JOST A MON

My primary objective was to go and eat cod in the Viana do Castelo. No, not à la Margarida da Praça, nor à la Gomes de Sá. In the end what I had, let's see if I remember, was "sliced cod with maize bread on a bed of baked potatoes and salted turnip tops."

He would imagine the two holiday meals at Passover with all the relatives, uncles and cousins. The basket with the haroseth, the bitter herbs that would have tasted so good now, the hard-boiled eggs, the white silk cloth with blue stripes that covered them … What he would have given for a hard-boiled egg today! Or better still, a piece of lamb. He remembered the taste of the matzo - the unleavened bread - and the fun of searching for the hidden piece, the prize for the child who found it. He didn't want to think about the songs or the three toasts. If he could just have a few spoonfuls of cholent - the terrine of rice, eggs, dried beans and goose that had to be cooked all night in the community oven. As a young boy, he'd been sent more than once to fetch it.

A few blocks away was the restaurant, Alkimia, full of fashionable people, and although it was crowded and we had no reservation we were immediately seated. I ordered a drink in Spanish and the waiter clarified my order in English, something that never happened in Madrid. Teresa ordered various small plates and they came quickly: tuna belly cut in the manner of Iberian ham and served over some kind of broad bean; white bread rubbed in oil and covered in tomato paste; a dish involving truffles and tiny pieces of sausage that might have been duck; it was all delicious. They brought us a bottle of white wine I hadn't heard Teresa order and by dessert I felt pleasantly drunk. Dessert was a wonderful and unfamiliar ice cream and I asked the waiter what was in it and he said "Eucalyptus." I was slow to recognise the gorgeous word as English.

Naine on vesi – selge,
Puhas ja igavene.

Mehed on maitseained
sajandi supi sees.

Woman is water — clear,
pure and eternal.

Men are the spices
in the century’s soup.

"All right, Hassam. Now you must play very close attention to what I tell you. Take notes and repeat after me: to make a good dry martini, we need, in this order: one part gin, Beefeater if possible." 

"One paht gin, Beefeatah if possible," Hassam repeats. "Very good, sir.

I would be very disappointed if you, the readers who have been with me since the beginning of this story, were to think me careless or disrespectful [...] 

"Now write this down, Hassam. We need a few drops of dry vermouth. Very dry." 

"A few drops of dry vermouth. Very dry." 

[...] 

"Now we will need a glass cocktail shaker." 

"Let me write this down," says Hassam. "Transparent glass cocktail shaker." 

[...] 

"Do you have it all down, Hassam? Very well. Now, you don't have to repeat this next bit back to me, just take it all down. First, fill the cocktail shaker with a fair amount of ice. Have you got that? All right, you will then bless the ice cubes with a drop - one drop, Hassam! - of vermouth and then you shall add the gin. Then - and this is extremely important, Hassam. Don't try and be original, please - the liquid shall be shaken, not stirred. Is that clear? After that, all you have to do is pour it, making sure that no ice cubes fall into the glass. A good dry martini, Hassam, is a difficult thing to achieve, although I am sure that if you follow my instructions point by point..." 

[...] 

...I sit here recounting my final observations on all that has come to pass at L'Hirondelle d'Or in betwen my attempts to get this dim-witted waiter to mix a perfect martini. 

"Ah! There you are, Hassam, finally! Let's see how you made out this time around." 

I test out the martini, though I will save you the gory details. Once again, the experiment has been a disaster.

El gran Carlemany, mon pare,
dels alarbs em deslliurà,
I del cel vida em donà,
de Meritxell, la gran Mare.
Princesa nasquí i Pubilla
entre dues nacions, neutral;
sols resto l'única filla,
de l'imperi Carlemany.
Creient i lliure onze segles,
creient i lliure vull ser.
Siguin els furs mos tutors
i mos Prínceps defensors!
I mos Prínceps defensors!

But there was no way he could sleep, and he eventually found himself studying a road map, tracing the escape route Margalida had mentioned, and then in the kitchen staring at the open fridge, with the vague idea that he should be doing something more than just worrying himself silly. Cooking, for example: and at that time of the morning he could think of nothing better than a seafood tartare,  a recipe he had been turning over in his mind since the previous evening, a sort of adaptation of the oyster tartare that Jean-Louis Neichel had invented, but without the oysters. Instead, he had fresh clams, sea urchins, prawns, a jar of unspectacular Russian caviar, and some hake macherated in virgin olive oil, salt and green pepper. He cut open the sea urchins, removed their eggs and chopped them together with the clams and prawns, then added a combination of capers, fennel, shallots, gherkins. He had no seaweed or sea-grass, so the recipe could only be an approximation. He sprinkled oil and lemon on the mixture, spread it on the fish, stuffed it into the empty sea urchin shells, and topped them off with a spoonful of caviar. He opened a bottle of white Peludi wine, and placed the sea urchins, the wine, glasses, toast and butter on a tray. When he succeeded in waking up Albert and Margalida and she saw all this exotic display in front of her, she had to stop herself reaching instinctively under the pillow for her gun.

We start with a small dish (tapa) known as fideua, which consists of short noodles, fried by Martiño (he's a keen cook and takes a regular class on a Saturday morning). These are then boiled in a fish broth, and baked in the oven, where they pop up like fresh blades of grass. To follow is a delicious black-ink paella, and then the traditional Catalonian dessert brought by Eva – almonds, hazelnuts, sultanas and dried figs. Miguel's best friend, Leo, a German writer and teacher, arrives as midnight approaches, and the group keep Spanish hours, drinking sweet wine and whisky into the night, and arguing over politics, in anticipation of a relaxed nine o'clock start the next morning.

He went into the house and, without once looking into the living room, at the pictures on the fireplace and everything he left behind, went down the stairs into the cellar. The fruit he'd picked over the last month hung from the roof beams: melons from a reed-rope, strings of beans, garlic, grapes, peppers, chilli and laurel. On the floor, heaped on a tarpaulin were figs, apples, potatoes and quinces. The mixture of scents coming from the different ripening fruits created an intense, sickly-sweet smell in the cellar.

Before, when all the members of the household had lived and were hungry, they picked many of the fruits hanging on the trees, shiny without artificial help, plump like coloured light bulbs - the whole farm lit up by the glow of pears, peaches, cherries and apples. Those reserves of food lasted until Christmas. Yet in the last couple of years, although the crops had dwindled and they kept little for themselves, they ended up throwing a good part of it away, uneaten by them and their younger son. Dried fruit became impossibly hard to swallow; it felt like the pears and quinces had turned sour, grapes left a smoky taste in their mouths and cherries left their mouths full of stones. When his elder son had lived that never happened; when he had lived the harvest never seemed sufficient. Before he'd started to die he would come home full of energy, always hungry, and if dinner was late, he would go down to the cellar and take whatever fruit he liked. But in the last couple of years such a big store made no sense.

Very slowly, almost fondly, he tied the slipknot and made sure it slipped properly before slinging it over one of the roof beams.

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.

77 is a deficient number.

Meanwhile, does anyone remember the NBC adventure series 'The Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers'?

And, of course, Jesus of Nazareth is supposed to be of the 77th generation from Adam.

77 is evil.

77 is also vile!

77 is the number of digits of the 12th perfect number. Somewhat uncannily, 77 also is the number of integer partitions of the number 12.

77 is the sum of three squares, 4² + 5² + 6², as well as the sum of the first eight prime numbers.

77 is the atomic number of the element iridium. Does anyone remember Motorola's ill-fated ventured of the same name that was supposed to revolutionise global telecommunications?

77 is the largest number that cannot be written as a sum of distinct numbers whose reciprocals sum to 1.