JOST A MON

"Dmitri! Are you cooking?" My legs swallowed the stairs two at a time. 

My partner was standing in front of the microwave, a beatific glow on his face. The door was ajar. 

"Perfectissimo!" 

I peered under his armpit. A plastic plate brimmed with cannelloni - six of them, covered in bubbling white sauce with a delicate marbling of tomato. One bare corner revealed paper-thin pasta. The smell told me lobster stuffing with a hint of tarragon. 

...

[Dmitri] lifted the cannelloni out of the microwave as if they were his firstborn. "Microwave oven remind Russian woman of husband with vodka. Thirty seconds, he's cooked."

For programmed occasions when the client wanted to show off his conquest and proposed having some associates over for dinner, culinary Margarita offered two cosmopolitan alternatives: a main entrée of fondue bourguignonne (with all the right silver and china), or chicken Maryland supreme. 

Margarita's specialty was, in fact, chicken. In forty minutes she could bone it, stuff it, and sew it up with bamboo needles. Another half an hour in the pressure cooker and it was done. But that was only for impromptu dinners. Sometimes, when a client had something good to say about traditional Cuban cuisine like they serve at the Bodeguita del Medio, Alicia's mother would let out a soprano laugh. "Whatever are you talking about? Good food at the Bodeguita?" 

By that time she would already have been treating him like an old friend, talking to him in the familiar tu, joking around, waving her restless hand in his face and inviting him to taste her own Cuban cuisine, which was much better, of course. 

And in one manner of speaking, it was. 

In matters of traditional Cuban cuisine, however, Margarita was a great fraud. If the guest was from Europe or from the southern cone of South America, for example, Margarita replaced the yuca con mojo with well-seasoned baked potatoes; the pork she prepared very lean and dry and just slightly pink in the center of the slices; the congri rice was never runny, and she seasoned it with a whole list of ingredients that congri was never meant to take. But she did produce a range of haut cuisine tastes, light with the slightest touch of bitter-sweet, which everyone praised. 

She also did herself grand with Italian pasta: cannelloni, lasagna, fettuccini, ravioli, gnocchi; with sauces like il bolognesa, il pesto, le vongole, l'arrabbiata, la puttanesca. And when there were more than eight to dinner, there was the ever popular paella that never let her down.

We were invited to a magnificent lunch in the hotel banquet room. I was like a kid when it came to the taramosalata and the mousaka, the souvlakia with tzatziki - small pieces of roasted pork seasoned with lemon, herbs, and olive oil, accompanied by the famous sauce made with yogurt, pepper, garlic, and mint - and the original kleftico. Especially delicious were the incomparable Greek breads made with raisins, spices, greens, olives, or cheeses. For dessert, a little freska frouta. Who could ask for anything more? Mediterranean cuisine is the best in the world. Farag proved that by eating enough for three or four people.

Six minutes later Clovis approached the supper-table, in the blessed expectancy of one who has dined sketchily and long ago.

"I'm starving," he announced, making an effort to sit down gracefully and read the menu at the same time.

"So I gathered;" said his host, "from the fact that you were nearly punctual. I ought to have told you that I'm a Food Reformer. I've ordered two bowls of bread-and-milk and some health biscuits. I hope you don't mind."

Clovis pretended afterwards that he didn't go white above the collar-line for the fraction of a second.

"All the same," he said, "you ought not to joke about such things. There really are such people. I've known people who've met them. To think of all the adorable things there are to eat in the world, and then to go through life munching sawdust and being proud of it."

"They're like the Flagellants of the Middle Ages, who went about mortifying themselves."

"They had some excuse," said Clovis. "They did it to save their immortal souls, didn't they? You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."

For programmed occasions when the client wanted to show off his conquest and proposed having some associates over for dinner, culinary Margarita offered two cosmopolitan alternatives: a main entrée of fondue bourguignonne (with all the right silver and china), or chicken Maryland supreme. 

Margarita's specialty was, in fact, chicken. In forty minutes she could bone it, stuff it, and sew it up with bamboo needles. Another half an hour in the pressure cooker and it was done. But that was only for impromptu dinners. Sometimes, when a client had something good to say about traditional Cuban cuisine like they serve at the Bodeguita del Medio, Alicia's mother would let out a soprano laugh. "Whatever are you talking about? Good food at the Bodeguita?" 

By that time she would already have been treating him like an old friend, talking to him in the familiar tu, joking around, waving her restless hand in his face and inviting him to taste her own Cuban cuisine, which was much better, of course. 

And in one manner of speaking, it was. 

In matters of traditional Cuban cuisine, however, Margarita was a great fraud. If the guest was from Europe or from the southern cone of South America, for example, Margarita replaced the yuca con mojo with well-seasoned baked potatoes; the pork she prepared very lean and dry and just slightly pink in the center of the slices; the congri rice was never runny, and she seasoned it with a whole list of ingredients that congri was never meant to take. But she did produce a range of haut cuisine tastes, light with the slightest touch of bitter-sweet, which everyone praised. 

She also did herself grand with Italian pasta: cannelloni, lasagna, fettuccini, ravioli, gnocchi; with sauces like il bolognesa, il pesto, le vongole, l'arrabbiata, la puttanesca. And when there were more than eight to dinner, there was the ever popular paella that never let her down.

We were invited to a magnificent lunch in the hotel banquet room. I was like a kid when it came to the taramosalata and the mousaka, the souvlakia with tzatziki - small pieces of roasted pork seasoned with lemon, herbs, and olive oil, accompanied by the famous sauce made with yogurt, pepper, garlic, and mint - and the original kleftico. Especially delicious were the incomparable Greek breads made with raisins, spices, greens, olives, or cheeses. For dessert, a little freska frouta. Who could ask for anything more? Mediterranean cuisine is the best in the world. Farag proved that by eating enough for three or four people.

The windows of the bácari offer you halved boiled eggs, rolled anchovies, crabs' claws, olives all'Ascolana, rice arancini, polpettini, stewed saltimbocca, nervetti (pork or beef tendon), fried sardines, masanete (small crabs), folpi (small octopus), creamed cod, onions, coppa di toro (bull salami), wild boar ham, squares of mortadella, cubes of dressed mozzarella, parallelepipeds of gorgonzola. These are all, of course, washed down with an ombra, a glass of wine that was once tapped straight from the barrel behind the bar. 

It isn't clear where the 'technical term' ombra (shadow) comes from: and that's as it should be, even its etymology should remain in darkness. At the most banal level, ombra might designate the misty translucency of the wine. But it's more likely that it refers to the open-air wine stalls in the summer, in the shade of the campanili, where people sheltered from the heat by drinking a glass of chilled wine. 'Andiamo a prendere un'ombra - Let's go and take the shade,' was a kind of wink, implying: 'Let's go where the drinking's done.'

The shops are well-stocked, and good quality meat and fish are readily available. A visit to the huge covered market at Dimitrov tér is a revelation to those who assume that all Eastern Europe is a land of unmoving queues and perpetual shortages... The most attractive stalls were those selling peppers. Masses of cherry-red and yellow paprika pods, strung into wreaths and other elaborations, were hanging form the beams and walls framing the stalls, while on trays below were scattered hundreds of shiny pale green sweet peppers. Beans and nuts and herbs were abundantly available, and in a far corner of the market a few stalls specialized in whole goose livers. Not cheap, of course, at 900 forints, but probably a tenth of the price you would have to pay in a Périgord town square. The market is spacious enough to accommodate bakeries, clothes shops, sausage and lángos stands, peasants behind trestle tables selling locally produced honeys and jams and orchids boxed in transparent plastic. I bought some lángos, a lump of pale dough that is slung into hot fat, where it writhes until golden and dimpled; in the mouth it is soft, juicy and delicious, a kind of extrem doughnut that regrettably leaves a nasty oily taste in the mouth, no doubt an honest reflection of nasty oil in which it attained its succulence.

Jack: "All I want to do for Valentine's Day is go to Plunder and eat the Lovers' Delight." 

Liz: "That sounds filthy, Jack." 

Jack: "It is. Imagine a dessert for two, Tahitian vanilla-bean ice-cream in a pool of cognac, drizzled in the world's most expensive chocolate, Amedei Boselliana, covered with shaved white, black and clear truffles, and topped with edible 25-carat gold leaf. Can you imagine anything better?" 

Liz: "I don't know... you ever put a doughnut in a microwave?"

Singh took a deep breath. He smelt the spicy warm scent of ikan bakar, fish wrapped in banana leaf, on the hotel barbecue. His nostril hairs quivered appreciatively. Wherever he was, the smell of cooking food was always enticing... The policeman shrugged and ordered a cold Bintang beer and a nasi goreng. 

[...] 

His nasi goreng arrived, a neat hemisphere of fried rice topped with a fried egg, its soft yellow yolk trickling down the sides like lava from a newly awakened volcano. A chicken drumstick, six sticks of satay, achar or pickled vegetables and a couple of cucumber slices, were neatly arranged around the circumference of the plate. He ate every last bit with gusto, including the small bowl of sliced green chilli padi floating in light soya sauce. 

Singh tried to avoid thinking of the oily food coalescing around his arteries.

Meanwhile more and more food appeared on the table, deep bowls of mutton and potato soup, fried chicken, delicious young cucumbers cut unpeeled in slices covered with sour cream, and the fiery Georgian dish, shashlyk, wood-spiced grilled cubes of mutton, which, with that young wine fresh and innocent as the spring air outside, tasted succulent. Yet good as it all was, I noticed that my Russian companion enjoyed nothing so much as the bread, ... 

[...] 

They all ate far more bread than was necessary, and produced also a greater variety of breads than any other people I have ever known. I saw shops in the great cities where to cope with this craving they sold more than a hundred kinds of bread of every texture, from white to brown and midnight black, from snowy puffs of twist bread to poppyseed rolls and grey Minsk pistolets. But nothing ever equalled the black bread that was meal and reassurance in itself.

Food remained a source of mutual interest, and one remarkable culinary event featured a dog, which the priest Tupia killed, dressed and roasted, while Banks carefully took down the recipe. Most of the sailors were repelled, but Banks declared the results to be delicious. 'A most excellent dish he made for us who were not much prejudicd against any species of food. I cannot however promise than an European dog would eat as well, as these scarce in their lives touch animal food, Cocoa nut kernel, Bread fruit, yams &c, being what their masters can best afford to give them and what indeed from custom I suppose they preferr to any kind of food.'

The table was set up in front of them, and the dark-smocked men heaped their plates with turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes and gravy and little green peas with big yellow blobs of butter melting in them and cranberries and sweet potatoes topped with gooey browned marsh-mallows and olives and celery and rosebud radishes and -

Wang Shuo's Please Don't Call Me Human is an example of the stuff the Chinese government likes to ban - scurrilous, irreverent, blackly funny, deeply insurgent. Here, a peculiar outfit determined to recover China's face after the national insult of losing the 2000 Olympics to Sydney has organised a meal in honour of their champion.

Waitresses dressed as traditional serving girls entered in single file with an array of dishes as beautiful as potted flowers. The diners' eyes nearly popped out of their heads, as the fat manager stood up lethargically and described for the honored guests the name and unique qualities of each dish. 

"The core of this dish is three walnuts and a meatball. It's called, 'When three men walk along, one of them is my teacher.' The meatball is called a lion's head." 

"Ahh-!" 

"This one has potatoes cooked with thirty-six spices. Its name is 'Only books bring knowledge, all else is inferior.'" 

"Ooo-!" 

"The next dish is made of mushrooms stewed in a crock pot. It's called, 'The nation cannot survive a single day without a ruler.'" 

"Wow-!" 

"This one is a thick soup consisting of a small hen, a large rooster, a small rooster, and a male crab. Its name is 'At home obey your father, after marriage obey your husband, after your husband dies, obey your son.'" 

"Wa-!" 

"Next comes a simple dish - boiled eggs. Since there's no way of telling whether they are male or female, we call it, 'Seek not accomplishments, but avoid mistakes.'" 

"Hey-!" 

"The next dish is steamed bear's paw and fish. When it's done, the bear's paw is removed, leaving only the fish, and it's called, 'Bear's paw or fish, one or the other.'" 

"Ohhh-!" 

"This next one is stewed pork loin, with all the meat removed from the bone. Its name is 'The weak can travel the earth, the strong can hardly take a step.'" 

"Ai-!" 

"Here we have fried lizard and earthworms, which is called 'Face the strange with no fears, and its fearfulness disappears.'" 

"Yow-!" 

"This is a baked pigeon. We call it 'The bullet strikes the bird with its head up.'" 

"This is a dessert made of agar-agar, cocoa, and five duck bills. Its name is, 'Don't pursue a desperate enemy.'" 

"This is horsemeat with the hair left on. The meaning should be clear: 'When a man is poor, his aspirations are low. When a horse is scrawny, its hair is long.'" 

"This is a whole roasted pig, prettied up by the chef to give it a determined, peaceful expression, and to carry the meaning, 'Dying in glory is worse than living in ignominy.'"

“What is in America? Who gives a fuck what anyone thinks? I don’t give a fuck what they think and if I don’t get a film role because my teeth are crooked, then fuck them, I don’t want it. I just go, ‘It’s ridiculous.’ And if I don’t get a film role because I’m not thin enough, then, ‘Fuck you. Why would I fucking do that, you fucking shallow cunt!’ I hate them, and I hate that people think that I would. It makes me angry. I remember when a newspaper said, ‘He’s lost three stone for Hollywood.’ I went, ‘No [his voice veers upwards], I haven’t lost three stone and I would never fucking do it for Hollywood. I did it ’cos I work out and I wanna be fit.’ And that annoys me. Someone said, ‘I saw him in The Ivy and he was having a salad.’ ‘Yeah, I had a salad. I also had fucking deep-fried scampi and followed it with ravioli, you lying fucking cunt!’ So the answer is, ‘No.’”

Nearly every aspect of the Russian Imperium was ruled by excess. As pedestrian and commonplace a proceeding as a hunt was an excuse to consume large quantities of rich food and fine drink. When the Empress Elizabeth (daughter of Peter the Great) went on such a revelry, what did she and her cohort pig out on? Simon Dixon's biography of Catherine the Great (lots of great people in Russia, evidently) provides an answer:

For one such bacchanalian expedition, the cellarer at Monplaisir brought out 11 flasks of 'Her Majesty's sweet wine' (Hungarian Tokay), 21 bottles of her favourite English beer, 12 bottles of fortified wine, 1 bottle of the 'new sweet wine', 17 bottles of Burgundy, 16 bottles of champagne, 53 bottles of Rhine wine, 6 flasks of Gdansk vodka, 2 flasks of aniseed-flavour vodka, half a flask of lemon vodka and 2 phials of mustard.

On Aug 17, 1962, Life magazine's Life Guide section had a brief note of the continuation of a fad for 'package-deal' music albums.

MUSIC TO CHOKE ON. Furthering the fad for package-deal albums, the four-volume Sounds and Tastes of Foreign Lands series encloses a cookbook with each long-play record, providing both music and recipes for four kinds of exotic eating: French, Italian, Jewish or Oriental. You can savor onion soup à la Française with La Mer playing softly in the background, try Chinese sweet and sour fish to the accompaniment of a bamboo flute, fix Jennie Grossinger's roast goose and cabbage during a medley of Yiddish waltzes and wash it all down with Italian zabaglione and espresso to the tune of a mandolin. (Music Minus One)

As a result, the tables set about their corner of the park fairly groaned under their burdens. There were galantines of guinea fowl stuffed with minced tongue quivering in aspic jelly and decorated with feathers made of lemon-soaked apple peel. No fewer than eight pigeons in truffle gravy nesting in coils of pastry made their appearance and disappearance. There were stewed oysters, fried haddock fillets in anchovy sauce, and grilled sole with peach compote. Having noted Lord Maccon's fondness for poultry, the Loontwill cook provided woodcock pie, roast pheasant in butter sauce with peas and celery, and a brace of grouse. There was a baron of beef, a forequarter of mutton glazed with red wine, and lamb cutlets with fresh mint and broad beans - all offered on the rarer side. Corner dishes included lobster salad, spinach and eggs, vegetable fritters, and baked potatoes. In addition to the massive bride's cake and the piles of nutty groom's cakes for the guests to take home, there were rhubarb tarts, stewed cherries, fresh strawberries and purple grapes, gravy boats of clotted cream, and plum pudding. The food was declared an unqualified success...

A French-speaking cousin of mine, who has pronounced herself a wine connoisseur, always starts by asking for a large wine glass with a stem. She pours wine into it, commenting on the colour in the process, then swirls the glass slowly in her hand, puts her redesigned nose into it, moistens her gums, keeps the wine in her mouth for a moment with half-closed eyes, and eventually - watched in fascination by everyone else - delivers her peremptory and definitive opinion. Every time she goes to Paris she makes a point of learning by heart the vintage and price of a few famous wines so she can bewitch her entourage (and these are people who serve wine in Coke bottles) by quoting endless lists of enchanting mythical names such as Romanée-Conti 1929 or Mouton-Rothschild 1982, oh, if you only knew...

five layers of honeyed bread, honey and flour cakes piled a foot high, rice soup, pickled relish, soy, rice wine superior in aroma and flavour to Chinese millet wine, beef, mutton, pork, walnuts, dates, mutton sausages, fish, and lotus roots to sweeten the breath.

They sat at a round table in a bow widow that protruded from the back of the inn high above the water, yet so close it that they had tossed the oyster-shells back into their native element with no more than a flick of the wrist: and from the unloading tartan a hundred and fifty feet below them there arose the mingled scents of Stockholm tar, cordage, sail-cloth and China turpentine. 

'Allow me to press you to a trifle of this ragoo'd mutton, sir,' said Jack. 

'Well, if you insist,' said Stephen Maturin. 'It is so very good.' 

'It is one of the things the Crown does well,' said Jack. 'Though it is hardly decent in me to say so. Yet I had ordered duck pie, alamode beef and soused hog's face as well, apart from the kickshaws. No doubt the fellow misunderstood. Heaven knows what is in that dish by you, but it is certainly not hog's face. I said, visage de porco, many times over; and he nodded like a China mandarin. It is provoking, you know, when one desires them to prepare five dishes, cinco platos, explaining carefully in Spanish, only to find there are but three, and two of those the wrong ones. I am ashamed of having nothing better to offer you, but it was not from want of good will, I do assure you.' 

'I have not eaten so well for many a day, nor' -- with a bow -- 'in such pleasant company, upon my word,' said Stephen Maturin. 'Might it not be that the difficulty arose from your own particular care -- from your explaining in Spanish, in Castilian Spanish?' 

'Why,' said Jack, filling their glasses and smiling through his wine at the sun, 'it seemed to me that in speaking to Spaniards, it was reasonable to use what Spanish I could muster.' 

'You were forgetting, of course, that Catalan is the language they speak in these islands.'

. . .

'This excellent dish by me, for instance (and I see that they did their best to follow your orders), is jabalí in Spanish, whereas in Catalan it is senglar.' 

'Is it swine's flesh?' 

'Wild boar. Allow me . . .' 

'You are very good. May I trouble you for the salt? It is capital eating, to be sure; but I should never have guessed it was swine's flesh. What are these well-tasting soft dark things?' 

'There you pose me. They are bolets in Catalan: but what they are called in English I cannot tell. . .'

One day when I was especially busy, I asked Haffida to cook some fish. We ate the most delicately spiced bass that we had ever tasted. Haffida was from the seaport Safi down the coast. Why hadn't I thought of this before? She had marinated large chunks of the fish in cilantro, garlic, lemon juice, cumin, paprika and tomatoes and placed them on a bed of carrots and green peppers to cook on the stove. This was a fish tagine. Soon we tried her chicken tagine with prunes and onions spiced with ginger and saffron, her beef tagine with peas and artichokes. Like all Berbers, Haffida understood the mysteries of spices and herbs.

The Black Sea Cafe was famous for its mouthwatering dumplings called vareniki and pelmeni. Vareniki came in a dozen varieties of fillings, from sweet farmer cheese to sour cherries, enclosed in paper-thin dough, topped with sautéed onions, and bathed in drawn butter. When she'd had her fill of them, she would switch to pelmeni, which were stuffed with boiled meats and then drenched in a sauce of cheese and eggs and gratinéed. 

The plan was to wash it all down with plenty of ice-cold shots of Jewel of Russia vodka. However, the buzz wasn't what she was looking for as much as information. She'd yet to meet the man who could keep up with her drinking ability, though Butch Karp's colleague Ray Guma, a man she'd had a brief and forgettable fling with, was close.

...my dear Haddock has just been in and he says the wind is only Force 4 South Easterly but freshening, the drab thing will be if I miss the mid-day meal, I think there's a dim hope still because my delicious Danes do everything at the wrongest time, my dear we lunch at 11.30 and have dinner at half-past-five which gives one rather a protracted evening, but my dear what meals, the entire crew is only 21, but you couldn't comb Soho for more salubrious cooking and the most paternal steward, the overture to lunch is like all the stories, my dear yesterday I counted fifteen things on the table and all enchanting, there were two kinds of smoked herring and one smoked sole, with onions, imagine darling, two categories of bacon no three I think because one was hot, some fascinating sliced ham, some sort of hot fish, two types of egg-food, liver pate, home made and high marks for succulence, cold pork, and pressed beef, sausages in two styles, oh yes and mayonnaise of salmon and some sort of inscrutable stuff I cannot classify, all this my dear accompanied by schnapps, with chasers of refreshing lager, not to mention a mountain of butter, and of course just when you think the meal is over, not that you tackle all the things of course, it's just the spectacle, well in comes some hot pork or beef or somewhat magically but simply cooked, actually my dear they do not consume excessively but there is no doubt they understand the art of living, however perhaps one had better discontinue this discussion because it's putting ideas into the little tummy and now it's too manifest that steamers of 1000 tons ought not to go about the oceans excepting in the flattest calm, my dear Haddock who's indecently well keeps surging in and saying What a good sea-boat which I've told him not to say again, however to go back to the buildings which may be safer, there's one fantastic pale-green spire made of the tails of four dragons twisted together, I'll send you a postcard...

I can go on and on about Aleksandar Hemon's delightful The Question of Bruno. It is funny and moving and deliciously written; the language is glorious, and even Bosnian food gets a look in:

Then the lunch was served, and everyone sat around the long table, with Grandfather floating on the Lethe at its head. The table was creaking under heaps of pork and chicken limbs. There were big-ear soup bowls, which were reverently passed around the table, as steam was enthusiastically gushing up, like smoke from a snoozy volcano. There were plates of green onions, stacked like timber, and tomato slices sunk in their own slobber. After the lunch, everyone became drowsy, descending from the mountains of meat to the lowlands of sleep. Snippets of conversation died off within seconds, for no one's blood was capable of reaching the brain.

Most of the good fish had been picked over by that time of day. I bought some squid, at one forty-nine a pound, from a cross-eyed salt who was attempting to stare at Lee. We took it back to my apartment. 

After removing the ink sacks and the center bone,  I sliced the squid laterally into thin rings, and shook them in a bag with a mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, and oregano. Then I fried them in olive oil in a hot skillet. 

We ate these with lemon and a couple of beers as we watched the first half of the Skins game. For the second half we napped together on the couch in roughly the same arrangement as the night before. We woke as the afternoon light was fading. I drove her back to her car at the store and kissed her good-bye.