A Literary Feast: Recreating 10 Fictional Meals in Brooklyn
- c/o marthastewart.com
He empties the last of a Côtes du Rhône into a glass, puts the TV on mute and sets about stripping and chopping three onions. Impatient of the papery outer layers, he makes a deep incision, forcing his thumb in four layers deep and ripping them away, wasting a third of the flesh. He chops the remainder rapidly and tips it into a casserole with a lot of olive oil…He strips and chops eight fat garlic cloves and adds them to the onions. From recipes he only draws the broadest principles…Into his palm he empties several dried red chillies from a pot and crushes them between his hands and lets the flakes fall with their seeds into the onions and garlic…Onto the softened onions and garlic—pinches of saffron, some bay leaves, orange-peel gratings, oregano, five anchovy fillets, two tins of peeled tomatoes…Into a stockpot he eases the skeletons of three skate. Their heads are intact, their lips girlishly full. Their eyes go cloudy on contact with the boiling water…From the green string bag of mussels, Henry takes a dozen or so and drops them in with the skate. If they’re alive and in pain, he isn’t to know…The juice of the tomatoes is simmering with the onions and the rest, and turning reddish-orange with the saffron…One of the skates has arched its spine, as if to escape the boiling.
All the action in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday takes place over the course of one day (a Monday…jusssst kidding, obviously..aahhh, sorry) and it’s one of those books that really plays with the way time passes. At points in the book, a ton of action is condensed into just a few paragraphs which take place over the course of a few minutes, and then in other parts, you have pages and pages where you’re reading about, well, the preparation of a fish stew. But that’s ok, because McEwan is a master of craft and it’s actually pleasurable to go along with the main character, Henry Perowne, as he chops an onion and tosses seafood in a pot. Is it a little tedious? Maybe, but no more so than the usual routines of cooking, and so it rings very true. In the spirit of Henry Perowne, take a trip to Greenpoint’s Anella, and order the mussels in a tomato-saffron broth. They have the rustic simplicity of the best home-cooked meals, while simultaneously being exponentially better than what most people could easily produce in their own kitchens.
Anella; 222 Franklin Street, Greenpoint