Imperative cooking: Tapenade
The world of food is inhabited by two classes of person — chaps and girls. You can tell a chap by the way that he or she addresses the plate, alert and businesslike with a firm hand on the fork.
Girls sit as if on a blunt drawing pin and shunt their food about. Chaps like well- hung woodcock with the guts left in, Provolone, French blood sausage, Prove- ncal dishes of onions stuffed with garlic, eels, late season hot radishes, sheep's testicles fried in olive oil, Fernet Branca, ducks' eggs, Calabrian pasta with chillies, dumplings, the dark meat of crabs and Paan.
Some enjoy a cigarette between courses; others have been known to eructate gently.
Chaps throw bones into roaring fires, olive stones at girls and use cheap Greek tooth- picks.
Girls don't enjoy anything, except mild processed Cheddar, fluffy omelettes, Gol-
den Delicious apples and 'a tiny sherry, if you've got a medium one, please'. They leave things and are sorry but they cannot take offal. They will not use their bread to mop up the sauce on their plates, are always on a diet, have been told they must not eat grilled fish, think it a pity to kill pheasants, are allergic to anything cooked in wine and add hot water and skimmed milk to good strong Italian coffee when they can't find the decaffeinated they always carry with them because you've quietly removed it. Girls mistake a chap's size hors d'oeuvre for the whole meal or say they have to get out of eating the courses which follow. I'm told they fiddle with medicated dental floss in the privacy of their bathrooms without any enjoyment.
It should be clear that many ladies are splendid chaps and quite a few gentlemen eat like girls.
Grave problems arise when girls are in a minority. Feeling foolish they masquerade as chaps. That is where Tapenade comes in. I do not know if it was expressly invented as a detection device for transves- tite diners but it works very well. Serve Tapenade for your hors d'oeuvre and you will immediately flush out the girls. It combines all the ingredients they hate and in my experience the blighters quickly surrender, confess all and meekly leave.
Tapenade is a sauce served with a mixed hors d'oeuvre, cold fish or hard-boiled eggs. Eggs themselves can act as a second
form of counter-intelligence. Guinea fowl and goose eggs are fine, but ducks' eggs are best for frightening girls. Hens' eggs should be free-range — free-range not deep litter. Take no one's word that they are; most of my country friends who keep free-range hens buy in supermarket eggs to sell to gullible townees. If shopping for meat is a challenge, buying eggs is guerrilla warfare. When good eggs are unavailable try cold poached salt cod: health fanatics are nearly as terrified of salt as they are of eggs. The Tapenade ingredients will already be in any chap's larder: black olives, capers, anchovies, thick olive oil, marc, lemon juice and possibly garlic and tuna. Buy the olives at an Italian shop: the wrinkled black ones are best and the Tapenade needs two dozen. While there, buy some good heavy olive oil (Greek is best and the Italians sell that too); a quarter of anchovies, those preserved in salt not oil; capers, again those in salt not vinegar, a couple of tablespoons-full; and some grappa, the Italian equivalent of marc.
De-stone the olives by hand. De-stoners will not work on wrinkled olives. Soak the capers and the anchovies for a quarter of an hour than fillet the anchovies roughly. Mash up the olives, capers, anchovies, and two cloves of garlic if you wish. Add a little black pepper and possibly some tuna. Pour in a cup of olive oil gradually as you would for mayonnaise (you would for mayon- naise, wouldn't you?). Finally add the juice of one lemon and two tablespoons of grappa. Serve with the hors d'oeuvre and watch for the white flags.
I've always thought it a pity one cannot incorporate a few bird's eye chillies for completeness' sake but it is not necessary. However it serves as a reminder that there are Tapenade equivalents in other cuisines, especially in Thai and Korean cooking. I don't know if the chaps there have prob- lems with girls but they certainly have some dried fish, pickled garlic-and- cabbage and chillies which work wonders. I suspect the chap-girl conflict is global.
There is one thing worse than finding out that a dinner guest whom you supposed to be a chap is really a girl and that is when a weekend guest is revealed in his true colours. I serve Tapenade on bread for breakfast. It is delicious.
Digby Anderson
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