NANNY OOG'S
PHILOSOPHY
»/
COOKERY
THEY SAY THAT the way to a
man's heart is through his stomach, which just goes to show they're as
confused about anatomy as they gen'rally are about everything else, unless
they're talking about instructions on how to stab him, in which case a
better way is up and under the ribcage.
Anyway, we do not live in a
perfect world and it is foresighted and useful for a young woman to become
proficient at those arts which will keep a weak-willed man from straying.
Learning to cook is also useful (just my little joke, no offence meant!).
People say that proper
housewifery has died out. They say the skills which once were taken for granted
at all levels of society are being neglected because these days all everyone
thinks about is pleasure - the theatre, reading, ball games, and, of course,
making your own entertainment, which we never had time for when I was young.
My own granny even knew how
to make sparrow pie when times were hard (a bit on the crunchy side, since you
ask) but, nowadays, even if you gave a whole pig to half the housewives in
these parts there would be, when they'd finished with it, some bits
left over\ My granny would have had to go and
lie down.
Somehow the idea crept in
that housework was not real. Well, I remember my mam's kitchen, all full
of things bubbling, rising, pickling, soaking, salting and dripping. That
smelled real, all right. As she said, any fool could earn sixpence a week
working for Mr Poorchick, but it took real effort to make that stretch over
nine children. If you want to know why country men set such score by growing
fat pigs, huge pumpkins, giant marrows and parsnips you could use as
fence posts, it was because they were big enough to go round. Never mind
the vitamins and minerals, what you really wanted to get on your plate
was lots.
Now I'm hearing where
people in Ankh-Morpork are talking about 'the correct diet'. But the people
doing the talking are mostly men. I've got nothing against men. Quite the
contrary. But they can't cook. Oh, they can cuisme like
no one's business. Put them in some huge kitchen with dozens of chefs
and skivvies to shout at and they can manage to fry an egg and arrange it
delicately on the plate with sprigs of this and that on a bed of somethin'
vaguely sinister, but ask them to serve up meals every day to a huge bunch of
hungry kids on a budget of sixpence and they'll have a bit of a headache. I
daresay there are men who can manage it, but usually when I hear someone say
that a husband cooks, I generally reckon it means he's got a recipe for
something expensive and he does it twice a year. And then leaves the pans in
the sink 'to soak'.
Now, I am an old wife, so
when it comes to old wives' tales I know what I'm talking about. One of them is
that good cookery only happens in the houses of the rich and well-bred. This
is silly. There's more to good food than measuring the distance between
your knife and fork, carving swans out of butter, and a salt cellar that looks
like a scaled-down model of the Battle of Pseudopolis in solid silver - it's
all in the selection of good-quality ingredients
and the fact that there
should be plenty of them. Don't talk to me about gold plates - if you can see
what the plate is made of the portions are too small.
The time is ripe for a book
with good, honest recipes for normal folk. Mind you, it isn't cookery
books that are needed half so much as cooks who know what they are doing and
can make a meal out of anything. That's why Genuan and Agatean cookery
is all the rage in the cities now - they started out in places where all
the good grub was pinched by other people and you had to find a way of eatin'
things you normally wouldn't even want to look at. No one is going to learn how
to make shark's fin soup because they want to.
But why should we turn our
backs on good, honest Lancre and Sto Plains cuisine? It's just as good
as food anywhere else on the Disc and I should know coz I've been there and
tried it. Even if there are better cooking methods in foreign parts (and I
don't necessarily say that there are) why should the good folk of Sto Helit,
Scrote, Razorback and Bad Ass put up with food that's mostly boiled
and the only herb you ever see is sage?
The simple routines of food
preparation, the smells of food cooking - fryin' onions, apple pie with cloves,
roasting beef - are all a part of the pleasure of eating. Of course, it's all
the better if you're not doing the actual work. I've got a lot of daughters and
daughters-in-law now, and they all live really close, and I've generally
encouraged the view that a good plateful should always be sent round to Nanny.
No one can say I'm not prepared to go that extra meal. And they're all good
cooks, because I trained 'em well and I'd be sure to tell them if they wasn't.
One of the things that's
slowed the advancement of good cooking is that cooks traditionally are very
secretive about their recipes. They're handed down through families but guarded
jealously
against outsiders. I'm very
pleased that, with a lot of help, we've got recipes from all over the Disc -
from Mrs Colon, wife to Sergeant Fred Colon of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch,
from Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, from our own king,
Verence II of Lancre. And many others. It's amazing what you can do with a
little charm and a lot of blackmail.
It's hard to know exactly
what category these recipes fall in 'specially since some of them barely count
as food, but I've done my best to put them in order as First Courses, Main
Dishes, Misc. Savouries (and some are very misc.), Pudding and Misc. Sweets.
Dwarf cookery deserves a place of its own, probably as a boat anchor.
Let's start
with the first course that could so easily become a last course if it's not
done properly...
