Ciao, fictionfood.

There we have some little canapés to begin with. A little duet of tapioca-based crackers, spiced popcorns and the lollipops are made out of duck fat with peanuts.

There we are gentlemens. To begin with we have a nice little appetiser. We have liquor made out of mallow leaves, topped with a fizz which is made out of ginger beer, whiskey, as well as chilli.

It’s a Cote du Rhone Guigal winemaker 2006, will be a blend of Viognier, Roussane and Marsanne, a fresh, floral and rounded, and you will find a nice crisp finish as well.

There we are, gentlemens, at the bottom of those little sacks we got some diced smoked kale as well as shredded radishes, covered with very smooth duck foie gras mousse.

There we are gentlemens. Your next course is what we call the Humphries Pool. It’s a shellfish broth made out of mussels, clams, cockles which are cooked in their own juices, before to be garnished with a shred of local seaweed.

So what we have at the base of the dish, we got a goat cheese mousse and globe artichoke puree, and is garnished with deep-fried globe artichoke leaves, as well as baby Jerusalem artichoke.

It’s a cold dish this one, you’ve got some Manx queenies, which are baby queen scallops. They are resting on griddled baby gem and parsley coulis as well as a light creamy horseradish sauce.

To follow with that, a red, which is from France, Loire Valley which is in the northwest of France, Cabernet from grape, 100%, light fruity easy to follow.

Here is your next dish, gentlemen, which is a cut of the skate, pan-seared, served with a little langoustine, which are resting on a base of cauliflower puree and some baby celery stems.

I have a Pippin apple sorbet, served with a apple cake and butterscotch powder,  and a roasted quince.

More little goodies for you. Candle mint cake.

…we finally settled on a menu which included spotted dog. This contains no dog, either, of course, but is what the British called a “pudding” or what we today would call a “lump of dough more dense than an intergalactic black hole, dotted with weird fruit chunks” (thus the spots). The only surviving modern-day equivalent is, of course, the fruitcake.

… So, anyway, we also settled on venison pasty, a dish which showed off the charming British penchant for putting chunks of meat in a pie shell. For our other main course, we settled on lobscouse, which is a mixed-up hash of corned beef, potatoes, onions and leeks. It was (and still is) a mainstay recipe for the seafaring nations of the Baltic and North Atlantic.

Saucisson d’Arles

Pâté de foie gras

Jambon d’ York

Salade assortie

Fromage de Hollande

Omelette aux Confitures

Most of the good fish had been picked over by that time of day. I bought some squid, at one forty-nine a pound, from a cross-eyed salt who was attempting to stare at Lee. We took it back to my apartment.

After removing the ink sacks and the center bone,  I sliced the squid laterally into thin rings, and shook them in a bag with a mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, and oregano. Then I fried them in olive oil in a hot skillet.

We ate these with lemon and a couple of beers as we watched the first half of the Skins game. For the second half we napped together on the couch in roughly the same arrangement as the night before. We woke as the afternoon light was fading. I drove her back to her car at the store and kissed her good-bye.

Then the lunch was served, and everyone sat around the long table, with Grandfather floating on the Lethe at its head. The table was creaking under heaps of pork and chicken limbs. There were big-ear  soup bowls, which were reverently passed around the table, as steam was enthusiastically gushing up, like smoke from a snoozy volcano. There were plates of green onions, stacked like timber, and tomato slices sunk in their own slobber. After the lunch, everyone became drowsy, descending from the mountains of meat to the lowlands of sleep. Snippets of conversation died off within seconds, for no one’s blood was capable of reaching the brain.

…my dear Haddock has just been in and he says the wind is only Force 4 South Easterly but freshening, the drab thing will be if I miss the mid-day meal, I think there’s a dim hope still because my delicious Danes do everything at the wrongest time, my dear we lunch at 11.30 and have dinner at half-past-five which gives one rather a protracted evening, but my dear what meals, the entire crew is only 21, but you couldn’t comb Soho for more salubrious cooking and the most paternal steward, the overture to lunch is like all the stories, my dear yesterday I counted fifteen things on the table and all enchanting, there were two kinds of smoked herring and one smoked sole, with onions, imagine darling, two categories of bacon no three I think because one was hot, some fascinating sliced ham, some sort of hot fish, two types of egg-food, liver pate, home made and high marks for succulence, cold pork, and pressed beef, sausages in two styles, oh yes and mayonnaise of salmon and some sort of inscrutable stuff I cannot classify, all this my dear accompanied by schnapps, with chasers of refreshing lager, not to mention a mountain of butter, and of course just when you think the meal is over, not that you tackle all the things of course, it’s just the spectacle, well in comes some hot pork or beef or somewhat magically but simply cooked, actually my dear they do not consume excessively but there is no doubt they understand the art of living, however perhaps one had better discontinue this discussion because it’s putting ideas into the little tummy and now it’s too manifest that steamers of 1000 tons ought not to go about the oceans excepting in the flattest calm, my dear Haddock who’s indecently well keeps surging in and saying What a good sea-boat which I’ve told him not to say again, however to go back to the buildings which may be safer, there’s one fantastic pale-green spire made of the tails of four dragons twisted together, I’ll send you a postcard…

The Black Sea Cafe was famous for its mouthwatering dumplings called vareniki and pelmeni. Vareniki came in a dozen varieties of fillings, from sweet farmer cheese to sour cherries, enclosed in paper-thin dough, topped with sautéed onions, and bathed in drawn butter. When she’d had her fill of them, she would switch to pelmeni, which were stuffed with boiled meats and then drenched in a sauce of cheese and eggs and gratinéed.

The plan was to wash it all down with plenty of ice-cold shots of Jewel of Russia vodka. However, the buzz wasn’t what she was looking for as much as information. She’d yet to meet the man who could keep up with her drinking ability, though Butch Karp’s colleague Ray Guma, a man she’d had a brief and forgettable fling with, was close.

One day when I was especially busy, I asked Haffida to cook some fish. We ate the most delicately spiced bass that we had ever tasted. Haffida was from the seaport Safi down the coast. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? She had marinated large chunks of the fish in cilantro, garlic, lemon juice, cumin, paprika and tomatoes and placed them on a bed of carrots and green peppers to cook on the stove. This was a fish tagine. Soon we tried her chicken tagine with prunes and onions spiced with ginger and saffron, her beef tagine with peas and artichokes. Like all Berbers, Haffida understood the mysteries of spices and herbs.

They sat at a round table in a bow widow that protruded from the back of the inn high above the water, yet so close it that they had tossed the oyster-shells back into their native element with no more than a flick of the wrist: and from the unloading tartan a hundred and fifty feet below them there arose the mingled scents of Stockholm tar, cordage, sail-cloth and China turpentine.

‘Allow me to press you to a trifle of this ragoo’d mutton, sir,’ said Jack.

‘Well, if you insist,’ said Stephen Maturin. ‘It is so very good.’

‘It is one of the things the Crown does well,’ said Jack. ‘Though it is hardly decent in me to say so. Yet I had ordered duck pie, alamode beef and soused hog’s face as well, apart from the kickshaws. No doubt the fellow misunderstood. Heaven knows what is in that dish by you, but it is certainly not hog’s face. I said, visage de porco, many times over; and he nodded like a China mandarin. It is provoking, you know, when one desires them to prepare five dishes, cinco platos, explaining carefully in Spanish, only to find there are but three, and two of those the wrong ones. I am ashamed of having nothing better to offer you, but it was not from want of good will, I do assure you.’

‘I have not eaten so well for many a day, nor’ — with a bow — ‘in such pleasant company, upon my word,’ said Stephen Maturin. ‘Might it not be that the difficulty arose from your own particular care — from your explaining in Spanish, in Castilian Spanish?’

‘Why,’ said Jack, filling their glasses and smiling through his wine at the sun, ‘it seemed to me that in speaking to Spaniards, it was reasonable to use what Spanish I could muster.’

‘You were forgetting, of course, that Catalan is the language they speak in these islands.’

. . .

‘This excellent dish by me, for instance (and I see that they did their best to follow your orders), is jabalí in Spanish, whereas in Catalan it is senglar.’

‘Is it swine’s flesh?’

‘Wild boar. Allow me . . .’

‘You are very good. May I trouble you for the salt? It is capital eating, to be sure; but I should never have guessed it was swine’s flesh. What are these well-tasting soft dark things?’

‘There you pose me. They are bolets in Catalan: but what they are called in English I cannot tell. . .’