The Decadent Cookbook (17 page)

She keeps watch upon the courtyard of the hotel, and the empty avenue beyond the gate, and her anguish reaches into the uttermost depths of her soul while she anticipates the first kiss which the child will place upon her lips, as soon as she returns: a kiss which always carries an insipid trace of the taste of blood and a faint hint of that odour which perpetually defiles the rue de Flandre, but which, strangely enough, she does not detest at all - quite the contrary - when it is upon the warm lips of her beloved Rosaria.

The Glass of Blood
by Jean Lorrain translated by Brian Stableford is published in
The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins)
edited by Brian Stableford (1990).

One of Durian Gray’s favourite books, and one to which he returned time and again, was T.M. Heathcote’s
The Lives of the Dandies
. Not only was it an inexhaustible source of ideas about decor, costume and manners, but it had the ability to lift Durian’s spirits when he was feeling maudlin. A character he particularly admired was Sir George Margelle. The following passage describes Heathcote’s first meeting with the old man.

‘Whenever I hear mention of Sir George Margelle, I am invariably reminded of a particular quotation from
Hamlet
.

“… to live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty.”

These lines epitomise the state into which Sir George had sunk in his old age after a lifetime of dissipation. I remember particularly vividly the first visit I made to his Palladian house in Sussex. I arrived on a bitterly cold day in the winter of 1874. The door was opened to me by a small oleaginous man with sharp features and a disarming smile. He neither looked nor acted like a domestic servant, and I later discovered that he was Sir George’s chef and comprised the entire staff, being the only one who was prepared to still tolerate the old roué’s behaviour. He showed me through the house and into a study. On entering the room, the first thing I noticed was the sickly sweet smell of flowers which hung heavy on the air. Next to the fireplace, on an elegant daybed lay the enormously corpulent old gentleman. Debauchery had exacted its toll. His body was bloated, his cheeks and eyes blood-shot, and his voice was reduced to a gruff, throaty whisper.

We engaged in conversation for some time. It ranged over several topics, but there was one to which Sir George returned again and again - corruption. I knew that the putrid, the rotten, the diseased, the moribund, the decayed, the cankered, the mouldering had always held a certain fascination for him. Now in his dotage, he had became quite morbidly enthusiastic about this subject. At one point in our conversation he held toward me a copy of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and asked me to read one of his best-loved poems, entitled
Une Charogne
.

Rappelez-vous I’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme,

Ce beau matin d’été si doux:

Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infame

Sur un lit semé de cailloux,

Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique,

Brûlante et suant les poisons
,

Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique

Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons
.

Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture
,

Comme afin de la cuire à point
,

Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature

Tout ce qu’ensemble elle avait joint
;

Et le ciel regardait la carcasse superbe

Comme une fleur s’épanouir
.

La puanteur était si forte, que sur l’herbe

Vous crûtes vous évanouir.

Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride

D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons

De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide

Le long de ces vivants haillons.

(Do you remember, my love, the object we saw on that wonderful, calm summer morning. Just off the path lay a vile corpse on a bed of pebbles. It had its legs in the air like a slut. It was smouldering and sweating out poisons. Its fume-filled belly was opened up in a brazen, shameless manner. The sun beat down on this rotting meat, as if to cook it just right, and to give back to great Nature a hundredfold what she had joined together. The sky looked down on this proud carcass which was opening out like a flower. The stench was so strong that you thought you were going to faint. The flies buzzed around its putrid guts from which streamed battalions of black larvae, like thick liquid pouring over these living rags.)

The poem continues in this vein until the end where it becomes a sort of Memento mori. The poet reminds his love that she too will one day be in this state.

- Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure,

A cette horrible infection,

Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,

Vous, mon ange et ma passion.

Oui! telle vous serez, ô la reine des grâces,

Après les derniers sacrements,

Quand vous irez, sous I’herbe et les floraisons grasses

Moisir parmi les ossements.

Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine

Qui vous mangera de baisers,

Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine

De mes amours décomposés!

(And yet, you, Star of my Eyes, Sun of my Nature, my Angel and my Passion, you will come to resemble this obscenity, this horrible infection. Yes, this is how you will end up, O Queen of the Graces, after the last rites, when you will lie under the grass and the thickly-growing flowers, mouldering among the bones. So, my Beauty, tell the worms as they eat you with their kisses, that I have retained the form and divine essence of our decomposed love.)

I must admit I found the subject matter rather disturbing, but Sir George was obviously delighted with the reading. He sank back in his pillows with a sigh of almost voluptuous contentment. Then he suggested that I might like to stay for a little lunch. I accepted readily, curious to see what sort of regime the old debauchee followed. What I did not realise was that Sir George’s predilection for the corrupt and the rotten extended to the food he ate.

We were crossing the domed entrance hall, when the chef appeared with two woodcock and a pheasant. Judging by the smell of them, they had been hanging for some time. The flesh of the fowls’ breast appeared dark green in colour. Sir George held the carcasses to his nose, inhaled deeply and told the chef that they were not quite ready. He had noticed the way in which I had recoiled from the birds when they were brought close, however, and as we continued our slow progress towards the dining room, he began a short disquisition, citing Monsieur Brillat-Savarin as his authority, on the optimum condition for cooking and eating pheasant. If it is eaten within three days of its being killed not only does the meat tend to be tough, but its flavour is unremarkable. It lacks the delicacy of fowl and the fragrance of quail, Sir George explained. If, on the other hand, it is left hanging long enough and cooked at just the right moment, its flesh is tender and the taste sublime. It shares the flavour of both poultry and venison. Sir George went on:

“ This desirable state is reached only when the bird begins to decompose. Only then does the flesh begin to loosen and the fragrance develop.”

In Sir George’s opinion, the bird should be in such a state of putrefaction that when it is spit roasted one has to wrap a slice of bread around it and tie it up with string to prevent it falling apart. I informed Sir George that I had never been able to eat pheasant after the death of a favourite great uncle of mine who had eaten the bird in such numbers that he had succumbed to lead poisoning as a result of the quantity of shot that he consumed along with them. I was delighted to hear that we would not be eating the pheasant, but immediately became anxious as to what exactly would be served.

We sat at either end of a mahogany table, in a small, heavily mirrored dining room. At Sir George’s right elbow stood a large earthenware jar. He removed the lid and took out what appeared to be a lump of grey, dried mud. “Thousand Year Old Eggs,” I was informed. “From China, dear boy.”

Once the mud and the shell had been carefully removed, Sir George sliced the egg into quarters. It was a greenish-yellow in colour and had a pungent, cheesy smell to it. As I was contemplating the prospect of having actually to swallow one of these, Sir George called in the chef to give a detailed account of how the eggs were prepared. The fact that they were only several months old did nothing to restore my rapidly dwindling appetite and I viewed the arrival of the second course with trepidation.

The chef re-appeared eventually with a large dish of meat and vegetables which looked remarkably appetising. I asked him whether this dish had any particular name. “Olla podrida,” he replied. This left me none the wiser. I glanced in the direction of my host who looked up from his plate and informed me that it was Spanish for ‘rotten stew’.

Aren’t all Spanish stews rotten, I thought.

As with the first course, Sir George called upon his chef to recite to us the way in which he had prepared this dish. He read out the recipe he had followed from a book by Mr Richard Ford entitled
Gatherings from Spain
which was published some thirty years ago.

It was a very strange affair. There was my host, bent over his plate, and I, sitting somewhat rigidly, eating in silence while the chef intoned this recipe in much the same way that a monk might read from holy scripture while the brothers eat their midday meal in the refectory. It seemed that Sir George took in the reading with as much relish as he took in his rotten stew. The reading ended, I remember, with the following panegyric:

“No violets come up to the perfume which a cooking
olla
casts before it; the mouth watering bystanders sigh, as they see and smell the rich freight steaming away from them.”

A similar scene took place when a rook pie was presented. I declined this dish, saying that I was already satisfied, although in fact I have an aversion to carrion. For Sir George on the other hand, this was precisely what most appealed to him. Again we sat and listened to the chef explain how he had prepared the pie. At one point, Sir George interrupted briefly to inform me about a Medieval Arabic recipe he had recently come across which produced condiments from rotted barley dough. As the chef continued the explanation of his method, Sir George spooned quantities of gooseberry jelly on to his plate. He wore an expression on his face which could only be described as lascivious.

After the rook pie, we were offered a selection of cheeses, each in an advanced state of decay. I again declined, despite feeling increasing pangs of hunger. Sir George helped himself to those cheeses which displayed the highest proportion of mould.

We came finally to the dessert. My host leant forward and informed me in that hoarse, slurred whisper that this was his favourite course. It came as no surprise to me when the chef entered with a bowl of medlars - like the pheasant, medlars, which resemble grenadillas, are best eaten when they have begun to decompose. To accompany the medlars was a bowl of ‘pire fotute’, a precise translation of which need not concern us here. This, my host informed me, was a Sicilian dish made from rotting pears which tasted like chocolate. I took his word for it. Along with the fruit we drank a glass of Sauternes. Needless to say, Sir George waxed lyrical on the subject of ‘la pourriture noble’ or noble rot. He gave a most painterly description of the grey-green mould which is allowed to cover the Sauternes grapes before they are picked and which imparts that characteristic sweetness to the wine. The unsteadiness of his hand meant that a large proportion of the contents of his glass dribbled out of the side of his mouth or down his chin.

Just when I thought the meal had reached its conclusion, a large porcelain jar with a closely fitting lid was borne in ceremoniously. For one ghastly moment I thought Sir George was about to recommence the meal with his ancient Chinese eggs. What lay in store was something much worse. As my host was prising the lid off the jar, he told me that it contained a fruit - the durian - whose flavour was second to none, and quite unlike anything I had ever tasted before. Unfortunately I never did taste this extraordinary fruit. I never got beyond the smell. When the lid was finally removed from the jar, the stench that filled the room was indescribable. The only thing I might compare it to is the sweet smell of rotting flesh. I hurriedly excused myself and left the room.