The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit

A quite incredible book on how flavours work together, Niki Segnit’s The Flavour Thesaurus is part cookbook part reference work, with frequent digressions into anecdote á la Elizabeth David.
 

She devotes a whole chapter on the culinary properties of Globe Artichoke, a vegetable related to the thistle: 

Globe artichokes contain a phenolic compound called cynarin, which has the peculiar effect of making anything you eat directly afterwards taste sweet. It temporarily inhibits the sweet receptors in your taste buds, so that when you follow a bit of artichoke with, say, a sip of water, flushing the compound off your tongue, the receptors start working again and the abrupt contrast fools the brain into thinking you’ve just swallowed a mouthful of sugar solution. This makes for a diverting, if swiftly tedious, party game – sweet radicchio! – but it’s bad news for wine. And the enemy of wine is my enemy. The problem can be minimised by using ingredients that create a bridge between the wine and the artichoke (or simply taking a bit of something else before you take a sip of wine). Or you could ditch the wine altogether and drink Cynar, an artichoke-flavoured liqueur from Italy.

The obligatory recipe and anecdote follow. I reproduce it here with an eye to purchasing both a jar of artichokes and a bottle of cheap Italian white:

Globe Artichoke & Bacon: In Lazio, a boyfriend and I were speeding through a landscape of fairytale castles, well on our way to not living happily ever after. We had been arguing with such uninterrupted intensity that it was only a promising road sign that reminded us that it was well past lunchtime and we were hungry. Our motherly Italian hostess, perhaps picking up on the friction between us, took pity and led us to a table under an olive tree. Mercifully soon, she brought a label-less bottle of cold, dry white wine, an enormous spoon and a terracotta dish of something covered in breadcrumbs and cheese, molten bubbles popping on the surface like the meniscus of a volcano. My boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, or whatever he was at that moment, took the spoon and, breaking through the crust, emerged with a steaming heap of rigatoni, pancetta and artichokes, in a rich béchamel savoury-sweet with Parmesan. They say hunger is the best sauce, but if that lunch under the olive tree is anything to go by, the point in a relationship where it doesn’t matter any more runs it a close second. We smiled at each other. I topped up our glasses. He piled the pasta on our plates. The bitter, nutty greenness of the artichoke cut through the richness of pancetta and cheese. It was by far the best last date I’ve ever had. If your relationship is on the rocks, get 200g of rigatoni on to cook. Soften a finely chopped onion and 2 garlic cloves in olive oil with 75g sliced pancetta. Add 4-6 cooked artichoke bottoms (good jar ones will do), sliced into sixths. In a bowl, mix 125ml milk with 150ml double cream and 50g grated Parmesan. The pasta should be al dente now. Drain it, empty back into the pan and add the milky, creamy, cheesy mixture and the onion and artichokes. Stir and check for seasoning, then transfer to a baking dish. Cut a ball of mozzarella into slices and lay them on top. Cover with a mixture of 50g breadcrumbs and 25g grated Parmesan and bake for 30 minutes at 200oC/Gas Mark 6, covering it with foil if it looks in danger of burning. Serve with a bottle of cold, cheap Italian white.

It definitely sounds worth the trouble...

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

I’ve briefly touched on Sarah Waters’s trilogy of Victorian novels, specifically Tipping the Velvet, but The Little Stranger, although still in the realm of historical fiction, sees her in the twentieth century, an area she has also visited in The Night Watch. With its sense of dread and litany of things that go bump in the night, I was put in mind of my favourite of her books, Afinity, although this is a very different beast, with elements of the country house thriller, and a knowing analysis of the decline of the upper class in Britain immediately after the Second World War.

Rural GP Dr Faraday is called to the Georgian pile in his village, Hundreds Hall, which has been the home of the Ayers family for 200 years. The remaining Ayers, mother, daughter Caroline and son Roderick, are living in penury, the house collapsing around them, as death duties, taxes and the new Labour government of Clement Atlee do their best to drive them into the ground. The stress has started to get to them, especially Roderick, badly wounded in the war and already of a distinctly nervous disposition. The gradual build up of seemingly unexplained events – objects moving around, ghostly sounds – has served to finally tip him over the edge, or at least to the bottle.

Faraday has been invited to supper at Hundreds Hall, but he notes with disdain that Roderick has been at the sauce:

There was something else, which troubled me more. His whole manner had changed. Where before he’d carried himself in the tense, hunted way of someone braced against disaster, now he seemed to slouch, as if barely caring whether disaster struck or not. While Mrs Ayers and Caroline and I chatted together, with an attempt at normality, of county matters and local gossip, he sat the whole time in his chair, watching us from under his brows but saying nothing. He rose only once, and that was to go to the drinks table to top up his glass of gin and French. And from the way he handled the bottles, and from the stiffness of the cocktail he mixed, I realised that he must have been drinking steadily for some time.

After a dreadful dinner when the young man insults their guest, Faraday insists on seeing him in his room before he goes. It’s for medical reasons, of course, not just so that he can give Rod a piece of his mind:

“Why are you doing this to yourself? The estate’s falling to pieces around you, and look at you! You’ve had gin, vermouth, wine, and,” – I nodded to his glass, which was sitting on a mess of papers at his elbow – “What’s in there? Gin again?” He cursed quietly. “Jesus! What of it? Can’t a bloke get lit up now and then?” I said, “Not a bloke in your position, no.”

He leaves in a foul mood, and Roderick goes back to the bottle. But the spooky goings on are about to take a turn for the worse. As Faraday sleeps off his supper that night ...something dreadful happened out at Hundreds Hall.

No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

I had McCarthy’s The Road inflicted on me as a reading group choice, and plodded my way from start to finish without ever taking to it. The post-apocalyptic shtick grated from page one, but I found myself dragged to the end of the book by McCarthy’s spare style. Despite all the rude things I have said since about The Road, I said that I was determined to revisit his writing, and I finally took out No Country For Old Men from the library to make good on my promise.

Set in 1980, it starts with a man coming across the aftermath of a drug deal that has gone wrong in a deserted location on the Texas-Mexico border. He finds a case with over $2,000,000 in it and takes the rather hasty decision to nick off with the cash. After that, he’s on the run from a bloodthirsty Mexican drug gang, and the even more deadly and relentless Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic hit-man whose preferred method of execution is a metal bolt gun normally used for dispatching cattle at the abattoir.

Realising pretty quickly that he’s in a world of trouble, Llewellyn Moss, the unwilling fugitive with the cash, is chased from motel to motel across Southern Texas as the body count stacks up behind him. Finally, after being shot and injured and patched up again in a Mexican border town, he tries to arrange a secret assignation with his wife, also in hiding. On the way he picks up a hitchhiker, a fifteen year old runaway. Tempted into a rare bout of sociability, Moss gets a couple of cold beers when they’re staying at a motel:

He walked down to her room and tapped at the door. He waited. He tapped again. He saw the curtain move and then she opened the door. She stood there in the same jeans and T-shirt. She looked like she’d just woken up.
I know you aint old enough to drink but I thought I’d see if you wanted a beer.
Yeah, she said. I’d drink a beer.
He lifted one of the cold bottles out of the brown paper bag and handed it to her. Here you go, he said.
He’d already turned to go. She stepped out and let the door shut behind her. You don’t need to rush off thataway, she said.
He stopped on the lower step.
You got another one of these in that sack?
Yeah, I got two more. And I aim to drink both of em.
I just meant maybe you could set here and drink one of em with me.
He squinted at her. You ever notice how women have trouble takin no for a answer? I think it starts about age three.

Not exactly a conversationalist, Moss gets stuck into his brew:

He sat on the step and pulled one of the beers from the bag and twisted off the cap and tilted the bottle and drank. She sat on the step next up and did the same.
You sleep a lot? he said.
I sleep when I get the chance. Yeah. You?
I aint had a night’s sleep in about two weeks. I don’t know what it would feel like. I think it’s beginnin to make me stupid.

It’s a bit late to worry about that. With luck he’ll have time to enjoy the beer before Chigurh and the Mexicans catch up with him.

There’s a lesson to be learned here: if ever you find yourself in the Texas desert next to a lot of dead bodies, a bale of heroin and a satchel full of used dollar bills, walk away. Just walk away...