kind of sap or latex that the ocean briefly bleeds when its skin is broken and which hardens almost immediately on exposure to air. This is the view from a terrace I have always wanted.

  How have I allowed myself to engage for a living with that world down there? (‘That world’ of course refers not to the specific gridded quilt of Viareggio’s sprawl and greenhouses but to the cancerous showbiz ethos that today extends over all horizons.) Ghosting the little lives of famous nobodies – was it for this I passed so many A-levels? Maybe it is not too late to become Nietzsche, a cantankerous visionary or secular monk with a kitchen garden full of exotic international pods and legumes. The man with his finger on the pulses of the world … An
d there you go again: everything has to degenerate into a joke. But of all things, to be making your living – and not a bad one, either – as amanuensis to knuckleheads! And doing it well, what’s more. Doing it so brilliantly these idiots recognize the persona I’ve invented for them, even to the extent that I’m told that ghastly sprinter who now runs for Parliament in elections firmly believes he wrote his book himself (Alone Out There – don’t bother to read it) while I merely sat taking dictation like one of Barbara Cartland’s stenographers. I suppose I should be flattered. As he’s planning his new political career on the basis of an entirely spurious personality I ought, if there were any justice in the world, to have the last laugh. But of course there isn’t and I shan’t. In politics as in showbiz, bogus wins.

  The worst thing is that when I’m working with them – the awful Luc, the unspeakable Per – I occasionally experience the fleeting conviction that I’m related to them, or at any rate have known them a very long time. This must be the direst legacy of that distant, ever-present day on the Cobb when I grimly saw (‘grimly see’ being only one of Lyme Regis’s anagrams) my adored elder brother gulped like a tidbit by the Atlantic. Oh, poor Nicky, how I worshipped you! You were, at eleven, everything I aspired to be: big and brave and heroically athletic. Nothing my nine-year-old self could do came anywhere close to measuring up to your daunting example. I even failed to learn your trick of tossing the hair out of your eyes with a gesture that looked so wonderfully casual: a jerk of your neat head punctuating your passage through the world as though dismissing the moment and its achievement. On to the next effortless triumph.

  Of course the trouble with hero-worshipping an elder brother who dies is that you catch him up and overtake him and leave him there, forever eleven and stranded in a golden pool of promise. And when some of your absurder myths about him have likewise been outstripped by sober accuracy and family photos, you recognize what you probably knew all along: that he was actually quite an ordinary little boy, even a bit timorous and weedy, for whom his teachers were predicting an auspicious academic career. Smile, Gerry (another Lyme Regis anagram, lacking only an ‘r’).

  So maybe, by reminding me of a physical prowess I once looked up to, these hellish athletes are a legacy of that rotten day which marked the beginning of a new family regime that looked to me like blackest treason even as my father embraced it with obvious relief. Hardly had the coffinless double funeral been held (I suppose it was more of a memorial service) than my father married my new ‘auntie’, a heavy woman with a spotty bottom. Laura, she was – and is – and from the first her name and very being became confused in my mind with laurel: dark, funereal and poisonous, entangling one in its shrubbery. I still have no idea what my father saw in her except perhaps that she was a good ten years younger than Mama. Laura was from the first a woman of dazzling stupidity who made the awesome mistake of trying to step into her predecessor’s shoes, reading me the same books that Mama had read me, even insisting on finishing a Roald Dahl story Mama had started that fateful day. ‘Continuity,’ I could imagine her saying to my father, ‘that’s what kids need.’ Never the world’s most astute man and anyway at a loss over the tragedy that had overtaken his little family, he must have gone along with her, no doubt bewitched by the shrubbery. Anyway, she soon learned to hate me, which was clearly my intention all along. And it is only now, as I sip Campari and orange juice (try using those resinous Sicilian blood oranges instead of ordinary navels) at dusk on my terrace that I realize how very much Marta’s hair reminds me of Laura’s. Both have the same detestable thick frizziness. I am sorry my carelessness the other day gave Marta an excuse to be neighbourly. A single ill-judged thrust with my crowbar and there she was, invading my kitchen full of demonic virtue, force-feeding me gigantic balls of ex-Soviet putty.

  And now this Brill person. Was it going to be worse, going from proto-showbiz sports personalities to the real thing? I know nothing about these people, only the clichés the media purvey. Naïvely I assume superstars either spend most of their time lying in pools of vomit in very expensive hotel suites they’ve just trashed or else flying to Zürich for long, serious meetings with the gnomes in suits who manage their millions … Gnomes. Toadstools. Mushrooms. That’s it! Got it at last!

  Rabbit in Cep Custard

  Ingredients

  1 kg fresh rabbit chunks

  1 clove garlic

  6 tablespoons humdrum olive oil

  No rosemary whatever

  16 gm dried cepslporcini Fernet Branca

  3 egg yolks

  125 gm icing sugar

  48 gm flour

  451 ml milk

  Grated rind of ½ lemon

  Hundreds-and-thousands

  ♦

  If it’s nearly lunchtime and you’re a housewife who has just had this brainwave that rabbit in mushroom custard is exactly what’s wanted for tonight’s dinner, forget it. You’re already too late. The first job is to soak the mushrooms in the milk overnight in the fridge, and they need at least eight hours’ steeping. In any case, your husband’s gormless business partner who keeps trying to see down your cleavage will be much better off with Kippers ‘n’ Kimchi, a nifty little number that will strain his manners until they creak even as you describe it brightly as ‘a Korean speciality in your honour, Rupert’.

  Anyway, soak those ceps. At the same time steep the rabbit overnight in abundant cold water to which you have added a generous dash of the Branca brothers’ nectar. In the morning retain the soaking water and rinse the rabbit under the tap, then pat the chunks dry and roll them in icing sugar. Into your iron Le Creuset frying pan that you need both hands to lift put the oil, crushed garlic, rabbit chunks and the now flabby and expanded ceps that you have meanwhile strained out of the milk. Cover tightly and cook for two hours on a low heat, turning now and then. Uncover the pan, increase the heat and boil off the liquid that has surprised you by seeping out of the rabbit in such quantity. Over the resulting succulent brown nodules pour half a cup of the Fernet-tainted overnight soaking water and boil that off, too.

  While the rabbit was slowly seething for two hours you will have busied yourself with the custard, which is more or less a mushroom-flavoured crema pasticcera, although that is far too offhand a way of describing this grand culinary breakthrough. Beat the egg yolks and remaining icing sugar in a heavy saucepan, adding the flour gradually. Meanwhile the milk in which the ceps were soaked should have been brought to just below the boil. Amalgamate the contents of both pans gradually, using every sauce-maker’s trick at your disposal to prevent lumps forming, cook for five minutes, stir in the grated lemon zest and voilà! Mushroom custard. Test for exaggerated sweetness. A drop or two more Fernet to offset it? You have failed completely if you are remotely reminded of Bird’s custard in either texture or taste, even allowing for the absence of vanilla.

  When the custard is ready pour it over the rabbit, cover, and finish off over low heat for fourteen minutes or thereabouts. Do not uncover the pan again but let it cool, allowing the flavours to mingle and develop. Serve tepid on an oval dish, preferably one with a deft pattern of hellebores around the edge. A light dusting of hundreds-and-thousands will intrigue. The aim, as always, is to provoke in your diners the aesthetic reconsideration that is such a vital part of all new experience. The perfect offering for visiting boy-band leaders, madly conservative as they probably are in all their tastes that fall within the law.

  Marta

  15

  Dearest Marja

  Many thanks for your amusing letter. Father doesn’t change, does he? Talk about Mt Sluszic! Your story of the policemen reminds me of that night we were sent to bed early & Mili was ordered to close our shutters, remember? Heavy engines, a burst of shooting & that horrid screaming. Then next morning a landscape innocent as dawn. The estate clean as a pin, not a tyre mark anywhere, looking as though nothing had changed for 200 years. The only way you could tell something had happened was by Father’s black rage that they should
have behaved like that on our ancestral property. Well, by all accounts they paid for it later in Marseilles & Trieste, although I definitely do not wish to know the details.

  But darling Marja, for heaven’s sake don’t imagine that just because I’ve gone away for a bit & am trying to make my own life I’m forgetting my own sister or else repudiating the family. You’re constantly in my thoughts, my love, especially now Father’s sounding so heavy handed about you & Timi. We’ve known Timi since we were all kids. Remember what the huntsmen say about wild piglets not growing up into stags? Once a boar, always a boar. Yes, we know his attractions – God knows he showed us them often enough up at Bolk – but we’ve grown up since then & your feelings about him tally exactly with mine, I assure you. Go along with Father’s plan & marry the man & you’ll be waking up with a snout & bristles on the pillow beside you. You worry me when you say you think Father’s holding you hostage there against my return. Surely not? I’m certain his reason for not wanting you to go abroad yet is partly because you’re so young (by his old-fashioned standards, I mean. In some ways 22 is young… although it’s sure as hell old enough not to get hitched to Timi). This new boy you met in Voynograd, Mekmek, sounds fun. Let’s see how things go in the next few weeks. Maybe with our baby brother’s help we can smuggle you out of purdah, assuming Ljuka hasn’t lost his independence too. He’s becoming awfully like Father in some ways.

  Things are moving along excitingly here. A few days ago I had a call from the boy racer, Filippo Pacini, to say he wanted to come up & see me. An hour later with a sudden roaring there was his exotic car with him at the wheel & … his father climbing out! The great Piero Pacini himself had come to see how his little Voyde composer was getting on. We drank iced slivovitz in the kitchen while he reminisced at length about cutting his filmic teeth on location in Spain with Sergio Leone in the sixties. I hadn’t realized what shoestring budgets those first spaghetti westerns were made on. Peanuts, really. Pacini was very lowly then, of course, just starting out, but working on A Fistful of Dollars was a pretty good way to learn the trade because everything was improvised & you might find yourself having to play an extra in the morning & in the afternoon looking for a suitable tree in the desert from which to hang someone. Pacini periodically broke off to pay me small compliments with that Italian male gallantry that to us often looks a bit smarmy but in his case really isn’t. They’d brought me all sorts of little gifts including, curiously enough, a bottle of Fernet Branca & kilos of the most fabulous florentines that must have cost – but what the hell does it matter what they cost? I’m now moving in circles where people fly to New York for a haircut & drive De Tomaso Panteras.