Food is serious business
Apr. 20th, 2015 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI thought I had read all the Discworld books! Well, I’ve read all the Discworld novels, it turns out. There are other Discworld books out there—faux-nonfiction set in-universe to fulfill that weird sector of the book market where the books are essentially merchandise for other books. It’s a weird sort of metamarketing that I’m never sure what to make of, despite owning a whole bunch of “companion books” for some of my more expansive geeky canons.
One of these amusing extras is Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, in which a collection of recipes serves as an understructure for a whole lot of jokes. An odd thing about this book—besides its content—is that it seems to have been accidentally published with all the notes between the publisher and the agent left in. Most of these notes are arguing about what is and isn’t appropriate to publish, since Nanny Ogg generally offends people’s delicate sensibilities, and apparently her previous books had made the publisher’s wife laugh. The text itself also contains a number of allusions to leaving out certain “active” ingredients, such as arsenic, and some others which are unnamed.
Since Discworld does not follow in the fine old fantasy tradition of loading itself up with lots of food porn, the way that ASoIaF and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Redwall and basically all of the others do, instead preferring to dwell on the disgustingness of literally everything in Ankh-Morpork, the editors of this book have apparently had to alter the recipes quite a lot so that they become decent recipes that regular humans on Roundworld would ever eat. The caveat here is that the Roundworlders who do decide to make these recipes have to be British or at least be able to cook in British, because most of the measurements are given in metric and some of the ingredients are either named differently or are things I’m not sure we have in the US. I’m pretty sure “bicarbonate of soda” is baking soda, but I don’t know how much butter is 500mg and I don’t know what suet is. (OK, Google tells me it is “hardened beef or mutton fat” and how do you cook with this and WHY do you cook with this?)
Nanny Ogg appears to have collected these recipes from a number of notable personages in the Discworld, and so there appears Lord Vetinari’s recipe for bread and water, which involves a billion taste tester and several years of political manipulation, and Leonard of Quirm’s recipe for cheese sandwiches, which involves inventing all sorts of machines for making bread and cheese and then ordering some pizza. (There are also quite a number of regular recipe for curries, various English country dishes, candies, and things with names like “bananana surprise.”)
While I think I have to give the copy I read back to the friend I borrowed it from, I fully intend to borrow it back and try out some of these recipes just as soon as I learn to cook with the metric system.
One of these amusing extras is Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, in which a collection of recipes serves as an understructure for a whole lot of jokes. An odd thing about this book—besides its content—is that it seems to have been accidentally published with all the notes between the publisher and the agent left in. Most of these notes are arguing about what is and isn’t appropriate to publish, since Nanny Ogg generally offends people’s delicate sensibilities, and apparently her previous books had made the publisher’s wife laugh. The text itself also contains a number of allusions to leaving out certain “active” ingredients, such as arsenic, and some others which are unnamed.
Since Discworld does not follow in the fine old fantasy tradition of loading itself up with lots of food porn, the way that ASoIaF and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Redwall and basically all of the others do, instead preferring to dwell on the disgustingness of literally everything in Ankh-Morpork, the editors of this book have apparently had to alter the recipes quite a lot so that they become decent recipes that regular humans on Roundworld would ever eat. The caveat here is that the Roundworlders who do decide to make these recipes have to be British or at least be able to cook in British, because most of the measurements are given in metric and some of the ingredients are either named differently or are things I’m not sure we have in the US. I’m pretty sure “bicarbonate of soda” is baking soda, but I don’t know how much butter is 500mg and I don’t know what suet is. (OK, Google tells me it is “hardened beef or mutton fat” and how do you cook with this and WHY do you cook with this?)
Nanny Ogg appears to have collected these recipes from a number of notable personages in the Discworld, and so there appears Lord Vetinari’s recipe for bread and water, which involves a billion taste tester and several years of political manipulation, and Leonard of Quirm’s recipe for cheese sandwiches, which involves inventing all sorts of machines for making bread and cheese and then ordering some pizza. (There are also quite a number of regular recipe for curries, various English country dishes, candies, and things with names like “bananana surprise.”)
While I think I have to give the copy I read back to the friend I borrowed it from, I fully intend to borrow it back and try out some of these recipes just as soon as I learn to cook with the metric system.