But Venice is a Fish

In Tiziano Scarpa’s lovely little paean to Venice (Venice is a Fish), he makes the point that the true flavour of his city is not sweetness. To taste its full character, the visitor should repair herself to a bácaro, a kind of inn. There are fewer and fewer of these remaining these days, so go and grab and table while you can.

The windows of the bácari offer you halved boiled eggs, rolled anchovies, crabs’ claws, olives all’Ascolana, rice arancini, polpettini, stewed saltimbocca, nervetti (pork or beef tendon), fried sardines, masanete (small crabs), folpi (small octopus), creamed cod, onions, coppa di toro (bull salami), wild boar ham, squares of mortadella, cubes of dressed mozzarella, parallelepipeds of gorgonzola. These are all, of course, washed down with an ombra, a glass of wine that was once tapped straight from the barrel behind the bar.

It isn’t clear where the ‘technical term’ ombra (shadow) comes from: and that’s as it should be, even its etymology should remain in darkness. At the most banal level, ombra might designate the misty translucency of the wine. But it’s more likely that it refers to the open-air wine stalls in the summer, in the shade of the campanili, where people sheltered from the heat by drinking a glass of chilled wine. ‘Andiamo a prendere un’ombra – Let’s go and take the shade,’ was a kind of wink, implying: ‘Let’s go where the drinking’s done.’

 

When Seeking The Last Cato, Stop For Some Greek

In Matilde Asensi’s nonsensical novel (The Last Cato) of the search for the stolen remnants of the True Cross, the protagonists, a Swiss Guard, a Coptic archaeologist, and an uptight Sicilian nun stop for a bit of food en route to their latest test.

We were invited to a magnificent lunch in the hotel banquet room. I was like a kid when it came to the taramosalata and the mousaka, the souvlakia with tzatziki – small pieces of roasted pork seasoned with lemon, herbs, and olive oil, accompanied by the famous sauce made with yogurt, pepper, garlic, and mint – and the original kleftico. Especially delicious were the incomparable Greek breads made with raisins, spices, greens, olives, or cheeses. For dessert, a little freska frouta. Who could ask for anything more? Mediterranean cuisine is the best in the world. Farag proved that by eating enough for three or four people.

 

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.