Too Cold For Snow

served sub.
    Cue governor Snee, who welcomed everyone and gave a potted history of the ship, which was mainly voiced-over by the newsreaders on their particular shows. Then it was the Prime Minister’s turn because a top level strategy group had decided that the chef should have the lion’s share of limelight. He kept his speech tersely short. Then Jamie was up.
    ‘Thank you, Mr Prime Minister for your kind words and for the great support you have given to my campaign, no, let’s call it this country’s great campaign to convert our children from a generation that thinks food begins and ends with a burger to a huge group of bright kids who know when peas are in season and who rejoice in that time. But today we turn our attention to the incarcerated: criminals who have transgressed against society and are thus banished from society, but that doesn’t mean that society should then forget about them once they’re behind bars. That is a barbarian thought, the attitude of the sort of society that neglects its children and therefore itself. But today we begin a journey to improve the lives of those in prison, by giving them not just nutritious but delicious food.’
    And with that Jamie strode into the brand new kitchen that had been installed on the lower deck. They helped him make an enormous paella. This extended news programme commanded a huge audience. Even the Prime Minister’s personal ratings moved up a couple of notches.
    A fortnight later Tony met his new assistant, who brought seven crates of provisions on board with him. He watched amazed at the briskness with which the man threw bits of chicken, duck and pork, noodles and ginger along with splashes of wine into one of the big pots.
    ‘Fine banquet stock,’ said the man, winking cheerily. ‘Always start with the basics…’ and then he explained about the fifty-six cooking methods they used, from chao through ruan zha to dong, which was all about jellying and freezing. Tony listened to him as if he was explaining how to build a space rocket.
    Word had spread around the cells so that there was an excited chatter filling the place. The prisoners sounded like starlings. When they saw the screws laying out place settings for themselves as well as the prisoners, they knew something was up. When they saw chopsticks instead of knives they cheered within. Stylish, totally stylish. The men sat down as if in church. Even the governor graced them with his presence. And then they ate their fill. Tony had been reading Fiona Dunlop’s book. Glory be! He had been reading a cookery book!
    A great vat of jade web soup with quail eggs and bamboo pith fungus kicked things off, the fungus redolent of the bamboo forests, where ‘fuming cataracts spill over rocky hillsides, over red earth and rocks’, that date from when the world was young. They ate rabbit with rock sugar and succulent stewed meats, tea-smoked duck and coral-like snow lotus, a plant where the roots lie in mud but the blossom reaches to the sky as a symbol of Buddhist enlightenment. There were intriguing dishes such as ants climbing trees, where tiny morsels of meat clung like insects to the chopsticks. Bitter melons followed radish slivers, flavoured with dark tangerine peel. After the famine years their bowls overflowed with Gong Bao chicken with peanuts and a dish called Pockmarked Mother Chen’s bean curd, ‘named after the smallpox-scarred wife of a Qing Dynasty restaurateur’. When the chef announced the name of this next dish through the serving hatch an old wag said ‘Anything’s better than pock-marked Tony’s pasta’ and even Tony himself laughed in a break from so much chopping. He had no idea cooking could be so labour intensive, how so few things came out of a tin.
    The men washed everything down with a rivulet of green tea and there was something heartening about the way in which some of the younger men showed the older convicts how to use the chopsticks. Rounding off with silver ear fungus in crystal sugar soup and eight treasure rice pudding there wasn’t a man among them – even the power lifters who burned through twelve thousand calories in a single session – who didn’t feel replete, as full as a tick. They took away the photocopied menus which would take the place of bare-breasted women in the cells.
    The governor stood up and asked the men to show their appreciation to Larry, the new assistant chef, and to Tony who’d slaved so hard to make this wonderful meal work.