Cooking With Fernet Branca Read Online Free

ever heard of: Petrof, or something. All her living seems to take place in the kitchen, a low cave with a beamed and blackened fireplace big enough to roast a yeti. It is also full of burst chairs with clothes on them. I was glad to notice she appeared to have no cats about the place. I have nothing at all against these animals but in my experience if there’s one around, roguish girls like Marta may make compulsive pussy jokes. One is embarrassed for them.
    ‘For you, Gerree, all Voynovia fooding tonight,’ she said as we eventually reeled to our seats at the kitchen table, having first pitched off bundles of sheets. By then we had finished most of a bottle of Fernet Branca and even the electric light was beginning to have a brownish tinge. With a flourish she plonked before me a gross sausage the colour of rubberwear and as full of lumps as a prison mattress. It was a little larger than those things in Bavaria that just fit into bowls the size of chamber pots.
    ‘Is shonka,’ I think she said, resting her breasts on the table on either side of her own plate. Smiling weakly, I made the good guest’s obligatory ‘mm’ noises and gingerly poked it with the point of my knife. There was the sound of a boil being lanced. A spurt of boiling fat shot across the table and even on that late June evening my spectacles misted over. The contents of the sausage, bright fed with paprika, lay there before me like an anatomy lesson. ‘My sister Marja she send from Voynovia. We eat like this, Gerree.’ Cheekily she speared one of the lumps on my plate with her fork, dipped it into a pot of black treacle and held it playfully to my lips.Mechanically I opened my mouth and allowed it entry but thereafter there was nothing mechanical about my chewing. It was exactly like trying to cross a hot beach barefoot. When I say black treacle I only mean that was what it looked like, though I’m damned if it really wasn’t mainly molasses. What the rest was, I cannot say, but my impressions included saffron, pickled walnuts and lavender, with perhaps a pinch of plutonium. The only thing missing, surprisingly, was Fernet Branca.
    Once one mouthful of shonka and sauce was down a kind of local anaesthesia set in and the next forkful was marginally less lethal. And you know how it is, I’appetito vien mangiando and all that, it wasn’t long before I had eaten a good two inches of the thing, with a mere yard to go. My attention was nearly monopolized by the food so maybe I was less careful than I’d intended to keep the conversation firmly on small talk. Middle-sized talk (i.e. more than the weather and less than Life) accompanied much of my shonka which, as I progressed, increasingly resembled in its effects the hemlock they gave poor Socrates to drink. A curious numbness began in my extremities and slowly converged on the heart. I wanted very much to lie down and found myself musing about famous last words. It was clearly out of the question on all counts to ask Marta to remember to sacrifice a cock for me. Irrelevancies came and went in my mind like brilliant little plankton drifting in and out of a tide pool. I suddenly realized The Bends would be rather a good title for Snoilsson’s autobiography, especially since he’d told me he was going to take up championship depth-diving when he quit motor racing.
    ‘I’m sorry?’ I said through a knobbly mouthful of cysts.
    ‘You are funny man, Gerree,’ she replied. I noticed she had hardly touched her own shonka which anyway was a fraction the length of mine. ‘I am saying I hear you singing from here in your house.’
    ‘Oh? Well, yes, I suppose I do like to sing as I work. Here a bit of Rossini, there a snatch of Bellini, you know how it is.’

    ‘Very loud your voice. I am thinking is strain.’
    ‘Trained? My voice? Oh no. Just as it always was, I’m afraid. Most kind of you, though.’ Judging by the general peasant mess of her house, to say nothing of the shonka , it was safe to