Haute Cuisine Faux Cuban

Alicia of the plump bottom and expectations of the high life likes to bring prospective suckers to her place, where her mum, Margarita, will concoct such a repast that the sucker will be well and truly, well, suckered. In Daniel Chavarría’s tale of Cuban amorality and yuppiedom-at-any-cost, Adios Muchachos, here is what Margarita has to offer:

For programmed occasions when the client wanted to show off his conquest and proposed having some associates over for dinner, culinary Margarita offered two cosmopolitan alternatives: a main entrée of fondue bourguignonne (with all the right silver and china), or chicken Maryland supreme.

Margarita’s specialty was, in fact, chicken. In forty minutes she could bone it, stuff it, and sew it up with bamboo needles. Another half an hour in the pressure cooker and it was done. But that was only for impromptu dinners. Sometimes, when a client had something good to say about traditional Cuban cuisine like they serve at the Bodeguita del Medio, Alicia’s mother would let out a soprano laugh. “Whatever are you talking about? Good food at the Bodeguita?”

By that time she would already have been treating him like an old friend, talking to him in the familiar tu, joking around, waving her restless hand in his face and inviting him to taste her own Cuban cuisine, which was much better, of course.

And in one manner of speaking, it was.

In matters of traditional Cuban cuisine, however, Margarita was a great fraud. If the guest was from Europe or from the southern cone of South America, for example, Margarita replaced the yuca con mojo with well-seasoned baked potatoes; the pork she prepared very lean and dry and just slightly pink in the center of the slices; the congri rice was never runny, and she seasoned it with a whole list of ingredients that congri was never meant to take. But she did produce a range of haut cuisine tastes, light with the slightest touch of bitter-sweet, which everyone praised.

She also did herself grand with Italian pasta: cannelloni, lasagna, fettuccini, ravioli, gnocchi; with sauces like il bolognesa, il pesto, le vongole, l’arrabbiata, la puttanesca. And when there were more than eight to dinner, there was the ever popular paella that never let her down.

 

Microwaved Pasta Passes For Good Food

I sincerely hope the author is being facetious here. Of course, it’s a Russian who is making the pasta, and we all know how that will turn out. Still, the narrator’s  mouth waters at the thought of Dmitri’s cooking. Take a look at this, from Camilla T. Crespi’s The Trouble With A Hot Summer:

“Dmitri! Are you cooking?” My legs swallowed the stairs two at a time.

My partner was standing in front of the microwave, a beatific glow on his face. The door was ajar. “Perfectissimo!”

I peered under his armpit. A plastic plate brimmed with cannelloni – six of them, covered in bubbling white sauce with a delicate marbling of tomato. One bare corner revealed paper-thin pasta. The smell told me lobster stuffing with a hint of tarragon.

…

[Dmitri] lifted the cannelloni out of the microwave as if they were his firstborn. “Microwave oven remind Russian woman of husband with vodka. Thirty seconds, he’s cooked.”

 

A Fixed Conclave

When people go into this sort of obsessive detail about what their characters ate – without actually describing the food itself – you can’t expect the book to be any good, can you? And so in S. Perone’s Murder Almighty we find a rather sad thriller about a fixed papal conclave and the following passage:

Dinner at the ancient La Canonica Trattoria – a stone’s throw from the residence of Cardinal Delarossa, Patriarch of Venice – had been candlelit and cozy. Because of the unusually warm October evening, Vella and Carolyn had been seated on the stone terrazza, at one of the corner wooden tables. The high-backed wooden chairs and white tablecloths provided a touch of elegance typical of Venetian outdoor dining.

Carolyn had ordered the Grigliata di pesce, featuring salmon grilled with lemon butter, while Vella had ordered the Cannelloni Canonica, witha creamy marinara sauce. They had decided together on a light dry white wine from eastern Tuscany, Bianco Vergine Valdichiana.

I mean, come on! How trite and leaden is this?

 

What would augmented humans eat?

In case you ever wondered what delicacies would appeal to an enhanced human far into the future, wonder no more. In The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 3, appears a story called Necroflux Day by John Meaney, in which a Bone Listener and his son have a meal in celebration of the boy’s birthday.

The food was good: komodo steak and buttery mashed tubers, then squealberry pie and ice cream, washed down with hot blue chocolate. But no waiters came out to sing Happy Birthday, and Carl and Dad were seated behind a heavy pillar, where entirely human diners could not see the hint of otherness in father and son as they ate.

 

Collation at Schloss’s

Philippe Claudel has penned an absolute marvel of a novel in his Brodeck’s Report, from which I excerpt this bit:

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What did he say?”

“He said he wanted a ‘collation’.”

“A ‘collation’? What’s that?”

“A light meal, he said.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What he’s asked me to do!”

Everyone was curious to see what a ‘collation’ looked like. Most of the crowd followed Schloss into his kitchen and watched as he prepared a large tray on which he put three thick slices of bacon, a sausage, some marinated gherkins, a bowl of cooked cream pudding, a loaf of brown bread, some sweet and sour cabbage and a large piece of goat’s cheese, together with a jug of wine and a mug of beer. As he passed through the crowd of his customers, he carried the tray reverently, and everyone made way for him in silence, as though for the passage of a holy relic.

 

High Table at Souarcy

In Andrea H. Japp’s medieval crime series starring the beautiful, wise but impoverished Agnès de Souarcy, meals are important, especially when the odd guest arrives. Here’s an excerpt from the first novel of the series, The Season of the Beast.

Mabile was not displeased with herself. Agnès de Souarcy had expressed her wish to thank the good chaplain and the servant had prepared a proper feast – a six-course meal, no less. Following an hors d’oeuvre of fresh fruit, whose acidity was supposed to act as an aid to digestion, there was a broth made of almond milk. For th third course the servant had plumped for roasted quail spiced with a black pepper sauce. That insufferable Agnès de Souarcy was such a sickler for table manners that the baby fowl should keep her busy for a while…

…She must hurry. The quail would not keep them busy forever. She should be back in the kitchen helping Adeline serve the desserts: a traditional goat’s milk blancmange followed by black nougat made from boiling honey and adding last year’s walnuts and spices. To round off the meal she had prepared some hippocras, a mixture of red and white wine sweetened with honey and spiced with cinnamon and ginger.

 

Fufu and Meat at Akosua’s

Nii Ayikwei Parkes has created an evocative world of science clashing with magic, the modern battling the traditional, in the Ghanaian crime caper Tail of the Blue Bird, from where I excerpt the following passage of yummiferous foodiness:

Oduro laughed and stamped his feet, and Kayo noticed Esi suppressing a giggle with her hand as she reached over to take the water away. She returned, accompanied by her mother, with earthenware bowls filled with fufu and the richest, reddest palm nut soup Kayo had ever seen. On the surface of the soup were cuts of okro, chillies and garden eggs. Large chunks of antelope meat were submerged like vessels guarding pale cream islands of fufu. The soup was steaming hot.

Akosua lit a torch close to them so that they cold see their food, then she put her arm around her daughter’s waist and marched her back to the rear of the hut.

Oduro poured a bit of palm wine on the floor and said, ‘Our fathers, we share our meal with you.’

The men looked at each other, nodded their heads, and then, as one, dipped their fingers into the red soup.

 

Maghrebi in Rome

In Amara Lakhous’s lovely little novella Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittore, one of the characters, desperately lonely and missing his family back in the Maghreb, recalls the wondrous cuisine of his homeland and wails:

It’s sad spending Ramadan far from Bagia! What’s the point of giving up eating and drinking, only to eat alone? Where is the voice of the muezzin? Where is the buraq? Where is the couscous that Mama prepared with her own hands? Where is the qalb alluz? Where is the zlabia? Where is the harira? Where is the maqrout? How can I forget the nights of Ramadan in the neighbourhood, and coming home late? Mama’s voice full of tenderness, the love that charmed my ears: “My son, it’s time for the suhur.” The month of Ramadan, the Little Feast, the Big Feast, and the other feasts fill my heart with anxiety. People say: “Why don’t you go to the big mosque in Rome for the prayers for the Big Feast?” No, thank you. I don’t want to see hundreds of needy people like me, needy for the odour of their loved ones.

 

Coronation Menu

And I don’t mean just chicken…

Boris Akunin’s latest instalment in the Erast Fandorin series, The Coronation, has the intrepid investigator chasing after a master criminal through the revels following the crowning of Russia’s last Czar. A stampede occurs, killing hundreds, marring the holy occasion. But appearances have to be kept up, and the nobility intends to fulfil its ceremonial obligations.

…And I was totally dismayed by the Moscow Illustrated Newspaper, which could think nothing better than to reproduce the artistically designed menu for the forthcoming supper for three thousand in the Faceted Palace:

LUCULLAN BOUILLON
ASSORTED PIES
COLD HAZEL GROUSE A LA SUVOROV
CHICKENS ROASTED ON THE SPIT
SALAD
WHOLE ASPARAGUS
ICE CREAM
DESSERT

That is to say, I could see perfectly well that, owing to the sad events, the menu that had been drawn up was modest in the extreme, with no extravagances at all. Only a single salad? No sturgeon, no stuffed pheasants or even black caviar! A truly spartan meal. The highly placed individuals who had been invited to the supper would appreciate the significance of this. But why print such a thing in a newspaper that had many readers for whom ‘dog’s delight’ sausage was a treat?

 

Irene Huss’s Husband’s Cooking

Now that I’ve read a couple dozen or more Scandinavian crime novels, I think I won’t be lying if I say that food has little coverage in that genre. So it’s pleasant to come across to occasional reference to food, even if the food is so generic, it could have been eaten even by a, umm, well, anyone. Here’s the detective superintendent Irene Huss,  in Helene Tursten’s The Glass Devil who’s being treated to a fine home-cooked meal by her loving hubby:

It was almost eight o’clock and her hunger was sharp. In her imagination, she could already see the scrumptious dishes Krister was preparing. Since they had been together when he had bought the ingredients, she knew what was on the menu. The appetizer was going to be baked goat cheese encrusted in honey, served on a bed of basil on a slice of bread. The main course was grilled cod, vegetables in wine sauce stir-fried in a wok, and home-fried potatoes. The dessert was Irene’s favourite: chocolate mousse. Not exactly food for weight-watchers, but incredibly good. The wine was from South Africa and was called, oddly enough, Something Else. Intriguing, because they hadn’t had it before.

[...]

“Sweetheart,” Krister said, “this wine is far too light and dry. Shall I go to the wine cellar and get a Drosty-Hof instead?”

Irene thought the wine they had had was good, but Krister was the expert; if he said they should drink the other wine, then it would be probably be better.

Krister went to the laundry room and opened the top cabinet of the closet next to the drying cabinet. An almost-empty bottle of Famous Grouse was there, along with two bottles of Drosty-Hof white wine and a small Bristol cream purchased on their last short vacation to Skagen because the blue bottle looked so nice.