Читать книгу Shooting the Cook - David Pritchard - Страница 9

I think it’s worth a small gastronomic detour at this point to explain why John’s opinion mattered so much.

I first worked with him in Hong Kong in 1976 making a series about the police called The Hong Kong Beat. He was a highly respected director and I was his researcher. Until then I hadn’t been further than Lloret de Mar on a Club 18–30 holiday, so this hot and steamy colony in the South China Sea came as a bit of a shock—an extremely pleasant one. When we weren’t in the back of police Land Rovers hoping for murder and mayhem (sadly I’m ashamed to say this is true) we would be in the street food markets that surrounded our hotel in Kowloon. I’ve been back to Hong Kong since and most of these street stalls have been swept away, but back then they were everywhere. For me they were the main attraction of the place, along with the Star Ferries which plied their way between Hong Kong Island and the mainland.

There was so much to choose from at the markets. Red ducks dripping with fat, and hunks of pork, the crackling cooked to golden perfection, hung from the frames of ramshackle counters. We’d normally be served by unsmiling, crew-cutted old men tossing a whole variety of vegetables and noodles in huge woks that, now and again, briefly caught fire. The stoves roared like jet engines, pushing out tremendous heat, so everything cooked quickly, which, of course, is the whole secret of this style of cooking; and the food was so cheap. Our mouths watered so much with anticipation that it became impossible to talk without spraying each other. This was the most delicious food I had ever tasted, and the combination of spicy noodles, crispy green vegetables, pork, duck, and prawns was light years away from any Chinese takeaway I’d ever had back home.

John was a true trencherman and like me had a ferocious appetite. Sometimes in the car driving back from filming in the New Territories, the country area by what was then the Chinese border, we would make up songs about how hungry we were. One day, John, in his soft Scottish burr told me about a restaurant he’d been to where the speciality was Peking duck. He described what he’d eaten: the soft pancakes smeared with plum sauce, the sweet crispy skin of the duck and the crunchy match-sticks of cucumber and spring onions. The way he described it, he had to take me to this restaurant now. Nothing else would do.

It was called the American Restaurant and it was everything John said it was. Although it was very early in the evening, the place was packed. Waiters wearing white gloves were carving huge golden brown ducks at the tables and the bamboo steamers they carried past us left a waft of sweet smelling dough in their wake. By the time a waiter came to take our order I was nearly passing out with hunger. John explained that we each wanted a duck and the full order of pancakes and the other accompaniments that go with it.

‘No,’ said the waiter, rather curtly I thought. ‘You cannot have one duck each. You can only have one duck for two.’

John looked at him and explained we were both extremely hungry and that one duck would not be enough. Unfortunately this only made the waiter angry.

‘One duck enough.’

He began to write the order down on his pad which upset my friend John enormously. ‘He want duck,’ he said, pointing to me, ‘and I want duck.’

I nodded appreciatively and tried to give the impression that one duck to us would be no more than a mouthful.

It seemed we had reached an impasse and I was beginning to think that we were about to get unceremoniously chucked out of the best Peking duck restaurant in the world.

‘Get me the manager,’ said John.

‘Why don’t we just have one duck and share it?’ I ventured helpfully. ‘And if we’re still hungry we could ask for another one.’

John gave me the kind of stare you get from the Scots when you unwittingly mistake them for Celtic instead of Rangers supporters and vice versa.

The manager arrived and was charm personified. He explained that the restaurant had been there since the war serving Peking duck and as far as he knew no one had ever ordered a duck each before. And so that evening John and I made history. They had to put another table next to ours to carve these enormous ducks which looked more like geese. I’m sure they found the two biggest birds in the kitchen to teach us a lesson. The waiters expertly separated the skin from the caramel coloured-flesh and left mountains of each before taking the carcasses away for the chefs to make soup.

‘Make soup?’ I said, looking at the piles of duck and the steamers full of pancakes.

‘Yes,’ said our grumpy waiter, but now he was smiling. ‘First you have duck with pancakes and then you have duck soup. That’s why one duck enough.’

Unfazed by this news, John showed me the art of making and rolling the perfect duck pancake: sauce first then a sprinklng of cucumber and spring onion, then equal portions of skin and meat, all rolled up like a cigar. Crunch. It was sweet and crispy with a lovely aftertaste of duck fat. Soon it became a race and by the time we had counted twenty pancakes each, a dogged silence prevailed. Over an hour later we were still eating. Our appetites had been sated long ago, but we both knew we must devour every morsel.

The pancakes finished, out came the bowls of soup, which were huge and challenging and eventually they beat us. However, the manager and the waiters seemed transformed and treated us with great civility when we eventually left the restaurant and wobbled out into the warm steamy night. Maybe, thirty years later, the staff still recount the story of the Englishman and the Scotsman who had one duck each but couldn’t quite finish the soup.

So that is why the opinion of my friend was so important to me. Not only did John understand the world of television but food is his passion.

Now, I sat on his houseboat dreading his verdict. He turned to me and said rather gravely, ‘We’ve just got enough time to buy another bottle of fizz before they close, because this is going to be a hit!’

Early next morning I caught the first train back to Plymouth and in four hours or so I was walking up the very same corridor that had seemed so gloomy yesterday. People were making their way to the canteen. I saw the usual faces grouped around their usual tables—engineers at one end of the room, journalists and features staff at the other. I recognized the four, or was it five, engineers who had painted such a bleak picture of my efforts. But that was yesterday. Such a very long time ago, and today I was happy and probably a little hung over from the night before. I was up in the world of sun-split clouds in my Spitfire again, the Merlin engine purring like a contented tiger, the wings full of ammo and down below me, clearly outlined against the silver sea, four, or was it five, Heinkel bombers, as fat as turkeys, were making their way home…or so they thought. I pushed the stick forward and flipped the safety off.

‘I think I’ll have a nice cup of tea, Mrs Boggis, and one of your finest cheese scones, a nice warm one straight from the oven please.’