Cooking With Fernet Branca (7 page)

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, though 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

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.

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.

Years ago in the feckless wanderings of a gap year I found myself travelling by bus in Bolivia. Or was it Ecuador? Somewhere, at any rate, with that standard Latin American mix of vertiginous mountain roads, a bus with no glass in its windows and bald tyres, impassive Indian women passengers in bowler hats, and a matinée desperado at the wheel who periodically removed both hands from it in order to groom his heroic coiffure in the driving mirror. My internal voice was long since hoarse with shrieking and I had lapsed into the numb fatalism that can only be interrupted by a very few major urgencies. One of these was now making it imperative that we stop in the next five minutes. I had already checked the reassuring wad of tissues in the pocket of my rucksack and was going forward to order the driver to pull up when we swung into a mountain village over a hen or two and stopped by a rambling shack calling itself a bar. I was out of the bus and through that bar like Road Runner, leaving twisters of dust behind me. My face was probably more communicative than my Spanish; at any rate I was directed straight to the back of the building where a privy stood with its door hospitably ajar. Springing inside and banging the door to I found the only light came from a hole in the floor: a crusted circle about a foot across. I was in no state to argue. Mere seconds later I was panting in that squatting position so familiar to desperate travellers, sweaty face on knees, in a blissful state of release. I was able only to take in that disaster had been averted by a whisker, that life would go on and for all I cared the bus could too, without me. Gradually my senses returned even as I fumbled for the tissues and began to take in for the first time the unsteady planks of the floor, the drone of bluebottles and – most interesting of all – the view beneath me. The hole of this jakes afforded the sight of a stupendous gulf of blue air: a vertical drop over a chasm so deep I might have been in a helicopter. A thousand feet below my dripping rump lay stained and wicked crags above which my eye caught the slow wheeling specks of vultures sizing up my
offerings. It was the first time I had experienced vertigo in a lavatory. I left the hut a good deal more gingerly than I had entered it, now having the leisure to note its true nature as a place of easement cantilevered out on bleached poles over an abyss.

What days! And what I wouldn’t give to be able to return to them, though less for the conventional reason of erotic adventuring when sap was high than because even fifteen years ago the prospects still seemed good for living a reasonably serious life in my native land. I looked forward to becoming neither a wage slave nor a tycoon. But that was before British culture slumped to an infantile consensus obsessed with cash and fashion. New Labour and wall-to-wall football have left only exile, the stoic’s way out. If one is not allowed to be serious one may as well emigrate. Even mockery is an art form requiring discipline and sacrifice.

So now I sally forth from my pointless house above pointless Casoli with a song on my lips to do away with a privy I have just recognized as a spectre from my own, as much as from the house’s, past. Obviously the Ecuadorean and Italian peasantry had thought along the same lines when viewing a handy precipice. Why dig when the hand of nature has already dug for you? However, the gulf in this case is nowhere near as deep or as steep, and as I run a practised eye over the job I realize for the first time that this privy was never built out over anything but was merely an earth closet at the edge of a hillside terraced for vines and vegetables. Gradually the hillside has been eroded by winter rains and a minor earthslip some time ago has left the hut’s outer wall dangling and sagging over thin air. Good: it shouldn’t take long to complete the job and send the remains down into the cleared patch below, where I’ve made a start on reclaiming the terraces from the jungle that has buried them over the years of abandonment.

Do you find that certain pieces of music automatically suggest themselves as the only possible accompaniment to
particular tasks? Well,
I
do, although I can’t always say why. As I contemplate the murder of this hut I find myself locked into that dramatic scene where Massaro confronts the terrifying Brasi who has sold him poison to kill Don Antonio, Erminia’s guardian, who refuses to countenance Massaro’s courting her. But the poison hasn’t worked although Don Antonio’s hair has fallen out and his skin has acquired a curious metallic sheen. Being a man of lively intelligence he has become suspicious. In terror and fury Massaro returns to Brasi to protest that the poison he sold him has itself expired. ‘Vedi!’ he sings with a passion provoked by his impending arrest and Erminia’s taking the veil, ‘vedi la data indicata sul fondo del barattolo! Perfido! Oimè!’

Decisively I insert the end of the crowbar between the hut’s floor and the ground and lever upwards with a fine gesture imitative of Massaro’s rage and passion. Unfortunately the floorboards are rotten and spongelike. Since I am standing a little higher than the hut I am flung forward by the unexpected lack of resistance and go crashing through the doorway itself, thudding against the far wall. There is a sudden lurch, a lot of noise and a confused tumbling, shot through with streaks of sunlight and bright pain. Silence. The world recedes and reapproaches, lulling like waves in tropical shallows. For a timeless period I am suspended, then unceremoniously cast up on dry land. When I open my eyes something terrible has happened and I am blind. I try some weak screaming but it hurts my side so I stop. I’m blind and going to die and the melodramatic effusions of halfwits like Massaro are not in the slightest bit consoling, any more than are the prospects of
Hot
Seat!
selling a million. What do such trivia matter when I’m pinned to the earth and about to be pecked to death by the circling vultures? More time passes while I miserably drift, then without warning there is a neck-ricking wrench and the sensation of a lid being lifted. Light floods me. I can see again! It’s a miracle.
‘Un
miracolo
,’ I murmur weakly, like Erminia in Act 3 on discovering that her confessor
is Fr Brasi, the ex-venefice who has now repented and taken holy orders. (They, I’m glad to say, are soon destined to elope, the
nouveaux
Héloïse and Abelard of pulp opera.)

‘No, Gerree, is no miracle.’ And there, with grisly inevitability, is Marta holding my hard hat which I suppose must have become jammed over my eyes by the fall. I notice – because in such moments of revelatory clarity one notices everything – she is also holding a bottle of Fernet Branca in the other hand. Poor dear, she simply can’t be parted from it. Awfully sad, really, what with her bogus musicianship as well. Still, in my present shocked and dishevelled state I experience an almost affectionate pang of neighbourliness towards her. Pretty lucky she was around, frankly. We’re a long way from civilization up here. I reach to pat her hand reassuringly but she misinterprets the gesture and holds the bottle to my lips with a murmured ‘Just a little, Gerree, if you must. Very bad for hospital.’

I stop sucking at the pourer. ‘I’m not going to hospital,’ I protest. A dribble of Fernet runs down my chin. ‘I’m perfectly all right. Just a bit dazed, you know. Took a bit of a tumble.’

‘You asleep ten minutes.’

‘Oh nonsense. Just help me get –
Ow!
’ For as I sit up an interesting pain shoots through me. The phrase ‘cracked rib’ leaps into my mind. Thanks a million, God: that’s all I needed.

‘Maybe you break inside.’

To the ironic the world is boilerplated with irony and I notice far overhead a pair of vultures twirling: buzzards, actually, but close relatives all the same. Their thin mewing drifts downwards, a feeble noise like kittens being wrung out which is so at variance with their supposed raptorial majesty. With some anguish and Maria’s brawny assistance I get to my feet. Already her alcohol is making my knees weak. I must have fallen a good half mile, to judge by how far overhead the plateau seems on which my house stands and which somehow has to be reached. Slowly and painfully we climb the path up the terraces. The pain eases somewhat, probably
the effect of the Fernet, creating the illusion of my head floating upwards while a numb body plods below. At long last I slump into a chair in my kitchen.

‘Now I call ambulance,’ says Marta, looking around for the telephone.

‘You will do no such thing,’ I tell her in my most commanding tone, which even to my ears sounds feebly buzzardish; Clark Kent emboldened by sherry. ‘As you can see, I’m perfectly fine, just a bit shaken and bruised. I shall retire to bed. Maybe you ought to do the same after your heroism. If tomorrow morning I’m at death’s door we may have to call in the sawbones, but not until then. I’m most grateful to you for your help, Marta, dear. That was a very neighbourly act. Thank you.’

My quiet sincerity has its effect and she dimples at me.

‘Now I help you upstairs, Gerree.’

‘No,’ I say firmly, ‘that won’t be necessary at all.’ There are limits. I mean, where will it end? With her tugging off my
intimi
, as the Italians primly call underwear? She should be so lucky. Being helped out of one’s clothes by strangers is something the discriminating person reserves for Emergency Room staff, mortuary attendants and casual lovers. Ex-Soviet-bloc neighbours who try to get one drunk do not hack it. ‘Thank you all the same.’

At last I persuade her to leave, which she does reluctantly after swapping phone numbers. It is agreed I shall call her if I need assistance and she will anyway come over in the morning to see if I’ve survived the night. We part with expressions of goodwill. When I discover that she has forgetfully left behind her bottle of Fernet I almost call her back. Having collected a few necessities I climb the stairs stiffly, but not before I’ve noticed through the window the grand new panorama left by the privy’s demise. This sends me quite cheerfully to my bed of convalescence. My methods may have been a little crude but the end has been achieved – a thought that enabled even the Creator to take a day off.