Competition No 3826
Set by Stephen Hackett, 5 April
We asked for extracts from a cookbook by a 20th-century literary giant.
Report by Ms de Meaner
All good. Some of the excellent pastiches, however, somehow just weren't cookery books even though, to be fair, food was mentioned. Hon menshes to El Basilio (Hemingway), G M Davis (T S Eliot), Susan Therkelsen (Orwell), Josh Ekroy (Kafka) and Gavin Ross (Joyce). The winners get £20 each, the best of whom (D A Prince) also gets the Tesco vouchers.
Rice Pudding: the measures to be taken
First get your rice. The toiling masses of Szechuan, good persons to a man, have laboured to bring in the harvest. What will you do with it?
Put it in a bowl with two pints of milk. Check carefully that the milk is not the milk of human kindness, for kindness is one of the seven deadly sins of the bourgeoisie. Only harshness can deliver us from harshness.
Remember that the dramatic cook has her eye on the finish, but the epic cook has her eye on the process. Boil for exactly 43 minutes. As Lenin reminded us, timing is central to the art of insurrection.
Eventually it comes to the boil. Quantity, as Engels showed us in the Dialectics of Nature, is transformed into quality.
Will there be a happy ending? That, good friends, is up to you. Remember that what matters is not the quality of the dish, but who owns the kitchen.
Ian Birchall ("Bert" Brecht)
First shoot your bird. The bird is good and a big bird is better. A man has to be himself in the face of Christmas and turkey because this is what he is used to and it is his destiny to gut it, stuff it, cook it and eat it. You just kind of work your way to it until its tissue is like sandpaper going down your oesophagus and into your stomach, with the brandy giving it a kick on the way to digestion. A big turkey has big giblets. Remove them from the cavity of the bird. They feel good to touch before they're turned into stock and gravy. Making the stuffing is like running with the bulls. Without aficion, the fights and the stuffing are nothing. Those with aficion know much about putting dried sage, onion, chestnuts, breadcrumbs, sausagemeat, thyme, salt and pepper into the belly of the bird. Women like Maria would forgive anything in a man, fear, nervousness, lying, unfaithfulness, anything, but not a badly basted turkey. After a few slugs of Cacuila and a few more after that, sit in the sun and watch your big game sizzle. It tastes fine.
John O'Byrne (Ernest Hemingway)
Hot Cross Buns
These are the crucified, the holy ones with blasted blessingness, the frightday buns for all the blackness of a churchious day. From the bakery they come pennyeach, but if you've a mind, and a fist, and an oven hotting for hell you can conceive them; fruition is nine-tenths of creation in your babbling pothouse of a kitchen. Yeast - not a yesterday rising but in freshacious riot - and flour, and eggness, and spice. Oh the spice, the soul of it, flung into the seethe of the bowl's mouth. The yeast butting its head in a sweat, ministering to the dourness of the everday dough, rousing it under a woman's hands. Whatsomever they tell you, it's women who knead. Bedded in a blanket it's in a whorled of currants and raisings and loud sultanas. And all this fruition coming to pass, ordained under the mark of the cross. The flour and water, wafer and wine double-cross of it, over the bunface moon, waiting for a dribble of the milk of human kindness. Then into the furnace roaring like a dandy dragon for the transformulation, holy of holies.
D A Prince (James Joyce)
No 3829 Set by John Crick
Status anxiety is the latest syndrome. But are there others? We'd like descriptions please, and possible cures.
Max 150 words by 6 May.
E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
