Gentleman's Relish Read Online Free

context it tastes like soap and it sticks to teeth as embarrassingly as spinach.’
    In season, she led him around the fields and lanes behind the house introducing him to blackberries, sloes, elder bushes, mushrooms, crab apples, sorrel.
    When Perry turned ten, shortly after his creation of a puffball and bacon roulade had seduced a new neighbour and demoralized the neighbour’s wife, his mother fell ill. For a few weeks, without anyone’s appearing to notice, he inherited her apron, and whisked up menu after comforting menu for his father and older brothers, reading cookery books in bed and skiving off afternoon sports sessions at school to race into town on his bicycle before the covered market closed. When she returned, grey and shattered after her operation, she was gratefulto have had her wooden spoon usurped, still more to taste his nutritious soups and cunning vegetables after two weeks of hospital pap.
    Her gratitude, however, seemed to break the peaceful spell of his father’s quiescence. It was as though he were noticing for the first time as Perry stirred his sauces and deftly shredded roots and nuts, swamped in a practical but undeniably floral apron.
    â€˜Why don’t you play rugby like Geoff?’ he asked. ‘You’d like rugby. Once you got used to it.’
    â€˜Sport bores me. What do you think of this duck? Was the fennel a mistake? Maybe celeriac would work better, or even parsnip. If I could get it to caramelize properly without the skin burning…’
    Perry was duly banished to a boarding school on the Yorkshire coast, handpicked for its bracingly sporty philosophy and lack of opportunities for any science more domestic than the use of Ralgex and Universal Embrocation. His mother was brought down from her sickbed and set back to work at the kitchen stove. She collapsed there shortly afterwards and died of an internal haemorrhage halfway through assembling a deceptively humble fish pie. Perry cursed his father for his cruelty but laid on a suitable buffet for her funeral and brought his seduction of the neighbour to an electric conclusion with the aid of some witty yet somehow mournful filo parcels of pigeon, leek and sultana.
    He hated school and counted off the passing weeks like a prisoner. His impatience to be free had more to do with the liberty to have access to more inspiring ingredients than with any brutalities visited on him. His growing mastery over food continued to protect him like a hero’s winged sandals or magic armour. An ability to dress crab and whip up a mayonnaise won him an entrée to the shielding comforts of the prefects’ common room in his second week and the older boys soon set him to baking them cakes instead of forcing him out onto icy playing fields. He even came to look forward to overnight field trips with the cadet corps, given charge as he was of the campfire kitchen. Since adolescents have always lurched between the kindred demands of belly and groin, cookery also brought him sporadic tastes of rough-handed romance.
    His father and brothers had long dismissed him as effetely artistic and were as surprised as he was when he began to specialize in chemistry. Boarding school had given him a taste for independence. Without his mother there, the family home held little appeal for him and while passing through university and qualifying as a forensic scientist, he went there as little as possible. (He made exceptions for his brothers’ successive weddings, miserable occasions where the poor quality of the catering made him more than usually grateful that he had kept cookery as a vice and not pursued it as a livelihood.)
    He had only the one live-in lover, first encountered in the meat aisle of a local supermarket. Douglas had come out shopping in tennis clothes, fresh, or rather not, from a match. Perry could not help noticing the way the chilled air from the meat cabinets raised goose bumps on his legs and Douglas noticed him