Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson

strapping nurse (Hattie Jacques in a starched cap).
    ‘Yes, Gerree, you eat. Very good and stronging, you will see. So – we cut bag.’ She lances the stockingette and, unconfined,the monstrous dumpling bursts forth. She puts it on a board and bisects it with the bread knife. With a gasp of steam the two halves flop apart revealing a dense, greyish interior with what looks like an engorged prostate at its centre. ‘Very good,’ says Marta judiciously. ‘I make last night.’
    Numbly I watch her hack off a sturdy portion and pour sugar and cinnamon cream over it. After that there seems to be nothing for it but to sit at the kitchen table and address myself to this colossal duff.
    ‘Eat,’ she orders, joining that huge historic chorus of mothers with hairy forearms who stand over small men bellowing ‘Mangia, mangia! ’and ‘Don’t be shy ! ’
    Strangely enough it turns out to be edible, though hardly palatable, its major challenge residing as much in the texture as in the taste. I remember as a child reading the Amazing Facts column of a boys’ magazine that told of the discovery of a star so dense that as much of it as could fit in a matchbox would weigh 32,000 tons. I used to while away boring lessons by imagining winning endless bets (‘Ten quid says you can’t lift that matchbox, Thompson’) and devising ways of preventing it simply falling through the ground towards Earth’s centre. It was intriguing to think of something that was both easily possessible in terms of size and utterly unownable because of its weight. And here I am, a quarter of a century on, eating a similar substance that I can feel falling in a straight line inside me between gullet and rectum. Surely when I stand up there will be a tearing sound and I shall find my trouser seam in tatters and a smoking pile of undigested kasha on the chair? Until that happens the stuff is massively filling. If you can imagine a planet-sized marron glacé that has begun to collapse under its own gravity – a sweet chestnut on its way to becoming a Black Hole – you will have an idea of quite how filling this syrupy, mealy, oiled substance is. There are serious calories in every crumb.
    ‘You must finish, Gerree,’ says Marta, standing over me in her parody of the maternal tyrant. I blame it on glasnost , orwas it perestroika ? Whatever it was, anyway, that allowed kasha and Martas to escape from behind the Iron Curtain … Such are the dishevelled mental babblings that accompany the cracking of my maxillary muscles as I chew on and on. The prostate in the middle turns out to be a toffee-like filling based apparently on horse liniment. The linseed oil is loud and clear. ‘Very good,’ she says approvingly as I get the last spoonful down and sag back in my chair. Evidently I now have permission to get down and go out to play. Oh, that ‘twere possible. I debate what to do about Marta but no idea comes. In the face of this kasha offensive I now realize how puny my Garlic and Fernet Ice Cream was. I recall the interesting but not well-known fact that several honeys are actually poisonous, in particular – and I shall need to check this – rhododendron and laurel honey. I envisage the gift to Marta of a bombe surprise based largely on meringues and ice cream held together by rhododendron honey. Nice idea, and probably immune from suspicion, let alone criminal conviction (‘“A tragic error on the part of 62,000 bees,” the judge began his summing up’), but too leisurely and roundabout a way of solving the immediate problem of an irritating neighbour. Planting rhododendrons or laurel, waiting for them to flower, learning to keep bees … Hopeless.
    Long after my tormentress has left I can do little but loll, sipping weak tea made from some much-touted South African bush that tastes like stewed hay. Slowly the bolus in my stomach dissolves and with it my lassitude. It will do no harm to make a date to see this Brill fellow, or Nancy or whatever he