Port-Louis, Rue Thasard – Boucherie Seugrem
Scene 11
En route to his house Maille rode through the Rue Thasard in order to stop at the Boucherie Seugrem to buy a fine piece of meat for dinner. As he entered the butcher’s, Maitre Seugrem was hanging up a bunch of freshly blanched tripe on the hook.
«Bonjour Maitre», Maille greeted him, «What must a man eat when he does not understand things correctly anymore?»
«Non semper ea sunt, quae videntur», chuckled Seugrem, smoothing his black-and-white pinstriped apron over his stately stomach.
«Horaz?» suggested Maille.
«Phaedrus – from the Fables.»
«And what does that mean?»
«A sausage is not always a sausage.»
Right from the time when they were in school together Oskar Seugrem had always known better. Maille had trusted him implicitly and carefully copied him in the exams. For four years they had shared the school bank. Then, Maille, despite his skills as a copist, had to repeat a full school year. Later, Seugrem had studied Latin and actually written a doctorate about the primordial soup in the metamorphosis of Ovid. At a point, he experienced a drastic change of heart and exchanged his doctoral hat for that of a butcher’s cap: not out of economic necessity but out of pure passion.
From the very start, Maille had been one of the faithful customers of Suegrem's meat shop. He had never regretted his fidelity: the quality of Seugrem’s products was as perfect as his translation of the «Gallician War» or his solution to a mathematical problem. Moreover, Seugrem had remained a friend of sorts and belonged to the select club of connoisseurs with whom one could converse about the darker side of food, about disgust, repentance or voracity, about the weirdness of certain consistences or the empathy for particular sea creatures.
Maille bought a pound of tripe. His cook Odette knew exactly how to prepare the tender entrails, with thyme, a bit of bacon, rum and, at the end, a good shot of lemon juice (recipe). The tripe would be the prelude to a farewell menu that Maille wished to treat himself to that evening – because who could know what awaited him in Dakar?
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Menu Maille
The whole menu, Odette Sissay cooked for Hektor Maille the eve of his mission:
- Soup Chofrèt (Chilled Ginger Soup)
- Pwason an wob vè (Fish in Pandanus Leaf)
- Tripes à la mode de Senpuav (Tripe in sauce)
- Pen nwè (Caribbean Fruitcake)