Swirl! Sizzle! Wilt!

7 March, 2011 – I have little interest in gonzo food writing, such as when a fearless chef seeks out ever more exotic delicacies that prove almost invariably to be insects. Not that I find it particularly repugnant, more that it’s a bit boring, and besides, I have alighted upon something much more piquing, and more stomach-churning. The flesh which makes me feel decidedly queasy is people – or rather, more exactly and more honestly, the thought of writing about real people. To serve up others as subject matter feels like taboo… But it is unavoidable, and so I have a trick – developed to settle and distract the mind – which makes it a little more palatable.

The trick is to make everyone I write about a cartoon character – not least myself. Not that I am wilfully spurning veracity. Any similarity to actual people is entirely deliberate, but any true resemblance in those depicted may also be accidental. There are no photographs on this site. I am not aiming for hyper-realism, capturing every detail, the truth and nothing but the truth. Rather, I write in the spirit of exaggeration, satire, caricature and the belief that they can contribute in different ways to truthfulness, and, above all, because the cartoonist’s frame seems particularly appropriate.

*****

There are only exclamation marks as time with the Maximalist is replayed. There’s a cartoonlike tempo. The pace gets faster and faster, and more extreme. There is none of the fine-grained detail of everyday life. None of the necessary tedium or trudging or waiting. There are no ellipses.

But this is not only the experience of a spectator seeing now the neatly framed action. At the time, as we lived it, there was a cartoonlike irreality. We suspended disbelief. Two animated characters running off a cliff, propelled forward for many years, defying gravity and oblivious to the coming calamity. We eventually came crashing down, yet half-believing even then that we could, however improbably, be caught and saved by a slight and conveniently positioned twig or perhaps by a passing stork.

As in the best cartoons, there were two polar opposites pitted against each other, each unfathomable to the other, but each needing the other, each defined by the other. Her restlessness and ecstatic unreason. A balefulness and a very amusing earnestness. You have to deliver me a dog. You have to deliver me a son. You have to deliver me a son with your curly hair. Her foil was my caricature: my grumpiness, caution and rationalism (twinned with an irrational indulgence of her). At the beginning, each trait a positive in her eyes, just as I could only accentuate the adorable in her. Sure, with time, I was painted into a corner, and doubtless she felt similarly, but at the start there was only a bright, unblemished, fantastical picture.

We had drawn each other with very broad brushstrokes and very much in two dimensions. Declarations were emphatic. The more vivid the embellishment, the more sustaining it felt. For what is love if not pinning one’s colours to the mast? If you are going to put someone on a pedestal, make it impressively tall (and whatever you do, don’t stop building higher). For is there not some virtue to sincere exaggeration? Not hyperbole for the sake of puffery but ingenuous preening. Stop performing and it is over, that is for sure.

Even the callousness, when watched again, feels more cartoonish and comical than anything else. Thwack! Take that. Kapow! Little stars would circle our heads. We would come back for more, the predictability and the added expectation making it funny.

Our epic, Manichaean struggle extended in my eyes to our attitudes to food. I, of course, had a simple, straightforward relationship to food. A good, healthy, relationship. Food, the one thing that I never worried about. While her relationship was riven with complexes, confident seemingly in her tastes yet insecure, a tremendous appetite but also a hankering for malnourished chic. An extra dimension in our cartoon tussle.

*****

‘Croquant!’ An imperative that has not to my knowledge appeared in comic strips. Food describing has a clear affinity with the onomatopoeic declarative verb-adjectives of comics however. See Jamie Oliver’s bish, bash, bosh shtick, and Rice Krispies of course. It is certainly good for the loud bits.

(Incidentally, I draw the line at a loony toony approach to nutrition. From the Krispies website: “Rice is packed with carbohydrates… and a word that long must be good for you!”)

Stalking through the realm of cartoons, I decided to have spinach, and lots of it. Plus, I am keeping a friends’ cat company at present. The friends are on holiday and the puss, who has not gone on holiday, lives close to some fine Turkish shops. I bought four proud bunches, thick-stemmed not baby-leaf. It was not too mucky but still, I filled the sink three times with freezing water. Immerse the spinach, swirl around, the grit sinks and drains away. Then I pick over the leaves, leaving only the most vibrant green – nothing hoary, nothing etiolated, and nothing yellow- or sepia-tinged.

Dripping wet, the spinach hits a hot pan, sizzles, wilts.

From the Turkish emporium, I have two fat bunches of wand-like spring onions. I slice almost the whole length of each and fry. In a jet black frying pan there are rings within rings: pale green, dark green and white. Hoops within hoops, a kaleidoscopic monotone Kandinsky, cooking only gently but making my eyes water all the same.

I wring the spinach and add crudely chopped to the pan. Chunks of pickled feta and a smidgen of cayenne. Is there a nutmeg in the house? Yes, and half, finely-grated, goes in too. I love spinach and feta böreks, but I was in no mood for parcelling up and triangulating. I would bake a pie, see things in the round. A deep pie. No compromise. Paper-thin filo would be my canvass. Taking the first leaf, I line the tin. Then paint with melted butter. I continue to build the layers then pile in the spinach, then more layers buttering as I go. I brush beaten egg over the top then bake.

Out of the oven, the transformation from pasty to beautiful Midas-kissed pastry is complete. The golden lid fragile and brittle. Fragments shatter as cut. Crunchy on top. Pleasantly soaked, sodden through at the bottom. I bite through the crunchy part, then the masses of soggy spinach to more pastry. The feta sharp and salty, imperviously unmeltable. I ate the first half of the pie greedily, standing by the cooker, gobbling slice by slice as soon as it was cool enough. The next night, the second half was just as good, better even with added expectation.

****

Leftovers. There are rarely leftovers.

From the reams of filo, there remained a couple of sheets and enough stuffing…

In our comic capers, the Maximalist’s least favourite speech bubble was ‘compromise!’ As she battled the dark side of procrastination and pragmatism, I was, by turns, an ally – joining her in the fight as we provoked each other to ever-more extravagant heights – but increasingly often I was the foe, the sensible villain to her crusading impatient idealist.

… There was enough to make an extra parcel, so I triangulated but without compromise, without splitting the difference. I had my pie and ate it… and it, the börek, was wonderful, even better than the pie: a divinely proportioned golden section with more crunchy surface area, sharp angles and a most pleasing pastry to spinach ratio.

A final scrap. For all my careful menu planning, plotting, and attempts not to serve up flesh and blood, the characters I have adumbrated may have taken impossibility to incredible lengths, for with the new clarity and brightness of these days, these 2D characters of mine appear to have cast shadows, quite long shadows at that.