Speccie Competition Culinary Comparisons
This competition was entirely beyond me. Sincere congratulations to Chris o'Carrroll and Bazza who were worthy winners, and George Simmers, whose Tony Blair pudding OUGHT to have won, I cannot but feel.
Culinary comparison
In Competition No. 2772 you were invited to liken a well-known figure, living or dead, to a foodstuff.
This challenge fell on somewhat stony ground, producing a small if distinguished entry in which politicians featured strongly. Here’s a flavour of George Simmers’s Tony Blair pudding: ‘The inviting exterior has no real content, but is a glossy shell which quickly deflates, degenerating too soon into a brown mess with a bitter aftertaste…’ David Cameron hardly fares better. Tracy Davidson compares him to a sponge pudding: ‘The slightly blotchy, puffy top half struggles to maintain composure and consistency when faced with any heat.’ And for G.M Davis ‘cooled, congealed rice pudding’ brings to mind Ed Miliband’s speeches: ‘earnest, mollifying, predictable, passion-free and somehow glutinous, with the sticky consistency that held cold rice pudding in an inert, reliably dull block.’
D.A. Prince impressed equally with her ‘Burnt Nortons …the T.S. Eliots of the cheese course — dry, sparely elegant and cerebral in their gritty texture’.
The prizewinners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each. Top of the class this week is W.J. Webster who pockets the bonus fiver.
Richly complex and aromatically fruity, this is a truly Jacobean dessert — Jamesian, if you prefer, though Jacobean gives a more vivid sense of the Old Pretender. Layer succeeds layer in what can only be called a magnificent trifle, embodying the Master in a single confection. It is ‘rooted’, as it were, in a sponge of early experience absorbing the American taste of blueberry conserve mingled with a cranberry tartness and laced, not with the traditional sherry but a measure of bourbon — or indeed Bourbon. What comes next is not, of course, simple English custard but a suitably refined crème anglaise, whose Gallic overtones smooth away any coarseness in the Anglo-Saxon original. And lastly the whole construction is topped with quintessentially elaborate decorative flourishes, a mazy latticework of intricately woven filaments endlessly drawn out into an insubstantial thinness scarce visible to the naked eye.
W.J. Webster
There can surely be no more Ciceronian a foodstuff than the brussels sprout, its very essence an echo of the great orator himself. Misunderstood and often disliked by the young (and now indeed ignored in schools, where it was boiled down to make it easily digestible), the sprout was once an inseparable part of the educative experience, just like the words of the great Roman. And matching Marcus Tullius Cicero’s prose, the deceptive sprout has all the tightness and texture of the ‘De oratore’, unfolding in the mouth petal by petal, like the balanced clauses of the great argument ‘In Catilinam’. Never itself quite of consular rank, though always part of the culinary Senate on high days, nevertheless the sprout played its role in the foundation of a great empire, nourishing and sustaining just as firmly the warriors of Queen Victoria as the speeches of Cicero did Roman rhetoric.
Brian Murdoch
A pioneer in the artisanal Worcestershire sauce movement, this restaurant ferments a signature house blend as well as rotating seasonal specials, each of which adds distinctive notes to the chef’s cheeky, imaginative interpretations of traditional British classics, foremost among them a robustly Churchillian steak and kidney pie. Some ingredients — finely minced onions and slowly stewed bay leaves and sprigs of thyme — diffuse their essences like the ancient values and bulldog virtue that permeate the great orator’s inspirational wartime speeches, while the textures of meat and coarsely diced carrots arrest the attention like his blunt, indomitable jabs of anaphora: ‘We shall fight . . .’ The dish employs mushrooms (sliced thick and simmered in wine) like so many of Sir Winston’s finest rhetorical flourishes, as grace notes to be enjoyed for their own sake, yet also to be savoured as serious contributions to the full-bodied impact of the whole.
Chris O’Carroll
Crème brûlée is the hard-boiled cousin of the crème caramel, its inversion, so we might view it figuratively as the tough American opposite number of the tame English whodunit or even as the gastronomic equivalent of the personality of Raymond Chandler, a doyen and godfather of American crime fiction. The topping is hard and bitter, but it’s still sugar, and more sugar sweetens the egg and cream mixture beneath it. Similarly, though Chandler could be an ‘eccentric nuisance’ whose drunken misbehaviour repelled people and lost him friends, he was an admitted sentimentalist at heart, like his hero Marlowe. The vanilla flavouring, redolent of traditional tastes and orthodox sex, points at the Victorian in Chandler, the prim conservative moralist who complained that James M Cain wrote pornography. Matching the soft with the crunchy, the light with the dense, crème brûlée mirrors not only Chandler’s style but his very soul.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Henri Charpentier’s creation, the little crêpe Suzette, has the miraculous provenance of Jeanne d’Arc, appearing as it did before royalty and demanding attention. The first taste of the marvellous concoction delighted Prince Edward and continues to delight in ways mysterious to man. The ingredients of salt, flour, sugar, egg and an orange are surely the humblest and yet they are transformed into something divine. The peasant girl from Domrémy, La Pucelle d’Orléans, was no less unpretentious and her transformation equally astonishing. Just as Jeanne was careful with the way she dressed for her great mission, so too the crêpes must be solicitously teased towards their immolation and eventual triumph. Their inspiring spirit is not God, of course, but Grand Marnier that bursts into a glorious flame, reminding us of the flames that encircled poor Jeanne before she attained her sainthood.
Frank McDonald
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