Extreme Vegan

The black Delia contains a single recipe for vegans, and despite my devotion to the culinary arts, it's always made me wince a tiny little bit when I read it. It's the same kind of wince you see when people are told that lobsters are boiled alive (and appear to scream) in order to be cooked, only much harder to spot. Whereas I have no love for vegans, who appear to despise their lives and seek to make themselves miserable by depriving themselves of all flavour and taste, the recipe is a little extreme.

It does taste fantastic when it's cooked, however. And in the final reckoning, the end always justifies the means when you're cooking. Certainly when I'm cooking, anyway.

I reflected briefly on this as I took the third leek and forced it into the vegan, who was now unconscious and curled into the fetal position. This is what is referred to in the book as an Advanced recipe, which means that the chef will require greater-than-average upper body strength, mostly to subdue and tenderise the vegan prior to stuffing it. There are two stuffings; one a vegetable based one and the other a standard farce made from pork. After that it all gets a little more complicated, and the culinary code of conduct prohibits me discussing it further.

I'd not intended to cook vegan at all; for the assassination I'd been hired to carry out I'd intended to use a basic food poisoning using elements of the cutlery polish to ensure that I was above suspicion. In fact there were seven ounces of chrome and an ounce-and-a-half of thorium in my chef's kit that I'd been expecting to add to a veloute that I'd serve with a Blanquette de Volaille aux Champignons. When I arrived though, and was faced with a whey-faced steward with a crooked back, a hooked nose and a mealy-mouth who informed me only then that the banquet, to start in a mere five hours time, was to be vegan, I saw red. The same red I saw when I passed the first practical at Chef School.

The steward is in the pantry on a meat-hook, bleeding out, waiting to be made into an andouilette. The guest of honour, a speaker for the rights of carrots, is now dish of the day instead. It pains me that probably no-one will get to taste how good this dish actually is, as my new plan is to mould the dish around a hedgehog of carrot spears, which is turn will be set into a small lump of C4 with a radio-detonated fuse. There will be collateral damage, but the contract clearly states that the kill may be a little untidy if necessary.

There have to be limits in my profession, and vegetarianism is definitely a step too far.

Cookery School II

It was the second week of the cookery school. Of our original class, only eight were left. We were told that the rest had left, unable to cope with the rigours of class, but none of us had seen them go. They'd left in the middle of the night (though they'd not have had much choice as we did 18 hour shifts in the kitchen), taken silently from amongst us.

I've described the events of the first three days in a previous post; the next four for the week were very similar, with two more people escaping from the stocks group into the group of people considered capable of cooking.

On the first day of the second week, we were given our Escoffier and our Delia. Escoffier was, of course, the Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery and our Delia was the jet black special edition that you can't obtain unless you know the ISBN number and have clearance from MI6. The one where she discusses the use of grenades and net curtains for creating mince when you're in a hurry.

The second week started with a day of wilderness training. We were woken before dawn, issued chef's blacks (similar to chef's white but only used for covert operations) and driven in a van with blacked-out windows to eight different locations, one for each of us. I was the last out of the van; the instructor handed me my menu, crossed himself, and saluted me. I saluted back, and then the van was moving off even as the instructor pulled himself back inside.

I looked at my menu. I was to produce a four course meal; hors d'oeuvres, soup, meat course and dessert. All I had with me were my knives, a length of cheesewire, some matches, and my copy of Delia that I'd taken to sleeping with against my heart. I looked around me -- scrubland, that could have been a heath or a common somewhere, with no signs of human habitation in any direction. Little in the way of edible plants, less in the way of wildlife I could catch, kill and cook. Not necessarily in that order.

I was just turning to look at the tracks that the van had left, when a flash of movement caught my eye. My hand pulled a knife from my bandolier and threw it slightly ahead of the movement, and as the knife left my hand I turned my head to look at what had caught my eye. The rabbit bolted again when it saw my head move, and the knife caught it squarely in the chest. I grinned; now things were going to be a lot easier.

I slit the rabbit from throat to tail and staked it out on the ground, making sure that it was firmly fixed and couldn't be easily pulled free. Then I tracked the van until it reached a road, and headed into civilisation. It took a couple of hours, no more. I came to a small village, and picked the largest house I could find; to my surprise there were only three occupants, a married couple and their daughter. I tied them into their beds, picked up the dog and a couple of pet parrots, and started cooking.

The meal took another couple of hours to prepare, and I was beginning to sweat a little now, as I still had to get back and lay it out to present it. I left the family a dish of foie du chien a la lyonnais on the table as a thankyou for their hospitality and left their front door open when I left so that someone would find them and untie them. Then I hotfooted it back to the scrubland.

The rabbit had done its job; the carrion birds still circling overhead identified where I needed to be, and I had the dishes all laid out before the instructor returned. He tasted each dish, frowned a little at what he felt was underseasoning of the soup, but finally nodded. I had passed.

When I got into the van, we returned to the cookery school. I couldn't help but noticed that there were now only seven of us, which meant that I'd been expected to pass all along. And that the final week of the course was an elimination week.

Cookery school

I was getting slightly worried about this cooking school. I'd been here three days so far, out of the two-week learn-to-cook holiday I was on, and it already felt like a lifetime. I was crossing the days off in my little pocket diary already, and would probably have left quietly in the night if they didn't lock us in the dormitories.

The dormitories were just that: long, low-ceilinged rooms with twelve beds down each of the long walls with a locker at the foot and a wardrobe-cum-cupboard at the side. Each bed had sheets and a single thin blanket, and when I opened my cupboard there was a pin-up in there, presumably from the previous occupant, of an asparagus stalk. With some stains on it.

On the first day we had looked in dismay at the beds, put what we could of our luggage in the lockers and wardrobe, and then looked on in further dismay as everything that wouldn't fit was taken away from us to be burned. Luckily I always travel light, and hadn't actually be able to fill my locker or wardrobe, so I kept all of my stuff. The woman who'd arrived with a toddler had been told that either it went in the locker or went to be burned. She went hysterical, and we've seen neither of them since.

The first day in the kitchen was spent on knife work. All day. 18 hours long to be precise, chopping things into batons, into julienne, into dice and brunoise. My fingers were bleeding at the end of it from the numerous occasions I'd slipped, and my arms were aching as though I'd been lifting weights. I could barely see from the tears that the onions had induced. I was so tired I slept without noticing if the bed was hard or not, or if I was warm enough with only a sheet and a green, military issue blanket.

The second day we were split into two groups. My group was announced to contain only the people who were competent to cook, and there were four of us. The other group, containing 19 people were told they weren't fit to clean our knives, and set to making stock. We continued to hone our knife skills; we were given double the quantity of vegetables to chop as the day before, and told we had only 15 hours to do it all in. I chopped like a maniac. It helped that I didn't want to look up: the splashes and the screams told me how the other group were being punished for failing to get their stock right.

When the 15 hours were up I'd chopped up all of my vegetables and was so edgy that I was sharpening my knife every two minutes because I had nothing left to chop. When a slab of beef was slapped in front of me and I was told to fillet I'd started before the instructor has taken his hand away. As he walked off I heard him saying quietly, "this one has potential."

That night I took the blankets from the beds on either side of me, and annexed a locker and a wardrobe that I didn't need. I'm not sure why, but I felt a definite need to exert my authority. No-one tried to object; they just got on with shivering in silent misery.

Today, the third day, two people had graduated from the stock group to my group, and the rest all seemed to have burns and scalds; mostly hands, but one or two faces too. When I came into the kitchen I'd pulled my knife from my belt automatically and looked from something to chop or to fillet, and the rest of the students had backed away from me. The instructor looked at me appraisingly, and then at a live chicken chained at the ankles to the long steel instructor's table at the front of the classroom. He nodded at the chicken, and said,

"You have three minutes to kill, clean and joint the bird. You may leave the feathers on."

A red haze seems to descend, and I can't remember what happened after that, but I remember moving fast, and hearing a high-pitched squawk. My memory only clearly comes back with me shouting "2 minutes 48" and hurling the chicken head at one of the slaves in the second group. It hit her between the eyes, and she collapsed to the floor. As she did so I said curtly, "Pick it up and use it for stock," and I'm ashamed to say I don't honestly know if I meant the chicken head or the woman.

I felt the chef's hand on my shoulder, and he said quietly, "You will make a good chef-assassin, we will move you up to the advanced course tomorrow."

And that's what's got me worried; I don't know if I can cope with the advanced course....