A Taste of Death Read online

  That’s five to ten kilograms of beef bones, which I roast in the oven for twenty-five minutes in a shallow tray, for colour and flavour. Then I put them in an enormous stockpot together with a mirepoix of onions, celery and carrots; fill it up with water, add a bouquet garni, a bundle of parsley, thyme and bay leaves tied up with string, cover and leave it on the stove overnight, ticking over at a very low heat.

  Then, in the morning, with a spider, which is a kind of hybrid of a sieve and a spoon, the size of a small badminton racquet, I remove all the bones and vegetables and bouquet garni and leave the liquid to cool. I had done that yesterday and, huffing and puffing – it weighed a ton – moved the gigantic pan. I took it to the yard at the back of the kitchen where in addition to the bin area I have an out-house where there is a freezer and a dry store. The air temperature in the out-house was about five degrees, fridge temperature, so I was happy to leave it there for a bit. Today I went to fetch it from where I had left it. I couldn’t find it.

  I scratched my head, I was puzzled. I found the stockpot, cleaned and gleaming, but where was my stock?

  At nine thirty Francis arrived. His honest-looking face was freshly shaved and he’d smartened his clothes up, although they were badly rumpled – perhaps I should teach him how to iron. Nothing could be done about his blond hair which poked up and out like a bird’s nest.

  ‘Hi, chef, what do you want me to start with today?’

  ‘Francis, where’s the stock?’ I asked.

  He frowned. ‘Stock, what stock, chef?’

  For a moment I wondered if I was going mad.

  ‘The stuff that was in this pan.’ I opened the cupboard and pointed to the stockpot.

  ‘That dirty water?’

  Icy fingers clutched around my heart,

  ‘What did you do with it?’ My voice was strangled.

  ‘Well, I threw it away!’ He looked both hurt and puzzled. He knew from my expression and tone of voice that he’d done something bad, but he wasn’t sure quite what. His resemblance to a dog was even more marked: one that had let its master down in a way it simply couldn’t understand. If he had had a tail it would have wagged apologetically.

  I nearly wept. All that work, all that time, all that money, for nothing. Twenty litres of prime stock, literally down the plughole. I counted to ten, Francis’s big, beefy red face looked at me with agonising remorse.

  ‘Please, Francis,’ I said through gritted teeth, ‘I’ve already told you once: never throw anything away without asking me first!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise it was valuable. I’m sorry,’ he apologised again, ‘I’m as much use as a lead parachute.’ He looked like he might burst into tears.

  I sighed, ‘Never mind, let’s put it behind us and move on. Now …’

  I pointed to the Hobart oven, a double oven with a steam function that, to me, had been one of the selling points of the restaurant. It was an amazingly good piece of kit, the kind of thing you might find in a much bigger kitchen.

  ‘Could you give that a clean?’ I gave him some degreaser and heavy rubber gloves and a face mask. ‘Go easy with that stuff, it’s toxic, and be gentle with the oven, it’s quite delicate.’

  ‘Will do, chef.’ He opened the door, nearly tearing it off its hinges. He gave me an apologetic look. Don’t say anything, I thought. I smiled encouragingly.

  By ten o’clock, God knows how, Francis had broken it.

  Storm clouds were beginning to gather around my new life.

  First the dead Whitfield, now my dead oven.

  I knew which one I would miss more.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tuesday, 19 January

  The following day I got up early as usual. It was still dark and still raining. It had now been going on for days, it felt like forever. A flood warning had been broadcast on local radio before I actually got up. The upper Thames was swollen and high and Marlow High Street and the church were threatened by the rising waters.

  I got up off my mattress, shivering in the draughty, chilly bedroom with its malfunctioning, gurgling radiators. I’d tried draining them, to no effect. I needed a plumber, but I couldn’t afford one.

  I was safe. At least from flooding. Hampden Green lies on top of one of the Chiltern Hills and if it ever floods then the whole country will be more or less under water. I didn’t feel like going out for a run and the ground off-road would be horribly slippery with mud, so I did some yoga, then two hundred press-ups, four sets of thirty and four of twenty. I did two hundred sit-ups, five sets of forty. I shadow boxed for twenty minutes, practising slipping then punching and combinations. I finished with twenty minutes of Qi Gong breathing and meditation exercises then a quick read of Chuang Tsu. The essence of what he said was, if life gives you lemons make lemonade, but couched in terms of yaks and silk bleaching by way of imagery.

  I’d like a yak, I thought, as I showered in the icy bathroom. The shower wasn’t a shower per se, it was one of those rubber things, shaped like a Y that you fit over the taps. I’d last seen one of those when I was a student in a hideous student flat, many, many years ago.

  A yak would give me love, I thought; a yak would be something to cuddle up to for warmth. A yak would keep me centred and happy.

  I pulled on my chef’s whites and went down into the kitchen.

  I only had one small electric oven instead of my giant Hobart so I thought I’d better spread the load through the day. I didn’t have a yak to cook or rice cakes to make. But I began early anyway and by nine a.m. I’d made two Victoria sponges, one lemon flavoured with zest and juice, the other a ginger cake with stem ginger in it. I had some Crabbies ginger wine and I thought I would either flavour some cream with it or maybe make a kind of syrup. After yesterday, I felt pleased with the way things were going.

  At nine thirty I had a fish delivery from the company I used, A Safe Plaice. Kenneth, the fish guy, was an Old Harrovian, immensely tall, immensely posh. It kind of made you wonder what he was doing driving a fish van. His voice was incredibly upper-class, languid, as polished as the hand-made brogues he favoured. I’ve got a bit of a thing about shoes. So, clearly, had Kenneth.

  ‘I’ve got a special on Cromer crab today,’ he drawled. He made Prince Charles sound like he was from a sink housing estate. The vowel in ‘crab’ went on and on and on, ‘craaaaaaa-aaab’.

  ‘Are they good? Dressed or undressed?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re whole crab, they’re bloody good, bloody marvellous.’ (‘whole craaaaab … bloodgood … blooodmaaaaarvlous’)

  ‘I’ll take four.’

  ‘Good man,’ said Kenneth gravely.

  ‘Are you off to the King’s Head?’ I asked. The aspirational Michelin place around the corner intrigued me. I was dying to see their kitchens and have a good nose around. The thing is, the star isn’t just awarded for blinding food. It’s everything: surroundings, service quality and above all consistency at that level.

  I can cook competently, on occasion faultlessly, but when times are busy and there’s only me in the kitchen sometimes things are less than perfect. At Michelin level, everything should be faultless, not just sometimes. If you play tennis, you might play like Federer for one game. But to do it over and over and over again, that’s a different matter.

  ‘Yes, and then I’m popping in to see Ropey.’

  Who on earth is Ropey? I wondered.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Ropey, the Earl,’ he looked down at me from his great height, his brow furrowed. Oh, the Earl, I thought, of course, silly me! Kenneth continued, ‘D’you know him?’

  ‘I can’t say I do.’

  ‘Bloody good bloke,’ said Kenneth, ‘bloody nice chap.’

  And then, with that, he said his goodbyes and he was gone.

  When Francis came in, I showed him how to cook and prep the crabs. Two would be for dressed crab and two for crab cannelloni.

  ‘Why are we cling-filming the table?’ asked Francis. He scratched his he
ad in puzzlement.

  ‘Because, Francis, when we crack the shells, crab juice is going to go everywhere and I don’t want to waste my money and your time by you spending a couple of extra hours clearing the mess up,’ I said patiently.

  ‘Silly me,’ said Francis, then added gravely, ‘We don’t want to get into a pickle, do we?’

  ‘No, Francis,’ I said, ‘we most certainly don’t.’

  I prised a shell open and pointed with the tip of my knife at the grey leathery protuberances near the head.

  ‘These are called dead men’s fingers,’ I explained. Someone had told me they were toxic. I wasn’t sure if that was the case or not but I wasn’t going to take any chances. ‘Now, Francis, this is important. They’re poisonous and I do not want them in the food. We don’t want to make anyone ill, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, chef,’ I corrected him.

  ‘Yes, chef,’ he repeated. Good, I thought, that’s that.

  ‘Good, and no bits of shell in the meat either.’

  ‘No, chef.’ His sweaty face beamed at me.

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘let’s crack on.’

  A VW Golf is a perfectly good car that wins awards, sells well and will get you from A to B. A Rolls-Royce is also equally good at getting from A to B and, like the Golf, wins awards and sells well. But there is a difference.

  You can have venison at the Old Forge Café, and very nice it is too. At the King’s Head around the corner, you can have vension saddle with snails, a mousseline of girolles, chervil infused pommes purée and glazed, blow-torched mandarin. It’s three times the price of mine and deservedly so. It’s a luxury dish. I am a one-man band, the Brigade at the King’s Head is probably round about ten persons in total. You have a chef for sauces, a chef for meat, a chef for fish, a chef for veg, and so on.

  They can do stuff like that. I can’t.

  The King’s Head has four rosettes. Four rosettes means that the restaurant deserves national recognition for culinary technical expertise and skill together with other elements that go to make up a restaurant, ambience, wine list, service, etc. But basically it’s down to the cooking. At four rosette level fame, a Michelin star is lurking in the wings – you’re perpetually on edge because any, every, customer could be that inspector. It makes for a very tetchy head-chef.

  I wasn’t on edge because of an inspection, I was on edge because I was having to do everything via the small plug-in oven that I normally used for baking cakes. It was a hell of a nuisance, to say the least.

  A repairman for the Hobart was on his way. Every time Francis looked at the oven or saw me look at it, his face fell and he washed dishes in silence. His body language was like a dog who’d done something wrong, ears down, tail swishing low and apologetically. He was feeling terribly guilty over the incident.

  So when Graeme Strickland, the King’s Head head-chef arrived for lunch, it was an event. I had looked his menu up on the internet several times, envious of both the technical skill that the dishes implied and his imagination, his originality.

  Jess bustled in to the kitchen in great excitement. Her dark eyes were alight.

  ‘It’s Graeme Strickland!’ she hissed at me.

  I was confused. ‘What, just walked in?’

  ‘No, he came in ages ago. He’s just had a toad in the hole and then Victoria sponge with plum compote and Chantilly cream, the one that you flavoured with that weird Swiss liqueur.’

  Pflumli. And she was right, it was weird-tasting stuff. Someone had given it to me as a holiday present. Every so often I’d use it. It was taking ages to get rid of. That’s how weird it was.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I should have recognised him earlier.’ Jess was furious with herself.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I said, and it really was. Many of my fellow chefs would have quite frankly gone ape-shit if a waitress had failed to spot someone they felt they should know about, like a rival chef or, more importantly, a critic. I tended to treat all my customers the same, I really doubt that I would have treated Strickland any differently to anyone else. I was after integrity.

  ‘Tao cannot be exalted; nor can it be debased. Therefore it is the most valuable thing in the world.’

  There, a bit of the Tao Te Ching.

  Mind you, I wasn’t sure if my calm attitude was down to the fact that I had, so far, enjoyed a smooth service – despite the frightful oven incident – and that everything had gone swimmingly. It’s easy to be tranquil when things are going well, it’s when things go badly that you have to prove yourself. If things had been going pear-shaped it would have been a different matter, a cock-up with an order, throwing my sequence of timings out. Maybe a complaint. There are too many possible disasters to enumerate. Anyhow, I was remaining calm, all seemed to be going to plan.

  There was also the happy accident that the toad in the hole had succeeded perfectly as a restaurant dish. I had once worked in a place that had it on the menu by making them in advance and reheating, with predictably poor results. I was going down the par-cooked sausage, fresh batter route and telling customers it would take twenty minutes. Doing each one more or less from scratch. Luckily they all seemed happy with that.

  If the experiment hadn’t worked well, or if I hadn’t been happy with the quality of the cake – the Victoria sponge that I had served Strickland – or if I hadn’t seen before service started, the disaster that Francis had made of the Chantilly cream, over-beating it until it practically turned into butter – ‘I’m sorry, chef,’ staring at the jagged, congealed yellow mess, ‘No, it’s fine, Francis, gentle peaks was what we were aiming for …’ – and redone it myself, I wouldn’t have been so gentle with Jess.

  ‘He wants to know if he can come and say hello …’ Jess added.

  I looked up at the clock, an automatic habit for any chef. Two fifteen p.m.

  I took my apron off. There was quite a bit of batter stuck to it and a smear of blueberry coulis after a Francis-related incident when he had spilt half a bowl of it over me (‘ooops a daisy, sorry, chef’) and there was onion gravy as well. I wasn’t just cooking the menu, I was wearing a great deal of it too. Not a good look. I threw it in the laundry basket outside the door that led upstairs and grabbed a new one in snazzy red and white stripes.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, tying the pristine clean one tight around me, ‘bring him in.’

  Two minutes later Jess reappeared with the chef in tow.

  Strickland and I eyed each other from over the barrier of the shiny, hot steel surface of the pass, that part of a kitchen where the chef hands the food over to the waiters.

  We were a bit like dogs sniffing each other, friendly but wary.

  I saw a small, slim man, very erect on his feet, in his mid-thirties, self-consciously good-looking, his features sharp and regular, with short brown hair and a very determined chin. He put his hand through the hot plate gap to shake mine, careful to avoid making contact with any of the metal surfaces or the powerful lights. He was wearing a dark green jacket and, as he put his hand to mine and the sleeve rode up, I could see powerful wrists, the dark hairs bisected here and there by old scars and a couple of nasty-looking fresh burns.

  I hadn’t doubted that he would be anything but a hands-on chef but it was still good to have my guess confirmed. I have only met a few chefs who refused to get their hands dirty. I find it hard to have any respect for a chef who doesn’t actually cook. I have met a few executive chefs who say things like, ‘I’m conceptual,’ or words to that effect. They’re not my kind of people.

  And what would he have made of me? Forty-five, a good ten years older than him, old for a chef, thin, shaved-head, glasses, ascetic-looking. A friend of mine had said once that I resembled a priest. I kind of liked that. Although he had qualified it, a defrocked priest.

  We finished shaking hands and he said, ‘I enjoyed my lunch. I thought your bread was good, make it yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The hard crust?’

&nb
sp; ‘Steam.’

  ‘I thought so …’

  And we were off. Excited, animated conversation about food. The great thing about catering is that even at my lowly level you can meet the top rank of chefs fairly easily and they tend to be pleasant, affable people, once they’re out of their kitchens, keen to share their knowledge. It’s a bit like playing football for a minor team and regularly bumping into Premier League players.

  Half an hour later he left to walk back to the King’s Head which was on the outskirts of the village. He would be getting ready for the evening shift. Strickland’s hours were roughly Monday to Saturday, eight a.m. to midnight. A ninety hour week. On Sunday he got drunk and slept. Over our food talk he’d had a coffee, complimentary petits fours that I had made, two glasses of brandy and (here I’m making an educated guess, based on his suddenly glazed eyes and an equally sudden outbreak of sniffing after he had used my bathroom) a huge line of coke.

  I watched him go with affection and a certain amount of reflected glory that I wasn’t indifferent to. Strickland’s verdict was a huge ego boost.

  I should have been paying more attention to my Tao Te Ching reading for that day:

  ‘Upon Misery, Happiness rests; under Happiness, Misery lies.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Wednesday, 20 January, early evening

  It wasn’t only success that I had to cope with. I had failure too. Misery as predicted by the Tao Te Ching. My Hobart oven was as dead as Whitfield. The repairman had been most apologetic. I hadn’t understood the technicalities but I did understand this much.

  Francis, in the course of cleaning it, had shorted it and blown the fuse. That was no problem, what was a problem was a bodged repair job from a few months previously that had wrecked the circuitry leaving it an accident waiting to happen. The damage caused by Francis had simply brought this to light sooner rather than later.