Imperative cooking: anniversary dinners
THIS WEEK is yet another wedding anniversary. On Tuesday Mrs Anderson and I will have eaten 11,200 dinners togeth- er, which means some 56,000 courses both cooked and eaten. So I have been busy thinking about a dinner — 'a' dinner? what's celebratory about one dinner? No, we'll have three dinners over three days; the times when one could do more than one dinner a day are long over. So what shall we eat to mark the event? Anniver- saries call not for extravagant but for nos- talgic food, grub that makes a chap remem- ber the place he first ate it or the chaps he ate it with. At this 56,000th milestone, we shall have dishes which were once some sort of landmark sending us off on a new culinary trail or typifying someone's influ- ence.
The first dinner is more or less English. It was my father who introduced me to eels. We will start with jellied eels. They are expensive now in London because of Chi- nese demand for them, but they are cheap outside — I have just bought some in Kent. They were naughty on the way home: one jumped out of his bucket in the boot, slith- ered through the back of the rear seat by the arm-rest and came to the front to sit `up with the driver'. Keep them in a basin or in a bath with water dripping to aerate it. Then, when you are ready, grab them with a towel-covered hand (empty the bath first), chop their heads off with a Chinese cleaver, gut them, check there are no hooks in the head or insides, cut into pieces, make a stock with head, extreme end of tail, white wine, peppercorns, bayleaf and water, poach the eel pieces in the stock, fil- ter the stock over them and leave in the fridge to jelly. We shall eat them with vinegar in which dried bird's-eye chillies and cloves have been marinaded. After that, a dish of mixed game, last year's partridge, pheasants and duck — frozen, I'm afraid, but after having been well hung — and some home-made game sausages. With this a potato puree made in the French style with a mouli- legumes, lots of butter and black pepper. Then a rocket salad, stilton, celery and a few grapes. That is for the 'versary eve. On 'the day' it will be more of a Frog din- ner. I learned about food in the Midi in the very early Sixties, mainly from a French grandmother. We shall start with a grand aioli: salt cod, salt tuna, cold potatoes, cold cauliflower or leeks and, if we can find them, a few escargots de mer and a huge bowl of garlic mayonnaise. Then a dish I think that Merne-Jeanne invented herself, just slightly amended to use duck eggs. The eggs are fried in olive oil, with wine vinegar sprinlded into the pan at the last minute. For the main course, a coq au vin with a proper farmyard cock — to remind us of the time we kept poultry — shallots, dried ceps, all cooked in Rh6ne and accompa- nied by fried bread done in — shall we have chicken or duck fat? A salad of frisee, Provençal goats' cheese preserved in olive oil, and plums pickled in mare.
On day three, some more recent Spanish influence. The French do have first courses of several dishes, assorted crudités, for instance, but not often. The Spanish are terrific at them. There is still some dried tuna roe in the larder, and we'll have some squid in its own ink, slices of morcilla, whole anchovies in salt, chillies and olive oil, peppers stuffed with salt cod, caper fruits and roe — no, let's have whelks chopped in a mixture of very finely chopped tomatoes, onions, cucumbers and peppers. Next a rice dish: Italian or Spanish rice cooked in a very strong fish stock (made from plaice skeletons, crab shells, cods' heads, snapper heads and bones, and other good things discarded by ignorant shoppers and available for nothing), with a few large prawns fried in olive oil and doused in Spanish brandy on top and lots of saffron and pimento.
A main dish of kidneys — beef kidneys — would be nice after that, just fried in oil with garlic and perhaps a little cumin. A spot of jerez in it? Possibly, but would it go with the cumin? Leave out the cumin and douse with fino? Pity, the cumin is good. You prefer the jerez? All right, my dear, two versions: you have the fino and I'll have the cumin. Again a salad, this time of mixed leaves, Density lettuce, rocket, chico- ry and American landcress. Then the best cheese in the world, Cabrales, and a sticky Spanish sweetmeat.
Thirty-two years, every day a chance to enjoy cooking and eating good food with the best of chums. What do fitness centre enthu- siasts, serial adulterers, ballet-goers and Dinky-toy collectors know of real pleasure?
It's from the Continental Circus. They have an opening for seven corporate clowns.'
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