Monday, October 25th, 2004...9:55 pm
Have I mentioned that I’m an exceedingly good cook?
And modest! And with a very great love for all kinds of cookery books. Except those with “donna hay” on the cover, although I will give her snaps for her pasta twirling tips.*
Tonight I was catching up with the man of action’s side visits during his trip to Melbourne to run a marathon, and saw his post describing the finds he had made during a trawl of second hand bookshops, including a 1976 copy of the Larousse Gastronomique, Le Bible of french food and cookery.
My copy is a battered old beast of the 1979 edition, bought for twenty bucks about ten years ago. It is a wonderful reference, beautifully written and covering everyting from hippopotamus (“Large amphibious pachyderm whose flesh is much sought after for food by the African natives”) to Claire, the “name of the marine enclosures in the Marennes region where the oysters are left to go green” (tempting, non?)
I would love it for my favourite entry alone: “HOAXES (Gastronomic) SUPERCHERIES GASTRONOMIQUES”. In the usual exhaustive style of the rest of the work, we move calmly through the categories, from “Jest of a host” , via “To test the plate and discernment of a guest” right on to “Hoaxes dictated by events”, and winding up with your straightfoward “Practical jokes”.
A favourite is from the second category, where it is described how the scarcity caused by the siege of Paris in 1870-1871 led to the creation of a pie believed to be made of elephants from the zoo, but in fact made of mice. “And it was a bone, a mouse’s bone, found in a pie dish that led to discovery of what lay at the bottom of the affair. But it was very good. And that, after all, was the main thing”.
Isn’t it, just?
* Hold long pasta in tongs high above plate. Lower pasta, slowly, twirling plate. Admire pretty circle of pasta. Strain head trying hard to remember anything else of value donna hay has ever said or done. Shrug in resigned fashion because, oh well, at least she’s not in jail like Martha Stewart. Spend next five minutes idly fantasising about donna hay in Prisoner ironing machine type “incidents”. Start to eat cold pasta, which has no sauce on it, because it’s all in a pretty pile in the middle. Mix pasta properly. Enjoy.
7 Comments
October 25th, 2004 at 4:24 pm
Doesn’t the larousse have a recipe for stuffed elephant trunk?
I think a cookbook is only any good if it tells you how to cook a penguin.
All you need is a match. The dark secret of Shackleton’s expedition was that they survived by throwing penguins on the fire. They gave off quite a lot of heat.
October 26th, 2004 at 12:10 am
Yes it does and in one of the earliest documented examples of food snarkiness: “Pliny told us that only the trunk found favour with amateurs”. And Pingu, Noooooooooh!
Title is true people – she has mistressed terrine, a task which left me with hot tears of disappointment.
Sadly my edition has nothing between Hippopotamus and Hocco, so there must have been some updating between ‘76 and ‘79 no doubt to counter growing competition from Reader’s Digest’s Strange Stories and Amazing Facts. This aside, I love it for its timelessness and hence fadlessness, my copy could have been put out any time in the past 30 years. I wish I’d got mine 10 years ago.
Donna does state the obvious but I would not wish a caught hand in the pants press on anybody.
October 26th, 2004 at 10:56 am
1979 lacks the elephant recipe, but notes that the meat is leathery (ha!) and that in “some Asian countries” the trunk and the feet are thought the nicest.
Also no penguin. On pelicans it says “Their flesh is oily and tought but is, nevertheless, eaten in some countries.” Heathens.
And anthony, if you have no hoax entry, I will have to put up a post sometime about the best “jest of a host”, Grimod de la Reyniere’s “Economist’s luncheon”.
October 26th, 2004 at 1:51 pm
Yes please for the post and I did have pelican once, but you should have seen the bill.
Thank you and good night
October 27th, 2004 at 7:08 am
I think Donna Hay is like Delia Smith – bossy school prefect type who secretly dislikes food and all its messiness.
October 30th, 2004 at 12:05 pm
I have to admit I rarely open the Donna Hay books I have.My favourites are Philip Johnson(Ecco Restaurant in Brisbane he has another one just out in time for Christmas) and River Cafe – Blue, Green and Yellow (especially the Blue). And the closest tome I have to a religious one is the Cake Bible. As for Larousse I am just a babe in the woods – 2003 ed.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
[...] surprised how very cranky these statements from the audience made me. I have as little respect for Donna Hay as anyone, and OK, it may be bourgie to have a bunch of fancy cookbooks on prominent display in [...]
Leave a Reply
All you need to do to free yourself of the burqa forever is register a gravatar at www.gravatar.com; if only it were that easy for everyone.
For your convenience and my amusement, annoying commenters will bear Teh Mark of Teh Troll™ gravatar.