Read The Devil's Larder Online
Authors: Jim Crace
‘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.
A
FTER 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?
F
OR THE
500
TH
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.
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.
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.
L
IKE 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 with 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.