Rumblings: Food Fiction

Guest voice Lawrence Norfolk believes that a fertile imagination can turn every dinner into an adventure

From an early age, on my birthday, I was allowed to eat whatever I wanted. My mother prepared these dishes - which were usually things I had read about in books or which intrigued me by virtue of their outlandish or mythic qualities. So my eighth birthday was celebrated with turtle soup, which must have lodged itself in my consciousness via the mock turtle in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and my ninth featured frog's legs from the entry on France in my children's encyclopedia. The next anniversary was marked by a T-bone steak (from a western) and the one after that by a large white fish whose name escapes me. The turtle soup was the worst; a bowl of oily yellow liquid in which lolled a plug of greyish-white flesh. I ate it anyway, along with the frog's legs and the outlandish dishes that followed.

The first restaurant I remember was a bustling family-run Italian place where I ordered spaghetti vongole; mostly, I think, because of how it sounded. Then I watched anxiously through the whirl of waiters for my dish to emerge from the frantic region beyond the mysterious door at the back. It seemed impossible that just by saying "spaghetti vongole", such a dish would appear. But it did: a bowl filled with pasta and topped with bits of octopus, clams and prawns. I devoured it, slurping down the garlicky tomato sauce and mopping up with bread.

In adolescence I decided to cook something. I chose pizza. About the dough, all I remember is that it stuck to anything it touched and I made a lot of it. The tomato part of the topping was parts of tomatoes. The cheese part was supermarket cheddar. Eased out of the oven, the discs sagged like Dalí's watches. They were disgusting, according to the boys who nevertheless ate them. The girls took the opposite view. These were authentic pizzas, they countered indignantly. This was how they were made in Italy, the prettiest one declared; then, to my surprise, she draped herself about me. I don't know if she had actually been to Italy and nor did I care. But I remember having the dim realisation that her attention had something to do with the fact that I had cooked this meal. Food, I began to understand, was about more than the food.

At college I cooked huge dishes of chilli con carne, steak, terrible omelettes, duck. I had a roster of dishes and so long as I kept to those I was OK. Octopus was not on my roster. Nevertheless, when I met the woman who would become my wife, octopus was what I decided to cook. I had seen fishermen hauling octopuses out of boats on Crete. In the local taverna I'd eaten succulent slices of white flesh in a delicate lemon sauce. Also, octopus was on special at Sainsbury's. I chopped the tentacles into discs and threw them in the pot and boiled. And boiled. I knew that, above all, octopus had to be tender. I poked an octopus chunk with the point of a knife. It had the resilience of an ice-hockey puck.

The memory of the Greek fishermen came back to me. They were hitting the octopuses, I recalled now, thrashing the tentacles against rocks to tenderise them. I can't remember how or when I decided my octopus was fit to eat. We sat across from one another, jaws working, attempting smiles, each of us wondering how long we had to chew before it would be acceptable to spit.

© The Daily TelegraphLawrence Norfolk's latest novel is 'John Saturnall's Feast' (Bloomsbury)