"Whats -- hic -- this?"

"What we need here is a congtinental -- hic -- chef to improve le ton," menaces the housekeeper, tossing me mam a killing look as she sweeps out the door for me mam is a simple Yorkshire lass for all she has magic in her fingers but no room for two queens in this hive, the housekeeper hates her. And the housekeeper is pricked perpetually by the fancy for the importation of a Carême or a Soyer with moustaches like hatracks to croquembouche her and milly filly her as is all the rage.

For Madam would touch nothing but oysters and grapes on ice three times a day, due to the refinement of her sensibility, while Sir fasted until a devilled bone at sundown, his tongue having been burned out by curry when he was governing a bit of Poonah. (I reckon those Indians hotted up his fodder out of spite. Oh, the cooks vengeance, when it strikes -- terrible!) And as for the Shooters of Grouse, all they wanted was sandwiches for hors doeuvres, sandwiches for entrées, followed by sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, and their hip flasks kept replenished, oh, yes, wash it down with the amber fluid and who can tell how it tastes?

But what a clang and clamour she unleashes with that demand; as if shed let off a bomb in a hardware store, for all present (except my mother and myself) attack their improvised instruments with renewed vigour, chanting in unison:

"The kitchen child! The kitchen child! You cant turn out the kitchen child!"

"Oh, madamissima!" quavers the poor little skivvyette. "Tis nobbut the cooks babby!"

And the very first soufflé that ever in her life as cook me mam was called upon to make, ordered up by some French duc, house guest of Sir and Madam, me mam plea九*九*藏*书*网sed as punch to fix it for him since few if any fins becs pecked their way to our house, not even during the two weeks of the Great Grouse Shoot when nobs rolled up in droves to score the feathered booty of the skies. Especially not then. Palates like shoe leather. "Pearls before swine," my mother would have said as she reluctantly sent the four and twenty courses of her Art up to the dining room, except that pigs would have exhibited more gourmandise. I tell you, the English country house, yes! thats the place for grub; but, only when Sir and Madam are pas chez lui. It is the staff who keep up the standards.

Into the oven goes the soufflé; the oven door slams shut.

It being, as you might yourself compute, a good three months off October, Sir and Madam being in London the housekeeper maintains a fine style all by herself, sitting in her parlour partaking of the best Bohea from a Meissen cup, to which she adds a judicious touch of rum from the locked bottles to which shes forged a key in her ample leisure. The housekeepers little skivvy, that she keeps to fetch, carry and lick boot, just topping the tea-cup up with old Jamaica, all hell breaks loose below stairs as if a Chinese orchestra started up its woodblocks and xylophones, crash, wallop.

"Born in a trunk", they say when a theatrical sups grease-paint with mothers milk, and if there be a culinary equivalent of the phrase then surely I merit it, for was I not conceived the while a soufflé rose? A lobster soufflé, very choice, twenty-five minutes in a medium oven.

That was when too much cayenne went in. She always regretted that.

"Out of the house for this!" cries the housekeeper. "Hic," she adds.

"To hell with it!&qu

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ot;

The first toys I played with were colanders, egg whisks and saucepan lids. I took my baths in the big tureen in which the turtle soup was served. They gave up salmon until I could toddle because, as for my crib, what else but the copper salmon kettle? And this kettle was stowed way up high on the mantelshelf so I could snooze there snug and warm out of harms way, soothed by the delicious odours and appetising sounds of the preparation of nourishment, and there I cooed my way through babyhood above that kitchen as if I were its household deity high in my tiny shrine.

"Lawks a mercy, child," says she. "I never thought to ask. I were that worried the wallop I give the oven door would bring the soufflé down."

"A bonny boy!" croons me mam, planting a smacking kiss on the tender forehead pressed against her pillowing bosom.

The kitchen brigade made such a din that the housekeeper retreated to revive herself with another tot of rum in her private parlour, for, faced with a mutiny amongst the pans, she discovered little valour in her spirit and went to sulk in her tent.

Conceived upon a kitchen table, born upon a kitchen floor; no bells rang to welcome me but, far more aptly, my arrival heralded by a bang! bang! bang! on every skillet in the place, a veritable fusillade of copper-bottom kitchen tympani; and the merry clatter of ladle against dish-cover; and the very turnspit dogs all went: "Bow wow!"

Due to my mothers corpulence, which is immense, shes round as the "o" in "obese", and the great loyalty and affection towards her of all the kitchen staff, the housekeeper knew nothing of my imminence but, amid her waxing wroth, also glad to hear it, since s九九藏书he thought she spied a way to relieve my mother of her post due to this unsolicited arrival and then nag Sir and Madam to get in some mincing and pomaded gent to chaudfroid and gêlée and butter up. Below stairs she descends forthwith, a stately yet none too stable progress due to the rum with a dash of tea she sips all day, the skivvy running in front of her to throw wide the door.

Then, just as she bent over the range to stir the flour into the butter, a pair of hands clasped tight around her waist. Thinking, at first, it was but kitchen horseplay, she twitched her ample hips to put him off as she slid the egg yolks into the roux. But as she mixed in the lobster meat, diced up, all nice, she felt those hands stray higher.

But not quite exemplary. The cook met her match in the eater. The housekeeper brings his plate herself, slaps it down. "He said: "Trop de cayenne," and scraped it off his plate into the fire," she announces with a gratified smirk. She is a model of refinement and always very particular about her aspirates. She hiccups. She even says the "h" in "hic".

What a spectacle greets her! Raphael might have sketched it, had he been in Yorkshire at the time. My mother, wreathed in smiles, enthroned on a sack of spuds with, at her breast, her babe, all neatly swaddled in a new-boiled pudding cloth and the entire kitchen brigade arranged around her in attitudes of adoration, each brandishing a utensil and giving out there with that merry rattle of the ladles, yours trulys first lullaby.

My mother weeps for shame.

"The kitchen child!"

And as she was folding in the toppling contents of the bowl of beaten egg-white, God knows what it was he got up to but so much so she flingswww.99lib.net all into the white dish with abandon and:

So me mam took great pains with the construction of this, her very first lobster soufflé, sending the boy who ground knives off on his bike to the sea, miles, for the beast itself and then the boiling of it alive, how it come squeaking piteously crawling out of the pot etc. etc. etc. so me mam all a-flutter before she so much as separated the eggs.

"For isnt it Alberlin, chef to the dear Devonshires; and Crépin, at the Duchess of Sutherlands. Then theres Labalme, with the Duke of Beauforts household, doncherno. . . and the Queen, bless her, has her Ménager. . . while were stuck with that fat cow who cant speak nothing but broad Yorkshire, never out of her carpet slippers. . ."

At three years old she gave me flour and lard and straightaway I invented shortcrust. I being too little to manage the pin, she hoists me on her shoulders to watch her as she rolls out the dough upon the marble slab, then sets me to stamp out the tartlets for myself, tears of joy at my precocity trickling down her cheeks, lets me dollop on the damson jam and lick the spoon for my reward. By three and a half, Ive progressed to rough puff and, after that, no holding me. She perches me on a tall stool so I can reach to stir the sauce, wraps me in her pinny that goes round and round and round me thrice, tucks it in at the waist else I trip over it head first into my own Hollandaise. So I become her acolyte.

But, no. The soufflé went up like a montgolfier and, as soon as its golden head knocked imperiously against the oven door, she bust through the veil I have discreetly drawn over this scene of passion and emerged, smoothing her apron, in order to extract the exemplary dish amidst oohs and aahs and of the assemb

九-九-藏-书-网

led kitchen staff, some forty-five in number.

"The cooks baby?!?"

And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kitchen? Those vaults of soot-darkened stone far above me, where the hams and strings of onions and bunches of dried herbs dangle, looking somewhat like the regimental banners that unfurl above the aisles of old churches. The cool, echoing flags scrubbed spotless twice a day by votive persons on their knees. The scoured gleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, an altar, before which my mother bowed in perpetual homage, a fringe of sweat upon her upper lip and fire glowing in her cheeks.

"But, mam!" I often begged her. "Who was that man?"

"What on earth are the -- hick -- lower ordures up to?" elocutes the housekeeper in ladylike and dulcet tones, giving the ear of the skivvy a quick but vicious tug to jerk the gossip out of her.

Alas, my cradle song soon peters out in the odd thwack and tinkle as the housekeeper cast her coldest eye.

And that was the truth of the matter; who else could I claim as my progenitor if not the greedy place itself, that, if it did not make me, all the same, it caused me to be made? Not one scullery maid nor the littlest vegetable boy could remember who or what it was which visited my mother that soufflé morning, every hand in the kitchen called to cut sandwiches, but some fat shape seemed to have haunted the place, drawn to the kitchen as a ghost to the dark; had not that gourmet due kept a gourmet valet? Yet his outlines melt like aspic in the heat from the range.

I draw a veil.