The Decadent Cookbook by Jerome Fletcher Alex Martin Medlar Lucan Durian Gray Page B

I accepted readily, curious to see what sort of regime the old debauchee followed. What I did not realise was that Sir George’s predilection for the corrupt and the rotten extended to the food he ate.
    We were crossing the domed entrance hall, when the chef appeared with two woodcock and a pheasant. Judging by the smell of them, they had been hanging for some time. The flesh of the fowls’ breast appeared dark green in colour. Sir George held the carcasses to his nose, inhaled deeply and told the chef that they were not quite ready. He had noticed the way in which I had recoiled from the birds when they were brought close, however, and as we continued our slow progress towards the dining room, he began a short disquisition, citing Monsieur Brillat-Savarin as his authority, on the optimum condition for cooking and eating pheasant. If it is eaten within three days of its being killed not only does the meat tend to be tough, but its flavour is unremarkable. It lacks the delicacy of fowl and the fragrance of quail, Sir George explained. If, on the other hand, it is left hanging long enough and cooked at just the right moment, its flesh is tender and the taste sublime. It shares the flavour of both poultry and venison. Sir George went on:
    “ This desirable state is reached only when the bird begins to decompose. Only then does the flesh begin to loosen and the fragrance develop.”
    In Sir George’s opinion, the bird should be in such a state of putrefaction that when it is spit roasted one has to wrap a slice of bread around it and tie it up with string to prevent it falling apart. I informed Sir George that I had never been able to eat pheasant after the death of a favourite great uncle of mine who had eaten the bird in such numbers that he had succumbed to lead poisoning as a result of the quantity of shot that he consumed along with them. I was delighted to hear that we would not be eating the pheasant, but immediately became anxious as to what exactly would be served.
    We sat at either end of a mahogany table, in a small, heavily mirrored dining room. At Sir George’s right elbow stood a large earthenware jar. He removed the lid and took out what appeared to be a lump of grey, dried mud. “Thousand Year Old Eggs,” I was informed. “From China, dear boy.”
    Once the mud and the shell had been carefully removed, Sir George sliced the egg into quarters. It was a greenish-yellow in colour and had a pungent, cheesy smell to it. As I was contemplating the prospect of having actually to swallow one of these, Sir George called in the chef to give a detailed account of how the eggs were prepared. The fact that they were only several months old did nothing to restore my rapidly dwindling appetite and I viewed the arrival of the second course with trepidation.
    The chef re-appeared eventually with a large dish of meat and vegetables which looked remarkably appetising. I asked him whether this dish had any particular name. “Olla podrida,” he replied. This left me none the wiser. I glanced in the direction of my host who looked up from his plate and informed me that it was Spanish for ‘rotten stew’.
    Aren’t all Spanish stews rotten, I thought.
    As with the first course, Sir George called upon his chef to recite to us the way in which he had prepared this dish. He read out the recipe he had followed from a book by Mr Richard Ford entitled Gatherings from Spain which was published some thirty years ago.
    It was a very strange affair. There was my host, bent over his plate, and I, sitting somewhat rigidly, eating in silence while the chef intoned this recipe in much the same way that a monk might read from holy scripture while the brothers eat their midday meal in the refectory. It seemed that Sir George took in the reading with as much relish as he took in his rotten stew. The reading ended, I remember, with the following panegyric:

    “No violets come up to the perfume which a cooking olla casts before it; the mouth