a tribute to the bad movies i've slept through

Of Smoked Cats, Figuratively

“Stir the flour, semolina, cornmeal, sugar, errs and almonds together. The mixture will be severely crumbly. Now use your fingers and work in the butter and the fish. Don’t despair: after five minutes or so it will confound you by taking on the correct fatty consistency. Add the sultanas, pepper and grated lemon. Still on the stodgy side? The optional yoghurt will cure that. Go on until the dough is uniform, with no individual flecks of mackerel. […] Transfer the dough to the tin and bake for forty minutes, or forty-four minutes if you become distracted by a drunken slut in a neighbouring cottage.”

Not my dinner, but the latest installment of British humor on my reading list. The novel is Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson (bonus points if you tell me why the name sounded familiar when I was browsing through the bookstore) and I read it recently. I thought, I like cooking, I like drinks, and I like bizarre books, so how can I go wrong with this one? How can one go wrong with a smoked cat pie? Green bacon and a drop of household paraffin? Making up a comical character from a fictional Eastern European country? On a serious note, I like the idea of drawing an exaggerated distinction between fiction and reality through food because food has been used way too much to idealize reality. At the end of the day, eating is for making us full, and writing is for filling in the space between photographs of naked women in porno magazines, so why not make fun of snobbism when it comes to both? And as Cooking preaches, olive oil snobs are worse than even wine snobs, which, I don’t know if you will agree with me, is one of the most snobbish things you can fit in a sentence with only one verb.

posted by Dora @ 12:15 PM