Hilarious at the time, but

10 April, 2011 – Coriolanus vows that he’ll “never Be such a gosling to obey instinct…”. Wary of martial braggadocio, hyperconscious to the perils of elevating reason above intuition, I want to charge – am spurred to charge – in the opposite direction: to trust again my instincts, though not, necessarily, to embrace goose.

In the past 26 years I have eaten meat once* – the occasion when a convivial Russian sought to fatten me up. He is the majority share-owner of a company I’ll call Russian Corner. I interviewed him in his Moscow restaurant in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. The place was open for us; it may only ever open for him. To join the establishment he had built this establishment with crushed velvet wallpaper and three thousand brandies – the largest collection outside France, he said – vitrined along one wall. Visions of shattering glass and amber.  A scene from Scarface just waiting to happen.

But I shouldn’t reimagine too dramatically, for my host had not the slightest ounce of menace. A cuddly cliché; a bear of a man. Extremely jovial, endearingly proud. We sat around an outsized circular table and the interview sallied desultorily forth.

The food was very much secondary. Sensing that here lay monstrosities, I thought I had chosen safely, plotting course by course to avoid unwelcome surprises. Garrulous both; much hot air. We sailed plainly through the calm, unadventurous waters of a tomato and mozzarella salad. Then from out of nowhere, as tacking gently to the main course, there appeared a “special treat from the chef”. My host beaming, a plate of fois gras ravioli was softly set down before me.

Discretion felt the better sliver of valour. There it is, I thought. The goose will not go unstuffed by any stubborn refusal or bad manners on my part. This was no time to tell, through a translator, the tale of my pseudo-vegetarianism, born at an impressionable age after seeing gloriously viscid, big-eyed calves, yanked into the world at 3am on a farm in the Lake District.

More than that though, I wasn’t utterly repelled, immobilised or stricken. Rather, the curious food-lover sought to wrestle the controls. Part of me was thinking: I could try a supposed delicacy, and try it relatively guilt-free. Still more, Il Capitano Ironist asserted himself. Oh the delicious irony of being force-fed fois gras by a rotund oligarch-type. How could I possibly refuse? To your own self be true, but true to which self? Trust your instincts, but which? I was true. True to the self that wants things delivered on a plate, including sometimes the wrong, the bad. The intuitively wrong to which I am not in the final reckoning actually taste averse. The rottenness that I have tolerated; which I have known in my gut was wrong but which I have not spoken up against. The bad which I can contextualise and excuse, which I can swallow whole, laugh off, write off, or write up seven years later with a self-legitimising sense of ironic absurdity.

Later, my colleague judged that the fois gras hadn’t been that good. Too fatty, she said. It left a bad taste in her mouth.

*****

Coriolanus goes on to say that he will “… but stand As if a man were author of himself”. Living in more cosseted times, I have no marauding Volscians to repel but can share the more modest ambition to cook as if I was the author of my own recipes, eating what I instinctively feel like. That seems at the moment to be a lot of garlic, propelled by the arrival of wild garlic. In recent days, there were prawns, lentils and chickpeas in much garlic, coriander and mellow rapeseed oil. Then a fried egg with chilli and tzerziki. A breakfast of wild garlic with scrambled egg.

And a snack – if four rounds of toast can be called a snack – that involved driving  headlong into my prevailing instincts. Fearnley Whittingstall instructs that a pint of beer be burned off to reduce its volume by half. Best bitter, best Adnams, evaporated before my eyes. But it was worth it. The foundation for a tart, caramelly roux, which combined with wild garlic and cheddar bagged me a very good Welsh Rarebit.

***

True to type, carnivores love to taunt mercilessly. How can I love food but not eat meat? They hold the higher ground, not morally, but from accrued stockpiling of all red-blooded language. And yet, while I may have been willingly shoved over enemy lines, I will never be such quisling to grant an inch on the vegetarian relish of food. All enjoyment that carnivores take, I can best.

When small – and twirling a fork was a test – I’d think mischievously that spaghetti is the perfect dish to test the mettle of guests. All that looping to discomfort and discomfit. Now I might lay down a plate of whole roast garlic and see if they recoil or dive in.

A roast; my most recent dish of garlic. Whole heads decapitated then drenched in dry alcohol and stock and herbs. From the oven, tumescent cloves saturated with fino sherry. Four half-heads, golden, singed. Sour dough toast crackling. All polished off quickly with slugs of Tio Pepe. Not, I’m told, how it is supposed to be drunk. An instinctive animalistic gluttony kicking in, I was soon picking over the papery carcasses, seeking out the last giblets of garlic, lapping up the very last juices.

* Fish is a different matter – though I suspect not really, for I feel the hypocrisy well