Marcel Boulestin, a hero of Anglo-French culinary interaction, inexplicably omitted from ‘Larousse Gastronomique’. ‘It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.’ Thus X. then add six pints of what in England would be chlorinated former effluent (also known as ‘water’) and boil furiously.Īnd this introduction to his chapter titled “An Aïoli”: His seemingly innocuous ramblings are dotted with laugh-out-loud funny lines and humorous asides, such as this sentence from a recipe for fish stew:

Structured around a series of seasonal menus - for winter, spring, summer and autumn - replete with recipes, it’s easy to feel that Tarquin’s thoughts on everything from what makes a good blini to the secret of a great croque monsieur (a “dab of mustard” apparently) are essentially harmless (and occasionally soporific), without quite realising he’s making a series of rather sinister confessions involving family members and various servants. These, in turn, are intertwined with his own personal history, the second - and more popular (as we are constantly told) - son of wealthy parents (a successful businessman and a former stage actress), educated at home via a succession of private tutors (because his nature was judged “too fine grained and sensitive” to weather boarding school) and effectively raised by a kindly Irish nanny, called Mary T, whom he adored but then inexplicably seemed to frame for a personal theft. This lends the narrative a “serendipitous, ambulatory and yet progressive structure” as his wanderings are accompanied by his highbrow thoughts on food philosophy, provenance and gastronomy - or, as he describes it later, “gastro-historico-pyscho-autobiographico-antropico-philosophic lubrications”. (For the rest of the year he lives in Norfolk.) He begins by stating “this is not a conventional cookbook” and then explains it was written while on a short holiday travelling “southwards through France, which is, as the reader will learn, my spiritual (and for a portion of the year, actual) homeland”.

The tale is narrated by Tarquin Winot stream-of-consciousness style in a voice that is both pompous and eccentric. John Lanchester’s debut novel, The Debt to Pleasure, is a subversive black comedy about a narcissistic food snob who has a well-disguised penchant for murder. Fiction – paperback Picador Classics 232 pages 2015.

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester