Life is a Minestrone

The rain was cold and persistent, slicking the surface of The Wicker into a black mirror that reflected the lights of the fast food signs. I was in the back corner of a cafe, just another Sheffield place that smelled of chip fat and stale cigarette smoke. Facing the door with my back to the counter, I ran my fingers across the formica tabletop, sticky with the ghosts of Henderson’s Relish and Tetleys.

My line of work is food: the dirty, less digestible end of it. Missing chefs, stolen recipes, and culinary heists are my stock in trade. A gastronomic sleuth, if you want to be cute about it. Nobody ever is.

I cracked the case of a truck load of gruyère that went missing on the A57 somewhere between Worksop and Todwick. Mind you, you didn’t have to be no Sherlock Holmes to link it to the chain of family run fondue restaurants that had suddenly sprung up around Rotherham. They stood out like a Booth’s gala pie in the middle of Lidl. But stolen cheese was the easy part. Cheese, at least, didn’t lie to your face, then wrestle you to the ground with a boning knife.

Lately I’d been following a pattern: a string of deaths linked to a cult that called itself the Reduction Order. They believed personal liberation could be achieved by applying cooking methods to the self. Simmer the ego until it thickens. Boil off the inessential. Reduce the self down to a sticky, concentrated essence. Take back control of the ego. The week before, we fished a retired teacher out of his hot tub in Dodworth. He’d tried to confit himself in duck fat. Coroner said his heart gave out before he got crispy.

But back to the cafe. Her name was Delia. She came in bedraggled, looking all Rita Tushingham: rain-plastered hair, face grey with worry. She slid into the opposite seat, unzipped her dark navy Regatta jacket and laid her hands on the table in front of her, like two fish on a slab. We’d spoken on the phone earlier. She’d asked me to find her husband. Said he’d gone missing chasing a recipe. I tapped a Woodbine from the pack.

“So. You want me to find a fella who’s vanished into thin air over a bowl of soup.”

“Not just a soup,” she said. “Consommé. Crystal clear. He said it were only honest thing left in’t world.”

I struck a Swan Vesta, pulled on the Woodie and let the flame do its work.

“Let me get this straight. Your husband, Philip, he’s been stood in a kitchen in Crookes, boiling bones and veg, straining it through egg whites and mince like some sort of alchemist, all because he reckons a clear broth is something to do with honesty?”

She looked at me with tired and watery eyes. “You wouldn’t understand. You looks like a man what’s never strained owt in his life.”

“I’ve strained plenty. My back and my patience mainly. But I’ve never strained a stock just to chuck away the best bits.”

This wasn’t merely about a missing husband. Consommé was the Order’s highest sacrament. You take bones, blood and vegetable scraps, boil the lot, strain it and filter it until it looks like tap water. Clear as glass. Tasting of everything but showing nothing. It’s a magic trick. A lie you can eat with a spoon. That’s what Philip was chasing: a meal that had lied so well it looked like truth.

I watched the smoke from the Woodbine curl towards the ceiling, then looked her straight in the eye. “Was your husband a member of a group calling itself the Reduction Order?”

She flinched like I’d caught her stealing from the till. “How did tha’ know that?”

“Tell me about him,” I said. “Tell me why a grown man loses his mind over clear soup.”

She took a breath. “It all started when he goes t’meeting. He comes back like man reborn. He said the Order’s leader - that man Alfie Nagger - told him the truth. He said a meal were a lie we tell ourselves about what we’re really doing. When tha’ sits down to a Sunday roast, tha’ doesn’t see’t animal. Tha’ sees Yorkshire puddings and roasties and a nice bit of beef. And that’s a lie.”

“Go on.”

“He said consommé were different. If he could make it perfect - proper clear, like lookin’ through glass into’t soul of’t thing itself - he’d have made summat honest. Summat what didn’t hide what it were. Pure.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I told him he’d gone soft in t’head. Folk round here have been strainin’ muck out of their lives since t’pits shut. Since Thatcher closed’t lot and told us to make do wi’ nowt. We didn’t need clear soup. We needed summat to fill us up. He said that were exactly his point. He said we’d been fed lies for so long we’d forgot what truth tasted like.”

“Even consommé hides something,” I said. “It hides the bones that made it and all the muck that got strained out. Just a different kind of lie.”

The grill man, a sweaty hulk with ‘SHEFF WED’ tattooed across his knuckles, slapped a disk of minced beef and rusk onto a pan, with the sound of a wet kiss.

“You see that?” I said. “That’s a burger. Nothing fancy. Nothing clear. Mucky and greasy. But it’s honest. It doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. Dead cow, bread, and fat.”

She watched the burger sizzle. “Philip wouldn’t touch owt like that,” she said quietly. “He said it were beneath him.”

“He’s dead,” I said. No point beating about the bush any longer. “They found what was left of him this morning in an abandoned luncheonette in Gleadless, burned onto the bottom of an industrial soup kettle. Looked like the stuff they used to grease winding gear at Cortonwood. No sign of consommé.”

She didn’t flinch. “What happened?”

“You know the raft you float on top of a consommé? Ground beef, egg whites, vegetables. It draws every impurity out of the cloudy stock. And when the broth underneath is crystal clear, what happens to the raft?”

She said nothing.

“You chuck it in the bin. It’s nothing but a grey, sodden lump of everything you wanted rid of.”

I tapped the ash from my Woodbine. “Philip wanted to be that raft. The Order taught him that the self could be the filter. Absorb all the muck of your own life - the disappointment, the mortgage you can’t afford, the bills you can’t pay, the memory of that Comprehensive that told him he’d never amount to fuck all. Strain it through your own soul. And from underneath, a pure truth would emerge. A consommé of a man. Transparent. Free.”

I drew on the Woodbine and watched the burger spit on the griddle.

“Of course, it doesn’t work that way. The raft doesn’t cleanse the muck. It becomes the muck. You can’t absorb all that weight and walk away clean. You end up as the thing they throw out. Philip reduced himself to sludge because he thought he could be the filter. But the muck won. The muck always wins.” I paused. “Doesn’t it, Delia?”

Her hands twitched on the tabletop.

I’m proud of my pausing. Knowing when to do it and how long for is very much an art in my line of work. I’ve cracked many a case with a perfect pause.

“You see Delia, there was one thing bothering me. The gas under Philip had been turned off. Dead men aren’t usually much good with cooker knobs. Any ideas?”

Nobody spoke. Rain rattled the windows. The burger hissed on the griddle. Behind me, water began running into the sink.

The grill man killed the heat under the burger, washed his hands and removed his apron. By the time he reached our table, he had a warrant card open in one hand. The tattoos were real. The job wasn’t.

“Delia,” he said. “I’m arresting you on suspicion of Philip’s murder.”

She looked at me. “At least we believed in summat. You believe in fuck all.”

I stood up. “That’s where you’re wrong. I believe men like Alfie Nagger feed folk anger and fear, dress it up as hope and call it taking back control. There’s an insanity about destroying yourself as a response to feeling angry about an unjust world. People like Philip end up as sludge while the Naggers of this world pocket the proceeds. I believe that’s wrong.”

I ground the Woodbine into a half-eaten fried egg, like a foundry shutting down for the last time; a small, final violence in a pool of molten light.

“But mostly, I believe in minestrone.”

The grill man looked up from the handcuffs with a start: “Minestrone?”

“Yes. Consommé is the lie of purity. It tells you that you can have the flavour without the muck. It’s a con. Minestrone knows it’s just a cupboard raid: beans sitting in the pantry since the miners’ strike, pasta shapes that don’t match, a heel of Parmesan rind you were too tight to chuck away, cabbage that’s seen better days. It’s lumpy. That’s the point. Life isn’t a clear broth. Life is a minestrone. You get what you get, all mixed together. Sometimes there’s a bit you can’t chew, but you swallow it because that’s the meal. And you share it. You sit round the kitchen table, talking and laughing, and if a stranger is hungry, you pull out a chair and give them a bowl. That’s where hope comes from. That’s how you build a future.”

I pocketed the Woodbines, pulled my collar up and walked out into the deluge. At the corner, under a streetlamp by the Arches, I pulled my battered earphones from my pocket, untangled the wires and plugged them into my iPod. I scrolled the click wheel past the jazz, past the blues, until I found it. I hit play.

“Life is a minestrone, served up with Parmesan cheese…”

I shoved the buds in and walked into the wet Sheffield night. Behind me, a hand was on Delia’s head, gently easing her into a police car. But now I had other fish to fry. An organised crime gang was running a turbot racket out of an upmarket fishmonger in Wigan. Time to get over to Northern Sole.

“Death is a cold lasagne, suspended in deep freeze…”

10cc. Even Mancs got it right sometimes. The lyrics were stupid, yet truer than any consommé ever was. Life is a minestrone. The whole bloody argument, right there in the lumps.