Paying The Price
I had a quite mad student when I tutored in Milan. Not mad in the endearing mad as a hatter sort way, nor in the cringey hey everyone, I’m going to jump in the pool with all my clothes on sort way (on second thought is that so cringe? This person sounds fun!), just mad in the genuinely mad sort way, infuriatingly mad, tragically mad.
She was the kind of mad where if you were to make the simplest of plans, let’s say to organise her giving you a bag, you’d be left two days later with no bag in hand or having even had sight of her, despite having visited seven different locations, her having come to your address, and at one point probably having been within 10m of each other only to have the phone slammed down on you with a cry of “oh you’re just making it all too stressful!”
(One of my friends is nodding in agreement as he reads this description. He still doesn’t have his bag.)
In the rare moments she softened, where life momentarily stopped being a one-woman competition to turn the inconsequential into chaos, she was unsurprisingly one of my favourite students. Tutoring to her was a two way educational process and she often sent me away with my own homework. My bookshelf filled with increasingly obscure Italian literature, which I never read, and always said that I’d never read, but this never stopped me being sent home with more.
About ten years later, and from the ten books I was given that still sit on my shelf, there is only one sentence I have digested from it all and that is because it was on the blurb of one of them:
(warning: shoddy translation follows)
“We lived through events so dramatic that they absorbed us, reducing our lives to an uninterrupted suspense… When I lived through those dramas, I couldn’t wait for them to end. Now I miss them. I realise that without them, life is certainly more easy, but it has lost every flavour.”
I laughed when I read it. Here was a man obsessed with life as drama, who speaks in metaphors of flavour, and writes a book called “in my long and tormented existence,” in essence, here was the most Italian man ever.
Yet the words have since gone on to form part of that collection of snippets, quotes, moments and conversations that stay with you for not entirely obvious reasons. They rang in Lockdown when the world split into opposite extremes of his drama conundrum; those working in hard hit sectors, your hospitals and hospitalities, were absorbed by never-ending dramas and lived in his “uninterrupted suspense,” while those with remote work found ourselves in a repetitive existence that leaked flavour.
Like Christmas (yes I got it in there again!), lockdown similarly lies too soon in our collective memory so I will spare you any more here. I will bring you instead to a period within that period, which was the rearing of my newborn son, George.
As parents, Jane and I have paid the price. This price has not been monetary, nor attached to any irreparable consequences, but instead one we have paid moment to moment and where its units are minted in the spectrum of our flavoursome drama - insipid comfort paradigm.
At the source of this flavoursome drama lies George’s sleep, which we have failed for the best part of a year to manage properly. I reflect on it now because, by some miracle, this week we seem to have sudden come out the other side with a well behaved sleeping baby. Instead of crying at the sight of his cot, George reaches for it, and it is now I who do the crying with streaming tears of sweet relief.
And as I think of preparing dinner tonight, of putting George down without a peep, of this new-found serenity, I can’t help but already think back to all the sleepless nights. Those evenings that quite literally formed an uninterrupted suspense, yet where within which lay moments of tenderness, twilight consolations and intimate victories. With him no longer migrating to us in the middle of the night, we rest better, but our small bed begins to feel a little too large.
This week’s recipe is for a feast we had one Friday in the throes of battle, where I remember waiting for Jane to emerge from the frontlines with news of a sleeping baby. It was quick and inexpensive, yet a banquet to tired eyes and filled with every flavour that our Italian’s drama can lend.
Victory Mussels
We revelled much in the implicit festiveness of bivalves in A Bag Of Mussels and this recipe with it’s deep reds and click-clacking shells conjures all the fire of a flamenco (dance, not bird). This is a recipe I originally found through the ever eminent Rachel Roddy, and you should read the original recipe for a much more relevant introduction than you’d ever be likely to find here.
Ingredients (for four)
1kg mussels
Enough olive oil to make a golden pool in your pan
1 glass white wine
2 garlic cloves, peeled but whole
Pinch chilli flakes (optional)
Tin of plum tomatoes, drained
250g risotto rice
Parsley
Optional: a green to add a little texture and weave, rock samphire works well and so does monksbeard
Method
Clean the mussels of their beards, and check they are alive by dropping a handful at a time in the sink and discarding any which do not close. This is covered in more detail in A Bag Of Mussels.
Put a pan with a lid that will fit all the mussels on medium-high heat and when sizzling hot add the wine and all the mussels with a clove of garlic and cover with a lid. Wait a bout three minutes, open the lid and see if they are largely opened (a transparent lid is handy as you can see when they are opened without lifting it). When opened, take off the heat and drain the mussels through a sieve placed above a pan, so that you keep the cooking liquid.
Extract the mussel meat from the shell from all but about ~15 particularly pleasant looking mussels, for these will be saved for adorning the finished product. Add hot water to the reserved mussel cooking liquid to bring it up to about 1L total and keep on the side.
In a pan large enough to hold all the cooked rice and mussels, heat a good pool of olive oil (say ~70ml) gently with a clove of garlic, the pinch of chilli and a couple of parsley stems. The parsley stems add flavour to the oil and will continue to flavour your sauce as it cooks.
After a few minutes of the aromatics poaching on low heat, once the garlic starts to take a little golden colour, add the tomatoes and gently mash with the back of a spoon. Turn the heat to medium, add a pinch of both salt and sugar (sugar adds some of the sweetness of fresh tomatoes that is often lacked in their tinned counterparts), and allow to cook for ten minutes or until they have softened and collapsed and turned a rich, dark red.
Stir in the rice now and let everything get to know each other a minute. Next pour in a stock to cover the rice by half an inch or so, and keep topping up whenever the rice begins to seem a little dry. After about 17 minutes the rice may be ready, but this depends on type and brand and the only way to judge is to taste as you go along. If adding the greens, throw them in when the rice is al dente and seems to have a minute or so left of cooking.
Add stock tentatively toward the end. The final texture of the dish (whether it be stodgy or soupy or somewhere in between) is ultimately up to you, but just remember you can always add more stock rather than take away. When the rice is cooked stir in the mussels and add stock to adjust the level of soupyness to your likening. Decorate the top with the choice mussels in their shells and put the lid on for a minute. This is the vital waiting time where the rice and sauce - having been abruptly rubbed up on one another - get to relax a moment before being introduced to the diners at the table.
Serve with some chopped parsley, extra chilli flakes, and even a little grated pecorino for those with the greatest longings for life’s flavour.
How true. No Chaos, No Creation. I remember this victorious motto because it once made its way onto a makeshift family crest....in fact it was the family to which both you and I belong.