A N O
T E
from THE EDITORS
GYTHA 'NANNY' OGG, the
author of these works, is a renowned practitioner of that combination of
practical psychology, common sense and occult engineering known as witchcraft.
Her genius even extends to the
written language, since it will be obvious to our readers that she has an
approach to grammar and spelling that is all her very own. As far as
punctuation goes she appears to have no approach at all, but seems merely to
throw it at the page from a distance, like playing darts.
We have taken the liberty
of smoothing out some of the more rumpled sentences while leaving, we hope,
some flavour of the original. And, on that subject, we need to make a point
about the weights and measures used in the cookery recipes. We have,
reluctantly, translated them into metric terms because Nanny Ogg used
throughout the very specialized unit of measure known as the 'some' (as in
'Take some flour and some sugar').
This required some, hah,
experiment, because the 'some' is a unit of some, you see, complexity. Some
flour is almost certainly more than some salt, but there appears to be no such
thing as half
of some, although there was
the occasional mention of a 'bit' as in 'a bit of pepper'.
Instinctively, one feels
that a bit of flour is more than some pepper but probably less than a bit of
butter, and that a wodge of bread is probably about a handful, but we have
found no reliable way of measuring a gnat's.
Timing also presented a
problem, because Mrs Ogg has a very vague attitude to lengths except in
humorously anatomical areas. We have not been able to come up with a reliable
length of time equivalent to a 'while', which is an exponential measurement
-one editor considered on empirical evidence that a 'while' in cookery was
about 35 minutes, but we found several usages elsewhere of 'quite a while'
extending up to ten years, which is a bit long for batter to stand. 'As long as
it takes to sing "Where Has All The Custard Gone?"' looked helpful,
but we haven't been able to find the words, so we have had to resort to
boring old minutes.
Finally, there is the
question of verisimilitude. In many of the recipes we have had to tinker with
ingredients to allow for the fact that the Discworld equivalents are
unavailable, inedible, or worse. Few authors can make a long-term living out of
poisoning their readers, at least physically. Take the case of the
various types of dwarf bread, for example. Brick dust, in Great Britain, is
not generally found even in sausages. It's hard on the teeth. Granite is seldom
served to humans. The biblical injunction that 'Man must eat a peck* of dirt
before he dies' did not suggest that this was supposed to happen on just one
plate. Also, most human food with the possible exception of the custard
pie has never been designed for offensive purposes.
So, we have to say, strict
accuracy has been sacrificed in the
* About
nine litres dry measure, we're afraid.
interests of having as many
readers at the end of this book as we had at the start. The aim has been to get
the look and feel of the original Discworld recipes while avoiding, as far as
possible, the
°rlgmal ^ Terry
Pratcbett
Stephen Briggs