Cooking With Fernet Branca Read Online Free Page B

think up an acceptable title. Like all racing drivers Per Snoilsson is constantly besieged by girls he laconically refers to as ‘pit bunnies’ or ‘screwdrivers’: part of the perks of hi-glam living. The readership wants plenty of detail about that, of course, and I have dutifully packed the text with titillating vignettes of post-race celebrations. These include the obligatory showers wearing nothing but the victor’s wreath, also the champagne-soaked knickers draped over silver ice buckets. There is even a description of the Pit Stop Game as played by three Ferrari drivers in a Monaco hotel suite. This had involved each driver pretending to be a car coming into the pits and being besieged by a team of girls whose duty was to attend to various parts of his body and have him away ( aliter dictum ‘back in the race’) in record time. Pointless to apologize for such unedifying episodes, they’re what readers want. But they don’t help with the title. I rack my Fernet-damaged frontal lobes. Why couldn’t this stupid Swede have had the enterprise to be something unusual, like that American driver who is an evangelical preacher between races and for whom the title Rev would have been a natural? Then I remember Per’s having once allowed some medical researchers to cover his body with electrodes which transmitted intimate physiological details during a race in Brazil. He informed me proudly that his buttocks had reached a temperature of 41 °C Bingo! Hot Seat!

    Oh yes, I like that. It suggests the weight of responsibility, danger, even lethality, as well as gruelling conditions. At a more private level it brings to my mind indentations made in quick-setting foam at a Surrey works. The phrase is so familiar I wonder if it’s already in use as a title but then think the editor can worry about that. Hot Seat! is good enough for me. Exclamation marks sell books! so I make some copies of the disk and take one down to Camaiore, where I consign it to the post office. Another job jobbed. In the market I find some plump and yearning langoustines and on another stall a refrigerated tray containing pieces of lontra . Farmed, of course: you can’t get wild lontra these days for love or money and I have tried both. Still, irresistible. I buy one and a half kilos for a sum that will appreciably dent my next advance, but what the hell. On the way back I pick up my mail from the bar and by the time I’m home my spirits have soared. Not only have I finished the book and got it out of the house but up here among the trees and crags the summer’s day that was sweltering at sea level is cooled by altitude to a pleasant warmth. I also realize my headache has gone, the last traces of shonka having been purged from my body.
    This calls for some celebratory cooking. The chance proximity in the market of the two major items I have bought prompt my culinary ingenuity to come up with an ideal marriage between river and sea, as it were. I see … yes … a cold dish, a race-day picnic-out-of-the-Bentley’s-boot sort of dish, a perfect complement to mood and weather. I come up with an inspired variant of a little something I once pioneered in the water meadows near Oxford:
    Otter with Lobster Sauce

    Before you rush off to try this dish for yourself, a caveat. Otter is a far subtler meat than rabbit (for instance), as no less an authority than Gavin Maxwell attested – and he was referring to sea otter at that. It should be cooked with the greatest careto preserve its uniquely delicate riverine flavour: like that of kingfishers fed on watercress. It is easily ruined by brutal treatment. Banish Clint Eastwood metaphors to another universe. Imagine a dish prepared by the Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows in a mood of wistful hyperaesthesia and you will have some idea of the sensitivity you will need to bring off this masterpiece:
    ♦
    Ingredients
    1.5 kg otter chunks
8 tablespoons sunflower oil
8 medium nasturtium leaves, chopped
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