Drink - Victoria Moore takes in the waters of life
The occasion of our dinner was a visit to England by my friend Matthew Green. Matthew lives in Japan, and he is always very keen to feature in this column. The last time he was over, he brought several phials of extraordinarily vile liquor from Okinawa. This time, he had sojourned in Oslo en route to London, and arrived bearing a bottle of aquavit.
Given that Matthew was staying at the Lanesborough (he claimed to have got specially reduced rates on some flimflam pretext), I don't quite know how we ended up in Robbie and David's flat in Kilburn peeling our own potatoes for Sunday roast. It was like a time-warp trip back to my Cambridge days. The walls were covered in all their old student theatre posters. We drank from mugs that Robbie has been using and never knowingly washed (with soap) for the past ten years. Robbie said that, the night before, a man had been sick on the doorstep, and that lunch would be four hours late because they hadn't started cooking yet.
I had intended not to drink, but when Robbie told us this, I asked Matthew to open the aquavit. Drinking aquavit is a sort of anti-pleasure. There is nothing in its flavour to pamper the taste buds. There is nothing luxurious about the way it sits in your mouth. But the cool, hard force of the hit is diabolically attractive. Perched gingerly on the grubby, flaking sofas, we needed it.
"Is this something you'd maybe drink with Coke or other mixers?" asked David, our co-host, from the depths of his armchair, while one of the guests grated nutmeg for the roast parsnips in the steamy kitchen.
No, it is not. It's something you drink on its own, fairly cool but not frozen, neat from the bottom of a tumbler. I sniffed the open bottle. Herbs, and lots of alcohol fumes. Stephen, taking a small sip, began to reminisce about drinking industrial alcohol in his days at Eton. (Why do public figures persist in sending their dear boys to this drink-and-drugs den?) "With orange juice. We used to get it in for magic tricks when I was in the Magic Society."
He's actually being unfair to the aquavit. It's only 41.5 per cent ABV and Matthew has ferreted out a particularly tasty one - Gammel Opland. Matthew keeps trying to tell us all about it, but no one will listen. Aquavit means "water of life". The name is an anglicisation of akvavit (itself a corruption of the Latin aqua vitae), which, in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, is a spirit, usually clear or straw-coloured, distilled from potato or grain and flavoured with caraway seeds. The taste of the caraway is usually quite crisp and clear - obvious once you place it, but most people tend not to.
It's one of those spirits that give the illusion of clearing the head when in fact they are busily deactivating all neurone respon-ses. That, after all, is why aquavit is drunk in all those cold, dark countries where the drinking culture revolves more around obliteration of the senses than it does around pleasure. It was perfect for the occasion.
Matthew explained that, in Oslo, he had drunk it with smoked herring and beetroot. "It's very cleansing," offered Claire. And indeed it is - the perfect foil for oily fish and vinegary pickles. We drank it with roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and indecently good roast potatoes - which it complemented so very badly that we quickly switched to red wine. The food was irritatingly good. I ate so much, I had no room for pudding. Then I remembered the special power of aquavit. When you drink it you can feel it delving down your throat and going straight to your belly. It seems to burn right through anything you've got in there. Like cigarettes, it's an excellent digestif.
Then David brought in the bread-and-butter pudding. He'd actually made this himself. It was so good that I bristled with irritation. Then Robbie's mother called and I heard him crowing about the quality of the food they'd prepared. "Well," she said, unimpressed, "if you can read, you can cook."
And we all drank to that.
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