The finale was the Massandra Malaga 1914, still blood-red at
the core, and probably the most viscous wine I have ever tasted. As you tilted the glass, it left a golden coating like oil. Rich and soft on the nose, it tasted remarkably concen- trated and fresh. This wine will live for another hundred years, by which time Soviet communism may be as distant a memory as the Tsars are now.
Harry Eyres
I e • I
Imperative cooking: hot stuff
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`00H! How can you? You'll never taste the fish.' There is nothing which upsets persons who suppose themselves to know about food as the offering of a few green chillies to go with their swordfish — or pheasant, or haricot beans. Some go furth- er and suppose that anything 'hot', not just chillies, will spoil the taste of good food. It's not just the English middle classes. The Frogs, including the lower classes, are positively girlish when it comes to a bit of oomph. I recall one otherwise robust peasant family into which someone had introduced a brand of mustard marginally less anaemic than the usual one. Gingerly trying a speck with her home-made Toulouse sausage, the eldest daughter shrieked, 'It stings, it stings."Stings, stings, stings,' chorused her two sisters.
This French reaction provides just the excuse the English girlish tendencies need in order to dismiss anything 'hot' as out- landish, uneducated and to do with India — 'and even there, you know, they don't really have hot things. They use very little chilli in proper Indian cooking. It doesn't have to be hot.'
So let us set the record straight. Chillies are used in huge quantities not just in India but Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ceylon and the whole of the sub-continent, in central and southern America, in China, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, west, north and southern Africa, the Indies isles and much of southern Europe, and not as an option but as a more or less essential even defining ingredient of many dishes. The European countries are even more embar- rassing to the English girls. Go to southern Italy and rough-ground red dried chillies are available in every café for shaking on pasta. Show enthusiasm for them, especial- ly in Calabria, and your patron will rush to spoon his own chillies pickled in oil gener- ously over your spaghetti. They are in the charcuterie, with the swordfish, super- abundant. The only place you won't find them is mentioned in most Italian cookery books on sale in England.
There are even more in Spain especially the south, again with fish, in stews, in Romesco sauce, fried whole, fresh and dried. There and in Portugal are splendid dishes of dried cod with chillies, all the Cephalopods and chillies. Chillies are in Russian vodka, in all manner of the cook- ing of south eastern Europe both sides of
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