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EATING MAMMALS

My career began with two strokes of good luck – fate you might say, because as instances of good fortune none could have bettered them. After the war, towards the end of which I served as a cook in His Majesty’s land forces, I returned to England and, armed with the ability to knock up a wholesome bully beef stew for three hundred, presumed to pass myself off as a chef. In my new, ill-fitting suit (we all got a new, ill-fitting suit) I talked my way into the kitchens of a modest hotel in Scarborough, and several years afterwards found myself working in one of the superior hotels on the Yorkshire coast. I won’t tell you where, because about a decade later, at a moment when I gained some brief, local notoriety for swallowing slugs, my former employer there wrote to beg me never to divulge the name of the place to another living soul. Quite right, of course, although by that time I had completely forgotten the name of the establishment, and his letter served only to remind me of it.

Anyway, whilst I was working at this hotel as third chef, in which role I took charge of breakfasts, I found myself one morning called to the table of a guest in order to receive his compliments. His name was Mulligan, a regular customer, and familiar to us all, not by the frequency of his stays so much as by the dimensions of his body. He was, quite simply, enormous. In his tweed suit he resembled a well-tailored tree trunk, a huge lump of man. One would not have called him fat, although there was certainly more to him than meat and bone. No, not fat. Even as he sat, motionless but for the steady working of his jaws, one could tell that he wasn’t a wobbler, that when he stood up his belly would not flib-flab around in front of him like a sackful of jellyfish. From head to toe he had achieved a condition only dreamed of by the obese, and scorned (somewhat jealously) by bodybuilders everywhere: firm fat. And underneath that magnificent outer layer there resided also an ample musculature, sufficient muscle indeed so that, had he been alive today, Mulligan would have been at least an American wrestler, and at best a great film star.

But as luck (for me) would have it, he was neither of these; he was the fêted Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan. And that morning, as I picked bits of uneaten bacon from returned breakfast plates, examining them for teeth marks before setting them aside for a quiche, he wanted to speak to me.

At that time I knew no more about him than what I saw, and that included what I saw him eat. On this particular occasion he had consumed enough porridge to fill a bowler hat, ham and eggs sufficient to keep a team of navvies on the move all morning, and half a loaf of toast. But, then again, he had done so the previous morning, and as far as I was aware my cooking had not improved miraculously overnight. So why he wanted to speak to the breakfast chef I could not guess.

I approached his table, where he was sipping tea from a china cup, as delicate as you like. As if to mark my arrival he dropped a lump of sugar into the cup with a pair of silver tongs. Then he looked up at me.

‘So you’re the breakfast chef,’ he said, in an Irish accent which teetered between seriousness and levity, as if everything had two possible interpretations. ‘Well, many thanks indeed for another fine meal. Yes, many, many thanks.’

I accepted his gratitude somewhat awkwardly, not quite deciding on an interpretation.

‘And,’ he continued, pushing a vacant chair towards me and lowering his voice, ‘I am in need of a little assistance, and you look as if you might be the right man for the job.’

I sat down at the table, and noticed that there was a pound note slotted under a side plate. He let me consider its possible significance for a moment, then went on.

‘Today,’ he said, then stopping to drain the last of the tea from his cup, ‘I have a little business, a professional dinner if you will …’

I nodded, still looking at the money.

‘… a rather special affair, for which I am to provide the liquid refreshment.’

I was about to tell him that access to the wine cellar was strictly by arrangement with the manager, having (incorrectly) deduced that he, like many others before him, baulked at the prices on our wine list and fancied some vino on the cheap. But I was a rather timid young man, and before I could summon up a suitably tactful form of words to explain that every thief has his price, and that mine was three pounds a case, he took a small piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket and placed it in front of me. On it was a recipe, handwritten and with no title:

Whisk until all ingredients combine. Leave to stand.

Whisk again and decant into eight pint bottles.

Whatever else he might have been, then, there seemed little doubt that Mr Mulligan was severely constipated. And do you wonder! one might add, although just how constipated a man can be, even a man the size of a tree trunk with the appetite of an elephant, was perplexing indeed. And why the home-made remedy?

‘I see that you find this something of a strange request, but I assure you that it is quite harmless, quite innocent …’

He nudged the plate with the banknote under it towards me.

‘And if you can supply me with the eight bottles by five this evening, in my room, there will be another small gift awaiting you.’

My eyes must have accepted the offer on my behalf, since he sat back in his chair as if the deal was now done. Carefully, I extracted the note from under the plate and stood up.

‘Oh,’ he added, ‘and, please, olive oil; of that I really must insist.’

In those days, not so very many years after the war, and with rationing only just out of the way, oranges enough for three pints of juice was a tall order. Even before I reached the kitchen it occurred to me that procuring wine was a far easier sideline than juicing six dozen oranges clandestinely, not to mention the tomatoes. As for the oil and the honey …

My career as a cook had been touched by the cold, pinching hand of rationing, so without hesitation I set to the question of spinning-out: I pulped the tomatoes and added sugared water and ketchup (for some reason more plentiful than the real thing); I ran to the sink, which mercifully was still piled high with unwashed breakfast plates, and rescued a good half-jug of fruit segments in syrup, not all orange, but at least citrus for the main part; I collected the dregs from two or three dozen glasses, and got more than a cupful of fruit juice, albeit of mixed origin; then, from the fruit store, I grabbed a couple of dozen oranges.

In a corner I got to work, grinding down the fruit-flesh with an ancient mincer (aha! If only I’d known!), sneaking cupfuls of concentrate and the odd can of tomato juice from the stores, pulping and grinding in an anxious frenzy. The oil was a dilemma, but also the making of me. In it went, pure olive oil. There was secrecy in it, and no great abundance in the supply room. And all the time that pound note looked less and less like good value. Curiously, though, I felt a certain pride, almost a reverence for the task, with Mulligan’s words echoing in my ears: Oh, and, please, olive oil; of that I really must insist.

And so it was that, as casually as possible, I stood over a pan of pure olive oil on a slow flame, and carefully stirred in a half-pint of honey, mimicking as far as I could manage the slow arm movements of someone heating milk and eggs for a custard. Oil and honey are at best distant relations and, although once heated through the emulsion had a not unpleasant taste, the oil did tend to rise. However, the job of introducing the sweetened oil to my juice mixture posed more acute logistical problems, and in the end I carried the lot off to my bedroom in a steel bucket. I whisked and whisked until my arm went into cramp. To my surprise, the stuff combined tolerably well, and although one couldn’t have said that it was a tasty concoction, neither was it all that bad.

Then I returned to my quiches and the luncheon preparations, leaving the bucket hidden inside my wardrobe. Six hours later I whisked the mixture again and put it into eight milk bottles.

At five minutes to five I began my furtive scurry through the hotel, the heavy crate of bottles in my arms, avoiding the main staircase entirely, sprinting along old servants’ corridors and up dark, winding stairwells only used in emergencies. When I arrived at Mulligan’s room, sweat had begun to trickle down my forehead and into my eyes, and as he opened the door I was blinking maniacally. Before I had chance even to look at him I had been yanked inside, and the door closed behind me. The room was full of the charming, intermingled smells of cigars and cologne, and in one corner hung a purple velvet smoking jacket, which, since Mr Mulligan was wearing a waistcoat and trousers of the same fabric, I guessed was part of his evening dress.

He fussed around with his cigar, unable to locate an ashtray, and finally popped the burning stub back into his mouth. From the wine crate he extracted a bottle, examined the colour of the liquid against the light from the window, and sipped. He murmured his approval, before replacing the bottle.

‘Not all fresh, especially the tomatoes, but a fine olive oil at least,’ he said, nodding towards a table where another pound note awaited me. ‘And that comes with my sincere gratitude, young man, to be sure it does.’

But I didn’t take the note. I wasn’t going anywhere until I’d had an explanation. Although in retrospect it was pure naivety which led me to such presumptuousness. Michael Mulligan, as I was to learn, was not a man whom one obliged to do or to say anything. If the King himself (the Queen by that time, actually) had desired something from him, it would have been requested formally, as a polite favour. In my ignorance, then, I stood my ground until an amused curiosity crept across his face.

‘I can see,’ he began, sitting down in an armchair and gesturing towards another, ‘that you want explanations, not cash.’

He laughed, not the big belly laugh one might have expected, but a high-pitched, impish giggle. I sat down and waited for him to continue.

‘That in itself is commendable. Here,’ he said, offering me a cigar.

I accepted it, lit it as one would a cigarette and, for want of knowing better, sucked heavily. All at once my lungs were full of burning rubber and dark, sizzling caramel, and my stomach lurched and tore itself in all directions, my throat near to rupture as I forced repeated vomit-spasms back down. Not only did I avoid vomiting but, to my amazement, neither did I cough.

Mulligan looked on with interest, and as I recovered from my first taste of a Havana, he said: ‘Now that sort of thing I find really quite impressive. You neither coughed nor were you sick, although even your evident pride has not been sufficient to keep your face from turning green. One doesn’t, by the way, inhale the fumes of a cigar. But I digress. Keeping it down! That’s what this is all about, my friend. The mixture which you prepared will help me to do likewise this evening.’

My head swam uncontrollably, and I was too debilitated by my lungful of smoke to make any response.

‘I have a rather unusual dinner ahead of me,’ he continued. ‘And your fine mixture will ensure that not only can I get it down, but that I can keep it down. Tonight, I will be eating furniture.’

I looked at him, but quickly diverted my stare; I realised that I was in the company of a madman. However, the newly-lit cigar in my hand smouldered, and from what I had often seen in the hotel dining room, a cigar of this length and thickness was going to go on smouldering for quite some time. From its tip a fine strand of blue smoke curled off into the air, but too little and too slowly, and I willed the thin ring of ash to speed up, to eat its way down the filthy stick with more visible speed, as a cigarette consumes itself in a gusting wind.

I desired only one thing more than to escape his smoke-filled room, and that was to confirm that he really had said such a thing. With this information I would quite happily have fled, cigar in hand, back to the hot, frenetic security of the kitchens.

‘I am an eating specialist,’ he said, and again I hardly knew how earnest or capricious I was to take him, ‘although, if I say so myself, of a rather exclusive kind. Not an attraction, in the normal sense. I do not actually attract people. My performances are entirely private affairs. But perhaps you have seen something of my profession, or heard of it at least?’

I assured him that I had not, shaking my head vigorously.

‘And in the pub, or at the fair, have you never seen men competing to be the fastest with a yard of ale, to the delight of all around? And have you never heard of the great pie-eating competitions, of tripe-swallowing and the like?’

I had to admit that I had.

‘Well,’ he said, turning his palms upwards humbly, ‘every profession has its amateurs, its quaint traditions and its side-street hobbyists. And every profession has also its experts, its virtuosi, its aristocrats. I, if I may be so bold as to say so, am of the latter category: a gentleman eater.’

And thus he began a narrative which took us not only to fine, seaside hotels in the north of England, but across the great oceans, to places and societies which, even in the depths of despair during the war, I had hardly dreamed existed.

Michael ‘Cast Iron’ Mulligan left Dublin in 1919 and followed many of his compatriots to the New World. A combination of charm and immense size and strength led him quickly into the public relations departments of New York’s finest bars and restaurants; that is, he became a liveried bouncer. However, he began to make a name for himself not through the grace with which he could remove drunks from the premises, nor the unerring discretion with which he could explain to a troublemaker just why he ought to make his trouble elsewhere, but after the evening’s work was done, whilst eating with his colleagues. Here he showed a talent for food and drink which amazed and frightened all around him. At first they thought he was just a hungry boy from the countryside feasting for the first time on good American food. But it continued, day by day, week by week, the quantities growing steadily. In the early hours, when the last of the customers were slamming taxi doors behind them, the band packing away their instruments, the kitchen would fill up with staff – waitresses, doormen, musicians – all waiting for that boy Mulligan to eat.

Such feats soon got him talked about, and not just below stairs. Before long the fine clientele of the restaurants and hotels where he worked got to hear about him, and wanted to see the greedy Irishman in action. However, the genteel nature of these establishments meant that demonstrations of this kind could take place only behind closed doors. Vaudeville, and more especially the freak-show business, was full of swallowers of all descriptions, and no association with such lower forms of entertainment was desired. So, before he knew exactly what he was getting into, Mulligan was performing nightly for enthusiastic private parties of rich New Yorkers, eager for any novel and diverting spectacle.

In those days he was strictly a quantity man. And his act came immediately after an audience had finished dining. That is to say, it came at the precise moment when, to a tableful of gorged, drunken socialites, the very sight of someone eating was in itself revolting. That such a sight involved almost unbelievable amounts of food merely exacerbated the monstrousness of the performance. To Mulligan it was no more than an extension of dinner, and each evening, after the show was over, he would pat his groaning stomach and shake his head with incomprehension, quite at a loss to explain his growing celebrity. Night after night it went on: a basket of fried chicken, a bottle of champagne, a plateful of sausage, a quart of beer, two dozen lamb chops, a trifle (‘a mere trifle!’ as the script went) followed, as if to confound the disbelievers, by another, identical trifle … The act came to its climax when, plucking a single rose from a vase, Mulligan made as if to present it to the most glamorous woman in the party and then, feigning to prick himself, would say: ‘Why, this is a dangerous weapon! I better take care of it!’ With which he would promptly gobble down the flower together with stalk (which he had de-thorned earlier), to the amazement of the city’s finest.

One evening, after a particularly successful show in which he had performed a routine entitled Americana (forty-eight hot dogs, one for each star; thirteen slices of apple pie, one for each stripe; twenty-eight cups of punch, one for each president; and a brandy for Lincoln), he was approached by a thin, fragile man who spoke in a strange accent, and who had the eyes of someone who expects yes for an answer. Laden with a stomach full of borrowed patriotism, yet happy with his performance, Michael listened with great interest to the proposal: Paris, twenty dollars a week, more varied work …

He was soon on a steamer to France, earning enough money through drinking competitions in the lower-deck bars that when he disembarked in Europe, he had more than two hundred dollars in his pocket, which he spent immediately on fine suits of tweed and velvet.

On arrival at his new place of employment – another unmentionable hotel, I’m afraid, since it is still there, almost unchanged they say, although of course I have never set foot in the place – he found a rather different kind of job awaited him. Amid the grand opulence of banqueting halls, their walls covered in immense oil canvases and gilt-framed mirrors, and occasionally in the private suites of the hotel’s more extravagant guests, he no longer ate his way through a fixed menu, but rather devoured whatsoever was requested of him. This, then, was the meaning of more varied work.

‘I was the greatest!’ cried Mulligan from his armchair, pounding his chest with a cannonball fist and laughing out loud. ‘The act was pure theatre, pure spectacle. After dessert was well under way, I would arrive and sit at a place laid for me at the table, this place having remained ominously and threateningly vacated throughout the dinner itself. There I would assume a pose of impervious indifference to those around me, who, I should say, often included not only crown princes, sheikhs and ambassadors, but also the shrieking, guffawing minor nobility of any number of European states, not to mention the greatest actresses of the Parisian stage, to whom clung more often than not one or another chuckling millionaire. Yet, before my steely, unforgiving expression (in addition to my size), these diners usually appeared a touch intimidated, with those nearest to me the most humbled.

‘And here we worked an excellent trick. The story went that I had been rescued from deepest rural Ireland (my red hair, which in those days I wore long, added zest to this detail), where I had been brought up almost in the wild by my grandmother. Moreover, I was profoundly deaf, and could communicate only through a strange language involving tapping one’s fingers into another’s palm, a language known only to my (now deceased) grandmother and the idealistic Frenchman who had brought me to France on the death of my grandma. This man had become my trusty assistant – the young lad was really an out-of-work actor from the provinces, so out-of-work, indeed, that this was his first job in Paris – and each night he acted as interpreter for Le Grand Michael Mulligan.

‘“Ladies and gentlemen,” he would announce after my silent presence had generated its usual disquiet, “Monsieur Mulligan hopes that you have dined well, and will be pleased to consider your suggestions for his own dinner this evening.”

‘Now, a curious thing is that the powerful and highly placed citizens on this earth are frequently the most childlike. Thus, whereas these guests were prone to exaggerated, uncontrolled enthusiasm once they had become excited, it was not unusual at the initial stages of my act to encounter a nervous silence. Eventually, someone, an inebriated eldest son over from England for the chorus girls, or a fat German banker too pompous and drunk to know timidity, would shout out, “A sardine!” to great and relieved hilarity all round. My assistant would tap the message into my palm. In return, Le Grand Michael Mulligan would consider the request solemnly until the laughter had subsided, and would either give a controlled, deliberate nod, in which case the specified item was called for, or would decline with a slow shake of the head, glowering in the direction of whoever had made so contemptible a suggestion.

‘And thus the evenings were enacted. The audience soon lost its coyness, and God alone knew what would come next. “Five locusts!” someone might shout, to the derision of the rest (in fact, we did have a small selection of dried insects, awaiting the order of any guest well known for his generosity), but through the derision an alternative would usually surface. “Well, if not locusts, how about worms?!” At which point my assistant and I would go into a protracted communication, resulting in the announcement, “Mr Mulligan will eat only one worm, since he says that he already has one, and another will keep it company!”

‘That one always got an enormous laugh, but the laughter would turn to screams of horror as a long, wriggling earthworm was placed before me, and I sucked it up like a string of spaghetti.

‘My twenty dollars a week turned out to be good business for the hotel too, since all petitions to Le Grand Michael Mulligan were billed to the requester. A very good business indeed. And in this way, sadly, I managed to bankrupt more than one person with my stomach.

‘I had, very early on, developed a penchant for beluga caviare, which could, as you can imagine, have perilous financial implications. Yes, in this way I turned several of our best guests insolvent, although for the most part I think they probably didn’t realise until the following morning. Yet it is a poor, sad-faced English gentleman for whom I harbour most regret. It happened on a particularly slow night, with no one of consequence (or imagination) in the house. My evening’s work had run to a mere bucketful of cherries, a fox’s tail (from a stuffed animal in the hotel lobby), and a side of pork belly, which I had rather enjoyed. Throughout the evening I had noticed, at the far end of the table, a man in a crumpled dinner suit, whose expression of empty fatigue had deteriorated by stages to one of inconsolable despair. With the mood rapidly leaving us, I was keen to secure one final request. Apart from anything else, I was still hungry, and my paltry menu sélectionné had thus far provided me with but a snack. Finally, the despairing English gentleman drew himself up from the nearly horizontal slouch into which he had fallen, and getting (somehow) to his feet, raised his glass.

‘“My dear Mulligan …” he began, as those around urged him to retake his seat, “… fine, fine, noble son of the Emerald Isle …” at which point he belched, but I took no offence, “… I tonight stand here, a poor man …” (“You’ll make another million, Quentin! Sit down, old boy!” came a shout from someone further down the table.) “… I have made and lost a great fortune. Yes …” he gulped down some port, “… but you, you of the fine orange hair, dumb to the heartless world which you neither understand nor whose vices, my dear sir, could you comprehend …” At which point he rather lost himself … “Err … ehm, but think not of this world, good man!” he rallied. “It is not worthy of your attention. Michael Mulligan, I toast you, and with my final sovereign I invite you to share with me my final dozen oysters.”

‘With this he raised his empty glass and held still, save for some involuntary listing, awaiting my reply. I communicated with my assistant, and indeed this time I really did use a form of secret language, for the message was unusual, and in truth it was rather a rash one.

‘“Mr Mulligan will toast your future success, sir, not with a dozen oysters but with a dozen dozen oysters!”’

Here Mulligan took a long, pensive draw on his cigar, watching the rich smoke spiral upwards from his nose and mouth, spilling out into thin, flat clouds which hung in the air, forming a plateau across the hotel room.

‘That,’ he said wistfully, ‘turned out to be a touch imprudent. A dozen oysters, two dozen, even six dozen, I had swallowed on one occasion. After all, seventy-two oysters are no heavier nor occupy more space inside than seven or eight braised pig’s trotters, or a couple of ostrich eggs. But a gross of the things … Ha! It was the undoing of me, two nights running! And as for the poor Mr Quentin, we never saw his face again. Who knows, perhaps he is paying off the debt to this day.

‘Ah, yes! Paris in the ’Twenties! How much I learned there, how much I learned. How much I ate!’

From his armchair he recounted more incredible tales, of churns of milk in Belgian monasteries, a grilled lion’s paw in Baghdad, sinkfuls of pasta (‘Tubes, my boy, the biggest possible! Pound for pound they look more!’); of a forty-five chitterling marathon in Brittany, ten kilos of roast cod in Bilbao, seven pickled mice for a bet in Marrakech. And he told me also of the people, those fine clients of the hotel, who sought a little extra zest to their dinner parties in Rome, Kabul, Delhi, London, Frankfurt, inviting him to their holiday entertainments in Goa, Rimini, Monte Carlo and Thessaloniki. On a visit to Tokyo he had consumed so much sushi that, in listening to him, one felt as if one were floating on a sea of raw fish; in Constantinople his ability to finish off an entire roast goat in little over half a day had so enthused one of the dignitaries privileged enough to witness the spectacle that Mulligan was presented not only with a belly dancer for the night, but was invited to extract and keep the bulging ruby which adorned her navel. Along the Magreb he had sucked the eyes out of more dead animals than he cared to remember, and the glittering rewards for such fripperies were staggering indeed. To crumbling European castles he had travelled, there to gorge on whatever his noble amphitryon decreed: seventeen pairs of bull’s testicles at the table of the Duke of Alba in Salamanca; inconceivable quantities of sausage for any number of gibbering, neurotic Central European counts; regular sojourns to the seats of the Dukes of Argyll, Dumfriesshire and sundry other Scottish lairds, each one desperate that Mulligan improve upon some or other haggis-eating record, or simply curious to know how quickly their national dish could disappear down the throat of one man. For a time he was in huge demand in the USA, where he set a string of records for chicken and ribs throughout the Southern states; he amazed the Romanian Jews in New York with his evident partiality for ridding any restaurant of all its chopped liver and the relish with which he glugged down whole pitchers of schmaltz as if it were … well, metaphors are hardly appropriate; the Ashkenazim wouldn’t have him, but he didn’t mind, there were plenty of other sects, plenty of other religions, to astound; he even did a promotion for the pro-Prohibition Methodists, drinking the body weight of a six-year-old child in lemonade, presumably to illustrate that purity and excess can coexist. He repeated Americana for countless gatherings of businessmen, and in one particularly prolific afternoon’s work notched up a record of sixty-two hot dogs (even before Babe Ruth’s achievement) at a public demonstration sponsored by Wurtz’s Wieners, a Chicago sausage company owned by one of those immigrants who really wants you to mispronounce his name.

‘Then the Depression hit,’ he continued, ‘and the profession of gluttony suffered something of a downturn. The rich became preoccupied, and the poor became hungry. Overnight, or so it seemed, no one wanted to see how much more than a normal man I could eat. Now it was a matter of just what I would eat beyond the normal. On its own this was nothing new for me. After all, for the better part of a decade a great many of the things I had sent down to my stomach could have been called food only through a very liberal understanding of the word, or by a desperately hungry person: in Oxford I had feasted on a sturdy hiking boot, prepared in advance, not à la Chaplin, but in vinegar and wine, and then slow-roasted in butter and olive oil; somewhere else (I forget) a mackintosh, curried; a canary in its little wooden cage (I mean, and its cage); a large aspidistra (leaves au naturel, stem and roots flambéed) …’