The Devil's Larder Read online

  The chef was not required to go down to the market hall. He already had provisions in the lost-property cupboard behind reception. There he selected a child’s school satchel, a calfskin handbag (a little spoiled by talc and leaking biros), a half-dozen leather belts and a well-worn pair of hiking boots, already greased with dubbin and softened for the pot by a thousand walks. These forgotten trophies of hotel guests, the chef was sure, would not taste good, no matter how the leather was tricked and dramatized with stock and sauces. But, surely, an experienced cook and innovator such as himself could produce from these ingredients something passable. This leather was only tough meat, after all. It could not taste worse than the ‘squirrel steak Tabasco’ he’d prepared for the fête de la chasse some months before. Here was a challenge.

  Chef’s sharpest knife was not up to the task. Once he’d unpicked any stitching from the bags and belts and had removed the sole and innards of the boots, he had to use a pair of industrial scissors to render the leather into strips about a centimetre wide. These he softened for four or five hours in tepid water.

  So far, this was easier than squirrel. No skinning, no boning, and nothing to eviscerate or draw. But at least the squirrel had some flavour, even though the flavour, as it turned out, was of the acorns that it had eaten and, oddly, of gunpowder. It would be easy, obviously, to spice up and vivify the leather from the many bottles on the kitchen shelves. Some jerky sauce, perhaps, some cayenne, or packet stock. But this was cheating, chef decided. And hardly ‘fitting’ for the celebration of a siege that had ended 500 years ago and killed three-quarters of the town.

  Chef turned to dell’Ova once again for inspiration, and the professor’s highlighted passage. ‘The salt from shore weed’ would have to be his condiment. The hotel backed on to a stony beach where there was kelp and wrack in abundance.

  He had of course to compromise by preparing an ‘unfitting’ base for the meat. It must seem edible, at least. He assembled a casserole of equal parts water and milk, with onion, turnips, carrots, chopped fennel and haricot beans, added the strips of leather and its mulch of seaweed, and left it all on a low heat, with the lid on the pan, to reduce and tenderize.

  ‘Shoe stew’, they called it in the kitchen. But on the menu card, that evening, it was described as ‘ragout dell’Ova’.

  Professor McCormick was generous with wine, and so his study group was game, if a little hesitant, at least to try the celebration stew. Their evening was memorable. The amateur historians held up their forks, heavy with thick leather laces, for the benefit of the professor’s video camera, plus the television news crew, and the photographers from two provincial papers, who had, thanks to the hotel’s PR manager, been summoned to the feast. A splendid photograph of Thomas Luken from Columbus, Ohio, and his wife Martha was reproduced in magazines throughout the world, including Time and, all too obviously, the National Enquirer. Mr and Mrs Luken were shown tugging with their teeth on opposing ends of a strip of handbag.

  Did anybody really eat the stew? Some people tried, of course. The leather itself was tasteless and beyond chewing, but the gravy was delicious, as you’d expect from such a five-star chef. When the meal was over, though, and what remained had been carried to the kitchens, it might have appeared that ‘ragout dell’Ova’ must have had its admirers. Not one of the plates was untouched. Some, indeed, were clean. Professor Myles McCormick would write, in his report, that ‘dell’Ova’s conviction that men and women can develop a taste for almost anything, if the circumstances so prescribe, was more than fully proven on this occasion.’

  Indeed, most of the leather had disappeared somewhere. The amateur historians had carried off their rich experience, but not inside their stomachs. They’d simply licked the gravy off and slipped their leather memories of that fine week into their pockets, or wrapped them in their napkins, or tucked them into their handbags. This was a siege they’d not forget. This was a history lesson that had made its mark. They’d had such unexpected fun.

  21

  A YOUNGISH MAN, a trifle overweight, too anxious for his age, completed his circuit of the supermarket shelves and cabinets and stood in line, ashamed as usual.

  He arranged his purchases on the checkout belt and waited, with his eyes fixed on the street beyond the shop window, while the woman at the till scanned all the bar codes on his medicines, his vitamins, his air freshener, his toilet tissue, his frozen Meals for One, his tins, his magazines, his beer and his deodorant, his bread, bananas, milk, his fat-free yoghurt, his jar of decaf and his treats – today, some roasted chicken legs, some grapes, a block of chocolate and two croissants. He rubbed his thumb along the numbers embossed on his credit card, while each item triggered a trill of recognition from the till.

  The till’s computer recognized the young man’s ‘Distinctive Shopping Fingerprint’ as well, the usual ratio of fat to starch, the familiar selection of canned food, the recent and increasing range of health supplements, the unique combination of monthly magazines. The pattern of the shopping identified the customer. Even before the woman at the till had swiped the credit card, the computer had lined up the young man’s details – his list of purchases for the previous seven months, his credit rating, his ‘Customer Loyalty Score’. It knew broadly who he was and how he lived. It could deduce what his modest rooms above the travel shop were like, how stale they were, how flowerless, how functional, how crying out for change. Here was the man whose cat had died or run away three months ago. No cat food purchased since that time. Here was the customer who had not left the neighbourhood for more than seven days in living, byte-sized memory. Last spring, he’d tried – and failed – to cut down on patisseries and sugar. Today, for once, he had resisted his usual impulse purchase of a packet of cheroots.

  Computer screened a message on the woman’s till: Cheroots . . . Cheroots . . . it said. Remind the customer he has not purchased cereals or cheese or vegetables this month. Remind him of our special offers: 12 cans of lager for the price of 10. Buy one bottle of our Boulevard Liqueur and get a second free. Remind him that time is passing more quickly than he thinks – his washing powder should be used by now, as should the contraceptives that he bought two years ago. He must need basics, such as rice and pasta, soap, toothpaste, flour, oil and condiments. Inform him of our retail schemes and that we open now on Sunday afternoons. Advise him that he ought to do more cooking for himself. He ought to tidy up and clean the bathroom tiles with our new lemon whitener. He ought to start afresh. Suggest to him he tours our shelves again. At once. For what we choose is what we are. He should not miss this second opportunity to recreate himself with food.

  22

  LIKE ALL THE best ideas, the old man’s was a simple one. Foods nourished by the heat of sunshine should be able to relinquish that same heat and that much sunshine at a later date. It is, after all, a basic law of physics that no energy is ever lost.

  Wine masters always say that the better reds release their ripening summer heat as soon as they are poured. Subtle palates can detect the year by quantifying sunshine in the grape. If that’s allowed, then an orange, say, matured and coloured by the sun in some hot place, must radiate as much. It should be the perfect hand warmer in winter. A southern plum, likewise, should have the knack of stewing itself in cold water. A kilo of bananas dropped into the garden pond should, for a week or two, keep the water nicely free of ice and save the goldfish from the chill. Ice cream, surely, could be softened slightly by the presence of some dates.

  ‘There ought to be a range of packaged fruits and vegetables – Sunbeam Meals, perhaps – that cook themselves,’ our old man said. ‘Picnics would be transformed by such convenience. Think of the benefits for miners, trawlermen and Eskimos. I’d be a millionaire.’

  The only problem he encountered was discovering the trigger to reactivate and then release the buried heat without using means that would themselves consume an equal energy. He dedicated all his time to problems such as this when he retired. We learned to live w
ith it and him, and only thought it strange when he was glimpsed about the town on winter nights, an orange gripped in each of his blue hands.

  23

  OUR NEIGHBOUR’S husband rented a strip of land and an angling hut by the river. He had no children or dog, but he had six fruit trees, some currant bushes and a plot of meadow, where he grew vegetables. I used to pass him on the way to school. In that uncertain light, he seemed the loneliest of working men, sometimes tackling the grey-brown soil with his trenching spade, sometimes sitting on the angling bench with a hand line or a short rod, sometimes struggling up the river bank with his two buckets to irrigate his vegetables, never idle, never anything but occupied, and frightening.

  He’d still be on his land when I came home from school, limping on his gammy leg, and always wearing sky-blue jeans so that, even in the grimmer half-light of the afternoon, he could not disappear. I never saw him walking to or from his home. My sisters said he slept in the angling hut, washed in the river, lived on what he grew, wee’d on his lettuces, crapped on his greens and poisoned strangers with his crops. His wife, for reasons more weighty than her loathing of his muddy boots, had not allowed him in the house for months.

  Sometimes, when he caught my eye, I’d have to wave in reply, I’d have to smile – embarrassed, I suppose – despite what my parents said about avoiding him and not accepting any fruit or vegetables. Embarrassment is worse than pain, for boys.

  One afternoon when I’d had to wave at him in that last year before I went away, he pulled an apple off his tree and threw it at me, high, uphill, across the meadow fence. I caught it with one hand, the crispest catch, the smack of flesh on flesh, of skin on peel. Another time, when he was working near the road, he dropped some berries into my palm. At other times, it was a handful of his manac beans or ripe shrubnuts. And then, occasionally, he’d give me something to take home ‘for the table’, some radishes perhaps, or a lettuce head, or – once – a fine, fat perch he’d caught.

  I never tasted anything, of course. I smiled, I waved, I shouted thanks. I took his berries and his beans, his vegetables, his fish, and dropped them from the railway bridge onto the line, a half-minute from our house, then wiped away the poison and the smell of them on snatches of wet grass. At home, I’d dream of him, bad dreams. A train was hurtling down the railway line. The blood and sap of lettuce, carrots, fish and fruit were splashed across its windscreen and its wheels.

  Once, though, he caught me off guard. He must have known I’d rather die than not do what he asked. He pulled a baby carrot from the row, snapped off its plume, wiped (half) the earth off on his sky-blue trouser leg, and made me eat it there and then, while he was watching from the far side of the fence. ‘You have to eat it from the earth, at once,’ he said. ‘Or else the flavour flies away. Go on. This is the best.’ And he was right. I put his dirty carrot in my mouth. I chewed, expecting bitterness. But nothing could be more delicate and sweet than that frail root. It is a taste that’s stayed with me for thirty years. A carrot from the shop could not compete. It had to be the earth, I thought, that tasted good.

  And so I took to finding new ways to and from the school, and I was thankful when, at the end of the year, I moved to the boarding college and never had to pass the meadow except in father’s car. I don’t believe I saw our neighbour’s husband for a year or two, and by then he had forgotten me – so I was not obliged to wave or smile again or throw his produce on to the railway line.

  I grow carrots of my own these days. I draw them from the soil before they’re quite mature and eat them there and then, just like I once did at my neighbour’s husband’s fence, fresh-pulled and half disguised by earth. But there’s no special taste to mine. They seem shop bought and ordinary, according to my son. So now I wonder what his secret was. If it was not the flavour of the soil that made the difference, then perhaps it was the taste of fear and shame. I can’t deny that he had frightened me or that I’d cheated him. Even in the grimmer half-light of the afternoon, I cannot make our neighbour’s husband disappear.

  But my son is young enough for simple explanations. I’ve told him how the man was calling from the far side of the fence, the stooping back, the snapping plume of leaves, and how the earth was (half) removed. It could have been his gammy trouser leg that made the carrots delicate and sweet, my son suggests (for loneliness is bound to have its taste). That one swift wipe across the sky-blue cloth, he says, had left its dressing on the root.

  24

  HER DAUGHTERS wouldn’t eat. She tried to bribe them with their favourite foods. They said they had no favourite foods. She threatened them with early bed, pocket-money fines, extra duties round the house, less television. That didn’t work. She feared her daughters more than they feared her. So, finally, she sought advice by contacting a childcare magazine. Its doctor wrote: ‘Do not forget that mealtimes should be fun. Once your daughters begin to enjoy the occasion, they will also start to love the food. Do not impose unnecessary rules, which blunt their pleasure. Try to make the food entertaining to look at and amusing to eat.’

  So mother sat her children down in easy chairs in front of the television and brought their dinners in on trays. She left them to enjoy themselves. They let their food go cold. She let them take their lunches out to the playhouse in the wood and eat with their fingers, like runaways. They threw their meals into the bushes. She tried giving them only desserts to eat. They just picked at them, even though she’d marked a smiley face on the custard skin of one fruit tart with chocolate pips. She prepared pasta dishes from five different shapes and many colours, but her daughters only tried the colours and the shapes they liked and wouldn’t even taste the rest.

  Finally, furious with herself, exasperated by her girls, she made a pizza and scored an angry face into the cheese topping with the handle of a knife. And just to show her, the daughters ate it, every crumb. Eating mother’s anger was good fun.

  25

  I’LL COME TO LUNCH, but only if you promise me that there’ll be other guests, old friend. We’ve spent too many years at that oak table in your yard with just ourselves for company. And I’ve grown bored. Enough, I say. Let’s change our habits or let’s call a halt. We die too soon.

  I see you wince. But, no, I’m bored by me, not you. You always were the perfect host, a listener. And I have been the less-than-silent guest for far too long. I’ve heard my anecdotes too many times. I can’t resist repeating jokes and telling you again my views on art or gardening or God or politics or chemistry or how you comb your hair. I have a reputation, I’m mortified to say, for being the life and soul of any gathering. I’ll speak my mind on anything, especially when my tongue’s been loosened by the grape.

  Excuse me if I blame the wine. Good honest wine, the sort you buy, is cheap, I know, but there are disadvantages to such outstanding discounts. A better wine, even one of modest price, might silence me while I appreciate the smell and flavour or inspect the details on the label. A good wine encourages a little placid introspection. But a bargain wine, in my case anyway, achieves the opposite. It makes me tedious. I am unsettled by the aftertaste. I feel I have to talk to pay you back for asking me, week after week, to share a bottle and some food. This is my only contribution, as you know, because my finances do not allow me to pay you back in other ways. Besides, you look so pained by any silences. I can see it in your eyes; they’re darting to and fro, alarmed, demanding that I rescue you by saying something, anything. If I don’t talk, you count the lunch a failure. But, if I do all the talking, then I hate myself. And that can’t be the proper purpose – or the desired outcome – of a lunch, that your one guest should go away with a lesser opinion of himself and just a little drunker than when he arrived (for I must admit I generally prepare myself for you by stopping off on the way for an aperitif at the Passenger Bar and, occasionally, if we’ve exhausted our acquaintance more quickly than expected, I console myself on my way home with a digestif there as well).

  So here is my proposal. Let’s st
retch ourselves, expand the pleasures of the lunch, put extra chairs out in the yard. I have a friend whom you would like, a cousin actually, though there does not exist between us any of the reticence that normally you find in families. No, I think you would enjoy our badinage. And he would be a better guest than me, as he is younger and his comments will be fresh. Moreover, he will welcome the attentions of your cats. I have not dared to say before, but I am not a felophile. I do not take exception to the distant view of wildlife in your yard, but I am not happy, let’s admit, to have the creatures seeking comfort in my lap or exposing their neat parts below stretched tails as they patrol the table top in search of titbits on our plates.

  I’m touched, of course, to see how unselfconscious and indulgent your love of cats can be. But this is something that I trust my cousin is better placed to appreciate than me.