In Competition No. 2854 you were invited to invent a title for a new cookery book, with a fresh angle, and supply a publisher’s blurb.
When it comes to the market for bizarre cookery books, a quick trawl of the web reveals that there is already stiff competition out there. The Star Wars Cookbook (may the sauce be with you) and Cooking in the Nude both caught my eye, and those of you who suggested a roadkill-based approach have been beaten to it by Buck Peterson, who published The Original Road Kill Cookbook in the mid-Eighties (yours, on Amazon, for under a fiver).
Commendations to D.A. Prince, Tracy Davidson, Sylvia Fairley and Nicholas Stone, who get applause if not cash. The winners, printed below, pocket £30 each. Adrian Fry takes £35.
‘Television freed cuisine from the tyranny of the palate,’ writes chef Preston Emmental in his Foreword to Conceptualist Cooking, ‘replacing it with the tyranny of the eye. I devise feasts for the mind.’ Abandoning the constraints of traditional kitchencraft for the stratagems of the modern artist, Emmental here presents, among much else, a necessarily abridged recipe for Everything Pie, an irresistibly enticing yet inedible Dadaist Razorblade Stew, a Not Kedgeree owing more to Duchamp than to haddock or rice and a dish produced using oblique instructions from Yoko Ono, the ingredients of which include one smile, 11 cumulonimbus clouds and a grapefruit. As the book progresses, Emmental outlines his theories; dinner guests are a bourgeois irrelevance, situationism a valid defence for kitchen tantrums and the apartheid against serving non-food items is definitively confounded by quicksilver soup with iron filing croutons. Groundbreaking to the end, the book will leave you ravenous.
Adrian FrySkippity Doodah and Other Treats
Waste not, want not, that’s what our folks said.
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