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see no reason why owl pellets mightn’t yield an equally interesting stock. I rather fancy chanterelles and a smidgin of fresh ginger would set it off admirably.’
    ‘But pellet soup’s not on tomorrow’s menu?’
    ‘I’m afraid not. One more thing that required notice. But I had a good morning’s shopping in Woodbridge earlier.’
    ‘Finished!’ announces Josh, banging the bowl on the table. Luna stretches and her hind paw gets enough purchase on the butter to push the plate away, leaving a deep footprint.
    ‘I want to know who’s coming,’ I say, ‘but Max won’t tell me.’
    ‘Oh, you know him, Gerry. He’s just a tease. There’s the odd local we owe hospitality to, and a player from Colchester Symphony Orchestra. We’ll only be eight. I’m going to do a plain ordinary roast and to hell with it. We look to your starter to add the exotic touch. Josh and I will be off to the butcher to collect the meat tomorrow morning so you’ll have the kitchen to yourself.’
    So next morning, having ruthlessly ejected the cat, I lay out a small but highly select variety of things in plastic pots, ready for their translation into something rich and strange, likesomebody’s father in that play I did for O-level. Over the years I have, of course, amassed a great number of inventions for teasing the palate, not a few of them themed. (My Men of Violence suite of starters includes Pol Pot Noodles, Somozas, Shin Fein – a divine junior cousin to ossobuco – Papa Duck, Kim Jong Eel and my celebrated Mobster Thermidor.) But today I shall stick to a mere three or four little appetisers, one of which was suggested by that wonderful book,
Emergency Cuisine
by Dame Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis. If one needed a glowing example of staunch British gallantry in the war years this little gem of a book would supply it, so practical in the face of adversity and so sunny and uplifting in tone. Winston Churchill’s speeches undoubtedly stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood of his people as they crouched around their sunburst-fretworked wireless sets; but Dame Emmeline would have taken both sinews and blood from novel sources and made of them novel sauces to fill their bellies with fire. The loss of her book in the recent collapse of my house, together with that equally irreplaceable volume, Maj.-Gen. Sir Aubrey Lutterworth’s Elements of Raj Cookery , is a blow that may yet prove serious enough to make me send in the bulldozers after all to see if they have survived.
    What Emergency Cuisine reminded me was how good field mice can be. Indeed, in the nineteenth century they received a famous accolade from Frank Buckland, who used to supplement his meagre public school diet with such delicacies. ‘A toasted field mouse, not a house mouse, makes a perfect bonne-bouche for a hungry boy. It eats like a lark.’ So for some days I set traps in the extensive stables and outhouses that surround the Hall, and these yielded ten – no, eleven on a recount – plump specimens which I kept secretly in a foil-covered pot in the little fridge in the pantry where Jennifer seldom goes. The worst job was skinning and boning them: there’s nothing more fiddly. For discretion’s sake I did it in my bathroom up in the attic. Even so, Luna must have caught the enticing scent because she came miaowing at the door. The skins and entrailshad to go down the lavatory. The result of my labours was what Jennifer had disparaged as the ‘things in gore’ in the fridge. It’s true that, when thoroughly unzipped, eleven field mice yield not much meat at all; but if there are only the eight of us that’s nearly a mouse-and-a-half apiece. The question is, which way to do them? One can cook the meat very gently with a little butter for a bare minute or two, add the merest dribble of mouse broth and use this delicate hash as a vol- auvent filling. On the other hand you can cream the meat with a pestle and mortar, ideally with a little goose fat and a teaspoon