JOST A MON

At tiffin I had some real curry, the famous native dish of India. I had been unable to eat it on the Victoria, but those who knew said it was a most delicious dish when prepared rightly and so I tested it on shore. First a divided dish containing shrimps and boiled rice was placed before me. I put two spoonfuls of rice on my plate, and on it put one spoonful of shrimps; there was also chicken and beef for the meat part of the curry, but I took shrimps only. Then was handed me a much divided plate containing different preserved fruits, chuddah and other things hot with pepper. As instructed, I partook of three of this variety and put it on top of what had been placed first on my plate. Last came little dried pieces of stuff that we heard before we saw, its odor was so loud and unmistakable. They called it Bombay duck. It is nothing more or less than a small fish, which is split open, and after being thoroughly dried, is used with the curry. One can learn to eat it.

After all this is on the plate it is thoroughly mixed, making a mess very unsightly, but very palatable, as I found. I became so given to curry that I only stopped eating it when I found, after a hearty meal, curry threatened to give me palpitation of the heart.

That night Samiya attempted to make kheer once more. The coconut milk and rice didn’t scorch this time, but she did not allow herself to feel any pride until the pudding had thickened with the rose water and raisins. She prepared the dessert the way Mrs. Hayat preferred, with slivered almonds and pistachios on top. When it was finished, she stared down at the bowl of white cream; the green and brown ovals of the chopped nuts squinted up at her like lopsided eyes.

Skin slapping against the linoleum floor followed by the tapping of a cane reminded Samiya of where she was. Her hands quickly covered the dish and carried it to the back of the refrigerator. By the time Mrs. Hayat entered the kitchen, Samiya was focusing on the dinner she had started before making the kheer.

Mrs. Hayat took a rolling pin and flattened the small balls of dough Samiya had shaped for the rotis. Samiya slid the perfect circles on an oiled pan over the stove. They worked in silence for a few minutes. Her mother-in-law seemed at ease; Samiya watched the older woman’s hands as she worked. She could see blue-green veins under the nearly translucent skin. Mrs. Hayat wore two thick golden bangles, one on each wrist, and they swung up and down her thin wrists as her body jerked to iron out the dough.

Samiya flipped the rotis back and forth more times than she would have if she had been alone. Careful not to char either side, she spun the dough with twirling fingers around the pan. Her own mother had taught her this way, showing her how to make her fingers dance so fast the heat couldn’t quite catch up.

The conditions and prohibitions with which the making of a successful bouillabaise is hedged around make it a problematic dish for the home cook, at any rate for the home cook who lives more than an hour or so's drive from the coastline between Toulon and Marseille. My house in the Vaucluse is an hour and forty minutes from Marseille, assuming good weather which is necessary on the twisting roads of the Lubéron. Other fish soups are less contentious in their composition, a fact which may make them appealing for those who are less beguiled than I am by what Spinoza called 'the deep difficulty of excellence'. In any case, over the years at my homes in Provence and Norfolk (less so in Bayswater) I have cooked burrida, the hearty and accommodating Genoese specialty; cotriade, the warming and economical potato-oriented Breton dish (sometimes seasoned simply through the addition of seawater); the soothing matelote normande, of which more shortly; the exuberant Portuguese fisherman's stew caldeirada, enough to make any one of us into a lusophile, and graced with the additional blessing of reheatability in the form of the excellent fish has ropa velha de peixe; the fiery but somehow light, refreshing, life-affirming fish stews of Thailand, spiked with chilli and lemon grass and the glamorous but refreshing exoticism of that suddenly convenient country (only hours away!); the paradoxical red-wine-using matelotte and raito, the former with its disturbingly phallic and alive-seeming eel, the latter with its elusive but comforting taste of cod; the equally coddy Basque ttoro, its origin betrayed by its telltale unpronounceability (my brother was fond of speculating whether, in Basque versions of the game of Scrabble, values were reversed, so that players only won a single point for using letters such as q and x); the crude Greek kakavia and the egg-and-lemon-enhanced psarosoupa avgolemono; the tasty Provencal soupe de poisson with its punchy rouille and promiscuous willingness to accept whatever is put into it (perhaps the most adaptable and portable of all these national soups); the chowders (from chaudière, stewpot, a word which also refers to the kind of domestic gas boiler whose explosion was to kill my parents) of North America, expressive of that continent in their hearty emphatic blandness; the delicate Bergensk fiskesuppe, which the unfortunate Mitthaug used to prepare with great displays of energy in his attempts to get the freshest possible, indeed the freshest imaginable, cod and coley, rising before dawn to go to Billingsgate and returning with fish, which, as my father observed, a competent veterinarian ought to have been able to resuscitate; indeed, our own grey little country is almost the only one which fails to have its own indigenous version of fish soup, even the Scots having their surprisingly edible Cullen Skink.

In what I subsequently came to think of as my aesthetic period, during my early and mid-twenties, I used to serve a seven-to-one martini of Beefeater gin and Noilly Prat vermouth, stirred with large ice cubes and then poured into chilled cocktail glasses; twist of lemon on top, releasing a fine invisible spray of citric juices. As a subsequent refinement I borrowed W.H.Auden's technique of mixing the vermouth and gin at lunchtime (though the great poet himself used vodka) and leaving the mixture in the freezer to attain that wonderful jellified texture of alcohol chilled to below the point at which water freezes. The absence of ice means that the Auden martini is not diluted in any way, and thus truly earns the drink its sobriquet 'the silver bullet'.

Suppose that Reuven, Shimon and Levi stand at a single point... Reuven sets out to the west and circles the world, Shimon circles to the east, and Levi remains in place... On one and the same day it will be three days after the Sabbath for Levi who remained, two days after the Sabbath for Reuven [who circled west, with the sun], and four days after the Sabbath for Shimon [who circled east, against the sun]. The difference between Reuven and Shimon will be found to be two days. ¹