Speccie Cooking the Books 11 April
 

Chris O' Carroll gets the fiver. Bazza does a really excellent Edgar Allan Poe. The rest of us will have to up our game. here is a good one. Haven't we done recipes before?

No. 2743: cooking the books
You are invited to submit a recipe as it might have been written by the author of your choice (please specify and 150 words maximum). Please email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 11 April.

Groundhog Day
 

Yup, we just did this for the Staggers.

Well, not quite the same. I am unable to re-use my Titus Andronicus recipe.
So how about this one?

Edgar Allan Poe's Recipe for Haggis

Sausage in a stomach bag is what a Scotsman calls a haggis.
Haggis makes the Scotsman hairy. Haggis makes the Scotsman brave.
Follow closely my instruction, you can test it to destruction,
Home-made haggis in a bag is such a dish as heroes crave,
Such a dish is so delicious, what they wish and what they crave,
Heroes risen from the grave.

Get your butcher to deliver, of a sheep, heart, lungs and liver,
Chop them finely with an onion, oatmeal, suet, salt and spice.
Boil with water in a copper for as long as you think proper.
Stuff your stomach, boil your sausage for as long as will suffice,
Boil with turnips and potatoes for as long as will suffice.
'Neeps and tatties' mashed are nice.

Scottish chippies do it with chips - good if the chips are fat and greasy and you make with the vinegar and brown sauce.

I did something vaguely similar years ago, though it is far too long for the Spectator competition. I suspect that they may have set the bar too low this time to get any kind of an effective parody going:

April is the cruller month, these soi-disant
American amuse-geules can be just the ticket
Pour ces nuits oubliées quand passe l'hiver sombre.

Take just so much flour: a sufficiency of flour;
eggs also: as many eggs as you may require.
When the time comes, you will need to beat these eggs in
One at a time.
(The eggs, I mean).
But that time has not yet arrived.

Bring the water, the butter, the sugar, the salt, to a boil.
Boiling. Water, this is among the many uses of water.

And then .....

I am afraid I have forgotten
what happens next;
What happens next, after you have brought the water to a boil,
(Together with the butter, the sugar, the salt, and the molasses).

You can ask Mme. Porecka who works at the bakery;
Mme. Porecka who works at the bakery
with her delicate white hands.

I am sure she will know.

You will also need time:- a great deal of time;
Quite possibly more time than any one of us still has.

You must use real butter.

jdlo, nutrizione, sustenance
food, glorious food.

Your T.S. Eliot cruller recipe does exceed the 150 word limit, but you're only 34 words over. If you could bear to kill your darlings to that extent, you might cook up a winner.

(The New Statesman and the Literary Review have both done recipe competitions lately. I can still taste my failure to win either one.)

Fragment
 

It hadn't occurred to me before, but I suppose one of the advantages of a parody of Eliot, or Pound, or Olson, or Harwood .... is that you can tear it in half, throw part of it away, and you still have pretty much the same parody you started with.

This is a quite an old piece, going back to the days when I used to workshop on the old SparkNotes poetry site. When they closed that site down I lost any motivation for pieces I had written specifically for workshopping there; dozens of them have been sitting on a memory stick for seven years or more.

Looking at this piece now for the first time since around 2004, there are a lot of things I just don't like about it. nutrizione is very weak; and (the eggs I mean) is Ezra, not Tom.

You might just have given me the poke I needed to finally make something of this.

Thanks, Chris, I owe you one.