The Food of Love (14 page)

‘Oh, car a, it was just amazing.’

As Laura listed the menu, Carlotta clicked her tongue and murmured, ‘Tay, yay, yay,’ appreciatively. When Laura had finished she said, ‘All that and erotic fantasies as well? I am definitely coming down to Rome next weekend. And you can bet I’ll be bringing

Andrea with me. It’s time he met my parents, anyway.’

Bruno was dismayed to find that Hugo Kass had been assigned to

work alongside him on the patissier’s station. Even more worryingly, and against all normal etiquette of a three-star kitchen, it

had been left vague as to which of them would be in charge.

Ostensibly the move was because Alain had been developing some

new dolci, but Bruno knew that it was really because the chef

wanted to play a little mind game with Bruno, to punish him for

his recent lack of performance.

It did not take him long to realise that Hugo was intent on

seizing any opportunity to demonstrate his own superiority. As the orders came in and were called aloud, it was customary for the

underling who was to cook each dish to respond with a crisp, ‘Oui, chef Bruno found that an order would barely be out of Karl’s mouth before Hugo had claimed it as his own. Hugo even

took on orders that required him to work on two dishes simultaneously, while Bruno was left fuming and twiddling his thumbs.

Tommaso, passing on his way to the sink with a tray of dirty

dishes, saw what was happening. ‘Why aren’t you doing anything

about this?’ he hissed.

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ Bruno hissed back, watching Hugo

build an intricate terrine of fruits in layers of alcohol-soaked sponge.

‘So? You’re better than he is.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Bruno said as Hugo’s hands danced over the

ingredients.

‘Do you want to work here or not?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Then you need to levati questo camello dai coglioni. Your

problem, Bruno, is that you’re a nice guy. Too nice. If you want something, you have to fight for it.’

‘OK, OK. Point taken.’

The next time Karl called out an order, Bruno had rapped out

a ‘Oui, chef before Hugo had even opened his mouth. It was an

order for papillote de banane. Even in the sophisticated version served at Templi - cooked in a parcel, with strips of vanilla pod and a passion fruit coulis-it was a dish Bruno could have cooked to perfection in his sleep. Hugo stood back, his face expressionless, as Bruno brushed some greaseproof paper with egg white.

‘Table fourteen, one tarte fine aux pommes,’ Karl called.

‘Oui, chef,’ Hugo said instantly, turning to his station.

‘One gratin de fruits—’

Literally: ‘Lift this camel off your balls.’

‘Oui, chef,’ Bruno snapped. Even before Karl had finished

speaking, he was reaching for the eggs.

A waiter handed another order to Karl, who scanned it quickly

and added, ‘Table eight, anothergratin.’

Bruno was about to respond but this time Hugo beat him to it. ‘Oui, chef,’ Hugo said quickly, reaching for some eggs himself.

So now they were effectively cooking the same dish, gratin de

fruits, in parallel. It was a deceptively simple recipe: fresh fruit in a sabayon sauce, lightly caramelised. Sabayon is simply the sophisticated French cousin of the Italian zabaione. The difficulty of the

dish came in the way it had to be cooked, which required

absolutely precise timing. Fresh egg yolks were whisked in an

electric mixer at the highest speed until they had tripled in volume.

Meanwhile, rhubarb was cooked with sugar and lemon juice and

strained through a sieve to make a syrup. Then the mixer was

reduced to its lowest speed and the hot syrup poured drop by

drop into the sabayon. It was this hot mixture that both cooked

the egg yolks and stabilised them. If the syrup hit the cold sides of the bowl it would solidify into thick lumps. If it touched the spinning blades of the mixer it would spit drops of boiling syrup back

at the face of the cook.

Like choreographed dancers, the two chefs reached in unison

for lemons and halved them. Their knives, as they chopped the

rhubarb, were as perfectly synchronised as a drummer’s sticks.

Each wore an expression of grim determination as they tried,

unsuccessfully, to edge ahead of the other. They both squeezed

the lemons with two deft twists of the wrist. They both hurled the husks of their juiced lemon into the bin, where the two fruits collided as they fell. They both turned to the big gas stoves at the

same moment, and the two coronets of blue flame appeared on

both their burners at exactly the same time.

The other chefs had realised by now that something was

happening. They watched, surreptitiously at first and then with

open-mouthed amazement, as the two young men battled it out.

As he whisked the egg yolks, Bruno plated the bananes en papiT love with his left hand and slid them down the counter towards a commis to go to the pass. Hugo, though, had neglected his tarte. With an oath he had to break off from the sabayon and lower the heat before the apples burned.

Now Bruno was precious seconds ahead. Calmly he lowered

the mixer speed and prepared to add the hot syrup, drop by drop.

‘Souffle aux fruits de la passion,’ Karl called.

Neither chef responded. Neither wanted the burden of yet

another dish to prepare until the battle of the sabayon was

resolved. There was a long silence, broken only by the hum and

descant of the two electric mixers.

‘Souffle aux fruits,’ the head chef repeated.

Bruno was torn. On the one hand, he didn’t want to do the

order. On the other, this was his station. It was his responsibility to make sure the customer wasn’t kept waiting.

‘Oui, chef,’ he muttered. Opposite him Hugo smiled wolfishly.

Bruno reached for another mixing bowl with his left hand. He

poured in equal amounts of passion fruit puree and pastry cream

for the souffle and flicked the second mixer on. Luckily he had

kept the egg whites left over from the sabayon. Still with his left hand, he started to whisk them in a bowl, at the same time adding a thin trickle of hot syrup to the sabayon with his right.

‘Afaccia d’o cazzo!‘ one of the other chefs breathed. ‘A DJ

couldn’t work those decks better.’

Bruno placed the fruits on a plate, poured the sabayon on top

and reached for his blowtorch. While his left hand still folded egg white into the souffle mixture, with his right he began to glaze the surface of his sabayon with the naked flame.

His attention on the food, it was only the sudden intake of

breath from the onlookers that alerted him. He leaped back just

Literally: ‘The face of the dick.’ This expression translates roughly as, ‘Amazing!’

as a foot-long flame lanced out of Hugo’s blowtorch, missing

him by inches.

“I beg your pardon, Bruno,’ Hugo said calmly, adjusting the

nozzle.

Bruno said nothing. The surface of his sabayon was webbed

with caramel now, crisp and brown. It was finished. Wiping the

sides of the plate carefully with the end of his cloth, he called a commis to take it to the pass. One or two of the other chefs broke into applause.

‘Quiet,’ Alain snapped. Bruno realised that he must have been

watching silently from the other side of the kitchen. ‘Get back to work, all of you.’

It was at least another minute before Hugo’s dish was ready.

Bruno quietly got on with preparing the souffle. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Alain walk over to the pass and bend over the

two sabayons, inspecting them minutely. Then he came over to

where the two young men were working.

‘If I ever see the pair of you doing anything like that again,’ he said quietly, ‘you will both be out of here. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, chef,’ they muttered.

‘This isn’t a racetrack. It’s a kitchen.’ He stalked off to inspect a plate of vegetables.

Bruno turned back to the oven, pulled out the souffle and

cursed. The top had burned. Then he saw why. He had set the

oven to 190 degrees. Now it was at 210 degrees. Someone had

changed the setting while he’d been distracted. He glanced at

Hugo but the Frenchman’s head was bent over his counter and it

was impossible to tell what kind of expression he had on his face.

Bruno chucked the souffle in the bin and started again. He might have won this battle, but he was prepared to bet that the war had only just begun.

‘We come now to the difficult notion of harmony,’ Dr Fellowes is saying. ‘Harmony was not just an aesthetic ideal for the great men of the Renaissance but a spiritual one also. It is the point at which conception and creation mesh; the painter’s skill reflecting and celebrating the greater harmony of the Divine.’ He plucks a piece of

fluff from his shirt, which today is of a colour best described as grape.

Laura smiles at him dreamily. She smiles at everyone today. He

coughs and continues: ‘The grace of the human figure, the delicacy of forms, the precise symbolism of colour and placement these

are all elements of harmony.’

As Laura bends her head over her notebook, Dr Fellowes

admires the quattrocentro profile of her neck, both delicate and harmonious. For a moment he falters. He thinks how amazing it

is that Italy can do this, can bring out the beauty in the most ordinary people.

Laura, meanwhile, is thinking thoughts so completely filthy

that she is amazed they aren’t making her blush. Quite the reverse, in fact. She glances coolly up at her teacher and pictures herself in bed with Tommaso. Ah yes - that goes there, and this goes here, and wouldn’t it be a nice surprise if that went there as well—

‘Harmony,’ Kim repeats, favouring Laura with a smile.

‘So we’re cooking for Laura’s best friend. And her best friend’s boyfriend.’

‘We are?’

They were at Gennaro’s, savouring the first ristretti of the day.

Bruno felt a little light-headed. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was in love, or because Gennaro had now turbo-charged his

Gaggia by fitting to it a vast pump from an industrial pressure

washer. This sent the pressure inside the machine right up to the maximum, into the red part of the dial, and the caffe was now so potent that even die-hard regulars sometimes found themselves

staggering to a table and sitting down.

‘Yes. Although I have to tell you that a slight complication has arisen.’

‘It can hardly be any more complicated than it already is,’

Bruno pointed out.

‘Perhaps complication is the wrong word. A small change of

plan. No, not even of plan. Of venue, that’s all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘This friend of Laura’s has told her parents about me, you see.

These parents live here, in Rome, and the result is that they want me to go and cook for all of them at the parents’ house, where this Carlotta and her boyfriend will be staying. So of course I had to say that would be fine.’

Bruno stared at him. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘What’s crazy?’ Tommaso shrugged. ‘I’ll go and commandeer

the kitchen, throw the mother out and then we’ll just have to find a way to get you inside.’

‘I take it I’m not actually invited?’

‘Well, no.’

‘So let me get this clear, Tommaso. You are expecting me to

break into this house—’

‘Apartment.’

‘Apartment. Even better. I suppose it’s on the sixteenth floor?’

‘Uh - second, I believe.’

‘To break into this apartment, which is on the second floor,

conceal myself somehow in the kitchen, and then, without being

spotted, cook a meal?’

‘Exactly. Bruno, your grasp of the situation is masterly and shows that you are clearly the man to formulate a plan to carry us through.’

‘Sooner or later, Tommaso, we’re going to be found out. Have

you thought of that?’

‘Of course. And then we’ll run like hell, before we have a good

laugh about it all. Meglio ungiomo da leone che cento da pecora, as my father used to say, God rest his soul.’

‘Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred as a sheep.

At the restaurant, Alain had positioned himself so that he could see everything taking place in the patissier’s corner. He was clearly looking for any excuse to elevate one of his two proteges at the expense of the other.

As Bruno pressed a mixture of pastry cream and mashed apricots

through the sieve to make a syrup, he noticed that it was

coming out lumpy. Surprised, he spooned it back into the sieve

and tried again. Again, the puree had blobs of fruit and even seeds in it. He picked up the sieve and looked at it more closely.

Someone had pressed something sharp a dozen times into the

metal surface, enlarging the holes.

He replaced the sieve without saying anything and inspected

the rest of his station. A chef’s work area is called his mise-en-place, and each chef surrounds himself with his own individual combination of tools, prepared ingredients, knives, seasonings and

favourite gadgets. In the pressure of a service, you reached for whatever was needed automatically, barely looking at it. You

assumed, for example, that your bowl of cream was the same bowl

of cream you had taken out of the fridge and checked a few hours before, that your vinegar was the same brand you always used, that your sugar really was sugar …

Bruno dipped his finger into his sugar bowl and licked it. Along with sugar, there was another taste. Salt.

With a sudden lurch of dread he tasted his vinegar. Instead of

vinegar, the bottle contained liquorice water.

He felt sick. How many dishes had he already sent out with the