Читать книгу Supper Club: Recipes and notes from the underground restaurant - Kerstin Rodgers - Страница 15

The Story of MsMarmiteLover

I’ve always cooked. I remember the first dish: I was at nursery school and we baked chocolate butterfly cakes. Even all these years later, I remember how incredibly pleased I was with myself. It seemed a magical process. The trick of removing the top of the cake and cutting it in half to make wings was unbelievably cool. I became obsessed with cakes for a while after that. I’d get up early before my parents awoke and get busy cake-mixing. One day I decided to go a step further and turn the oven on. At 6 a.m. my parents awoke to the smell of burning plastic – I’d decided to bake my cake in a red plastic bowl. My mum came downstairs and opened her brand new oven; the red plastic was dripping through the bars of the rack. ‘You can’t heat up plastic!’ she cried. And for a while, that was the end of my baking career.

At the age of eight I was given a copy of Good Housekeeping’s Children’s Cookbook, which gave step-by-step instructions in black-and-white photographs of how to make a cup of tea or toast a slice of bread. Many of the instructions started with ‘First comb your hair…’ From this I learnt how to make macaroni cheese, fudge, peppermint creams and coconut ice.

When I was 15, I got a Saturday job at WHSmith. A new series of magazines had come out: Supercook. As staff, I got a ten per cent discount. Every week, a copy of Supercook was set aside for me, illustrated with typically 70s food photography showing wood-varnished chickens and earthenware pots. The colour brown was big in the 70s. Three months into the subscription, I made a Sunday lunch for the family, from Supercook recipes. As the series was in alphabetic order – a letter a month – I’d only got up to ‘C’, which limited the menu to…Cabbage, Chestnut stuffing, Chicken, Chocolate mousse.

Eventually I got the sack from WHSmith. Not for my punky spiked green and blue hair (to match the uniform, I was pushing the brand!) but for lateness. This meant that my Supercook issues stopped at ‘R’. I could not cook dishes starting with the letter ‘S’.

This didn’t deter me. I hosted a dinner party for a guy I thought fancied me. My menu was sophisticated: grilled grapefruit halves with glacé cherries, spaghetti bolognese (the only thing beginning with ‘S’ that I knew how to cook) and baked apples with custard. I had 12 guests, a ridiculously large amount for a 15-year-old. Grilling the grapefruits took forever and the main course didn’t get served until 11 p.m., by which time I was exhausted and drunk. Then my friend Clare kissed the object of my affection, a cocky guy with a mullet, whose millionaire father owned a plastic-bag factory. Story of my life: I’m sweating in the kitchen, imagining that my beautiful food would attract soul mates, while my friends are outside, wearing platforms, face glitter and flicked-up fringes, getting some action. What idiot came up with that phrase, ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’? It’s so not true.

When I left school, however, I decided to become a photographer, not a cook. Becoming a chef didn’t seem within the realm of possibilities. TV schedules were not full of cookery game shows as they are now. I loved the Galloping Gourmet and Fanny Cradock, but that was about it. My mum had a boxed set of Elizabeth David books, but there were no photos and I wouldn’t cook something unless it had a photo with it. She also had Robert Carrier cooking cards. These were in a cardboard box, like a file, and each one had a photograph of the dish.

My parents had sophisticated tastes in food. They had a house in France, a wrecked stone cottage with twelfth-century walls that were three-feet thick and a fireplace you could sit in. It was outside a small town named Condom, 100km south of Bordeaux in the Aquitaine region. Every school holiday it took us two days to drive there from London. The route to Condom was devised around recommendations in a red, plastic-bound volume, Le Guide des Relais Routiers de France. It was our job as kids in the back seat to spot the Routier logo. Usually they were proper restaurants, cheap, with a set menu and a parking lot full of lorries. Sometimes, however, you would go into a private house listed in the guide and eat in a woman’s kitchen, just one table covered with a chequered oilcloth. The woman would be wearing her flowery apron and cooking in front of you, turning around from her gas stove to plonk platters down on the table. Once for hors d’oeuvres we were given a dish of long red radishes with their green tops still on, a basket of fresh baguette with a sourdough tang, a small hunk of unsalted butter and a pile of salt. We all looked at it, including my parents, not quite knowing what we were supposed to do with this array of ingredients. The son of the woman, noticing our hesitation, laughed and showed us what to do: he cut a little cross in the end of the radish, smeared on a scrape of butter, then dipped it in salt, crunching the radish with torn-off chunks of bread. So simple, just fresh produce, but so delicious.

Wine was always included and everybody, even children, had a little carafe of rough red table wine. This impressed us kids enormously, we felt so grown-up.

In those days I ate meat. My favourite meal, when we were allowed to order à la carte, was steak and chips. One night near Rouen, we stopped at a hotel-restaurant. We kids, as usual, ordered steak frites. There were strange mutterings from the proprietor; there seemed to be a problem. But then no, it was fine, steak frites it was.

When the steak arrived, I bit into it.

‘What do you think?’ asked my dad.

‘It’s yummy. Sort of sweet.’

‘But you like it?’ he asked, in a rare display of interest in my opinion.

‘Yeah, it’s great,’ I enthused.

At the end of the meal my dad told us that it was horse meat.

So I’ve been brought up to eat well, to eat adventurously. My parents loved to travel even before they had kids; my dad, in an attempt to woo my mum, suggested that they go on a cheap tour of Europe. They hitched everywhere. Their budget was the equivalent of 50p a day. When they arrived in Cologne, my mum perused the menu at a restaurant and chose the cheapest thing. The menu being in German, she had no idea what she would be getting.

The waiter, with a silver-domed platter held high, weaved his way through the crowded restaurant. He placed the heavy silver dish on their table and, with a dramatic flourish, lifted off the lid. There, squatting angrily on the platter, an apple between its teeth, was an entire pig’s head. That was what my mother had ordered.

She gasped.

‘I’m not eating that!’ she exclaimed.

The whole restaurant, having followed the progress of the waiter, burst into laughter.

When things had calmed down, my dad whispered:

‘Don’t worry. I’ll eat it.’

As he commenced tucking in, a smile playing around his lips, my mother breathed out heavily:

‘I think you should know that I’m pregnant.’

It turns out that I was conceived in Minori, Italy, earlier in the trip. My dad, unperturbed, gestured with his fork towards the pig’s head and said:

‘I suppose we are going to have to marry you, then.’

So, as I was growing up, my family travelled through France, Italy and Spain every summer, stopping at Relais Routiers and family-run restaurants en route. Every winter we went skiing, eating fondue, raclette and drinking glühwein in Austria and Switzerland.

Once, my father insisted on taking us to a very expensive and reputable restaurant in Spain, near Malaga. We drove through winding mountain roads for hours to get there. My father ordered the best Rioja wine and taught us to savour its aroma from specially designed glasses. The speciality of the house was the seafood platter, which the waiter displayed in its raw state: it was dominated by a two-foot long sprawling langoustine, its eyes waggling around on stalks. My mum and we kids recoiled. Moments later, the whole platter returned: everything was split in half like a Damien Hirst sculpture and steaming! We refused to eat anything at all. It didn’t help that we were all sunburnt and tired. My dad was very angry.

My father will eat anything. It’s probably a reaction to war-time rationing. He’ll suck the bone marrow out of bones…not just from his plate, from yours too. He was intolerant of any fussiness at the table; we were pushed to eat frog’s legs and snails.

The snail incident was traumatic; we stayed in a farmhouse in France that belonged to family friends. The back room was dedicated to keeping snails, mostly kept in buckets; their digestive systems were ‘cleaned’ by being fed on bread for three days. Some of the snails escaped, they were everywhere, shiny trails on the chalky walls and stone floor. We went to a nearby restaurant that served snails stuffed with garlic, butter and parsley. My dad exhorted us to try.

‘Go on, just one.’

We three kids spent the next couple of days in bed with terrible diarrhoea. Our bedroom was upstairs in this farmhouse, thankfully far from the snail room, but there was no inside toilet. We spent two days shitting in a communal bucket as we were too ill to make it to the outside toilet. I never tried snails again.

On this same trip, same farmhouse, my dad woke us early.

‘We are going mushroom hunting,’ he whispered.

Sleepy-eyed, we stepped out into the dark and walked what seemed like forever, down the poplar-lined French country roads to the forest. On this holiday, my dad read us a chapter every night, with all the voices, from The Lord of the Rings, by the huge fireplace. The forest, when we arrived, seemed to me to be populated by elves, trolls and hobbits. After hours of searching, dawn came, and all we had found were three orange chanterelle mushrooms and a few ceps. We carried them back to the farmhouse, where they were fried in butter and garlic. Nothing has tasted better since, although we found the texture of the ceps a little slimy. I still love to forage for mushrooms in the autumn.

In London, special occasions were marked with dinner at Robert Carrier’s restaurant in Islington. I remember my first meal there: every course was tiny and perfectly arranged on the plate. Sights that are now common in haute cuisine, like French beans all lined up in a neat pile, exactly the same size, were objects of wonder back then. You felt you wouldn’t get enough to eat, but of course you did.

One night my dad brought home an entire octopus. He laid out this huge tentacled creature, with its large body full of ink, on the kitchen table. We kids came down to stare at this monster. My dad was excited; my mum left the room, muttering, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

In those days Google didn’t exist. My mother’s cookbooks didn’t explain how to deal with octopus either. So my dad, a journalist, dealt with this crisis just as he would a story: call an expert, a good ‘source’, and ask them. He phoned Robert Carrier, whom he didn’t know and who was at that time probably the most famous chef in Britain, at his restaurant. In the middle of service. Robert Carrier, a very helpful gentleman, came to the phone and patiently explained to my father how to remove the ink sac, prepare and cook this octopus. He followed the instructions, amazed, despite his habitual cheek (something I seem to have inherited) at getting this help.

Of course, none of us would touch it.

My background is part Italian, part Irish and entrepreneurial to the core. My great-grandmother Nanny Savino had a shop in her Holloway council flat. I loved visiting her; the hallways were lined with bottles of Tizer and R. White’s lemonade, the bathtub with pickled pig’s trotters, the kitchen provided toffee apples and apple fritters and, most excitingly, under her enormous cast-iron bed were rustling brown boxes with the illicit earthy smell of tobacco – Woodbines, Player’s Weights cigarettes and matches. People would come to the door and ask to buy cheap fags from ‘Mary’. Her real name was Assunta but no-one could pronounce it. She came to Britain at the age of 16, before the First World War, from the small town of Minori, south of Naples. During the Second World War, the Italians were our enemies and her radio was confiscated. She wasn’t put in a camp, as several of her sons were in the British army. I never met my great-grandad, but from family stories he seems to have been a skinny man, under the iron fist of my enormous, rectangular, black-clad Nan. They started small businesses: a cart selling home-made ice-cream in the streets of Islington, then an Italian café. Even at the age of 80, infirm with arthritis, Nan was doing business from her house. It’s the Neapolitan way; even today there are independent street-sellers in Naples.

One of my most memorable meals was when I was eight years old, and we drove to Minori to see the Italian side of the family, many of whom lived in caves (the front looked like an apartment but the back was a rocky cave). My father’s godfather turned out to be the mayor of the village. He took us to a darkened restaurant, the best in the locality. The godfather wore a crisp white shirt, a tailored dark suit and gold glinted about his cuffs. The small finger on his right hand had a long, curly, yellowing nail. This was an Italian peasant’s way of saying ‘I don’t have to work the land.’ The waiters lined up as if it were a royal visit. Nobody kissed the godfather’s ring, but that wouldn’t have been out of place.

As we left, my brother piped up:

‘Dad, I like this restaurant, we don’t even have to pay!’

My parents hushed him. A few days later, we were invited to the godfather’s house. We had to climb a small mountain of lemon groves; the lemons were half a foot long, with thick knobbly skins, so sweet you could eat them straight off the plant. I remember being so thirsty as we made our way up the dusty lemon grove. The crickets were deafening and the sun beat down. At the top we were welcomed by the widowed godfather’s two 16-year-old daughters – twins I think – who had made us dinner. This time the godfather was wearing a white vest and blue work trousers. This dinner lasted for hours; they had pulled out all the stops: antipasti, pasta, a seafood course, a fish course, a red-meat course, a white-meat course, salads, vegetables, cheeses, puddings. It was the first time I had cannelloni, large stuffed rolls home-made by the young girls. It was a tremendous feat, this banquet, especially for such young cooks. We didn’t speak Italian (they spoke in dialect) and they didn’t speak English. After a few courses, we were struggling; my brother saved the day by groaning and clutching his stomach. At first the girls found this funny and offered him camomile tea but eventually his cries grew so loud and insistent that we had an excuse to leave.

Looking back, meals like this were the inspiration behind The Underground Restaurant, an attempt to recreate the languorous feasts of the continent. You see, the buzz for me, the shiver up my spine, the ‘Oh wow, this is all worth it’ moment, lies in these words: ‘community’, ‘sharing’, ‘experimentation’, ‘dismantling boundaries’. My instrument is food, that which binds us all (sounds a bit Lord of the Rings, doesn’t it?). We all need to eat. Many of us love to cook.

Feeding is how mothers show their love for their families. It’s how countries and communities and religions and families can identify with each other. Meals are memories, milestones in our lives; the first date, the lover that proposed, the husband that did not return for dinner (in retrospect, the first signs of divorce), the tentative feeding of your baby, the family discussions and rows around the table as the children grow up. Sunday lunch, one of the few remaining meals requiring mandatory attendance for family members, is where you might bring a prospective mate to meet the relatives. When I travel, new tastes and smells are intrinsic in recalling that country. Food divides us too: religions are distinguished via what they will not eat or drink.

My philosophy stems from a punk, do-it-yourself ethic. You don’t need a degree in music to start a band, you don’t need permission from the authorities or a catering-college diploma to start a restaurant. Some of the best chefs are self-taught: Raymond Blanc and Heston Blumenthal are two well-known examples. Sometimes, not having a formal education can help you think differently, laterally.

I had an unusual route into food. I did not go to catering college, I did not do a ‘stage’ at a top restaurant, I have not worked in ‘normal’ restaurants at all. Of course, I got the usual grounding that many receive from their mothers and grandmothers and from the societal expectation that being in possession of mammaries and ovaries should lead inevitably to being in charge of cooking dinner.

I’ve wondered, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Why am I sacrificing my social life (I never go out from Thursday to Sunday nowadays), my living room (life is lived in my bedroom, the living parts of the flat have shrunk to bedsit proportions), my mental health (my daughter says my personality totally changes every weekend; I turn into a stressed-out monster).

But then something like this happens...

One evening, from the kitchen, I heard a glass being clinked in the living room, then quiet. Somebody was speaking seemingly to the entire room.

Agog, I sneaked out to have a look. A young woman was standing up, introducing herself and saying, ‘It’s such a nice atmosphere here and I’d like to know more about the other tables so, if you like, perhaps you could say who you are, what brought you here...’

There was a little silence, then one by one, people started to stand up and say their names, where they came from, how they had heard about The Underground Restaurant.

This display of ‘show and tell’ was fantastic. It was also a little weird, like an intervention or a 12-step programme entitled ‘Supper-club addicts anonymous’. People were participating, contributing and using the space and the occasion in an unusual way. There was a lot of love in the room.

I’ve cooked at anti-G8 camps, catering for ‘barrios’ of 250 activists using local ingredients and whatever ‘The Anarchist Teapot’ catering company got delivered. Our materials were dumpster-dived; once, needing an enormous spoon to stir a large pot, we used a cricket bat instead. I’ve cooked in Belgrade for the People’s Global Action conference. Ever fed 450 hungry Serbian trade unionists, German punks and French philosophers? I have.

I cooked at a co-operative vegan cafe in Hackney, whose principles are as strong as their customers are random. It is in Crackney after all. I cooked weekly at the appropriately acronymed R.A.G., the Radical Anthropology Group, an evening class of anthropologists who mostly discuss the moon, Stonehenge, periods and Marxist sex strikes in hunter-gatherer societies. I’ve cooked at festivals, in fields, while the rest of the staff were high on E and K. I’ve cooked in squats, one of which was in a swimming pool, where I lived with my boyfriend in a changing room. I’ve cooked cans of soup on my car engine, on the way to camping. I pulled mussels from the freezing Antarctic sea, having backpacked to a national park in Tierra Del Fuego carrying white wine and garlic in my pockets to make moules marinières. I’ve dug clams at low tide on the Ile de Ré to make a campfire Spaghetti Vongole. I’ve cooked from a tiny cramped ‘vis à vis’ apartment in Paris, on a two-ring camping gaz stove, watching my neighbour’s every movement, the routine of ‘metro, boulot, dodo’(train/work/sleep). I cooked for the fortieth birthday of a man that had just dumped me. Heartbroken, humiliated, I made sure that there was a great spread, for him and his new girlfriend. Cooking is therapy.

In the last two years, since I started The Underground Restaurant, so many things have happened. I’ve had problems with trademarks, my freeholder, and Warner Brothers (the latter because I hosted a Harry Potter-themed dinner serving Butterbeer).

All along, I have encouraged others to start up their own supper clubs, via a social-networking site (http://supperclubfangroup.ning.com/) where supper-club hosts can publicise their meals, chat to each other about problems, successes and suppliers. I’ve also recently started up a bakery from my house. There is a dearth of bakeries in the UK; every high street should have a good organic baker. The idea to start selling bread from my house came, again, from Latin America, when I stayed with a Chilean family after randomly meeting them at a countryside bus stop when I was travelling there. One morning, the man of the house started to bake bread, and I watched as he put a notice in his window, ‘Hay pan’ (There is bread). Gradually neighbours dropped by and bought hot buns from him.

‘I always make a larger batch when I bake, everybody does in the village, to sell to others,’ he told me.

It makes sense: your oven is heated, it doesn’t take much work to double or triple your recipe, plus you can earn a little money. In the old days in Britain, each street had a communal oven; people didn’t necessarily have their own. I have an Aga, a large and expensive bit of kit, which produces beautiful bread. My first attempt was nerve-wracking but very successful, although the notice in my window didn’t suffice – I had to go out on the street to collar passersby. I sold most of my bread, wrapped in brown paper, and met my neighbours. I’m assigning a regular day of the week to sell the bread now.

In 2010, I launched The Underground Farmers’ & Craft Market in my home and garden, a huge success with 40 stalls and 200 punters. The idea was to promote small businesses and local, urban and home-cooked food. As well as stalls, there were live cooking demonstrations: I showed how to bake focaccia, a porridge expert who had won a prize at The Golden Spurtle Championship showed how to make the perfect porridge, and an urban cheese maker from Peckham demonstrated how to make South-London Halloumi. We also had a cocktail bar on an ironing board and live music.

On another occasion, Marmite, manufacturers of my favourite spread, asked me to create recipes for Marmite cupcakes. They put my face on a jar of Marmite, a career highlight for me, the equivalent of winning a foodie Oscar! I was also asked to talk at the Women’s Institute and the Real Food Festival.

One question at the Women’s Institute did trip me up, however. A lady asked:

‘Do you mind it when other people use your toilet?’

For some reason I replied:

‘No. I’m not anal.’

I’m pretty sure this is the first time the word ‘anal’ has been used at a Women’s Institute lecture. And it’s true, I don’t mind when 200 strange bottoms use my loo. After all, I’ve been to India and Tibet.

A question people never ask: Why are you doing this?

Because I love to cook. Because I love to mother. Because I’m a feeder. Because I love to share. Because I like to be in control. Because I enjoy the potential for chaos. Because I’m lonely. Because I like to stir things up. Because I like causing trouble. Because I find it funny and it makes me laugh. Because I want to change things. Because it’s now my job, it’s my living. Because it makes me cook things I wouldn’t be bothered to try for just me and my daughter. Because I don’t have a big family. Because I love community. Because it’s fun to come up with an idea and make it happen. Because, although I love words, I like action even better.