Warning - some characters may contain shot
The last time I cooked for Danny the Champion of the World he had just returned to the caravan with his father. They were exhausted. Contrary to what Mr Dahl would have us believe they had not gone to the village in search of an oven. After the success with doping the pheasants, they had gone back to Mr Victor Hazell’s estate because they’d ‘had an idea for the shoot’ as they put it.
They were famished so were thrilled to find that the pheasant casserole I had prepared was ready to eat. As you will know, the birds were booty from Danny and his dad administering a soporific to that nasty old landowner’s stock of pheasants. Raisins laced with sleeping pills. Very clever. And it had given them another idea.
If you remember, Mr Hazell had arranged a shoot for a load of fat cats he was trying to impress and it had been ruined due to all the game being asleep and therefore unavailable for shooting. When they had come round, most of the birds had flown away but some had overdosed on the raisins (there’s always a few, aren’t there?) and Danny and his father had taken advantage of their demise. He had called me to the old gypsy caravan two days earlier and asked me to make the stew. He said they would be hungry. And they were. They hadn't told me what they had been up to on the estate but given all the birds had flown, I suspect that the ‘idea for the shoot’ was inventive. The whole village and local area knew that Mr Hazel still had a houseful, despite there being no game to massacre.
‘What are we having with the stew?’ Danny asked me. I knew he was asking for a reason. He was hoping.
‘Soft polenta,’ I replied.
‘My favourite,’ he shouted, clapping with delight, and doing a little jig as his father looked on, a smile spread wide across his face.
‘Will it have way too much butter and parmesan stirred in right at the end?’ Danny asked.
‘It will,’ I replied.
‘And did you flavour the water with bay and thyme first?’
‘I did. Just for you.’
He did another little dance. It made my heart warm to see such glee.
‘Tell me how you did the pheasant. It smells divine,’ Danny’s father, William, said.
‘I did something I haven't done before and now that I have done it, I can't believe I haven't always done it.’
‘Which was?’ William asked.
‘I skinned the birds, rendered the fat and used that for the dish. Everything has taken on added depth. I cooked some lardons, added the pheasant fat, then sweated the onions in it - for hours. Reduced them by about eighty percent.’
‘Eighty percent? Jesus. How did you manage that?’
‘I brought an induction hob with me and after sweating them for a couple of hours on a low heat, I removed the lid and sweated it for another 4 hours on an even lower heat. Look.’
I lifted a little egg cup for them to try. Inside was a gloopy, glisteny, grey brown goo.
‘Try it,’ I said, offering them a teaspoon. ‘I kept a bit back cos I knew you'd be interested.’
They tried it and looked at each other, raising their eyebrows and shaking their heads.
‘Hot damn, that tastes good,’ Danny said. His father opened his mouth and then closed it. Hot damn? Not exactly the devil's own expletive. Not for a boy who had been eleven years old for decades. They even swore on the BBC Radio Four now, for fuck’s sake.
‘Six hours to sweat some onions,’ William said, shaking his head. And then, under his breath, ‘Hot damn.’
‘Then what?’ Danny asked. ‘And don't go on. We need to eat and get back to the shoot, okay?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said, pinging my arm up to attention like a railway signal. He was a commanding young man when he wanted to be. ‘As you know, I quartered the pheasants when I first got here and marinated them in red wine, orange peel, juniper, a clove, pepper, thyme, bay, onion and garlic and left them overnight.
The next day, I drained the meat of the marinade and dried them, then seared them in a nice pool of the pheasant fat. Whilst they were colouring in the pan, I set the strained marinade liquid on a low heat. By the time all the meat was seared, the protein had separated from the marinade and I strained it through a muslin ready for the pot later.
Once those onions I mentioned earlier were finally ready, I added them to the pheasant and deglazed the pan with them, scrape scrape scraping all those little bits back into the sauce. I ignited a good gurgle of calvados in the pan, then added more red wine and brought it all to a near boil. Then I added the marinade and, catching it before the stew actually did boil, I turned the heat down to a low medium. Then I let it cook for an hour and a half.’
‘So long? Wouldn't the breast be over cooked?’ William asked.
‘They were all old birds,’ I said unkindly, ‘Yep. Tough old birds. Wrung out. No tenderness left.’
Father and son didn't quite know what to say to that so I clapped my hands. ‘Let's eat.’
I poured out the polenta, golden with promise, onto each plate. Then I put a leg and a breast on each one and poured sauce over.
We had a bottle of Nebbiolo whilst we ate and they told me what they had in mind for the shoot. Dusk was coming and the game would be trying to get up into the trees for safety. Not that it would do them much good.
‘Would you like a gun?’ William asked me.
Er…yes,’ I replied.
We drove to the estate in a Land Rover father and son were fixing up. Dusk was falling but we still had enough time.
‘It’s not exactly sporting,’ William said, leading us into the woods. ‘But then this lot know all about that sort of thing, don't they? And there are no particular rules here. If you see one, he’s yours.’
As he said this, a white figure shot from behind a bush and began trying to scale a tree. It looked like a pig on two legs. Flaccid, fat with bonuses, engorged on pensions. Murky white in the coming dusk.
‘Banker!’ William shouted, raising his shotgun. ‘Mine.’ And he blew the banker into the bushes before he even got a foot off the ground.
To my right, I saw movement. ‘Media mogul,’ Danny shouted, swinging towards it. ‘Mine.’
Fin
Cover illustration Jill Bennet
Marvellous...always unexpected!
What jolly fun.