The Food of Love (12 page)

said, but he saw Alain nod vigorously as if he agreed with him.

Bruno also began to notice just how hard the young

Frenchman worked at keeping Alain’s favour. As a new chef de

partie, for example, he had the perfect reason to quiz the chef de cuisine about the dishes he was cooking - but not, perhaps, to

make quite so many flattering remarks in response as he seemed to be doing now.

‘Hey, Bruno. How’s it going?’ That was Tommaso, finished

now for the afternoon.

‘Terrible,’ Bruno muttered. Tommaso followed his gaze to

where Hugo Kass was once again tasting one of the maestro’s

signature dishes appreciatively.

‘He’s so far up chef’s culo I’m surprised he can taste anything

except caeca’ Tommaso commented. Bruno laughed. However

bad things were, he could always rely on his friend to come up

with a suitably Roman response.

Laura, sitting in Dr Fellowes’ seminar room, hums to herself

as she writes notes about torsione and contraposto. On the

whiteboard there is a large projection of a Michelangelo drawing, a male nude. His elegant buttocks flit across Dr Fellowes’ equally elegant face as il dottore paces back and forth, explaining in clear, well-rounded sentences the nobility of the ideals that lie behind them.

On her notepad, Laura doodles buttocks. Her humming

becomes audible, until her neighbour gives her a surreptitious

nudge.

The hush of the restaurant was broken suddenly by a loud crash.

In the kitchen, everyone jumped. There was the sound of shouting from the direction of the dining room. Then the doors to the

kitchen slammed open and one of the waiters ran in shouting,

‘Come quickly!’

The kitchen emptied as the staff went to see what was going

on. It seemed that a delivery man had been carrying a box of

fresh eels through the foyer when the bottom of the box had

burst open. About half a dozen eels were now zig-zagging like silvery lightning across the deep-pile carpet of the restaurant in

desperate search of freedom.

Franciscus clicked his fingers as he snapped out orders. ‘Pieter, Stephanie: move the customers to the bar. The rest of you, deal

with this.’ But it was easier said than done. The eels were Roman mud-eels - small, agile and determined - and the staff were hampered by having to crouch down at carpet level to apprehend

them. Again and again there was a yell of triumph, followed by a curse as the slippery anguilli wriggled through someone’s fingers.

The customers, ushered to the bar and initially distracted by

glasses of free Dom Perignon, were soon crowding back into the

restaurant with their glasses in their hands; offering advice, cheering a successful catch or groaning with disappointment as yet

another eel slipped through its captor’s grasp. It took five minutes before two eels were back in the box, and another five before the next one joined it. The staff, exhausted, paused for a rest.

Tommaso nudged Bruno. ‘Where’s the delivery man gone?’ he

muttered in an undertone.

Bruno looked around. It was true that whoever had caused

the mayhem had disappeared.

‘And how come he didn’t bring them to the kitchen door?’

Tommaso continued. ‘Everyone who delivers to Templi knows

to use the kitchen entrance. There’s something strange about

this.’

‘You two,’ Franciscus snapped. ‘Talk later, when you’ve caught

them all.’

Obediently, Tommaso went and prodded an eel from under the

table where it had taken refuge, only for it to slither beneath a nearby chair before he could grab it.

As the free champagne did its work, the diners’ sympathies

began to side with the escapees. They started applauding ironically each time the eels managed to wriggle out of their captors’ grasp.

Alain stood watching from the side, his face like thunder.

It was Hugo who eventually broke the stalemate. He turned on

his heel, went into the kitchen and returned a few moments later with two huge knives, one in each hand. They were steel Sabatiers as long as icicles, each ending in a lethally sharp point. He

advanced on one of the eels and, rather than trying to catch it, simply stabbed it behind the head with the point of his knife,

spearing it on the steel blade.

The watchers fell silent. Without pausing to remove the anguilla from his knife, where it thrashed around in a writhing treble-clef, Hugo moved on. Again the point of the knife stabbed down. Now there were two eels wriggling and twisting on the

bloody blade. A third eel was making a break for freedom across

the floor. Calmly, Hugo took three paces towards it and, crouching down in one fluid movement, speared it behind the gills with

his second knife. He turned towards the next, and moments later

the fourth and final eel joined the others on his knife. Without a word he went back into the kitchen. As the doors closed the

sound of blade snicking on blade could clearly be heard, followed by the quiet thump of eel pieces falling to the floor.

‘Back to your places, all of you,’ Alain ordered. ‘And thank God someone around here has some sense.’

When the kitchen brigade returned to their stations, the eels

were gone and Hugo was calmly preparing sauces.

It was Tommaso, clearing away the broken box from which the

eels had escaped, who found the words written on the side: ‘Be

careful who you throw out of your restaurant. They may have

slippery friends.’

Finally it was Bruno’s day off and he could go in search of ingredients for his next feast. The mattatoio, the old municipal

slaughterhouse in Testaccio, was long closed, turned into stabling for the horses that pulled tourists around the city in little traps, but there were still several smaller places nearby which took delivery of carcasses and butchered them on site; as the saying went, throwing away nothing but the bleat. One of these was Elodi, a

butcher’s shop hollowed out of the base of Monte Testaccio which was itself not a hill at all but an ancient rubbish mound

some thirty-five metres high that dated back to Roman times,

formed from an orderly heap of broken amphorae, the terracotta

jars in which the ancient Romans transported olive oil. Around the base of this centuries-old bottle bank various motor repair shops, butchers and even restaurants had excavated long, windowless

caverns with arched roofs. Elodi was gloomy, and the sawdust on

the floor was spotted with dark pools of blood, but the quality of the meat was known to be second to none.

Bruno spent twenty minutes talking to the owner, Iaco. Widi

offal, you were working on trust, and the consequences of being

sold some dubious meat were far worse than with ordinary cuts.

He let the other man know he was a chef, and discussed various

recipes with him until the butcher was as excited as Bruno himself about the meal Bruno was preparing. Iaco went into the back and

returned with his bloody hands full of treasures - the intestines of a baby veal, the brain of a sheep, a pig’s tongue, and a whole oxtail, still unskinned, like a rider’s whip. From these they made their final selection. The old man impressed upon Bruno that he was not to

make the dishes too fanciful. ‘Stick to the simple recipes and you won’t go wrong,’ he insisted. ‘Resist the temptation to make them your own. I know you young cooks, you always want to tinker.’

With these words ringing in his ears, Bruno took his haul, carefully wrapped up in newspaper, back across the river to Trastevere.

In the event his menu largely reflected the old man’s advice. His antipasto was the classic Roman fritto misto - tiny morsels of mixed offal, including slivers of poached brains and liver, along with snails, artichokes, apples, pears, and bread dipped in milk, all deep-fried in a crisp egg-and-breadcrumb batter. This was to be followed by a primo of rigatoni alia pajata - pasta served with the intestines of a baby calf so young they were still full of its mother’s milk, simmered with onions, white wine, tomatoes, cloves and garlic. For the secondo they would be having milza in umido - a stewed lamb’s spleen

cooked with sage, anchovies, and pepper. A bitter salad oipuntarelle al’ acciuga - chicory sprouts with anchovy - would cleanse the

palate, to be followed by a simple dolce of fragole in aceto - gorella strawberries in vinegar. To finish the meal off with a theatrical flourish, he had tracked down a tiny amount of kopi luwak, a rare coffee

bean from Indonesia. Despite what the old man had said, however, he could not resist the occasional twist; substituting an ingredient here and there, or breaking down a sauce into its constituent

flavours and deducting anything that wasn’t completely essential.

In his heart happiness and sadness were now inextricably mixed

together, like the yolk and white of an egg when they are whisked together in an omelette. The pain of not having Laura himself was exactly balanced by the pleasure that it gave him to cook for her, until he no longer knew where the sadness ended and the happiness began.

@Ž

Even before she got to Tommaso’s apartment Laura could smell

the rich, earthy miasma that wafted down the little street. She

stopped, closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. The smell was as

complex and pungent as old port, but unmistakably carnivorous.

Just for a moment she shuddered. There was something dark

about that smell, something almost rank - a musky, feral richness that belied the sweet, inviting top notes of clove and garlic. Her nostrils flared and her mouth watered. Pushing open the door into the courtyard, she hurried up the stairs.

The door to the apartment was opened by Tommaso’s roommate.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Is Tommaso here?’ She smiled at Bruno,

whom she liked.

‘He’s just putting the finishing touches to dinner,’ Bruno said.

‘Come on in.’

The door to the kitchen was closed and from behind it came

the sound of various Romanesco oaths and curses. “I wouldn’t go

in there if I were you,’ Bruno advised shyly. ‘He’s a bit obsessive when he’s cooking - you know how it is: he likes everything to be exactly perfect.’ A crash, and the sound of shattering crockery, served to underline his words.

“I guess it’s hard work, following a recipe.’

‘Sometimes, yes, but there’s much more to being a chef than

just assembling ingredients.’

‘Really? Like what?’

Bruno hesitated. ‘It’s like the difference between a pianist and a composer,’ he said hesitantly. ‘The pianist is creative, certainly, but he is only the mouthpiece of the person who dreamed the

tunes into life. To be a cook, it’s enough to be a pianist - a performer of other people’s ideas. But to be a chef you have to be a

composer as well. For example, the recipes you are going to eat

tonight are all traditional dishes from old Rome - but if all we do is simply recreate the past, without trying to add to it, it stops being a living tradition and becomes history, something dead. Those dishes were refined over centuries, but only through people trying different things, different combinations, rejecting what

didn’t work and passing on what did. So we owe it to the chefs of the past to continue doing as they did and experiment, even when we are dealing with the most hallowed traditions.’

Laura nodded, fascinated, and he plunged on, ‘Take one of the

dishes you will be eating tonight: fritto misto. The old butcher who sold me the meat was most insistent that it should be cooked the old way - so brains, for example, are always poached in vegetables, then left to cool before being sliced and deep-fried in

batter. But then you think, this batter is not so different to

Japanese tempura, and tempura can be served with a sweet chilli

and soy dipping sauce, so why not make an Italian version of that, perhaps with balsamic vinegar from Modena instead of soy, and

see what happens—’ He stopped, suddenly aware that he was getting carried away. Not only was he waving his arms around and

becoming overexcited, but he had also completely forgotten that

Tommaso was supposed to be the chef. He thought back rapidly.

Had he said anything stupid?

But Laura had other concerns. ‘Tommaso’s cooking me brains)’ She pulled a face.

‘Among many other things that you won’t have tasted before,’

Bruno said gently. ‘Brains, liver, intestine. You just have to trust ‘

he wanted to say me: with an effort he swallowed and went on ‘trust Tommaso. He knows what he’s doing, and there is nothing

that you won’t think is delicious once you’ve tried it.’

‘Like that old saying: “I’ve never tried it because I don’t like it.”’

‘Exactly. I think you, Laura, may surprise yourself with what

you like.’

‘Maybe.’ Laura felt a little uncomfortable. Bruno was looking

at her in a weird way, and his conversation was full of awkward

pauses and gaps during which he glanced at her and then shyly

moved his gaze away again.

She noticed, though, that when he was talking about food he

wasn’t shy at all. Then he looked her straight in the eye, his own eyes blazing with passion. To try to get him back on to the subject, she said, ‘So it was you who bought the food, not Tommaso?’

‘What?’

‘You said an old man sold you the ingredients.’

‘Did I?’

Laura gave up. After a minute Bruno mumbled something

about going out. He got up and dashed for the door.

There was a triumphant yell from the kitchen. ‘Eh, Bruno! Who

says a cock can’t learn to lay eggs!*’ The door opened and

Tommaso appeared, holding a salad bowl in both hands at shoulder height as if it were a race winner’s cup. ‘Puntarelle al’ acciuga, Tommaso-style.’ He stopped dead. ‘Oh, Laura. I didn’t hear you arrive.’