The Devil's Larder

20

FOR THE 500TH anniversary of the ending of the siege, Professor Myles McCormick, the big, bizarre Chicagoan who’d made our town his ‘project’, arranged a study week for amateur historians, ending with a celebratory feast. The fourteen participants — mostly, like the professor himself, Americans — could tour the burial site, the recently discovered (and augmented) earthworks and emplacements of the besieging army, the museum with its sad collection of wills and testaments, the still-intact harbour chain that had once stretched across the sea channel to the port. They could inspect the little statue of the city prefect chewing on a shoe and the memorial obelisk with its roster of the wealthy dead. In seminars, they could consider the day-to-day minutiae of living — and dying — without fresh food for more than fifteen months, and then discuss the broader, nagging questions of historical principle. And they could read and buy (in the professor’s own translation from the sixteenth-century text) the merchant dell’Ova’s contemporary accounts.

The study group was surprisingly easygoing for such a mordant subject, cheerful, attentive and intelligent, delighted with the hotel and the town, and keen to be as stimulated as possible on this short, testing and expensive vacation. So Professor McCormick must have judged that they would appreciate the ‘fitting’ menu he’d prepared for the closing feast. The hotel chef, a Dane with an unexpected sense of humour, had volunteered his services. ‘Anything for a change,’ he had said. The professor presented him with a copy of dell’Ova’s diaries, in which he’d highlighted one of the final passages. ‘Do what you can with that.’

We have been reduced to eating slop that might have been intended for my good host’s chickens and his pigs, had not those chickens and those pigs been speedily dispatched some weeks ago [dell’Ova wrote, elevendays before he died from the insupportable pain of ‘hunger headaches’]. I have always hoped, despite my many travels, that I would not need to sacrifice my dignity so much that I could sup on baser foods, as savages, but in these last few weeks I have discovered myself tasting — and, indeed, relishing — lascivious flesh from mice, ebb meat and worms, and also from dead creatures that have perished from their want of sustenance, all flavoured by our only condiment, the salt from shore weed. My vegetable dishes have presented only the very best grasses from the city lanes and leaves of such variety that autumn seems to have bared its branches at us in the courtyard, though it be only early spring. . Today we were called to table and an unexpected stew of leather goods. Within the steaming tureen our spoons located the tooled remains of a once-fine saddle, cut strips of bags and purses, a bandolier with the buckles thankfully removed, and a good pair of tanned shoes, which all too late I recognized to be my own. I can report that, given my condition and the rarity of any meal, this was the finest and sweetest-smelling preparation, as good as any beef, which it has ever been my fortune to savour or to chew. Hardship and hunger sophisticate the palate and the nose.

The chef was not required to go down to the market hall. He already had provisions in the lost-property cupboard behind reception. There he selected a child’s school satchel, a calfskin handbag (a little spoiled by talc and leaking biros), a half-dozen leather belts and a well-worn pair of hiking boots, already greased with dubbin and softened for the pot by a thousand walks. These forgotten trophies of hotel guests, the chef was sure, would not taste good, no matter how the leather was tricked and dramatized with stock and sauces. But, surely, an experienced cook and innovator such as himself could produce from these ingredients something passable. This leather was only tough meat, after all. It could not taste worse than the ‘squirrel steak Tabasco’ he’d prepared for the fête de la chasse some months before. Here was a challenge.

Chef’s sharpest knife was not up to the task. Once he’d unpicked any stitching from the bags and belts and had removed the sole and innards of the boots, he had to use a pair of industrial scissors to render the leather into strips about a centimetre wide. These he softened for four or five hours in tepid water.

So far, this was easier than squirrel. No skinning, no boning, and nothing to eviscerate or draw. But at least the squirrel had some flavour, even though the flavour, as it turned out, was of the acorns that it had eaten and, oddly, of gunpowder. It would be easy, obviously, to spice up and vivify the leather from the many bottles on the kitchen shelves. Some jerky sauce, perhaps, some cayenne, or packet stock. But this was cheating, chef decided. And hardly ‘fitting’ for the celebration of a siege that had ended 500 years ago and killed three-quarters of the town.

Chef turned to dell’Ova once again for inspiration, and the professor’s highlighted passage. ‘The salt from shore weed’ would have to be his condiment. The hotel backed on to a stony beach where there was kelp and wrack in abundance.

He had of course to compromise by preparing an ‘unfitting’ base for the meat. It must seem edible, at least. He assembled a casserole of equal parts water and milk, with onion, turnips, carrots, chopped fennel and haricot beans, added the strips of leather and its mulch of seaweed, and left it all on a low heat, with the lid on the pan, to reduce and tenderize.

‘Shoe stew’, they called it in the kitchen. But on the menu card, that evening, it was described as ‘ragout dell’Ova’.

Professor McCormick was generous with wine, and so his study group was game, if a little hesitant, at least to try the celebration stew. Their evening was memorable. The amateur historians held up their forks, heavy with thick leather laces, for the benefit of the professor’s video camera, plus the television news crew, and the photographers from two provincial papers, who had, thanks to the hotel’s PR manager, been summoned to the feast. A splendid photograph of Thomas Luken from Columbus, Ohio, and his wife Martha was reproduced in magazines throughout the world, including Time and, all too obviously, the National Enquirer. Mr and Mrs Luken were shown tugging with their teeth on opposing ends of a strip of handbag.

Did anybody really eat the stew? Some people tried, of course. The leather itself was tasteless and beyond chewing, but the gravy was delicious, as you’d expect from such a five-star chef. When the meal was over, though, and what remained had been carried to the kitchens, it might have appeared that ‘ragout dell’Ova’ must have had its admirers. Not one of the plates was untouched. Some, indeed, were clean. Professor Myles McCormick would write, in his report, that ‘dell’Ova’s conviction that men and women can develop a taste for almost anything, if the circumstances so prescribe, was more than fully proven on this occasion.’

Indeed, most of the leather had disappeared somewhere. The amateur historians had carried off their rich experience, but not inside their stomachs. They’d simply licked the gravy off and slipped their leather memories of that fine week into their pockets, or wrapped them in their napkins, or tucked them into their handbags. This was a siege they’d not forget. This was a history lesson that had made its mark. They’d had such unexpected fun.