Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

‘It is possible, of course, that my preferment might provide some opportunities for my young friends,’ he continued. ‘Which one of you gentlemen has the finest creases and the straightest back? At least one of you — I should not tease — has so impressed me with his gravitas that I can imagine him established as my aide in Belgium. And there are further possibilities. So best behaviour, gentlemen! We’ll see who benefits on Monday.’ He turned to place his empty glass on a side table and raised both eyebrows. ‘Who knows?’ he said, smiling directly at me, and ‘We shall see.’

His good news silenced us. No one spoke until the trolley with desserts was brought into the room. ‘Desserts?’ Director Europe said. ‘They’re rather late.’

He put his spoon into his cream gateau. He nodded, smiled and added, ‘Now I smell the flavour of the meal.’ Then, ‘I am reminded of my grandmother, when she was in the nursing home. I went with my older brother one evening to visit her. She’d ordered hot mint water as an aperitif and then, when the nurse had settled the tray of food across her bed, she insisted on eating her meal in reverse order, starting with chocolate mousse and ending with the soup. “I am eighty-three years old,” she told me and my brother. “Life is uncertain. Eat the pudding first.” ’

He put the dessert spoon into his mouth and hummed with pleasure at the taste. My prospects were restored by him. Forward Planning seemed a possibility again. Outside, the waiters lined up with the meats. And, in the kitchen, our soup was simmering on low and patient flames.

I’m twenty-seven years of age today. Life is uncertain. Leave the soup till last.

AFTER SHE HAD caught food poisoning from the soft cheese at the cafeteria (but before any of the symptoms had appeared), she had made love to her boyfriend and then to an old acquaintance she’d encountered entirely by chance, and then had kissed (though only playfully, but using tongues) her special friend in her local bar, a homosexual man, in fact.

She fell ill that evening, fever, headache, vomiting. And the three men caught up with her early next day. Fevers, headaches, vomiting, throughout the town.

Now, she wondered, could it be that in a world where there were evidently at least three cases of sexually transmitted indigestion, that there could be — that she could even cause — a single case of gastronomically transmitted venereal disease? Could that old devil, lurking in the bedroom, flourish in the kitchen too? Might she discover recipes to feed and satisfy and aggravate those famished lovers at her door?

FOR THE 500TH anniversary of the ending of the siege, Professor Myles McCormick, the big, bizarre Chicagoan who’d made our town his ‘project’, arranged a study week for amateur historians, ending with a celebratory feast. The fourteen participants — mostly, like the professor himself, Americans — could tour the burial site, the recently discovered (and augmented) earthworks and emplacements of the besieging army, the museum with its sad collection of wills and testaments, the still-intact harbour chain that had once stretched across the sea channel to the port. They could inspect the little statue of the city prefect chewing on a shoe and the memorial obelisk with its roster of the wealthy dead. In seminars, they could consider the day-to-day minutiae of living — and dying — without fresh food for more than fifteen months, and then discuss the broader, nagging questions of historical principle. And they could read and buy (in the professor’s own translation from the sixteenth-century text) the merchant dell’Ova’s contemporary accounts.

The study group was surprisingly easygoing for such a mordant subject, cheerful, attentive and intelligent, delighted with the hotel and the town, and keen to be as stimulated as possible on this short, testing and expensive vacation. So Professor McCormick must have judged that they would appreciate the ‘fitting’ menu he’d prepared for the closing feast. The hotel chef, a Dane with an unexpected sense of humour, had volunteered his services. ‘Anything for a change,’ he had said. The professor presented him with a copy of dell’Ova’s diaries, in which he’d highlighted one of the final passages. ‘Do what you can with that.’

We have been reduced to eating slop that might have been intended for my good host’s chickens and his pigs, had not those chickens and those pigs been speedily dispatched some weeks ago [dell’Ova wrote, elevendays before he died from the insupportable pain of ‘hunger headaches’]. I have always hoped, despite my many travels, that I would not need to sacrifice my dignity so much that I could sup on baser foods, as savages, but in these last few weeks I have discovered myself tasting — and, indeed, relishing — lascivious flesh from mice, ebb meat and worms, and also from dead creatures that have perished from their want of sustenance, all flavoured by our only condiment, the salt from shore weed. My vegetable dishes have presented only the very best grasses from the city lanes and leaves of such variety that autumn seems to have bared its branches at us in the courtyard, though it be only early spring. . Today we were called to table and an unexpected stew of leather goods. Within the steaming tureen our spoons located the tooled remains of a once-fine saddle, cut strips of bags and purses, a bandolier with the buckles thankfully removed, and a good pair of tanned shoes, which all too late I recognized to be my own. I can report that, given my condition and the rarity of any meal, this was the finest and sweetest-smelling preparation, as good as any beef, which it has ever been my fortune to savour or to chew. Hardship and hunger sophisticate the palate and the nose.

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.