Under a Croatian Sun (11 page)

E
very few days, I checked to see if the cricket-playing Luka had returned, and I kept an eye out for young men with the right physique. I had already spotted a few when I was told by Ivana that this blatant eyeing of the well-set-up young men of the village would make people jump to the wrong conclusions about my sexual proclivities and I was to stop.

A week later, Marko heard that Luka would be staying in Germany longer than expected, so I thought I’d start on one of the other projects I had in mind – a restaurant. I’ve always liked to cook, even though most of what I produce comes from the
Blue Peter
school of cooking (the sort that involves tins of tuna, sandwich spread and a lot of crumbled digestive biscuits), but what could be a better way of becoming part of the local scene than running a local restaurant?

I first thought of Mediterranean cuisine, but, as every restaurant already had that, why not English cuisine? After all, bringing your home cooking to your newly adopted homeland
is what people have done for generations – Italians, Indians, Chinese and whoever it was who invented the kebab, to name but a few. I’d never, in fact, come across an English restaurant abroad, but maybe we’d always been too busy planting coffee and moving our battleships around, and we’d never had time to get round to the catering. But what the heck; why shouldn’t I start an English restaurant?

Ivana, imagining the interim chaos in our kitchen, wasn’t so enamoured of the idea, but I enrolled in an Internet cooking course, ordered some cookbooks and started to think up exotic English menus. I took Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as my role model, as my style of cooking was more like his (and I looked more like him than any of the others – well, not quite so chubby, but similarly scrofulous).

In a short time, my skills improved greatly, despite Ivana telling me that my cooking was slapdash and that I made a frightful mess of the kitchen (no sense of what true artistry involves). This, however, did make me think that there was a cookbook waiting for me to write –
The Slapdash Chef
. I could see myself sporting a knowing grin on the cover of a large, glossy cookbook and looking as if I knew a thing or two about life – and what about the TV guest appearances,
Slapdash Chef
demonstrations and swapping witticisms on air with the likes of Nigella, Gordon and Jamie and other great thinkers of our age?

I didn’t tell anyone about my plans, but I looked around for a suitable site and investigated the four existing restaurants. Doing this, I got to know Ranko, the best cook on the island – ‘The Best in the Balkans’, as he so modestly put it. Bald-headed, barrel-chested and fierce-eyed, he had a voice like a bark and dominated his end of the Riva. He had been a sea captain and had retired when the war ended to turn his home into a restaurant. Outside he had erected an awning and put long
tables underneath, and it made a pleasant place to eat, but indoors it looked much like a canteen in a Soviet gulag. No one ate there unless it was raining, but the sight of the bar alone could put anyone off drink for life.

Ranko was anarchic, abrasive and always in trouble with the authorities, but for the locals he was a man who had seen the world and they looked on him with a certain amount of awe. He was also highly astute, and, although he drank too much for his own good, even when drunk nothing escaped his notice – and this meant that in the short time he had been operating he had managed to insult half of the population. Actually his favourite pastime when drunk was insulting Germans, but, when there weren’t any on hand, he’d happily insult anyone. Despite this, the restaurant had quickly become a village social centre – although, whereas at Marko’s you got the benefit of the proprietor’s wise advice, all you got at Ranko’s was the proprietor’s prejudiced opinion.

Being on a strategic corner of the waterfront, Ranko would sit under his awning and glare out at passers-by like a disapproving duchess, either beckoning to them with a wave of a hand, or waving them away as if giving a royal command. As he treated the restaurant like a personal club, many were not welcome – and, being Ranko, he made no bones about who they were. Nonetheless, he was effusively hospitable to those he liked and I started to spend a lot of time with him talking about food and exchanging insults, and, whenever he had cooked up something he was particularly proud of, he’d invite us to join him for supper.

On one of these evenings, we found him in an apron covered with blood and looking as if he’d spent the afternoon butchering piglets in a slaughterhouse. The wives of the other guests were trying to take it off him, but he was protesting
vociferously that it served as a reminder of the unavoidable relationship between a violent death and their dinner. But the wives were resolute, and in the end he was made to take it off, leaving them free to attend to the life-threatening draughts that their men might be standing in.

Once the matter of the air currents had been attended to, we all sat at the long table and the feast began. A large tureen of fish soup, which was simply delicious, was put in the middle and an equally large tureen of snails cooked in olive oil and garlic followed. Thinking that this was all, I had seconds of both, and was sitting back with my stomach bubbling away like a test tube in one of those Frankenstein films, when I saw Ranko’s squat frame emerging from the kitchen with another even bigger cauldron. Hare cooked with plums (
Zec u Slive
), he announced as he placed it on the table and lifted the lid. It smelled heavenly, but I was absolutely full and down the other end of the table I could see the look of panic on Ivana’s face. She knew how our polite requests for small portions were always ignored.

Exchanges with Ranko would go something like this:

‘Come! Eat more!’

‘Thanks, Ranko; that was simply delicious, but I’m really full.’

‘A small piece. Please!’

‘I really can’t. I’ve eaten too much of your wonderful cooking already.’

‘You have eaten nothing!’

‘But I’ve eaten a huge amount. Even I will get fat if I go on like this!’

‘Hah! So our English friends do not like our cooking. They eat at restaurant in London and Paris and on island we not so good! Eh?’

And, of course, we’d have to capitulate.

Ranko ladled out the food from the cauldron and I mushed the sauce into the baked potato. Delicious! Both tangy and creamy at the same time. The combination, everyone agreed, was a new height of gastronomic delight.

Ranko’s friends all wanted to know about English food.

‘What is it like? What do you eat at home?’ asked a friend from Ranko’s Navy days. ‘I have heard of roast beef and fish and chips, but what else do English people eat?’

Keen to pave the way for the English restaurant, I gave a glowing account of English cuisine and told them there were more Michelin stars awarded to restaurants in London than in Paris.

No one believed me.

‘Who’s ever heard of an “English” restaurant?’

‘I’ve never seen one anywhere in the world.’

‘There are many English pubs in Europe now, but no restaurants. What is wrong with English food?’

The picture I’d been treasuring of my English restaurant juddered in its frame and Ranko’s naval friend continued to heap scorn on English cuisine.

‘But why have the English never learned to cook?’ asked a professor from Split. ‘The French invaded you in 1066, but my French colleagues tell me it never made a difference to your cooking. They say that the only dish the English ever cooked well was Joan of Arc!’

Ranko gave his barking laugh.

‘There are even German restaurants in foreign countries,’ the professor went on, ‘and we all know what we think about German food!’

‘Yes, I went to Germany once. My son married a German girl,’ said the naval friend, who, by his size, looked like he ate a lot. ‘You can’t believe how plain the food is there. All they eat
is kraut, kartoffel, knobslauchs gristle or some other unmentionable parts of the pig. And they drink beer with everything. Do they do that in England, too?’

I opened my mouth to defend my country, but he continued. ‘And my daughter-in-law feeds it all to my grandchildren and my son doesn’t complain. Not wanting to offend, I couldn’t say anything myself to her, but I told my son he should get her to feed them properly. I think he’s afraid of her, though.’

‘Our sons aren’t the men of the house anymore,’ grunted Ranko.

Murmurs of assent from the other men around the table.

Ranko turned to me and said in English, ‘And German man he eat the horse. Croatian man he not have money like German man, but no Croatian man eat his horse. And I think no English man eat his horse. Yes?’

‘Well, I don’t think we would unless we had to,’ I said guardedly.

‘I am eating snake and crocodile in Africa, and once I am eating a rat,’ said the naval man in English, ‘but I am eating a German before I am eating my horse!’

At this, Ivana promptly did the nose trick and trying to recover she half fell off her seat. Ranko reached over to steady her and pat her on the back, and, when her spluttering had subsided, he finished wiping the hare juice up with bread. ‘Croatian man, he always eating good,’ he said. ‘Even in Roman time Croatian man eating good. But English man – what he eating in Roman time? Stew of dog and turnip. Yes?’

Once again, I rose for my country. ‘But look at all the celebrity chefs we’ve got!’

‘Chefs not celebrity peoples,’ said Ranko dismissively.

‘Not anymore. Celebrity chefs have star status these days. In our day, pop stars, film stars and sportsmen were the celebrities
and chefs wore funny white hats and were kept out of sight chopping liver in the kitchen. But these days chefs are up there in the spotlight along with Madonna, David Beckham and Pippa Middleton’s bottom. You could do with some celeb chefs down here.’

Ranko gave a snort. ‘In Croatia, chef not on television wearing silk shirt and yellow trouser. He in kitchen working hard!’

The company took their cue and were full of praise for the skills that Ranko had displayed that evening. Ranko waved his hand like a magnanimous king telling his lackeys he was glad they’d enjoyed the feast he’d just given them. ‘Best in Balkans!’ he called to me across the table and thumped his chest. ‘Maybe England BBC make Ranko new “celebrity chef” and he make much money! Yes?’

The argument about English food continued, but, not wanting to give Ranko any more anti-English food ammunition, I discreetly omitted to say that what was eaten in English restaurants wasn’t exactly what English people ate at home. Thank heaven I hadn’t told him about my restaurant plans.

‘Something will have to be done about England’s position in the world cooking league if my restaurant’s going to take off,’ I said to Ivana as we walked home.

‘Well, it’s going to stay at the bottom of the league as long as your mother’s still cooking,’ said Ivana.

(Ivana has been unfairly prejudiced against English cuisine ever since her introduction to it by my mother, whose signature menu is boiled mince with mash and carrots followed by gooseberry fool.)

Ignoring Ivana’s disrespect, I continued with my cooking course and tried out recipes in the cookbooks. But I didn’t dare go near the cooker when Karmela was around. Given her views
on men in the kitchen (and men in general), I kept away, and for half the week we ate whatever she cooked for us. There was a
Brodetto
she made out of sprats, eel and squid that was positively inspirational, but most of what she dished up must have come from a Red Army Canteen Cook Book. I spent years at a boarding school where we were fed on pig’s crotch, tapioca, margarine and cocoa, and I’d always thought that I could eat anything, but that was before I’d tried some of Karmela’s specials. The worst was a meaty mush she called
Pasticada
that had the consistency of wallpaper paste, and the next worst was a hostile-looking sausage thing covered in a gelatinous substance that would have come in handy for plugging holes in World War II aircraft fuselages. (I never found out the name of that one, but avoid it if you ever come across something that looks like that.) We pretended we ate everything, of course, but, as Karmela checked the bins daily in her never-ending quest for recycling opportunities, I had to bury it under cover of darkness. Someone did once remark about a smell of dead dog down that end of the garden, but I managed to put them off the scent with some upbeat talk about the strength of Croatian fertilisers.

With no one except Ivana to talk with about my restaurant plans (I didn’t want anyone in the village – and Ranko in particular – to know about it yet), I felt at rather a loss. I’d always had people at work to talk to, or my fellow cricketers on weekends, so I missed having others to talk over my ideas with. The Test Match had just started, too, and I really missed not having my friends around. We used to spend hours watching the Test together (and all the endless replays). Sad, some might say (and my children certainly say so), but perhaps that’s what cricket is all about – a bunch of blokes going over what should have happened while getting steadily more plastered. I suppose it
must seem very odd to someone not English that so many reasonably intelligent men the length and breadth of our green and pleasant land spend so much of their time doing this, but I do remember Frank Muir once saying that the mark of an Englishman is someone who opens his newspaper at the sports page before turning to the news.

The oddest part of all, come to think about it, was that our chosen team was almost invariably the loser, and most of the time we’d be watching an England sunk for 185 with the Aussies at 462 for six – and, although none of us would say it out loud, at the beginning of a game we’d be expecting that, even after a long struggle, a plucky retaliation and a stubborn last-ditch fight, we’d end up as the losers. What’s more, I swear I could detect an expression of wonderment on the England faces whenever we did happen to win; as if they hadn’t believed that victory was really on the cards. But, then again, that’s all part of being English, I suppose.