cook sparrow
Gut, pluck, remove legs and clean carcase in water. Alternate layers of salt and cleaned sparrow in a jar. When needed, wash away salt and fry with a little olive oil. In a separate pan fry onions until clear and add diced tomatoes. Put sparrows on top of sauce and garnish dish with basil. Tastes like chicken.
To cook cat
Gut animal, skin, remove head and tail, cut off paws and lower limb at joint, wash body cavity thoroughly. Carcass looks just like rabbit and can be roasted in similar way. Spit, brush with oil, season with tarragon. Cook until juices run clear when meat pierced with a knife. Tastes like chicken.
To cook dog
Gut, skin and joint. The thighs are too fatty to make good eating, the flanks can be trimmed for steak, the rest can be stewed or fried at a pinch. Boiling the meat before roasting or frying removes fat and helps lessen the distinctive flavour. Sauce heavily or season with chillies. Tastes like sour mutton.
The sad truth is that, apart from dog, one animal tastes much like another, and those that don’t taste like chicken mostly taste like beef, with the rest tasting like mutton. The secret of variety for meat is in the spicing. Vegetables, fruits, herbs have far wider variations in taste than the creatures that pick, browse or gnaw upon them. Even the way we describe the taste of meats other than the obvious ones is wrong. We say cat tastes like chicken when, had we been weaned on kitten stew, we’d say chicken tastes like cat.
‘To cook mice’ was my first recipe, written in careful lettering in a small notebook stolen from a master. I was ten and lied about the taste. It tasted more like chicken than beef because my palate was too inexperienced to make a better comparison. A cat and a dog changed my life. The cat came first, although the cat in this bit of the story is not that cat, simply a wild cat found trapped in a bush. But before this cat came a whipping. The old headmaster died the winter I was nine. The school was hushed into silence and slow movement. We knew in our common rooms and dorms that something was wrong because that afternoon’s lessons were cancelled and the doctor was seen entering the gates in his cart and was hurried up the main stairs by the old headmaster’s son himself.
The whole school attended his funeral.
The year I was ten no one died – and the year I turned eleven Dr Faure arrived. He taught Latin and theology and disliked me from the start. He disliked my face, my friendship with Emile, which he found suspicious, and he disliked that I was due to stay with Emile during the coming holiday when the terms of my attendance said I should remain at St Luce. He whipped me in his first week at school for being disgusting.
That is, he whipped me for eating a raw snail. Snails were common in the stews we were given and the masters ate snails boiled in butter and seasoned with garlic. This was different apparently. Because I took the snail from a pile of night soil collected from the school’s latrines and I ate the snail raw. He announced he would transfer that rawness from the snail to my buttocks. After Friday prayers and the blessing, I was called forward, climbed the steps to the dais, and told to drop my breeches and grip the far edge of a small table – a position that left me stretched across the table with my behind exposed.
He used a switch of willow twigs, soaked overnight in a tub of brine that was carried in between two boys. The salt water makes the twigs subtle and acts as an astringent to stop the stripes going bad. The first blow made me jump so fiercely my knuckles cracked where I gripped the table. I was eleven. Everyone I knew in the world was watching in silence as I fought the pain that scalded up my body. Emile had told me to scream. He said people like Dr Faure liked you to scream. There would be fewer strokes and it would be over quicker if I screamed. Only my throat was too tight and the scream would not reach past my teeth.
The second blow was fiercer, the third so fierce that the wall of the assembly hall swam in and out of darkness. A whimper left my lips and I heard Dr Faure mutter in satisfaction. I kept silent for the fourth blow, helped by the darkness that washed over me the second it landed. The fifth had my mouth open in a silent scream and I would have howled my lungs out with the sixth had I not looked up and seen a girl staring at me through a crack in an almost closed door. Her dark hair was greasy, her eyes wide and shocked, her mouth slightly open. She was my age, perhaps a year older.
A girl, in a school of a hundred and fifty boys.
The sixth blow shocked me into a low moan and the headmaster stepped forward before Dr Faure could decide to launch another. When I looked up the girl was gone and the side door to the assembly room shut again. I was helped to my feet by the headmaster and put into the care of two of my classmates, who were told to take me to my classroom and report to his wife if I showed any sign of fever. Dr Faure glowered at the fuss and scowled at me so fiercely I grinned, which only made him angrier.
They clapped me into the classroom, the other boys. I was a hero, the boy who took six strokes of the birch and barely murmured. I had to drop my trews and stand there while classmate after classmate came to stare at the bleeding. It was the best, several agreed, beating the existing record for damage, which had been inflicted by ten strokes of the cane laid on with full force by the headmaster the summer before. The previous record holder spent a full minute with his face a hand’s breadth from my rear while the class waited in silence for his verdict. Magnanimously, he agreed this was better.
A round of clapping saluted his sportsmanship.
‘Are you an idiot?’ Emile hissed, dragging me to one side when the clapping was done and the class had returned to flicking over the pages of the books they should have been reading or baiting each other. ‘He’ll just whip you again harder.’
Emile was usually good at knowing what others thought but he was wrong in this and I told him so. Dr Faure could not risk that I would hold out again. He’d failed to get a scream out of me and the headmaster had stopped him before he could inflict lasting damage. I’d made an enemy for life; neither Emile nor I doubted that. But Dr Faure could not risk another so very public humiliation in front of the boys. We should have guessed his response. Since he couldn’t break me he would break Emile. It happened the following week. Some imagined infraction on Monday afternoon saw Emile stretched across a table in the assembly hall on Tuesday morning, Dr Faure with a sneer on his face and a birch gripped firmly in his hand. Emile did scream. He screamed so loud that some of the smaller boys covered their ears. The headmaster stepped forward when blood began to flow after the third stroke, not to stop the whipping but to indicate Dr Faure should lessen his vigour. It made no difference, Emile was sobbing by then.
No one clapped him into our classroom. No one suggested he drop his breeches so I could see if I’d lost my title, although his bruising was every bit as bad and his welts as bloodily raw as mine had been. They avoided him as if cowardice was catching. His bourgeois birth, the fact his grandmother was meant to be Jewish, his going home at weekends were rolled out as reasons for his weakness. He went to bed still crying and woke looking even more hollow-eyed than the day before. At lunchtime, unable to stand his silent tears or the insults of my companions, I went to find the headmaster’s wife and insisted Emile had a fever.
‘What are the symptoms?’
‘He cries,’ I said.
She sighed heavily, muttered something about that bloody man and told me to fetch Emile immediately. He should spend the night in the sanatorium and since I was his friend I could sleep there too. In the meantime I was to bring her Emile and then return to my lessons. I was d’Aumout, wasn’t I? I agreed this was me and did what she said, collecting Emile under the scornful gaze of my classmates. ‘I’ll see you later,’ I told him.
‘Don’t bother,’ he said bitterly. ‘I want to be alone anyway.’
‘Don’t you want revenge?’ The plan had been forming since that morning. It was risky but what good plan wasn’t? And it would give Emile back his confidence and even impress the rest of the class. Not waiting for his reply, I left him at the door of the sanatorium,