A Moveable Feast (2 page)

Jan Morris, who was born in 1926, is Anglo-Welsh and lives in Wales with her partner, Elizabeth Morris. She has published some forty books of history, travel, biography, memoir and fiction, most notably the ‘Pax Britannica’ trilogy about the British Empire; major studies of Wales, Europe, Venice, Hong Kong, Sydney and Trieste; the historical fantasy
Hav
and the autobiographical
Conundrum
.

I am a shamefacedly self-centred and often blinkered writer. Although, in the course of a long travelling life, I must have eaten several hundred thousand meals on the hoof, I have never taken food very seriously or bothered to consider the seminal contributions it has made to every aspect of history down the ages. From mammoth meat to foie gras, from the composition of Elizabethan banquet madrigals to the strategies of blockading navies, from rocket rations to genetically modified cereals – I have ignored them all.

Too late to change! Food’s contribution to my historical or aesthetic thinking remains minimal to this day. But, of course, there are some foods that I decidedly prefer to others. Life without bitter Seville orange marmalade would not be worth living, but torturers could not make me eat another forkful of the Lithuanian delicacy called a
capelinas,
which is made of potato dough soaked in bacon fat, with a sausage in the middle. By and large, however, it is not the edible ingredients of travelling food that I remember, for better or for worse, but the circumstances in which I ate them.

Like most of us, I enjoy eating while actually in motion. An Indian curry is best of all when it has been thrust urgently through your compartment window at Hooghly Station the very moment before your great train leaves for Mumbai, and I remember with intense pleasure gobbling a pot of self-heating noodles on a lurching sampan on a wet and dismal dawn
en voyage
from Hong Kong Island to Tai Po in the New Territories. When I boarded the last frail remnant of the original
Orient Express,
in the absence of a restaurant car I was delighted to be handed a paper bag containing an apple, a hunk of cheese and a half-bottle of excellent white wine – what could be a better munch while we laboured across Europe?

On the other hand, eating
en avion
has generally been a disappointment to me, especially when, in more spacious times, I used to travel first class. This was chiefly because of the ridiculous hyperbole of airline menus, the preposterous sham Frenchness of them, the absurd lists of celebrated chefs who were alleged to have selected the ingredients, and the gigantic menu cards, like nightmare wedding invitations, which you were obliged, with extreme difficulty, to extract from among your magazines and Duty Free catalogues when a supercilious stewardess suddenly turned up and demanded your choice.

I do make an exception, though, for meals on the short-lived Concorde, during the brief heyday of its service between London
and New York. Who could honestly complain about poached apple chatelaine (a whole apple filled with redcurrant jelly and coated with kirsch and cream) or a wine list that numbered five champagnes, six burgundies and half a dozen clarets, to be enjoyed as the cabin speedometer gently told you that you were now travelling faster than the speed of sound?

Often it is the place that bewitches me, far more than the food. For example, the food is marvellous at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, but it doesn’t compare with the welcome of the setting when I check in on a summer evening and toddle down for a jet-lagged early supper on the hotel terrace. All around me, the spires and jagged rooftops of the old city are silhouetted against the twilight – the little steamers puff by, the royal palace looks stately over the water, scores of flags are still bravely flying, and as I hear the slapping of their ropes against their flagstaffs, and breathe in the cool clear air of the North, I hardly bother to notice when my victuals arrive.

In any case, simplicity is my criterion of good food on the hoof. I love to stop off for a snack at one of the tumultuous outdoor marketplaces of Asia, anywhere east of Suez. In Hong Kong there used to be such a place bang in the centre of the city waterfront, not a hundred yards from one of the grand hotels. It would amuse me, as I sat on a bench amidst the market hubbub, eating some delightfully organic sustenance, to think that just over the way I might be having a crab soup not half as good as mine, and ten times as expensive.

O, simplicity’s the thing, plus serendipity! ‘Here, try one,’ cried a cheerful girl to me, passing by in the back of an open truck among the orchards of Andalucía, and the kumquat she threw me, I swear, was the food of Paradise – along with baked potatoes from an open fire among the Sherpas, or the raw fresh herrings sold as snacks in the coastal streets of Holland, or Dungeness crabs among the tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco,
or the fried whitebait they have been serving for a couple of centuries at the Trafalgar Tavern beside the Thames at Greenwich, or blinis somewhere off Nevsky Prospekt, or big juicy asparagus fresh from a Lüneburg garden, or oysters on a trestle table down the road from Galway, or Guinness and prawns beside the sea in the Isle of Man, or classic fish and chips, the real thing, at Harry Ramsden’s at Guiseley in Yorkshire, where they will give you a free pudding if you manage to get through the mammoth platter called Harry’s Challenge …

Simple foods every one, the food of the countries I’m passing through. The very best meal I ever eat – and I have eaten it a hundred times – is simple food served with extreme sophistication. They serve it at Harry’s Bar in Venice, which I have frequented since the end of the Second World War, when it used to be cooked by the proprietor’s wife, Signora Cipriani. Now in her honour they call it Scampi Thermidor alla Cipriani, and it consists of prawn tails cooked in oil under a parmesan-flavoured sauce, with a little green salad and a rice pilaf on the side. I have a glass or two of the local pinot grigio, and if I ask nicely they might do me a warm zabaglione to polish it off.

Travel the world over, from the Ritz to McDonald’s to a street-stall in Chiang Mai, and you won’t do better than that.

Pico Iyer is the author of many books of travel, among them
Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk
and
The Global Soul
. A gourmand of experience, he prefers to consume the entire world, and not just its meals and its restaurants.

The quiche is as soft as hope itself, and the long spears of asparagus are so elegant on the plate that to pick one up feels like messing with the symmetry of a Klee. There are bowls of lettuce in our midst, and the chunky vegetable soup alone would make for a hearty meal. Bottles of salad dressing crowd the blond-wood table, large enough for six of us, while early-spring sunlight streams into the window-filled refectory, so that it feels as if we’re tasting radiance and taking a long draught of the sun.

The man next to me, his white hood down, springs up to cut the fluffy long fingers of quiche for an older neighbour, who lives now with Parkinson’s. Then he comes back and tells me about
the nine-hour drive he just took to an ashram in southern India, and the forest fire that wiped out a colleague’s place in the hills of Santa Barbara. I ask him if he saw the movie about the monks of the Grande Chartreuse and we talk about the Dalai Lama, Tanzania, how best to die. One of the men who’s just left this place – for Jerusalem, to work for peace – used to zealously keep the Sabbath in the midst of all these Catholics.

‘I suppose monks are the only ones who don’t keep the Sabbath,’ I say to my friend Raniero.

‘The inner Sabbath only,’ he says, his cheek dimpling as if he were not the prior.

In the corner there are two large tubs of green-tea ice cream and Italian spumoni dessert; next to them, two plates of peach pie with fruit so fresh I wonder if it’s been airlifted over from the Garden. In another corner is a thermos of hot water and all the teas, fancy and a little less so, that modern California can devise. We talk of common friends – Berkeley, Shanghai, LA – and I hear from a beaming monk how all the miles collected on the monastery credit card are sending him this summer – first class! – to Rio.

Then Raniero gets up and rings a little bell. ‘Dear God,’ he says, quickly, without fuss, ‘thank you for this food and the friendship around these tables. Special blessings to Benedict, for preparing this excellent meal. As we go forth from this room and back to our duties, may we always see that light that shines in others and in ourselves.’

‘You free for some washing-up, Pico?’ the man next to me, in an apron, says. Seconds later, I am standing next to the former prior, in his eighties, and the current one, working briskly, as we chat, to make all the plates shine again.

What in the world am I doing here, you might ask? I sometimes ask myself. I’m not a Catholic, and nine years of enforced chapel twice a day at British boarding school (with Latin hymns on Sunday nights) seemed to satisfy more than a lifetime’s quota of religion. I respect those people who have the groundedness and selflessness that faith often brings – the alertness to compassion and a larger view of things – but I’m not quick to call those virtues mine.

Yet what I am is a traveller, whose life is about trying to occupy shoes – and lives and hearts – very different from my own; and a human being, who cannot fail to be washed clean and opened up by silence. So I come to this Benedictine hermitage, tucked into the central coast of California, and sit in a little cell looking out on the great blue plate of the Pacific, 1300 feet below, scintillant in the sunshine, blue-green waters pooling around rocks, filling the horizon from one end of my deck to the other, and think about what travel really means, and why these men in hoods seem like the most fearless and spirited adventurers I’ve ever met.

A monk wants to be clear and undistracted in his journey, so he doesn’t have too much to eat (in theory), or too little; there’s nothing uncomfortable about this place, and sometimes I feel almost embarrassed at how well treated we visitors are. In my little trailer – ‘Hesychia’, it’s called, meaning ‘spirit of stillness’ – there’s a large pot of Extra-Crunchy Skippy peanut butter (‘Fuel the Fun!’) above the stove, next to a bag of Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate. In the communal kitchen, the ten or twelve people staying here on retreat can help themselves to ‘Very Cherry’ yoghurt and extra-virgin olive oil, Colombian coffee and kosher salt. Someone has contributed pineapple salsa from Trader Joe’s to the communal refrigerator, and one large bottle is always filled with oatmeal raisin cookies.

Every day, at 12.30, bells ring – as they do for Mass – and a monk drives down in a cracked blue hatchback, no licence plate on it, dust swirling up behind him as he accelerates out of the
Monastic Enclosure, and brings us a tureen of hot soup, a main dish, some vegetables and often extras, from which each of us collects a lunch to eat in silence in our rooms. One day it is carrot soup, flecks of Bugs Bunny’s favourite floating on the surface so it looks like strawberry yoghurt. Another day there are egg rolls, and pasta shells with salmon in them (fish the only ingredient to disrupt the monks’ vegetarianism). One year every dish came with a sprig of mint, or some basil, courtesy of a chef from a four-star restaurant in San Francisco who was spending a year here on retreat, getting himself in order.
‘Buon appetito!’
the monk always says as he leaves the glass trays on the counter, to come and collect them again an hour later.

If I wanted mere food, I realised some years ago – steaks and sorbets and spicy panang curry with strong chillies – I could find them almost anywhere these days, ten minutes from my home or across the world in some fairy-tale palace; if I wanted a meal to remember, I could go back to Aleppo or Buenos Aires or Hanoi. But after seventeen years of criss-crossing the globe, I came to think that it was only the food I couldn’t see that really sustained me and only inner nutrition that made me happy, deep down. A meal I grabbed in a Paris McDonald’s, to keep me walking through the streets of the 6th
arrondissement
, left me hungry ten minutes after I’d finished it; a richer, fancier lunch left me so replete that all energy for exploration was gone for the day.

Here I just get into a car and drive up a winding mountain road along the sea, three hours from my mother’s house, and find that I am perpetually full and hungry for more with every breath – the way, in love, you thirst for the other’s company, yet know that even years together will never be enough.

Now, as the bells ring and ring – time is so slowed down here that I explore every moment as I would the crevices and soft spots in a new lover or a simple honey-flavoured candy exploding in my mouth like caviar – I can reach in my little trailer for the rice and bean chips (with adzuki beans) I’ve brought up or (as I’ve smuggled in here on more than fifty retreats now over nineteen years) the jumbo bag of chocolate chip cookies. In the monastery bookstore they’re selling Chocolate Fudge Royale and Special Gourmet Mocha Mix in hazelnut flavour. Pieces of the hermitage’s celebrated moist fruitcake are available, free of charge, by the cash register, and bottles of Monastery Creamed Honey sit among the Tibetan prayer bowls and rosaries.

But mostly what I do here is think about daily bread, and what communion means in the context of the traveller’s daily lifelong companions: restlessness and solitude. In silence the day stretches out and out till sometimes it feels as if yesterday were an eternity ago. I wake up as the first light begins to show above the hills, and make toast and two cups of tea for myself in my little kitchen. I take long walks along the monastery road, stopping at the benches set around every turn to watch the sun sparkle on the water and the coastline to the south slough off its coat of early-morning fog. I read and read – Patti Smith, Marcus Aurelius, Werner Herzog, Thomas Merton – and attention becomes so sharpened that every snatch of perfume, scuffling rabbit or echo hits me like a shock.

The day itself becomes my fuel. I reach for some ‘simply cashew, almond and cranberry’ trail mix from my suitcase. I stop by the kitchen to pick up an apple. I handwrite letters to friends far away, make plans for the summer, watch the colours turn above the ocean as the darkness falls.

Not having anywhere to go or anything I have to do – no telephone or laptop or television – makes each hour feel as nutritious as a Christmas feast. And spending so many hours in
silence, all emptied out, gives new meaning to community when the monks invite us to share in their lunch after Sunday Mass (I go to lunch though I skip the Mass).

Sometimes, when I don’t intend to, or am just walking down the road, or reading a biography of the incorrigibly licentious Lord Rochester, I think about what I seek at mealtime. It’s not the tastes I savour (I was born and grew up in England, so my taste buds were surgically removed at birth); it’s the setting, the circumstances, the company. I would rather, as Thoreau might have muttered, eat a hunk of bread with a friend over good conversation, in a place of beauty such as this, than suffer through a multicourse opera at El Bulli. The food is a means to happiness, a sense of peace; and the true meaning of happiness, as Socrates told me yesterday morning, is not to have more things but to need less. I’ve never been in a restaurant where people seem so much themselves – which is to say at home – as at the Sunday lunches with the monks.

It’s really just a story of love and attention, I come to think – and not even caring which is which, or where one ends and the other begins. I’ve been lucky enough to eat
injera
bread at Lalibela on New Year’s Eve, and to step down into a basement kitchen in Lhasa, where red-cheeked Tibetan girls were cooking up a feast. I’ve had $300 French kaiseki meals along the red-lanterned lane of the Pontocho district, near my home in Kyoto, looking out on the Kamo River and the eastern hills of the old capital beyond, a moon above the temple spires. I’ve relished vegetarian meals in a blue restaurant painted over with the lines of Neruda in Easter Island on the first day of the millennium.

But I don’t think any place has taught me what a meal is – not just food and not just fuel – so much as here. ‘Get up and eat, else the journey will be long for you!’ was the topic of the week’s sermon at St Anthony’s church, in the middle of modern Istanbul, when I looked in on it seven months ago. Now I reach
into my bag of Reduced Guilt white corn tortilla chips, and pull out of a drawer one of the ‘sweet-hot soft ginger candies’ a friend gave me on the way up here. The journey doesn’t seem long at all. At the very best restaurants I’ve visited, my body changes a little when I’m through, and my mood lifts a bit too. Here, when I’m finished with my lunch, I feel as if my life has been transformed.