Day 4: Subordinate claws

I forgot to put my earplugs in last night, but the cockerels still didn’t get me. I got them, the little bastards. The last time I was up and about at 6.45 I was pushing Daily Mails through letterboxes. Today I am on herb and vegetable duty. Which means heading into the acre of greenhouse and picking and chopping the day’s requirements.

Not a bad start, though it was pretty cold. And it meant I was there on time. Today I was down to make Brown Soda Bread, Raspberry Jam (can’t say it out loud without thinking of Sean Bean in Ronin) and the aforementioned Penne with Chorizo. Yesterday was good but I had little to do really and found myself twiddling my melon baller from time to time. Today I wanted to put a bit of pressure on myself so I left a half hour gap in my order of work into which I hoped to squeeze another recipe.

I start by sterilising jam jars and warming sugar. Then I make my bread and bake it. Heat the raspberries, add the sugar, make the jam. Jar it up, take out the bread. All good. An hour and a half gone. I plan to start my pasta dish at 11. So I have time to make some scones. Or at least I think I do. By the time I have fucked about getting the ingredients it is pushing twenty to. Also, I am running out of room and pots and pans because I have cleaning to do. I waste another five minutes tidying up. Five minutes later I need to do it again because more faffing about, sieving and folding has ensued.

I need to get the water boiling for the pasta too as it is a bloody big pot. My scone mix is sitting there begging to be rolled. I get it done, but the pressure is on my pasta now. No emptying tins here of course so I have to peel and chop my own tomatoes, which takes a lot longer than opening a tin. The sauce suffers. I have to crank up the heat on the tomatoes, which everyone knows is a bad idea. Cook them slowly and gently over a long time for maximum depth of flavour.

Suddenly the clouds part and a bright shaft of heavenly light shines upon me. Since I have left it so late to start my sauce, we have run out of chorizo. Hallelujah. But wait. What is this? Another cloud? A rain cloud. Shit. Salami. There is salami instead. Oh well, the sauce tastes like shit anyway so in it goes. I add a quarter of the cream in the recipe. My bread looks and tastes great. My scones too are light and tasty. With the decadent raspberry jam spread on top you would marry me if I promised to make them for you every day. (I won’t). I plate up the Penne with Salami. It looks good. Someone asks if they can try some. “You can, but it tastes disgusting and I wouldn’t feed it to my dog” is my honest reply.

Deep down, I knew last night. I knew this morning, when I went out to wake the cockerels. I knew my pasta would be vile. Because I didn’t believe in it. I didn’t care about it. In fact I wanted it to taste like shit to vindicate my opinion of it. If I hadn’t had my head stuck up my arse I would have started it earlier, let the tomatoes cook slowly and develop their flavour. I’d have got the chorizo, which was milder than the really strong salami. I’d have tasted and seasoned it properly. And it would have tasted good.

Apparently it did taste all right anyway - according to my teacher at least. She thought the salami was too strong and the shorter cooking time explained the lack of flavour. And she told me to cook the pasta more, which is right, because it was extremely al dente, how I like it, and I wasn’t making it for myself. Still, everything else went really well, I applied more pressure, saw a few cracks and now I know where they are. No more cooking until Monday now, and to be honest, I’m not sure I can wait that long.

The afternoon demo promises a lot. My favourite instructor is in again, and he is cooking, amongst other things, crab. I love crab. Now when our man takes the lid off the cold pan of crabs and they move about, a few people (let’s be honest here - girls) make strange noises. They get louder as he picks one up and it wriggles around. “Always use a live crab. If it is deceased, you need to know that it is very recently deceased.” The humane method for bringing down the curtain on a crab’s life is to cover it with cold water and bring to the boil. As it passes a certain temperature, the crab goes to sleep. He puts the crabs back in the pan and covers them with water. As the lid goes on, one of their claws climbs over the rim. With a wry “Sorry Fred” he pushes it back in under the lid and our crab cakes and tarts begin their journey, just as another is about to end.

It is true that I once ate a tempura king spider crab claw that made me cry. The tears didn’t roll down my face as such, but my lip wobbled, I stopped thinking, and I cried inside (like you did at the end of Bambi). It was so unbelievably sweet. And simple. Nothing but the lightest batter and the finest sprinkling of green tea salt. The crab must have been a big bastard because his claw was about a foot long. I hope He had a long and happy life to have gotten that big -swimming around in rock pools, hanging out with lady crabs, that kind of thing. He deserved it for the divine gift He bestowed upon me shortly after his death.

The Japanese man who prepared that dish wasn’t born knowing how to make it. At some stage in his life someone taught him the very same thing I was taught today. It is about learning. Layers and layers of learning. Maybe one day I will have learnt enough to be able to honour a dead crab’s life with the kind of cooking that we mere mortals dare not begin to think ourselves capable of. We are. We just have to believe.