Recipes I will never make (although, on the other hand, you never know)

 

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 I like reading cookbooks, for the following reasons:

 

 

-        Sometimes I get good ideas from them.

-        Sometimes, believe it or not, they’re well-written. From the dry beautiful prose of Elizabeth David to the wisecracks of Peg Bracken, you can lose yourself as easily in a good cookbook as you can in any novel.

-        Now and then you read something really eye-crossingly strange.

 

 

Albert Einstein performed “thought-experiments,” in which you didn’t really perform any physical experimentation; you just thought it through. 

 

 

These recipes, for me, are “thought-recipes.”

 

 

I know, for example, where to find a recipe for Roast Hump of Gazelle.  (I think camel hump can be substituted, if you’re out of gazelle.) 

 

 

My old copy of The Joy of Cooking includes a series of diagrams showing how to skin a squirrel. It involves putting the squirrel under your boot and pulling the tail upward.

 

 

I have read many times Alice Toklas’s recipe for Oeufs Francis Picabia (basically a big bowl of undercooked raw egg with lots of melted butter mixed into it), and for Truffled Sweetbreads (to be served on lettuce leaves).  Elizabeth David recounts a three-page all-day process for cooking a rabbit, which I think begins by analyzing the mental health of the bunny before you cook it.  It ends with people lining up outside your house, mesmerized by the delicious smell of the dish you’re cooking.

 

 

Then there is salade Rossini, which is (take this down):

 

 

·       Potatoes cooked in chicken stock;

·       Mussels (a third less than the potatoes);

·       “As many truffles as the budget will allow, sliced and cooked in champagne”;

·       A nice fruity vinegar and olive oil and salt and pepper and some tarragon over all. 

 

 

It actually sounds delicious, but my budget does not allow for any truffles at all, so I will not be sampling M. Rossini’s salad anytime soon.

 

 

I also have a recipe for stewed dog, to be served at weddings.  I can send it to you if you don’t believe me.

 

 

And here’s one I’ve read, but can’t find (Apollonia has seen it too, and we continually reassure one another that we’re not crazy, we’ve both seen this recipe): a big hunk of Bologna sausage, roasted and basted with grape jelly.

 

 

My mouth waters whenever I think of it. 

 

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