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Friends are sometimes surprised to spot, lodging among the cook books in my
kitchen, Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday. “But surely,” I say to
them, “you know that it contains the most brilliant recipe for fish stew?”
Published last year, Saturday is one of McEwan’s slighter novels
and has been criticised for its smug assertion of liberal bourgeois values.
At the Buxton literary festival recently, two questioners from the floor said
they had wished that the precocious family of Henry Perowne, a renowned
neurosurgeon, had been slaughtered by his prolish would-be nemesis, Baxter.
McEwan complained that his books used to be condemned for their nastiness;
now he was being told his characters were too nice.
But there is nothing nauseating or slight about the fish recipe. It is quite
epic. That Perowne can execute it between a game of squash and a life-saving
operation is merely a testament to what a Renaissance Man he is.
I first followed it over a very middle-class winter weekend in Whitstable
where a friend, her two children and I did the whole ritual of visiting the
fish market and choosing the fish personally. It was a rare Saturday in
which we had nothing else to do but be middle class.
The recipe, in the hardback, is described between pages 176 and 179. It is not
laid out as in a cookery book, so you have to make your own notes before you
shop, but it is easy to follow, if a little flowery in its descriptions: the
skate’s heads, for instance, have lips that are “girlishly full”; the pale
greenish clams are “dainty and pure”, etc.
Basically, you make a soup of tomatoes, onions, garlic, saffron and herbs (I
would go easier on the “several dried chillies” than he does), add a stock
you have made from skate and mussels, and pour in a bit of white wine.
Later, when your guests arrive — it is, natch, a dinner-party dish — you
reheat the casserole and plop in the washed clams, the rest of the mussels,
the tiger prawns and the chunked-up monkfish tails you bought earlier at
your rip-off fishmonger or authentic seaside market. It takes another ten
minutes to cook.
I have served it to guests several times, varying the fish, on one occasion
using industrial quantities sold to me by a pair of Geordie pedlars who had
come down with their wares from Tyneside. The firmer the fish the better.
You eat the stew, as instructed, with brown bread, salad and red wine,
feeling ever so Bloomsbury.
But, I wondered, what other culinary treats might be lurking in the pages of
fiction? Upon investigation, I discovered that cooking in books is usually
in fact perfunctorily described. In Anna Karenina, for example,
there is a debate about whether to make raspberry jam with or without water
but the only tip you might take away with you is the old princess’s and
quite mad: “Cover the jam with a piece of paper and wet it with rum: it will
never get mouldy, even without ice.”
But because when you read your mind fills in details, it is easy to remember
evocative descriptions of cooking as detailed recipes. Dr Kay Scarpetta, the
star of Patricia Cornwell’s forensic thrillers, is no mean cook, but when I
looked up her chicken risotto recipe from her latest adventure Predator it
amounted to: “The snow has stopped and chicken broth simmers. Scarpetta
measures two cups of Italian arborio rice and opens a bottle of dry white
wine . . . She melts butter in a copper saucepan and begins to brown the
chicken. She pours the rice into the chicken broth. Her cell phone rings.”
Recipe interruptus.
There is plenty of great food writing, but it is usually more about eating not
cooking. Dickens in A Christmas Carol proved himself the supreme
describer of an English feast but the cooking in his household was done by
his wife Catherine, as her biographer Susan Rossi-Wilcox made clear last
year in Dinner for Dickens.
We know that the characters in Jane Austen’s Emma, ate wedding
cake, minced chicken, scalloped oysters, thin gruel, apple tarts and
custard, but these dishes were prepared below stairs, out of sight of the
author’s otherwise all-seeing eye.
In choosing what to cook for this experiment, I also felt I should avoid
dishes designed to go wrong. There is a very funny write-up of a disastrous
dinner party in Bridget Jones’s Diary in which, because she
tied chicken carcasses with blue string, the disappearance of a crucial main
ingredient, and the over-cooking of oranges, an ambitious menu of velouté of
celery, chargrilled tuna with coulis and fondant potatoes, and comfit of
oranges, becomes a menu of blue soup, omelette and marmalade.
(Incidentally, the book’s author, Helen Fielding, whom I used to know a bit,
was never under any illusions about her culinary skills: at a dinner party
at her place I remember trying to gnaw my way though a particularly tough
chunk of beef in her boeuf bourguignon only belatedly realising it was a
cotton sachet of bouquet garni.)
Two of my favourite novels, however, pride themselves on their kitchen skills:
John Lanchester’s 1996 The Debt to Pleasure, in which the
antihero Tarquin Winot’s epicurean snobbery is a symptom of his madness, and
Nora Ephron’s 1983 Heartburn, in which her alter-ego Rachel
is a cookery writer struggling with a faithless journalist husband. Each
contains not the occasional suggestion but sufficient recipes for several
dinner parties.
Spoilt for choice, last weekend I chose a main course of Irish stew from the
Lanchester (pages 23-24, the Picador hardback) and a pudding of cheesecake —
how deliciously Eighties! — from the Ephron (pages 47-48 in my old
paperback).
Tarquin Winot is a food fascist. You must obtain exactly the right ingredients
and combine them exactly as he says. Buying the meat was the first problem.
Mr Dove, at his locally famous butcher’s in Battersea, sold us not the
required shank or scrag but a shoulder of lamb, cut into two. He didn’t sell
shank because it was not a good cut. Butchers who did, he explained, were
rubbish and did not know their trade (a theme he returned to several times
during our short visit). And no one wanted scrag these day, unlike in in his
grandfather’s time.
Anyhow, the 3lb (1.3kg) of lamb came to £6.50 only, which for a meal designed
to serve “six trencher persons” seemed eminently reasonable. The next
problem was the potatoes. The recipe depends on a mixture of firm and
floury. Since this was August, the organic greengrocer over the road
admitted the big tatties that he was selling us were not particularly
floury.
“The ideological purity of the recipe is very moving,” Tarquin writes madly.
You trim the lamb into cutlets and then layer the two different types of
potatoes, onions and lamb into a strata, obeying the order Tarquin decrees
(I cocked this up, by starting with soft rather than hard potatoes) and
sprinkling each with salt and herbs. “Add cold water down the interstices of
the meat and vegetable until it insinuates up to the top.”
The result, after three hours in the oven on a low gear, was, well, watery. As
predicted, the not-very-floury potatoes had not dissolved sufficiently to
thicken the gravy. It was also under seasoned.
We tried reheating it the next day, adding a paste of corn flour and mustard
powder. It was tastier, as well as more tender. But the only praise I
received was for the carrots, which were from Asda. I’d have been
embarrassed to serve this masterpiece to guests but I may give it another go
in the winter.
My girlfriend Lucy, meanwhile, was i/c the pudding: Amelia’s cheesecake
recipe (Amelia being the narrator’s father’s second wife). Unlike
Lanchester/Tarqin or Ephron/Rachel, Heartburn’s Amelia is not an
ingredient snob. Again Asda came into its own, this time for the
Philadelphia cream cheese. (Amelia “always said she got it from the back of
the Philadelphia cream cheese packet”.) The problem was the phrase “make a
nice graham cracker crust and pack into a 9in pan”. This is always the
problem — and not just in novels — with recipes: they assume too much basic
knowledge. Lucy crunched up digestive biscuits and combined them with
butter. “Then mix 12oz of cream cheese with 4 well-beaten eggs, 1 cup sugar
and a teaspoon of vanilla. Pour into the pie-shell and bake at 350 degrees.
Remove and cool for 15 minutes. Then spread gently with 2 cups of sour cream
mixed with half a cup of sugar and bake for 10min more. Cool and refrigerate
several hours before serving.”
All this Lucy faithfully did. By the time we had finished eating our thin lamb
gruel, the cheesecake had been cooling for two and a half hours. Yet, and
strangely, it was not quite cool. The top, nevertheless, was delicious. Our
issue was with the “nice graham cracker crust”. It wasn’t. It was thick and
gooey and had mulched itself into the topping. So I retired to bed
disappointed. I may be no cook but I can follow a recipe. I may be no
literary critic, but I can usually follow a plot.
Still, the comparative failures of the Lanchester and Ephron recipes makes me
like neither book the less. Equally, the magnificence of his fish stew does
not make me think of Saturday as any more than minor McEwan. My
regretful conclusion? Cookery books are best for cooking and literature is
best for . . . well, whatever literature is best for. After all what kind of
saddo curls up in bed with a Larousse?
