Eating Mammals. John Barlow
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nudged the plate with the banknote under it towards me.
‘And if you can supply me with the eight bottles by five this evening, in my room, there will be another small gift awaiting you.’
My eyes must have accepted the offer on my behalf, since he sat back in his chair as if the deal was now done. Carefully, I extracted the note from under the plate and stood up.
‘Oh,’ he added, ‘and, please, olive oil; of that I really must insist.’
In those days, not so very many years after the war, and with rationing only just out of the way, oranges enough for three pints of juice was a tall order. Even before I reached the kitchen it occurred to me that procuring wine was a far easier sideline than juicing six dozen oranges clandestinely, not to mention the tomatoes. As for the oil and the honey …
My career as a cook had been touched by the cold, pinching hand of rationing, so without hesitation I set to the question of spinning-out: I pulped the tomatoes and added sugared water and ketchup (for some reason more plentiful than the real thing); I ran to the sink, which mercifully was still piled high with unwashed breakfast plates, and rescued a good half-jug of fruit segments in syrup, not all orange, but at least citrus for the main part; I collected the dregs from two or three dozen glasses, and got more than a cupful of fruit juice, albeit of mixed origin; then, from the fruit store, I grabbed a couple of dozen oranges.
In a corner I got to work, grinding down the fruit-flesh with an ancient mincer (aha! If only I’d known!), sneaking cupfuls of concentrate and the odd can of tomato juice from the stores, pulping and grinding in an anxious frenzy. The oil was a dilemma, but also the making of me. In it went, pure olive oil. There was secrecy in it, and no great abundance in the supply room. And all the time that pound note looked less and less like good value. Curiously, though, I felt a certain pride, almost a reverence for the task, with Mulligan’s words echoing in my ears: Oh, and, please, olive oil; of that I really must insist.
And so it was that, as casually as possible, I stood over a pan of pure olive oil on a slow flame, and carefully stirred in a half-pint of honey, mimicking as far as I could manage the slow arm movements of someone heating milk and eggs for a custard. Oil and honey are at best distant relations and, although once heated through the emulsion had a not unpleasant taste, the oil did tend to rise. However, the job of introducing the sweetened oil to my juice mixture posed more acute logistical problems, and in the end I carried the lot off to my bedroom in a steel bucket. I whisked and whisked until my arm went into cramp. To my surprise, the stuff combined tolerably well, and although one couldn’t have said that it was a tasty concoction, neither was it all that bad.
Then I returned to my quiches and the luncheon preparations, leaving the bucket hidden inside my wardrobe. Six hours later I whisked the mixture again and put it into eight milk bottles.
At five minutes to five I began my furtive scurry through the hotel, the heavy crate of bottles in my arms, avoiding the main staircase entirely, sprinting along old servants’ corridors and up dark, winding stairwells only used in emergencies. When I arrived at Mulligan’s room, sweat had begun to trickle down my forehead and into my eyes, and as he opened the door I was blinking maniacally. Before I had chance even to look at him I had been yanked inside, and the door closed behind me. The room was full of the charming, intermingled smells of cigars and cologne, and in one corner hung a purple velvet smoking jacket, which, since Mr Mulligan was wearing a waistcoat and trousers of the same fabric, I guessed was part of his evening dress.
He fussed around with his cigar, unable to locate an ashtray, and finally popped the burning stub back into his mouth. From the wine crate he extracted a bottle, examined the colour of the liquid against the light from the window, and sipped. He murmured his approval, before replacing the bottle.
‘Not all fresh, especially the tomatoes, but a fine olive oil at least,’ he said, nodding towards a table where another pound note awaited me. ‘And that comes with my sincere gratitude, young man, to be sure it does.’
But I didn’t take the note. I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d had an explanation. Although in retrospect it was pure naivety which led me to such presumptuousness. Michael Mulligan, as I was to learn, was not a man whom one obliged to do or to say anything. If the King himself (the Queen by that time, actually) had desired something from him, it would have been requested formally, as a polite favour. In my ignorance, then, I stood my ground until an amused curiosity crept across his face.
‘I can see,’ he began, sitting down in an armchair and gesturing towards another, ‘that you want explanations, not cash.’
He laughed, not the big belly laugh one might have expected, but a high-pitched, impish giggle. I sat down and waited for him to continue.
‘That in itself is commendable. Here,’ he said, offering me a cigar.
I accepted it, lit it as one would a cigarette and, for want of knowing better, sucked heavily. All at once my lungs were full of burning rubber and dark, sizzling caramel, and my stomach lurched and tore itself in all directions, my throat near to rupture as I forced repeated vomit-spasms back down. Not only did I avoid vomiting but, to my amazement, neither did I cough.
Mulligan looked on with interest, and as I recovered from my first taste of a Havana, he said: ‘Now that sort of thing I find really quite impressive. You neither coughed nor were you sick, although even your evident pride has not been sufficient to keep your face from turning green. One doesn’t, by the way, inhale the fumes of a cigar. But I digress. Keeping it down! That’s what this is all about, my friend. The mixture which you prepared will help me to do likewise this evening.’
My head swam uncontrollably, and I was too debilitated by my lungful of smoke to make any response.
‘I have a rather unusual dinner ahead of me,’ he continued. ‘And your fine mixture will ensure that not only can I get it down, but that I can keep it down. Tonight, I will be eating furniture.’
I looked at him, but quickly diverted my stare; I realised that I was in the company of a madman. However, the newly-lit cigar in my hand smouldered, and from what I had often seen in the hotel dining room, a cigar of this length and thickness was going to go on smouldering for quite some time. From its tip a fine strand of blue smoke curled off into the air, but too little and too slowly, and I willed the thin ring of ash to speed up, to eat its way down the filthy stick with more visible speed, as a cigarette consumes itself in a gusting wind.
I desired only one thing more than to escape his smoke-filled room, and that was to confirm that he really had said such a thing. With this information I would quite happily have fled, cigar in hand, back to the hot, frenetic security of the kitchens.
‘I am an eating specialist,’ he said, and again I hardly knew how earnest or capricious I was to take him, ‘although, if I say so myself, of a rather exclusive kind. Not an attraction, in the normal sense. I do not actually attract people. My performances are entirely private affairs. But perhaps you have seen something of my profession, or heard of it at least?’
I assured him that I had not, shaking my head vigorously.
‘And in the pub, or at the fair, have you never seen men competing to be the fastest with a yard of ale, to the delight of all around? And have you never heard of the great pie-eating competitions, of tripe-swallowing and the like?’
I had to admit that I had.
‘Well,’ he said, turning his palms upwards humbly, ‘every profession has its amateurs, its quaint traditions and its side-street hobbyists. And every profession has also its experts, its virtuosi, its aristocrats. I, if I may be so bold as to say so, am of the latter category: a gentleman eater.’
And thus he began a narrative which took us not only to fine, seaside hotels in the north of England, but across the great oceans, to places and societies which, even in the depths of despair during the war, I had hardly dreamed existed.
Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan left Dublin in 1919 and followed many of his compatriots to the New World. A combination of charm and