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Lear's Nonsense Cookery

Sometimes I find reading for this nightmare degree a complete chore. Sometimes it's a joy. I discovered a wonderful piece by Walter Benjamin on food I'd like to write about when I have the time. Today, the fat Welsh librarian kept walking past looking stern at my gasps of laughter reading Edward Lear. I thought I'd post this. It brightened my day.

Extract from the Nonsense Gazette, for August, 1870.

Our readers will be interested in the following communications from our valued and learned contributor, Professor Bosh, whose labours in the fields of Culinary and Botanical science, are so well known to all the world. The first three Articles richly merit to be added to the Domestic cookery of every family; those which follow, claim the attention of all Botanists, and we are happy to be able through Dr. Bosh's kindness to present our readers with illustrations of his discoveries. All the new flowers are found in the valley of Verrikwier, near the lake of Oddgrow, and on the summit of the hill Orfeltugg.'

THREE RECEIPTS FOR DOMESTIC COOKERY

TO MAKE AN AMBLONGUS PIE

Take 4 pounds (say 4 1/2 pounds) of fresh Amblongusses, and put them in a small pipkin.

Cover them with water and boil them for 8 hours incessantly, after which add 2 pints of new milk, and proceed to boil for 4 hours more.

When you have ascertained that the Amblongusses are quite soft, take them out and place them in a wide pan, taking care to shake them well previously.

Grate some nutmeg over the surface, and cover them carefully with powdered gingerbread, curry-powder, and a sufficient quantity of Cayenne pepper.

Remove the pan into the next room, and place it on the floor. Bring it back again, and let it simmer for three-quarters of an hour. Shake the pan violently till all the Amblongusses have become a pale purple colour.

Then, having prepared a paste, insert the whole carefully, adding at the same time a small pigeon, 2 slices of beef, 4 cauliflowers, and any number of oysters.

Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time.

Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.

TO MAKE CRUMBOBBLIOUS CUTLETS

Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible slices, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times.

When the whole is thus minced, brush it up hastily with a new clothes-brush, and stir round rapidly and capriciously with a salt-spoon or a soup ladel.

Place the whole in a saucepan, and remove it to a sunny place, -- say the roof of the house if free from sparrows or other birds, -- and leave it there for about a week.

At the end of that time add a little lavender, some oil of almonds, and a few herring-bones; and cover the whole with 4 gallons of clarified crumbobblious sauce, when it will be ready for use.

Cut it into the shape of ordinary cutlets, and serve it up in a clean tablecloth or dinner-napkin.

TO MAKE GOSKY PATTIES

Take a pig, three or four years of age, and tie him by the off-hind leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of currants, 5 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and six bushels of turnips, within his reach; if he eats these, constantly provide him with more.

Then, procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, four quinces of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown waterproof linen.

When the paste is perfectly dry, but not before, proceed to beat the Pig violently, with the handle of a large broom. If he squeals, beat him again.

Visit the paste and beat the pig alternately for some days, and ascertain that if at the end of that period the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.

If it does not then, it never will; and in that case the Pig may be let loose, and the whole process may be considered as finished.

p123-5 in The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, ed Holbrook Jackson (London: Faber, 1993)

me and my microplane

Alright it's not massive news, but I bought a Microplane. Everyone goes on about Microplanes. If you watch television cookery programmes they all (them TV cooks) use Microplanes. Nigel Slater doesn't usually endorse products but he endorses the Microplane. The "Ask Nigel" he endorses it in hasn't made it to the Observer website, for some reason, unless, bizarrely, I imagined him endorsing Microplanes.

So yes, I paid ten times more (£22) than I could have paid for a Sainsbury's box grater and got this Microplane, I feel compelled to write, but grater, whatever. It is, I keep reminding myself, only a grater.

It minces very well, which (ha!) I find attractive: it's perfect for garlic and for fresh, zingy apple purée for Birchermuesli. It shaves featherlight curls of parmesan over pasta/risotto.

But I'm yet to get used to its tiny, vicious blades. My fingertips are in serious danger. A slightly blunt box grater I can rub my hand against, not for thrills, but to grate to the nub of a carrot, the nub of anything. And what about grating carrots? I have the coarse grade Microplane. Do I need the "supercoarse" if I don't want minced carrot? For zest do I need "fine"? Do I need to shell out £60 on graters, because TV cooks use them?

I'm sure Microplane is like Apple. When you buy something made by Apple - at least when I first bought this Macbook - you feel acutely you've spent too much, when something cheaper, really, would have done. When you've got it, you like how modish it is, but find it slightly irritating because it seems, simply, not as practical as what you're used to. But then it grows on you. People complain about how annoying it is and you feel a bit defensive. Though secretly you sort of agree; or did before. Eventually you love it, don't know why you'd bother with anything else. You become evangelical about its superiority.

Well, something like that. It's yet to happen with my shiny new Microplane, but I've only had it for a few days.

hm

Writing about food suits me better than trying to be urbane and sounding irritating writing about restaurants. I need to be a grown-up to do restaurants.

Tom Yum, paralytic, Tom Yum, anxiety

EATING NOTES

Tip Top Thai and Dim T, Heath Street, Hampstead

Here are a few things I haven't written down because I feel I should be working on my dissertation. I should be. I can't think to write. I'm anxious. I'm thinking about food because it's manageable and outside my head. Unlike, I suppose it's inevitable I add, my dissertation.

New Years Eve. Hampstead. A restaurant called Tip Top Thai on Heath Street we only go to because other restaurants are fully booked. The proprietor sits on a chair by the bar, grimly overseeing four metres square of restaurant. She gets brought tea through the time we're eating, but doesn't say anything. She just sits. The maître d' has a face barren of joy or, yet, expression and reluctantly gives us a table.

Those of us who don't order a starter receive (cue expression) a scowl for not ordering a starter, and I get a further one when all I order is a bowl of Tom Yum and some steamed rice. I am not hungry, so this is all I want. I am scared into ordering a glass of house white ("You want drinks" - not so much a question as a command) which turns out okay. The soup is a bare thimbleful, but it's hot and aromatic, lemongrass predominant. There are a few not-overcooked prawns floating around in there and the rice is, well, cooked and tastes like rice.

Okay so it's not really fair to judge a place on the food, having tried one dish of Tom Yum - what Thai can't knock up an acceptable Tom Yum? My Thai aunt uses stock cubes she gets from Yum Yum in Brighton and works a miracle with them - but the sweet and sour creation served to James is fluorescent enough to make me suspicious. Besides, the waiting staff are so awful it barely matters. I won't be back for it - the food.

Jess and I ask for filter coffee, which causes some consternation although the menu reads: "Filter Coffee". "What coffee? Fil-? Oh. No. We only have normal coffee." Which means instant coffee. You can see the undissolved flakes winking at the brim. Oddly, it's very good instant coffee. Almost I'm tempted to ask what brand it is, because I could drink this, at dire moments. (Unromantic thoughts.)

Resisting, we pay, and we're not going to pay service, except that bitchface assumes a harder expression and worse English than she can actually speak. I ask if it's discretionary. "Yes." So we don't have to pay it. "You pay this," she barks, jabbing her finger at the 110% total.

It's only a few pounds so we pay and get out. It's very irritating, and I leave with the kind of fury that you imagine compels people to write in to a newspaper, or ring Watchdog. Pathetic, in other words. But still, you resent giving money to people who don't even have the grace to bother seeming they care.

Next, New Year's Day. After a night of hard drinking to escape the worry of talking to people, which saw me alternately asleep and throwing up by half past ten, being taken into a fried chicken place on the Finchley Road at half past four in the morning, buying fish and chips and eating them to fill the gap which the vomit, leaving me, left in me, I wake up on New Year's morning in serious need of restoration.

(I regret that my first fish and chips in two or three years is from Montana Fried Chicken, Finchley Road - however satsfying, in a wrong, guilty way, they were. A retributive pilgrimage in order? Whitby? Padstow? Whatever. I think I'll go to Loch Fyne when I get back to Cambridge next weekend and have good fish and chips sans sick starter. I'd forgotten the joy of fish in batter - and chips for that matter. I don't have chips often enough, proper fried ones or even just wedges of potato left to care for themselves in a hot oven with herbs and oil. Potato made crisp, soggy, fluffy by mere application of heat and fat - be it of a goose, a cow, a sunflower, an olive - is without doubt one of the good things in life.)

Johan suggests a walk and we end up going for lunch at Dim T, again on Heath Street, but the Fitzjohn Av end.

Dim T is good - out and out, no bones, no cliches, good. Service is easy-going but professional and the food is - has been each time I've come - really excellent. It's pan-Asian so you could get sneery, but then you remember that places like Tip Top Thai exist, and you think how awful restaurants can be, and then, here, how good they can be, and authenticity is piffling jingoism.

I have Tom Yum again. I need something cleansing, restorative. It's repetitive, I know, but that doesn't matter. The basin - I mean mixing-bowl - of soup which comes is triumphant, a steaming bath of aromatic broth, with large, beautiful coral-striped prawns, noodles, pak choi, good thick bits of chilli with the seeds in, bits of ginger and lemon grass. This is nothing like yesterday's ramekin of liquid with bobbing prawns. The prawns are fresh, with the crunch they have when freshly cooked and on the point. The balance of flavours in the broth, which is all-important, really, is as it should be, hot, sweet, sour, salt. It could do with a bit more heat, maybe, but there's chilli sauce on the table.

We share dim sum. Pork buns. How do you get dough to be like that? It's light, but satisfyingly stodgy, skin-soft and clinging. The pork filling is gutsy, long-cooked, sweet, salt and delicious. Pork and prawn dumplings have a good mouth-coating oitment of porky fattiness, and the taste, which somehow goes so well with it, of sweet seashell prawn. Spicey beef ones have a little slice of red-chilli on top, the meat itself is minced, warmly spiced, rich, and again delicious. You get three of these dim sum in a basket, but you want more, and that surely is a good sign. I leave some noodles and soup in my bowl. It's not that I don't want more but I'm bursting with broth. It's at moments like this I envisage Christian Jessen, all square-jawed and healthy and wearing a lab-coat, saying your stomach is the size of a clenched fist. Groan.

Dim T seems, looking at the menu, to be generous with its pricing, but it turns out it's the food that's generous. Alright, dim sum are a little over a pound a mouthful - but they're so delicious! - and the bowl of soup is around eight quid - but it's fabulous, and massive! Tip Top should trip down the street a few yards to see how service should be done. I'm feeling poor - my bank account is scary before Student Loans give me my new year's pocket money - so I don't pay a tip here. I feel I should, but I don't; the waiter doesn't show a flicker of disapproval.