Everyone who cooks knows that cooking is an unpredictable business. A faithful recipe we have cooked time and time again to perfection doesn’t come out as we expected it to. You take your eye off the clock for one minute and a burning smell begins to emanate from the oven. You take a beautifully-risen cake out of the oven, and when your back is turned it sinks. Continue reading “Don’t blame the cook!”
Category: The Novel
Who Stole the Tarts?
The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne …. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look them – “I wish they’d get the trial done,” she thought, “and hand round the refreshments!”
(Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll)
David Copperfield’s Batter Pudding
In my last post, about eating other people’s food, I wrote about the episode in David Copperfield where the young David ‘loses’ his meal to the hungry waiter in the Yarmouth inn. As well as drinking David’s ale and eating his chops, he also dives eagerly into his ‘batter pudding’: Continue reading “David Copperfield’s Batter Pudding”
Eating someone else’s food
When we had done, [the waiter] brought me a pudding, and having set it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become absent in his mind for some moments.
‘How’s the pie?’ he said, rousing himself.
‘It’s a pudding’, I made answer.
‘Pudding!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, bless me, so it is! What!’ looking at it nearer. ‘You don’t mean to say it’s a batter-pudding!’
‘Yes, it is indeed.’
‘Why, a batter-pudding,’ he said, taking up a table-spoon, ‘is my favourite pudding! Ain’t that lucky? Come on, little ‘un, and let’s see who’ll get most.’
The waiter certainly got most. (David Copperfield, Charles Dickens) Continue reading “Eating someone else’s food”