Greedy musings
Henrietta Bredin
There have been times, shaming though it is to admit, when my thoughts have wandered during an opera performance. Perhaps even more shamingly, those wanderings lead with alarming frequency to food. It doesn’t take much to set me off and before I know it I’m planning what to give people for lunch on Sunday. If people are actually eating on stage — which happens surprisingly often — there’s really no end to the possibilities for greedy musings.
Take Tosca, for example. The action’s hardly begun before the Sacristan is scurrying about inspecting the picnic basket that he’s kindly provided for Cavaradossi — who is so carried away by artistic inspiration as he paints that he never even samples the contents. These, if the production was going for contemporary accuracy, would probably include a good crusty loaf, a chunk of salami, perhaps a wedge of a local sheep’s cheese like Cacio di Roma and certainly a flask of wine. Frascati, perhaps? And later on, what exactly might Scarpia have been tucking into before Tosca makes her dramatic post-concert appearance in his private apartments at the Farnese Palace? He wasn’t the sort of man to indulge himself to excess, but I’m sure he would have had a number of dishes to toy with while awaiting her arrival: a dish of tortellini in brodo, some herby slivers of meat from a lamb almost too young to bleat, a spoonful or two of some elaborately moulded iced pudding in varicoloured layers and a selection of nuts that he could pick from and crack in a deliberate and menacing fashion.
Massenet’s Manon opens with lots of hustle and bustle at an Amiens coaching inn — plenty of opportunity for hokey stage business — at the heart of which Brétigny and Guillot, with their interchangeable female companions Javotte, Poussette and Rosette, sit themselves down and give full and proper concentration to ordering lunch. They discuss whether to have fish or chicken, listen to the innkeeper lovingly describe the seasoning of a dish of crayfish and become endearingly excited by the prospect of pâté de canard.
Crayfish turn up again in The Seven Deadly Sins. One would expect food to figure in the depiction of Greed, but it’s still surprising and rather cheering in an operatic context to hear a hymn to the delights of ‘crawdads and chitlins’. I’ve discovered that ‘crawdad’ is Louisiana-speak for crayfish, and that they are also sometimes known in those parts as spoondogs, while chitlins are the intestines of young pigs, which can be prepared in a number of ways, deep-frying in batter probably being the favoured method.
A long time ago when I was working at English National Opera, there was a production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel by David Pountney, designed by Stefanos Lazaridis and unforgettably conducted by Mark Elder. This still ranks as one of the highest of high points in my opera-going life, and my attention never wandered at all during those performances. But food is integral to the plot and for the first-night party a colleague and I were rash enough to propose making a gingerbread house. I find cooking for people a source of deep contentment, but I am not and never have been keen on baking. As we discovered, this wasn’t just baking, it was a major construction job. Books for Cooks came up trumps with a wonderful volume giving detailed instructions for making a Lebkuchen Hexenhäuschen, but the whole business took hours. I’ve never cooked anything else from that book but, looking at it again now, I see that the pages are still covered in gingery-cinnamon smears and my exasperated scribbles and reworkings of the measurements for the walls. It did look rather wonderful in the end, though, with almond roof tiles, iced curlicues and multicoloured sweets stuck all over the place — and it was hugely satisfying to watch Felicity Palmer, who had just given an outrageous and pretty terrifying performance as the Mother and the Witch, smashing into it with gusto.
Rossini famously enjoyed his food and wrote a charming letter to the singer Isabella Colbran, passing lightly over the rampaging success of his new opera, The Barber of Seville, before going on to give the recipe for a salad dressing which he assured her would send her into ecstasy. It comprised ‘oil of Provence, English mustard, French vinegar, a little lemon, pepper and salt’ to which were added, after beating the ingredients well, a handful of chopped truffles. Sounds good to me, and I’m quite sure that Rossini would have had no truck with the deeply horrible and thankfully no longer ubiquitous truffle oil as a substitute for the real thing.
In Act Three of Der Rosenkavalier, Baron Ochs orders a meal over which he intends to seduce the serving girl Mariandel, who in fact turns out to be his rival Octavian in disguise. I’m certain that Ochs would have been a Tafelspitz man, as was the opera’s composer, Richard Strauss; and I wonder if the inn where the seduction is planned was based on the great Viennese institution, Meissl & Schadn. This was a restaurant, sadly flattened by American bombs in 1945, in which simply ordering boiled beef was not enough. You had to be able to differentiate between a great many different cuts and modes of preparation. Strauss himself was a devotee of the Beinfleisch and the waiters would have known his preference, never dreaming of attempting to palm him off with Schulterscherzl, Bröselfleisch or Zwerchried instead.
Some years ago, Welsh National Opera performed a production of Beatrice and Benedict in which a large vat of pasta with an accompanying ragù was prepared and devoured on stage. The sauce was made to a family recipe (of which he refused to reveal the ingredients) by Osvaldo Valente, a tenor in the chorus, and it was torture for the audience, who were assailed by delectable garlic-laden aromas but obliged to sit and watch while everyone on stage happily tucked in. Which is apparently exactly what the bass-baritone Forbes Robinson used to do during performances of La Bohème at Covent Garden. He sang the role of Colline and was one of the merry group of Bohemians gathered together at the Café Momus on Christmas Eve. What he had worked out was that, although he had to be there, he didn’t actually have to sing very much, so he was able to eat his way steadily through a perfectly good dinner every night — just remembering, probably prompted by what was in front of him, to come in on time with his line: ‘Questo pollo è un poema!’ All this is just the tip of the iceberg, or even the icing on the gingerbread. There’s the jam that Madame Larina and the old nurse are stirring up in Eugene Onegin, the Japanese delicacies that Pinkerton so rudely refers to as ‘candied flies and spiders’ in Madam Butterfly, mushrooms (laced with rat poison) in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the sausages to which Mr Broucek is so devoted, seed cake and egg and cress sandwiches courtesy of Lady Billows in Albert Herring ...
Enough already — it must be time for tea.
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