I’m making him cook better. Absolute ban on frozen food. I must have fruit, green vegetables. I have steak. Salmon. (John Fowles, The Collector)
A recent popular Facebook activity involved someone posting a photo of the cover of a favourite book over five days and tagging a friend to do likewise. As a book obsessive – with a slightly embarrassing love of lists (when it comes to books) – I was delighted to have the chance to choose my top 5 books, or perhaps more accurately my top 5 book-covers (some books failed to make the list because I didn’t think their cover was up to scratch!).
A friend and fellow book obsessive – we met years ago when working in Waterstones – chose John Fowles’ The Collector as one of her five books.
Obsession about books – and food in my case – is one thing, but Fowles’ first novel, published in 1963, explores a much more disturbing take on obsession.
Frederick Clegg, the collector of the novel, is a loner in a lowly clerical job who collects butterflies in his spare time. Opposite his office live a family with two teenage daughters, both of whom are away at boarding school but whom Clegg sees when they are home in the holidays. Clegg becomes obsessed with the elder daughter, Miranda, who is in the Sixth form; he keeps a track of her movements and notes them in his diary. From the outset he compares her to the butterflies that he collects:
Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, going up to it very careful, heart-in-mouth as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance.
When he unexpectedly wins a fortune on the pools, Clegg gives up his job and his obsession becomes all-consuming. Realising that a middle-class girl like Miranda would not be attracted to him – even with his newfound wealth – he initially succumbs to despair.
However, he then begins to dream up alternative narratives, in the most powerful of which he captures Miranda, drives her to a remote house and keeps her prisoner ‘in a nice way’. She gets to know and like him, ‘and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything’.
When he sees an advert for a secluded cottage for sale in the Sussex countryside, Clegg is able to make his dream a reality. Staging an accident – he pretends to have run over a dog – he kidnaps Miranda and takes her to the cottage.
Clegg’s deluded belief that he has kidnapped Miranda because he loves her, and she is his ‘guest’ – as he frequently refers to her – not his prisoner, is shown through the way he feeds her.
When he brings her to the cottage he puts out some ‘biscuits and sandwiches’ that he had bought in Hampstead, and the next morning asks her what she wants for breakfast, implying she can choose.
Initially Miranda refuses to eat, but after a while relents. The first proper meal she consumes is ‘a supper of fresh frozen peas and frozen chicken in white sauce’. Clegg notes ‘she seemed to like it’, but his observation seems to be just another one of his delusions. In the second part of the novel, the narrative perspective switches to Miranda – in the form of diary entries she has written during her captivity – and she writes, as in the passage above, that she is making Clegg ‘cook better’ and has placed ‘an absolute ban on frozen food’.
Miranda’s desire is for fresh food – ‘fruit, green vegetables’ – and, reflecting her privileged upbringing she wants expensive foods: ‘steak. Salmon. I ordered him to get caviare yesterday’.
Having already done recipes with steak and salmon for this blog – and not really being wealthy enough to afford caviare – I thought I would focus on the green vegetables for this post, cooked with pasta (a simple meal for an unsophisticated cook like Clegg). By 1963, when the novel was published, spaghetti bolognese had become a staple meal in English households, so this combination of pasta and vegetables is not too far-fetched as a culinary response to this passage.
PRISONER’S PASTA WITH GREEN VEGETABLES
Ingredients (serves 2)
500g mixed green vegetables (I used asparagus, mangetout and courgettes)
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 finely chopped garlic cloves
150g short pasta
4 tablespoons crème fraiche
50g grated parmesan cheese
Salt and pepper to taste
Method:
Dunk any vegetables that you would normally boil – e.g. mangetout, asparagus, broad beans, peas – for 2 minutes in salted boiling water. Remove from the heat and strain through a colander.
Heat the oil in a medium-sized frying pan. Fry the other vegetables with the chopped garlic; when they are beginning to soften add the partly-boiled vegetables and cook for a further 3-4 minutes.
In the meantime cook the pasta in boiling water following the timings on the packet.
Towards the end of the vegetable cooking time, add the crème fraiche, stir through and heat gently.
Drain the pasta and add to the vegetables. Add the parmesan cheese, stir through and season to taste.
