Vanilla Salt (19 page)

Àlex Graupera’s cooking aims to be accessible to everyone, in terms of both price and flavours… It would be unforgiveable for any food lover to forgo the chance of trying out Roda el Món, one of the country’s most attractive restaurants. An exquisite touch and the joy of food come together in this fresh project of Annette Wilson, backed up by the wide experience of our most innovative chef
.

Carol has many readers and great prestige, as is evident in all the requests for bookings.

“Thanks, Carol,” Annette says to herself. She’s deeply grateful and would like to give her a big hug right now. But she’s travelling. She knows Carol and her tastes well enough to find some way of thanking her when she gets back. Now she rushes to tell Àlex.

“We full all tables today!” Annette shouts from the kitchen door, waving the reservation book. “Carol she write about us in newspaper.”

“What? She hasn’t trashed us? Carol loves a good massacre. She’s a bullfighter who’ll never stop till she’s thrust her razor-sharp sword deep in your heart. If she’s praised you, you must be a real cunnilingus artist.”

“Don’t be so crude!”

“Listen to her! You get the words right if they interest you, don’t you?”

“Get you cooking, you arrogant chef. We full today. We need the food.” Annette ends the conversation with a command and leaves the kitchen.

She’s happy. She runs up to her room and gets the beautiful photos she’s brought with her from Canada, plus her mementos: the Mayan rain stick, the Quechuan mate gourd and the peanut necklace. She’s hopeless at DIY, but excitement guides the drill. She hangs up the photos and places her objects around the dining room. They are her amulets, she wants them near her, and anyway they’re lovely. They’ll add some warmth to the space, which is too austere.

She still has to do the shopping! She rushes out with her basket. They have to open soon. Luckily the fridge is full of all the things they cooked yesterday and, since they only had one customer, they can repeat the menu. As she leaves, she almost trips over some boxes. Frank’s left another gift of small fish. This Frank… he’s such an angel. Next to the fish is a small box of lemons and pears. Albert! She’s an atheist, but she believes in God today, because someone’s come down from heaven to help her, or it could be the power of her amulets. Perhaps they’ve finally got to work!

“Àlex. Come! They are gifts at door. Come, get them. I must go supermarket or you no have salt you ask.”

Whatever the cause, what’s happening is really beautiful. First, Òscar’s generosity; then a helping hand from Carol; now the encouraging gifts from their old suppliers, Frank and Albert. They’re all helping. If Àlex could only be a little bit more positive, she muses, everything would be easy. But Àlex hates her, she thinks. He could never stand her, and
now she’s boss of Roda el Món and they’ve changed the name of his restaurant, he detests her much more.

Yet Annette’s attracted by Àlex. His brusque style, his show of youthful rebelliousness in the greying ponytail, his tattoos, the intense flavours of his cooking… She finds everything about him magnetic. She tries to get this across to him, but either Àlex is unable to interpret her messages or his animosity towards her is beyond repair. There’s no hope now. Àlex knows about her “lapse” with Carol, and it’s evident that he’s come to all kinds of conclusions. In his clear-cut, seamless, black-and-white way of thinking, she’s just joined the world of “sour lesbians”. She’s no longer a possibility for him, if she ever was. Annette can’t stand misogynists, but for some strange reason she makes excuses for him. She can’t understand her response to this obnoxious – in the eyes of others – creature. The fact that she’s so confused only confirms that she’s totally in love with this disagreeable man, who, at first sight, has nothing in his favour. But Annette knows that beneath his layers of hermetic concrete there are latent virtues. Bringing them out is just a matter of time… and love.

This is what she is thinking as she lugs her heavy basket back from the supermarket.

She leaves the purchases on the kitchen table. Àlex watches her take out a big bag of potatoes. He pulls a face but says nothing, focusing on his current task of grating lemon rind, after which he’ll squeeze the juice. Dessert today will be made from Albert’s gift. It’s a very simple custard, to go with a pear sponge. The lemon will give it a slightly acid touch and perfect creaminess. You just have to mix three hundred grams of sugar with four eggs, fifty grams of flour and some lemon juice and rind, plus the same amount of water. Then you cook it over low heat until it’s thick and creamy. This is a time for singing something slow, like Lole and Manuel: “Light conquers dark in distant fields where fresh bread smells fill the air, and with morning’s spurs the village stirs.”

“The dining room’s full. Can you serve everyone? Failing on day one is like tripping on the first stair. It’s a terrible fall and you can end up seriously injured,” he warns her maliciously.

“Today no is day one.”

“It might as well be. Don’t worry about the food, because it’s all under control and the dishes are very simple. I can even sing while I’m cooking. You have to remember that I’m not going to help you in the dining room. I’m the chef and, even if Carol’s given me the big write-up in her article, I don’t want customers to see me or identify me with the restaurant.” He bites his tongue to stop himself adding: “Because this isn’t the kind of cooking I like doing.”

“You have part of restaurant,” she reminds him. “I phone Graça, Frank’s wife, so she help me.”

“Well, now we’re really going to have a party, what with a redhead managing the dining room helped by a black woman in loud colours! If one speaks Catalan badly, the other one doesn’t understand a word. What a circus! But I don’t give a damn, as long as you don’t expect me to make couscous with coconut milk and serve dry lamb. While you’re at it, you should get a Chinese girl to make up the UNICEF brigade. Then at coffee time you can get the customers to hold hands, raise their arms and pray for universal peace. You couldn’t have found a better name for the restaurant. Roda el Món, yes ma’am, with ‘Around the World’ you’ve hit the bull’s eye.”

Annette wants to throw potatoes at his head, knowing that potatoes, precisely, would do more damage than a warehouse full of gunpowder. But she thinks they’re too important to be wasted on Àlex’s cranium. They cost money, and money is all-important. She glances round the kitchen, looking for the heaviest saucepan which, if she aimed straight, would make a nice hole in his head. Luckily for him, and for Annette too if she doesn’t want to serve a life sentence, someone rings at the
door. She runs out to answer it, cursing in French or English or Catalan. Who could possibly tell?

The customers are arriving. In less than an hour, the restaurant is jumping. All the tables are full. Graça has arrived late, just when Annette was about to commit suicide. There is no time even to say hello. Graça, who has no idea where the cutlery and plates are kept or how to serve soup, runs nervously in and out of the kitchen bearing off dirty plates and bringing more food.

“Annette, customer that table want speak you.” Graça points.

“Which table?” All the tables are “that table”.

“Table little boy.”

Now they have a huge problem. The little boy wants chips. Chips! Now she won’t have to commit suicide, because Àlex will boil her in oil. Obviously someone’s going to get badly burnt today.

“Graça, you go kitchen for to peel potatoes,” Annette orders. “Cut as like you. You put oil in saucepan on fire. You call me when it go hot!”

“Kitchen? Potatoes? Àlex he kill me!”

“You do it!”

Annette goes into the kitchen, picks up the biggest cleaver, the one for chopping veal bones, and addresses Àlex in her sternest voice. “Àlex, Graça she work in kitchen. If you no let this I kill you.”

“You’re getting madder by the day. I should make a recording. You’d get ten years for that. You don’t have to threaten me. This place is yours, so you can do what you bloody well like, as I’ve said time and time again. Careful with the hot oil. You can do more damage frying potatoes than with that cleaver.”

The first potatoes ever to be cooked in the history of the restaurant are carried out of the kitchen. Annette’s fried them in no time as Graça has done the preparatory work. They may look like common-or-garden chips, but they’re a triumph. One to Annette.

Roda el Món’s last customers leave after five. The dining room is a complete mess, but Annette’s more than happy. She sits at Table 3 and sighs deeply, loudly enough to be heard in Australia. Graça’s still bustling around everywhere, not that she’s being very productive, but she can’t stop.

“Give me a break, woman! You’re doing my head in, flapping around in those bright clothes of yours. It’s worse than watching a merry-go-round,” Àlex yells from the kitchen.

“Come, sit down you here, Graça, and we drink beer. I need rest a moment,” Annette says.

Graça comes and sits down, but has tea, as she’s a Muslim. They talk about their lunchtime performance in the dining room. They’ve made mistakes at just about every table. The girl at Table 2 ate the tuna of the man at Table 8. The man at Table 8 didn’t notice that he’d been served chicken instead of tuna, because he was so fascinated by the spectacularly heaving bosom of the lady with whom he shared the table. The family at Table 6 have had red wine instead of white, but luckily the price was the same.

Graça understood that the man at Table 1 wanted white coffee, when he’d asked for an iced coffee. The people at Table 3 didn’t get their bread until dessert was being served. At Table 5 they didn’t get their salt, but that was OK because they obviously had blood-pressure issues. Neither did the croutons ever embellish the asparagus soup of the little old man at Table 4, but since he had no teeth he wouldn’t have been able to eat them anyway. Remembering him, Annette gets an attack of the giggles, which makes Graça laugh too.

Hearing them carrying on like this, Àlex comes out of the kitchen. “You’re going to have a heart attack! What are you laughing at? You should be crying. What a disaster that was! Do you want to eat the chicken from Table 7? I don’t know why but it’s still sitting in the serving
hatch. What did that customer eat if he didn’t have chicken? Bread and olive oil? What a disaster, what a bloody disaster!”

“Graça, what eat gorgeous man in Table 7?”

“He gorgeous, yes, he very gorgeous. He eat, he eat
suquet
, yes, eat fish stew. He no ask chicken.”

“So what happened, then?” Àlex asks. “There’s one serving of chicken in the kitchen still waiting for someone to eat it.”

Annette can’t stop laughing. Now she remembers. It’s all because of her terrible Catalan. Rushing from table to kitchen to table, she’d gone into the kitchen and said “
C’est un pollastre
”, instead of “
Quin pollastre
”, an expression Òscar had taught her. She was referring to the smart-arse at one of the tables and, in the midst of all the uproar, Àlex had heard
set
instead of “
c’est
” and, thinking therefore that she’d said Table 7, had produced the chicken for the man who’d actually asked for
suquet
.

Once that mystery is explained, a scandalized Àlex can’t help but laugh too. All three of them are laughing and they can’t stop, because they’re also letting off a lot of steam mixed up with their lunchtime stories. Suddenly Annette turns serious.

“You see dining room, Graça? It nearly six. We open nine. We must hurry. Àlex, you have ready food for this night? We full booking.”

“It’s all ready, Madame Learner. You never have to worry about the food in this house. You just get someone to start cleaning up. I have no intention of doing it by myself. I’ve cooked for thirty people, like an octopus, managing eight pots and pans all at once. And don’t forget there’s a saucepan full of disgusting oil that’s had those revolting potatoes fried in it.”

While Graça’s tidying up the living room, Annette goes into the kitchen, which has stacks of dirty dishes everywhere. She whistles. Slowly, like a grandmother sitting by the fireside with a blanket over her
knees and white hair up in a bun, Annette tells the surprising story how potatoes came to Catalonia.

“Tomatoes and potatoes they same family, the Solanaceae family, you name nightshades. They toxic. They come here little bit late, sixteen century, fifty years after Columbus he find America. Emperor Charles, he rule in Seville then. This plant have success because it have beautiful flower they use for to decorate palace. Eat flower also like delicacy thing or flower of courgette now. But they think the tubercle it food for pigs so it no way good, and church say people no can to eat potato because it food Devil make and only for animals, infidels, bad people or prisoners. After long time we know church put it taboo because it no decide tax farmers must to pay for to grow new vegetable.”

Àlex listens, feigning a lack of interest, as he cleans the stove and collects the
mise en place
bowls containing all the ingredients he’s prepared in advance in order to streamline the cooking during his shift. Annette hugely enjoys telling the story, which she hasn’t thought about for ages. As she’s talking about potatoes with all the élan of an anthropology lecturer, snippets from her happy student years keep popping up. If only she’d stuck with that! She wants Àlex to understand her lecture and teaches with passion and care, sparing no details and including all the juicier anecdotes.

“In the 1744, Prussia is in middle of War of Seven Years and people they hungry so start eat potatoes. The pharmacist Parmentier he in war-prisoner camp and he survive three years only eat potatoes. When he liberated he tell King Louis XVI grow potato in grain fields so they have food in war time and the King he give Parmentier land for to grow them. When they pick first potatoes he cook dinner, all plates make with the potato and the queen she decorate the hair with potato flowers. After all courtiers copy her and they have fashion of potato flowers in the hair. But people they resist still for to eat potato.”

Àlex has finished his chores. Now it would be time for him to go and rest in his room, as he does every afternoon, but he’s so bewitched by Annette’s lilting voice and the story she’s telling that he sits on the table with his legs swinging like a little boy, listening with great attention. Annette can’t see him as she’s labouring at the sink, washing dishes and scrubbing pots with her back to him, but she senses him. If it weren’t for her voice telling the story, you could hear a pin drop. She knows he’s quiet and listening, so she doesn’t turn round, doesn’t look at him, because she doesn’t want to spoil the magic. She continues.