Cooking With Fernet Branca Read Online Free Page A

assume she didn’t know Italian opera from a hole in the ground. I wondered idly what sort of music she was used to in Voynovia. No doubt wild knees-up stuff with zithers and balalaikas and drunken whoopings when at the end everyone bursts into tears and hugs each other, full of vodka and nameless Slavic melancholy.
    ‘And your work, Gerree, what your work?’
    ‘I’m a writer, Marta.’
    ‘Writer murder?’
    ‘Not murder stories, no, although I am getting an idea for one. Biographies mainly.’
    ‘Ah, Gerree, you and me artists.’
    ‘Well …’
    ‘But yes. I am songer.’
    ‘A singer?’
    ‘No. I am making songs.’
    She shoots me such a look of mischief through the general frizz hanging in front of her face that a plump tumour I was about to dunk in the treacle remained in mid-air, arrested and quivering on my fork. My imagination leaped forward like a pricked hen and I could foresee the loom of intime evenings around her Iron Curtain upright. The tumour was jerked off my fork and fell into my glass. A great splash of Fernet Branca drenched the salt, the table, a pile of books, my shirtfront and her frizzy mane. It was like one of those cutaways from Jack Hawkins’ face on the bridge as we catch the sea astern of his destroyer erupting in a massive tuft of blasted water as the first depth-charge explodes.
    ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ I said, trying to hoik the lump out of the glass. But my manual dexterity had gone haywire, paralysed by shonka and drink. I shot a nervous glance at the hair with the gleaming nose poking through it. It was quivering, shaking,suddenly blown apart by a great woof of laughter. She wiped her hair and her face with a blotched napkin and slumped back in her chair, helpless.
    ‘Very funny man,’ she repeated when she could speak. ‘I want to see more and more of you.’
    Oh God.
    ‘And now, Gerree, we try your ice cream. Is very special fooding.’
    ‘Cuisine,’ I said curtly. ‘We say “cuisine”, not “fooding”. “Fooding” doesn’t exist in English.’ For I was reckless now, determined that my natural good manners shouldn’t let me in for whatever designs she had on me. Still, those very manners oblige me grudgingly to admit that she not only downed her garlic ice cream like a trooper but promptly called for more. By that stage our taste buds were surely dead and between us we polished it off. Thereafter I remember nothing except an achingly Socratic sensation of coldness which was explained only when I woke myself with a series of awesome farts to find that I was lying on the ground by my front doorstep with dawn breaking all around.

6
    There is something radically wrong with Tuscan bread. Frankly, it’s a disgrace: the one thing to disfigure an otherwise classic cuisine. Even Italians from other regions make ribald remarks about it – like for instance that it’s the only bread in the world to emerge from the oven already stale. This is merely a slight exaggeration. Tuscan bread is non-fattening once it is over three hours old because cutting a slice requires energy equal to the slice’s calorific value. (This is henceforth known as Samper’s Law.) It is a feature the Italian slimming industry should do more to promote. It now occurs to me that when Robert Graves coined his appallingly sentimental image of ‘women good as bread’ he may have had Tuscanbread in mind, in which case he meant the far more likely women hard as nails.
    The reason I mention this is because in the days following that first dinner with Marta I had a great craving for bland nursery food and found a good use for Tuscan bread in bread-and-milk: little bowls of pap I ate slowly with a spoon that trembled. My complacent simile that had likened Garlic and Fernet Ice Cream to a .44 Magnum had been wrong. One never saw Clint Eastwood incapacitated by his own gun’s recoil.
    For several days I poke listlessly through the typescript of The Chequered Fag , correcting typos and still trying to