THE PRONOUNCEABLE TRUTH

Like parsley, like dill

27th June, 2012, Wigan – It was the one time that I have ever, even faintly, felt that I understood motorsport. It was also the only time that I have been cast in the most likely of roles, that of translator. Naturally, food was responsible.

I had taped posters to Padua university’s ancient stone walls which said, “English boy:  willing to exchange English for Italian lessons.” The posters, translated by my bemused flatmates, were perhaps the most successful thing I have ever written. More direct than many a love letter, more effective than, say, a press release for a concrete company or an annual report for a Kazakh bank… The posters hit their target. They were my entry into an Italian home, to a seat at the table.

With no flair for languages, blazing a trail of badly constructed, spluttered solecisms, I am not a natural linguist. I have known linguists. “Oh. Actually”, they say, “dreaming in a foreign language happens quite quickly…”. They feel out and find form in strange tongues. Quickly and effortlessly making mental switches, gliding into expressivity as new grammatical forms become embossed, seemingly burned deep in their brains but delicate and adaptable too. They soak up words – including silliness (‘diarize’, ‘concretize’, par example). For them there is no accounting for taste. That I see now is the point: no accounting, scheming or calculating. Just communicating. For the natural linguist, taste is irrelevant – a lack of discrimination not a pitfall. Rather the enthusiastic and unprejudiced willingness to try a new phrase first and taste it only later is leap of faith, a stepping-stone to fluency. Sensibly, the linguists put the basics in place first. Then they start with the parsing knife.

Ambitiously, impatiently, foolishily, I have always from the off wanted both to wield the cleaver and fillet finely. I itch to use conditional before I can run through the present simple. I am quickly bored by “J’ai un chat”. During the long, elementary barren time, I hate sounding like a stuck record with a few simpleton phrases: no jokes, nothing mordant and certainly no puns. No ambiguity, nothing cryptic. Just arid clarity. Fruitless small talk. Chit chat about a chat.

With the short-term working memory of a monoglot goldfish and a dyslexic brain which thinks that verbs congregate, I have been foiled and frustrated by each language that I have ever tried to learn – and have infuriated and befuddled those who have tried to teach me. When asked in an early French class to write our names on the blackboard, I – thinking too much, or rather thinking it was the obvious thing to do – began to write ‘Petit’. This bewildered the teacher, amused everyone else, and set the tone for my misadventures in languages. Different, wonky routes and crazy workarounds.

When first in Italy, living in Rome, I’d pass the afternoon sitting with an Italian cookbook and the dictionary, trying to deconstruct culinary terms and derivations. I hoped to develop linguistic and culinary competence together. I learned that Tiramisu is a bawdy reflexive form with which one can potently pep oneself up – but little else. Which is why, after Rome, I took to the solicitous posters.

A middle-aged couple phoned. They had a daughter in England who they might visit one day. We made arrangements somehow, and what fine arrangements they were. Thus began a routine of the most splendid weekends. Each Saturday I would catch the train to Venice and spend the day wandering far among the ginnels and backstreets. Not affording to eat in the restaurants, but happily idling at the bar with an Aperol spritz. Pretending not to be tourist, but, reading Calvino and Jan Morris, doubtless pretentiously marked out.

Each Sunday, Gennaro would collect me and take me to their house a little outside Padua. In theory, I’d teach a little English, and they’d teach me a little Italian. In reality, we would talk a little and then I would be fed. Very well fed.

I’d try to help in the kitchen, however Gennaro would slope off to the television for the start of the Grand Prix. He’d yell at the top of his lungs – not for a narcissistic driver, nor out of any real affection for the moneyed jamboree – but purely and simply for the deep, Italian red of Ferrari. At that time, at that place, with a home-cooked Italian Sunday lunch only moments away, motorsport didn’t seem quite so utterly ridiculous.

Such was the routine – an extra-ordinary routine of food dedicated to simple greatness. But there was more. When my parents and a friend came to visit all the stoppers of the Italian Prosecco of hospitality were unleashed for one of the most splendid meals that I have ever been lucky to enjoy.

The friend arrived straight from an overnight flight into Sunday lunch. After the rallying cry of the motor sport, lunch began with the greatest fritto of assorted seafood morsels in a fresh, crunchy tempora. Then there was bucatini in anchovy sauce and, I can’t remember what, for the meal went on for hours as lunch became evening as bottle after unlabelled bottle was sluiced away with only beneficent results, only abating with fruit and desert, and grappa and coffee. We really were very well fed. Improbably I was the most bilingual person there.

*****

I came to have small Italian and less Russian. With the Maximalist I accomplished sophisticated canine levels of communication. When friends – or new acquaintances – asked about my Russian, she would say with some relish, “Jonti is like a dog; he understands orders.” I would put it slightly differently. I would say that I had gone from zero to one, an infinite leap in physics, but in practical terms, after quite a few years application, still at level one.

Trying to compensate for scant linguistic adaptability, perhaps, I have great stick-ability. However foolishly, I stick at it. Moreover, when it is stuck, it stays stuck.

In my first year in Moscow, emerging blinking from the Russian winter, it was time to buy some lighter trousers. This after almost a year of language classes in which I had become the only student – everyone else either fluently soaring and chatting to the locals in the Metro, or else long given up. I set off to the garish, subterranean shopping mall under Red Square. A shop assistant asked if she could help. I replied automatically, fluently. In Italian.

When I arrived in Russia from Italy, my taste buds too were a little stuck – primed for simple, unfailing greatness. In Italy everything always tasted just as it should (and never more); in Russia things never seemed to taste quite like they ought. Instead always a little odd, a little off-kilter.

Gin and tonic in a can, for example. Bought in the Metro underpass. Swigged shivering at the heady start of another riotous Moscow night. A great idea, one of the very best, but only a very rough approximation of the elixir of juniper and quinine.

Given that in the Metro, where counterfeit was the stock in trade and personalised university degrees could be bought, this was perhaps unsurprising. But Russia’s strange culinary syncopation extended far from the cramped kiosks of the underpass right to the gilded tables of oligarch-haunts. Years later, when I came to dine in the fanciest restaurants, where a G&T was $20 not 20p, the food still felt like knock-off. Showy, very expensive, unflattering imitation at that.

The off-note, though jaunty wrongness of Russian food (in the prevalent aping of western dishes at least) seemed in part a Soviet-legacy. A make-do-and-mend approach to cooking, engendered by a sparsity of good produce that was still apparent more than 20 years on. (Once my students were horrified that I had eaten a baked potato. “In Russia, a potato big enough to bake must be radioactive.”) But the single biggest, the funniest, most charming and most endearing reason for the tonal duffness of Russian food, for its consistently farcical inability to hit the right note, was also a great source of comfort. A herbal thread from which I could dangle the strange discordant experiences of abroad. A truly delicious edible idiom, one which made a matching pair.

For a ubiquitous person or thing, I had learned in Italy to say, ‘come il prezzemolo’, ‘like parsley’. I was very happy, a little deliriously so, when I discovered the Russian phrase, ‘kak ukrop’, ‘like dill’. Across every plate, each herb gets everywhere (at least up to the national boarders).

Armed with a little culinary vernacular, I came to see Moscow, so evidently and disturbingly a place of extremes, in a different light: the extremities united in the extreme – in the ‘give me excess of it’, in the boundless fondness for and profligacy with dill’s aniseedy fronds. From the neighbourhood bar to the oligarch-hangout, dill, dill everywhere and all of it to eat. Dill with pickles, borsch and pelmeni, of course. But also Greek salads rife with imitation feta rolled in dill, soggy bowls of chips heavily dusted with dill, and a very different fritto – dill flavoured Fritto Lay crisps.

The food may have been seldom glorious, and my Russian plodding, perhaps even barbarous, but food and language, words and eating, eating and talking, talking about eating… all enriched my time in Russia. More than that, food – or what I took from food and the language of food – hinted at coherence in otherwise unfathomably bizarre times. It was the food which was memorable, which as meaningful, not least when I learned the perfect Russian expression for my unwieldy hair, “Like an explosion in Spaghetti factory”. For moments like that, for tastes, for peppered foreign experiences, it is time to go abroad again. To eat and cook away from home once more, and also time to grapple with another language – tussle even though I know that I will feel that I’m the being one pinned down. With language and life, let food lead the way.

***

But, before leaving, I have been clearing out a little of my parents’ loft. Emptying the attic. It is not a chore I enjoy.

Things have been stowed away for good reason – or worse, for what now seems like no reason at all. Paraphernalia and words scribbled come back to me with dark, duplicitous shades of mediocrity. Past moments, snatched flotsam. The once freighted and important, now banal: “What was I thinking?”, “Is that really how I was thinking…?”

This is not the thing to do before a trip. Vaguely nihilistic, insuppressible questions simmer: Why capture, why record anything? Why write anything? Would it not be better to live in and only for the moment? Is it not time to stop jotting wry observations, which likely amuse me and no one else? Rather than write this summer, perhaps I’ll travel and send a few postcards. Take a few snaps (never to be developed). Forget the quite tiring effort of storytelling, concretizing everything experienced. Forget forever trying to see how the now fits into a bigger recipe. Forget being a writer and a ruminator and a cooker. Forget that the only life worth living is the examined life, and just remember and laugh at Vonnegut’s rejoinder, “What if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”

Much more spiriting and instantly banishing such thoughts, I am reunited with over half of my cookbooks. No doubting why they have been kept. There are many fine books, including Derek Cooper’s essays Snail Eggs and Samphire, The Independent Cook by the infallible Jeremy Round (a copy rebound in plain bright blue paper), and, with perhaps the greatest name for any cookbook, Lindsey Barnham’s In Praise of the Potato.

I find too a tatty yellow t-shirt from the summer we paid our dues in Canada, worn in Toronto to sell ice-cream during muggy days, a time when humid late evenings would be spent drinking beer from glasses frosted in the freezer.

And I find something which wasn’t mine but is now. A bundle of yellowed, faded supplements. The Observer Guide to European Cookery, put together by Jane Grigson and put out, I don’t know when, but at a time when a mail order Le Creuset went for £26.95. A ten-week series which “begins with Italy, the birthplace of some of Europe’s best-known dishes” and concludes with Russia and recipes “you might be offered if you were invited to eat in a Russian home today”. Beneath a picture of “A stall in a ‘peasant market’ in Leningrad”, are, and I mean this in no way sarcastically, such delights as, thick aladuski pancakes, Aubergine caviar, pel’meni, and best of all, the princely beetroot salad that goes by the name Herring Under a Fur Coat.

*****

What to offer in a British home today? What to make as a farewell, I’ll-be-on-my-way, meal?

The drinking is the easy part. We’ll have, not Sovietskaya champagne (sickly sweet, rather hard to get), we’ll have Prosecco.

The day’s cooking starts with pudding. This involves a trip to the supermarket and a walk in the rain. All lost in the supermarket I have to search the internet for Delia Smith’s advice on how to make your own curd cheese. After the harsh strip lighting, I gather dripping elderflower heads under a northern sky.

Throughout the day, raw salmon marinates in masses of dill, granulated sugar, salt and crushed coriander seeds. In the evening, when we settle to eat, I rinse the dill clean away, its aniseed spirit imparted. It’s the starting point for a salad, which isn’t Russian exactly, but close enough. Close enough for comfort. I’d plotted on fennel, but searched in vain (in Tesco and hedgerow). Cucumber and avocado are valiant understudies, chipping in with their own unscripted, textual lines. It’s quite a performance, with segments of orange, lemon juice, and all dressed with a wonderful, sludgy basil oil.

The look on Dad’s face. “This is what I have come expect”, he says. Still he polishes it off. Indeed, forever the war baby, he thinks that’s it. That that’s us done.

Next. A fritto, a sofritto, of sorts. Back to the magic of chilli, garlic, olive oil and parsley too. The greatest congregation of ingredients. Crushing almost all of a large head of garlic. A massive bunch of parsley. All lightly fried. Parsley going dark green. Then adding, just before the garlic catches, a wonderful chorus of chubby cherry tomatoes, all bright red and yellow. When they are a little collapsed, I stir in sardines and much lemon juice. Neglect the drained spaghetti for a minute or two to make it hungry for the sauce.

We take great, good bites. The slightly softened cherry toms and melted sardines. Then mop the shallow, now empty pan in the middle of the table. The wine finished off. Momentarily, an empty bottle on the table. Obeying an ingrained Russian reflex, I take the bottle, not to get another, but because the it’s said to be bad luck.

To round things off, I make elderflower fritters. The family recover while I pull the fragrant tiny flowers from green spindly skeletons.

I start to have my doubts with the instruction: “pound the flowers to a beige mush”. To the pulp I dutifully mix in cream cheese, drained and blended cottage cheese, cinnamon and sugar. I have no parmesan but there is a sweet and tingly Piast in fridge. I am sure that will be just fine…

Never one to spot a lost cause – rather preoccupied with thinking how neatly this pudding symbolises my imminent departure (from a civilisation of hyper-connected hypermarkets to a wilder, more natural food of hedgerows) – I begin cooking the pancakes and trust that they will do what pancakes always do, get better with each one cooked.

But not these; there will be no improving upon them. At this point, while they cook (if a taupe, amorphous splodge, spreading not sizzling, just soaking up the fat can be said to be cooking) I turn to the recipe and belatedly read what Jeremy Round has to say by way of introduction, or mitigation.

It is he says, “An unusual treatment for elderflowers from the 17^th Century which originally appeared in Venus in the Kitchen by Norman Douglas, a book of recipes of ancient love.” Round adds, “I include an adaption of Douglas’s hopelessly unspecific instructions, more as a curiosity than a recommendation.”

A failure. Something truly hideous, laid before my family. The airy, scented charm of elderflower completely lost. The fritters are beyond words. Never mind the taste, it must be worse looking plate of food I have ever made. Never mind an aphrodisiac; they could test the love of family. After a small mouthful, from my mother a push, “Take it away”. Some things are best left in the attic. I retreat to glass of red wine and a nutty piece of Basque cheese with a fennel cracker.