Theme your life

Many years ago I decided to invite a couple of friends over for dinner. I wasn’t an exceptional cook, but decided to create a three-course meal, something special for a change.

I had known for a while that I would like to try and recreate something that I had savoured on the small Italian island of Lipari: an exceptional lunch of squid ink risotto. We’d had something similar a few years later on the cliff-top terrace of a restaurant on the Croatian island of Korčula, this time served not on a plate but in a chalky-white clam shell. It looked spectacular, especially next to a bottle of local wine, sparkling golden in the sunshine in front of a sweep of neon-green sea. Now I would have my chance to make it myself.

As far as I could remember, the dish involved making a standard risotto with the best rice available and stirring in a sachet of jet-black squid ink. Other ingredients included small pieces of tender sliced squid, a touch of tomato paste to thicken the colour even further, some toasted pine nuts, and raisins plumped up in white wine. It would take some time to make, and needed to be served fresh, so it would be good to start the meal. As for the main course, that needed to be quicker to prepare, so I wasn’t away from my guests for too long.

I was flicking through the recipes in my mind when I remembered something I’d made a few times before. It was a simple dish of black mussels cooked in the steam of a short broth, heavy with garlic, fresh tomatoes and a generous pour of white wine. A last minute clattering of shells in the pan as I mixed, and a vibrant green scattering of flat-leaf parsley to set it all off, and it would be ready to serve with crusty bread.

All that was needed now was dessert. I thought of cakes. I thought of something with chocolate. I thought of ice cream, made with the machine bought as a present for us by my father-in-law, a lover of home-made raspberry gelato and sorbet made with strips of lime peel. But one of his best and most memorable was an ice cream made with liquorice. Then everything clicked into place. Black risotto, black mussels, and black ice cream. We would have a meal in celebration of the colour black!

The meal was a great success. The risotto turned out to be the culinary highlight of my checkered cooking life up to then. The mussels were slurped and scooped and they rattled into bowls and the ladle clanged against the serving pot as the last scrapings of juice were collected. As for the liqourice ice cream, all who tasted that frozen, anise-tinted creation closed their eyes to concentrate the taste and then oohed and ahhed in abandon.

A plan was hatched. We were three couples, each with young children. At regular intervals in the future we would take turns to produce the best meals we could possible manage, with good wines to match them. And each meal would have a colour as a theme. Did the children agree? “Yes!” they all squealed, taking a short break from licking their ice cream bowls, but as long as they could choose the next colour.

And so it was done. The next meal followed a few months later. This time it was blue, and there was blue-swimmer crab on the menu, and blue-eyed cod. Then came yellow, with risotto milanese stained with saffron. And gold, with real gold leaf on our desserts. And white started off with garlic soup … and so on. And as we toasted each meal over the year, and the kids grew taller, we talked about previous coloured meals we had enjoyed together, and time stretched like elastic over the years, before pulling us closer together.

But the themes didn’t stop there. There are other gatherings that remain welded in our memories, like the World War Two meal, where hairdos were set and costumes were worn, and walls were plastered in propaganda posters, and an air raid siren went off during our rabbit casserole and we were forced to take cover from falling bombs under our kitchen table. This sparked off a run of ‘history meals’ set in different ages, from Medieval England to the 1970s.

Unlike almost every meal, routine or not, that we eat on a daily basis, these ones refuse to fade away in the haze of time almost as quickly as they were consumed. They remain as mile posts along the way, sturdy things that show us where we were in our lives, and how far we had travelled, and where we would be heading.

With celebrations come food. And these celebrations and meals can be magical. As the year passes they become marker points and with them in your life you can observe time passing by more clearly – and slow it down a little – by planning and enjoying your celebrations throughout the year, and looking back on them too. Most of us observe traditional celebratory periods during the year. For me it is Christmas, with its turkey and cranberry sauce, festive lights and a tree strung with glittering tinsel. When I lived in England there was Bonfire Night, when you burnt Guy Fawkes and let off rockets and lit Catherine wheels. And there are less theatrical celebrations too. There are sometimes pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, and always presents on birthdays and a cake with some candles, and hot cross buns and chocolate eggs at Easter.

But there are not enough celebrations in my opinion. We need more, far more to enrich our lives and encourage conversation and friendships. We can stick to traditions or just make them up. We can borrow from other cultures, and countries and even other times.

You could help in the resurrection of mid-winter wassailing, by banging pots and pans in an orchard and reciting incantations and singing to the apple trees to encourage a good harvest. Or you could see out the summer with an annual Passata Day. We do this every year. It was instigated by an Italian friend and his wife, but now it belongs to us, and several of our neighbours too. Together we cut, boil and bottle hundreds of kilos of tomatoes. We drink alcoholic Aperol with its distinctive bitter herbal finish, and finish the day with a communal meal of pasta and freshly-made, tomato sauce. Then, throughout the following year the air seals on our jars are popped and the scent of last summer is in the air again, and our minds are cast back to that day, and the heat of that season, and our mouths water too, as we contemplate the meal in front of us.

I have a good mind to reinstate some ancient celebrations to accompany the ones we already have. Perhaps New Years Eve could be followed later that month by the Festival of Thor, where we can share a horn filled with mead or wine and ask for strength and courage to take on the year to come.

I like the idea of the Ides of March, on March 15 as well. We don’t need to sacrifice a sheep or celebrate the death of Julius Caesar, but it could be an opportunity for a picnic feast and some communal games. And a Greco-Roman Bacchanalia sounds fun. There’s no need for a orgy if that’s not your scene, but some dramatic performances and plenty of raising of glasses to celebrate the God of Wine would be appropriate. In Ancient Rome they used to occur as many as five times a month, so you can choose any date you want.

And what about recapturing the magic of the Festival of Diana in August, or the Egyptian Lighting of the Fire in September, or the druidic Feast of the Musicians in November. There are thousands to choose from. And you don’t have to do the same ones every year either. Just pick and choose, be spontaneous or plan ahead, make each one special and memorable. Theme your life. Celebrate.

Image credit: Michael Coghlan/flickr