At last I am in a position to set down the recipe for Alien Pie.

Have you ever embarked on something that looked completely straightforward but which has turned out to be bafflingly technical? For instance, I was completely flummoxed some time ago in a dentist’s waiting room when trying to kill time with the crossword in the current number of JAPEDA, the Journal of the American Pedophilia Association – a scholarly magazine I had not encountered before. The trouble with these academic journals is that even their crosswords tend to be slanted towards their respective disciplines, with the result that what looks like an ordinary puzzle turns out to have highly specialized clues. I suppose this is what university professors like in their hours of relaxation. Personally, I would have thought a complete break with ‘shop’ might be preferable. I laboured in vain for half an hour, although it did occur to me later that Americans may spell ‘pyjamas’ with an ‘a’ in place of our ‘y’.

This same principle sometimes holds good for recipes, and what may look like a familiar set of easy-to-follow instructions for preparing a dish in an averagely equipped kitchen turns out to be the blueprint for a procedure that would tax an industrial chemist. Unfortunately this could be the case here. Alien Pie, unlike all my other recipes, may be better treated by the non-specialist cook as a theoretical text, more of a thought experiment than an actual dish. This is a pity because, although to prepare the dish adequately requires a week (a month if you include smoking the cats), it will open up a universe of taste you never dreamed existed. It is partly for this reason its name is so appropriate.

However, as we already know, this is also a commemorative dish: the direct outcome of what Nanty Riah and I were eating that fateful night of the helicopter and our subsequent conversation. As I mentioned before, at least three of the ingredients must be cat, beetroot and potatoes. Now, any cook knows that a subtle and delicate meat like cat will not easily blend with the stolid, Calvinist flavours of root crops. Had I not spent years trying like an alchemist to achieve this magical fusion I would not be able to give this recipe. But six months ago I triumphed unexpectedly with oyster and turnip profiteroles – creations light as butterflies whose gauzy wings waft you the merest ghosts of disembodied flavours. Who until then could have imagined the spirit of the oyster bed and the spirit of the turnip field tiptoeing out to meet clandestinely by night in a frivol of choux pastry? It required the invention of a process I have modestly named ‘sampering’. Sampering is somewhat analogous to the technique of enfleurage with which essential oils are extracted from flowers by aromatherapists (New Age charlatans who always come up smelling of roses). Sampering involves using fat to leach out delicate flavours. It is quite unnecessary to do it at midnight by the light of the full moon where seven ley-lines meet. I also doubt if it helps to be a virgin, whatever that is. All you need is a proper old-fashioned larder: a cool place where the French kept the lardier or bacon tub, since lard is what sampering requires.

Might I just mention in passing that lard also forms the basis of a stupendously successful weight-loss diet I pioneered for a women’s magazine, now sadly defunct? It was called the LFM diet after its three ingredients: lard, Fernet and multivitamins. Half a bottle of Fernet Branca a day, plus a single multivitamin pill and all the lard you can eat. Just that! And the weight, ladies, rolls off. Hard to believe? Try it for yourself in the privacy of your home. But do be sensible and remember, as when starting any new diet, not to consult a member of the medical profession. For obvious reasons doctors are dead against your becoming healthy. Older readers will probably remember that the LFM diet became famous mainly because if you followed it faithfully you always lost weight but never suffered hunger pangs. Indeed, the only disadvantage that occurred in a small minority of cases was grease stains on the underwear. Otherwise it was wholly free of side effects. In view of her new romantic status it might be neighbourly of me, before I go, to introduce Marta to the LFM diet. All part of the Samper service.

All right, then,

As I hinted earlier, securing and preparing the correct ingredients can be quite time-consuming. Alien Pie is as good a test as I know of punctuality: that innate sense of timing without which no one ever becomes a cook worthy of the name. The best commercially available smoked cat comes from just inside Italy, up by the Swiss border near Solda (or Sulden, if you’re feeling Germanic). It is purveyed by the Ammering family in the little village of Migg and they run an efficient mail-order service. Those high cantons of the Alps long ago developed ways of preserving meat against the long, cold winters when communities might be isolated by snow for months on end. Some uplanders in Switzerland still eat dog, but sadly this noble tradition has lately been reduced to a hole-and-corner ritual like early Christians celebrating communion underground. It is even unclear how much longer the Ammerings can remain in business. Last year’s production was interrupted by a dastardly attack made on their smokery by members of QI, the Quadrupedifili d’Italia. I am determined this distinctive taste be not lost to gastronomy and Claudio Ammering has now agreed to pass on to me his family’s secret in order to keep the art alive. It ought to be something one can easily learn. Cats are plentiful enough, God knows. According to the Mammal Society in the UK alone they kill 300,000 birds every two days. If nature can be so unashamedly red in tooth and claw even when obese with Whiskas, no ethical cook should hesitate to redress the balance in the birds’ favour. Cats are skinned and paunched like hares; it is the smoking process I have yet to learn.

Meanwhile, the baby beet should be lightly boiled and, when quite cool, thinly sliced and laid on a tray of cold lard before being covered with more shavings of lard topped off with a bread board on which is a brick. This is sampering. Over a period of ten days in the coolest place available short of the fridge, precious flavour leaches out of the beet into the lard. The pomegranate rinds, cut into thin julienne strips, should likewise be sampered.

Now the busy cook can relax and take himself down to the local fishing port for the turtle. These creatures are not as readily available as they used to be, apparently, and now only turn up from time to time as by-catch in fishermen’s nets. If spotted they should be snapped up at once, killed by cutting the throat, bagged and popped into the freezer. For Alien Pie no more than 500 gm of turtle meat is required. The flesh of even baby turtles can be tough, so marinade it first in white wine, sliced fresh ginger and crushed nasturtium leaves.

The great day arrives when these carefully assembled ingredients can be translated lovingly into a rare repast. Prepare yourself. Rise early. Think pure thoughts. Ensure your neighbour – who these days looks more and more as though she has taken to sampering her hair – is safely battened away in her frowsty gloom behind the fence. Put on a clean apron. Choose an aria worthy of the dish, for the chef who cooks without a song on his lips cannot hope to infuse the right carefree improvisatory note into his art. Today the future looks as bright as the Tuscan sunlight striking mottles from the cliff face visible beyond the kitchen window. I break into ‘Nuoce gravamente alla salute’, Orazio’s light-hearted warning to his friend and rival in love Ovidio that to fall in love will be the death of him. As indeed it proves to be in Act 3 when Orazio drowns him in a vat of cyanide: a perfect example of overkill and one unrivalled until the morbid excess of the much later opera Rasputin. I sometimes think I Froci di Firenze has to be my all-time favourite opera to cook by. Today I seem in fine form, melodramatically inspired, carolling away as with my terrible swift sword I chop the washed rhubarb stalks into one-inch lengths before subjecting the defenceless peanuts to the hammer blows of fate.

Soon the bacon and the crushed (but not ground) peanuts are frying in a generous lump of lard from the sampered beet and pomegranates. They are joined in our best iron casserole by the pussy fumé, the tortue marinadée and the rhubarb choppée. The puréed prunes should be thinned with a glass of Fernet and added to the pot. Then the pomegranate rinds and the beet are retrieved from the sampering. You will notice how pale the beet have become, the rich flush of their childhood having transferred itself to the lard over the preceding days. They can now be discarded, having served their purpose. The pomegranate rinds, though, are added, together with the peeled and diced potatoes. A tad dry, you feel? A glass of the marinade will rectify that; but remember there is a lot of moisture locked up in the turtle meat and the rhubarb. In my view pies should not be awash in that all-purpose brown soup the British call gravy. With a meat as delicate as cat we are aiming at a casket of disarming savours rather than a rugged stew a-swill beneath an iron roof of pastry. Add a pinch or two of salt and pepper and then – supremest masterstroke in all modern cuisine – the single drop of paraffin (or kerosene as the Americans call it).

You blench? Just a bit leery, are we? But listen: I have discovered that this single drop transforms the dish from merely very interesting into an unblushing classic. In such a tiny quantity paraffin is completely harmless, if that’s what’s worrying you. Nor can you taste it as such, any more than you taste the chocolate in that Mexican classic, rabbit in chocolate. It simply becomes something else, something inimitably itself. It is, well, alien, like the hint of industrial processes somewhere in the background of Knize Ten eau de cologne. Just be courageous! Coraggio! as I sing in the character of Orazio (who is trying to steel himself to cut out the heart of his poisoned friend and turn it into a paperweight by marmelizing). Add that drop, stir everything together, cover the pot and cook for two hours in a low oven (170°C).

In the meantime you can sift the flour into a bowl and work in 100 gm of the bright pink lard from the sampered beet and 100 gm of the faint pink lard from the sampered pomegranate rinds. You will need to add just enough Fernet to make it all cling together in a ball that can be briefly kneaded and rolled out into a half-inch-thick sheet of the oddest pastry you ever did see. Frankly, it looks like pink marzipan, for all the world like something that might be stockpiled by a Battenberg cake factory. Put it hastily into the fridge for half an hour. Then transfer the contents of the casserole (resist the urge to taste it but admire that deep smoky, plummy, geological smell like processes taking place deep inside a star) to a large, round, ovenproof dish. Lay a strip of the pastry on the pie dish’s moistened rim; place a tall cake ring in the centre of the dish with a saucer laid upside down on top and carefully drape the pastry over all, sealing it well around the edges. The shape should resemble a UFO; it is very much up to the cook’s individual ingenuity to add verisimilitude. I use small embedded olives for a ring of portholes. Then back into the oven with it for another forty minutes at 190 °C until it is the dark pinkish-brown of an unknown alloy heated to glowing by entry into a planet’s upper atmosphere.

Beyond this point we enter the realm of the sacramental, and words all but fail me. All I can say is that Alien Pie, hot from the oven and with a jaunty buzzard feather stuck in the top, should be eaten on a terrace overlooking a distant ocean above which the remnants of sunset brood like old wounds seeping through a field dressing. It is one of those experiences poised exquisitely between sorrow and oblivion.