The Decadent Cookbook
Read The Decadent Cookbook Online
Authors: Jerome Fletcher Alex Martin Medlar Lucan Durian Gray
A few comments on
The Decadent Cookbook
:
“If meat is the hard-core-of-food-as-sex,
The Decadent Cookbook
is a walk on the wild side, a book for those who scorn not only the Prohibitions of Leviticus but also the dictates of common sense, good health and kindness to animals.“
John Ryle’s City of Words Column in The Guardian
“Lucan and Gray, whose fruity monikers may strike some as being suspiciously apt, have concocted a fabulous and shocking assemblage.”
Christopher Hirst in The Independent
“Arresting, too, is
The Decadent Cookbook
(including a recipe for cat in tomato sauce).
Nigella Lawson in The Times Books of the Year
“Fancy boiled ostrich? Cat in tomato sauce? Or virgin’s breasts? The droll compilers trawl ancient Rome and other OTT times for kitchen oddities, mixed with literary off-cuts and pungent commentary. Delia Smith it ain’t.”
New Stateman & Society
“Start with a glass of blood, to set you up: recipe given in Jean Lorrain’s short story, helpfully included.”
John Bayley in The Standard’s Books of the Year
“An extravagant, shameless and highly entertaining book that could change the course of contemporary cuisine.”
The International Cookbook Review
“Get these decadent boys out of my kitchen.”
Katie Puckrick on Granada Television’s Pyjama Party
“A scholarly work, cleverly disguised as a very amusing read, from Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. 223 pages of about every kind of weird or simply repugnant food from the Romans to the 19th century, with intriguing recipes for boiled ostrich, roast testicles, boneless frog soup and other obscure delicacies. There’s even a whole section on cooking with blood. The perfect gift for posh friends: it is the kind of book they always have in their loo.”
Richard Cawley in Attitude Magazine
“Forget Prue Leith and Delia Smith the cookery manual that every Venue reader needs is
The Decadent Cookbook
. If your palate is a little jaded, if you thought you’d tried everything, then this is the book to make your smart dinner parties go with a bang (and several yech!s). The pseudonymous authors have trawled through the world’s great works of history and literature to assemble a truly sumptuous feast of decadent dishes and ghastly gastronomy.”
Eugene Byrne in Venue
“I point blankly refuse to eat some food called Virgin’s Breasts.”
Sean Hughes in The Observer
“entertaining.”
Scotland on Sunday
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors would like to thank the following for their invaluable help:
Ciacio Arcangeli, Andrew and Ilia Bradbury, Professor J.B. Bullen, Roderick Conway Morris, Charles Baudelaire, Sara Ayad, Christine Donoughér, Edward Gibbon, Susan Hitch, John and Lindsey Hoole, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Sören Jenson, Nicola Kennedy, Marina Malthouse, Sophie Martin, Anne Murcott, Anthony Neville, Charlotte Ward-Perkins, Tino Pugliese, Cassius Dio, Brian Stableford, Sara Sygare, Lotta Sygare, Vera at the Bodleian Library, and Jeff Young.
The editors would also like to thank the following for their permission to include the literary passage selected by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray to be read aloud during dinner:
Louis de Bernières for
Labels
© Louis de Bernières 1993, David Madsen for an excerpt from
Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf
© David Madsen 1995, Brian Stableford for his translation of
A Glass of Blood
by Jean Lorrain taken from
The Dedalus Book of Decadence (Moral Ruins)
- edited by Brian Stableford and first published in 1990, Editions Gallimard in Paris for an excerpt from André Pieyre de Mandiargues
L’Anglais décrit dans le château fermé
© 1979 Editions Gallimard.
The editors would also like to thank Victor Gollancz Limited for permission to reproduce three recipes in The Decadent Sausage chapter from Antony & Araminta Hippisley Cox’s
Book of Sausages
(1987).
The editors would also like to thank the Mansell Collection for permission to reproduce “The Ill-swept floor” a copy of a mosaic floor by Heralitus, A.D.200 and “My poor Medos, I shall be forced to eat you so that you can keep your poor master” an engraving by C. Hamlet after Drauer.
ONTENTS
2
T
HE
G
RAND
I
NQUISITOR’S
B
REAKFAST
9
T
HE
M
ARQUIS
DE
S
ADE’S
S
WEET
T
OOTH
12
P
OSTSCRIPT:
A
MBLONGUS
IN
C
ALABRIA
NTRODUCTION
For three brief but memorable years, Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray ran their own restaurant - The Decadent - on the first floor of a house in Edinburgh. It was a small, dark, luxurious place with a décor and atmosphere all its own. There were two dining-rooms: the first, as you walked in, panelled in ebony, the second hung with crimson and bottle-green silk. Deeper inside were three
cabinets particuliers
. These were snug little rooms, each about the size of a railway compartment, with a table that would seat up to six.
Cabinet Nº1
was a monastic wooden box, bare, ascetic, penitential, with pale cream candles and pewter plates.
Nº2
was the opposite - a sybarite’s paradise upholstered in Fortuny silks and velvets, richly coloured, heavily perfumed.
Nº3
was known as the Chart Room. It had a nautical theme (inspired by a passage in Huysmans’
A Rebours
) with portholes looking ‘out’ into tanks full of fish and lobsters, a ceiling hung with navigational equipment (sextants, dividers, compasses, etc.), coils of tarred rope, posters of transatlantic liners, and a speaking tube for sending out orders.
If you took one of these
cabinets
it was yours for the night - with no questions asked. Cushions, incense, musicians, liqueurs - any stimulants you cared to name - would be brought at any hour. The
cabinets
made very wonderful couchettes. Sound did not travel between them, and they welcomed conspirators of every kind - artistic, political, amorous, or simply friends determined to shut out the world for a night.
The waiters were all young, male and very good-looking. Most were ‘resting’ actors. Their standard outfit was the long white apron, black trousers and bow tie of Renoir’s café paintings, but you might equally see them as servants from Longhi’s 18th century Venetian suppers, with powdered wigs, breeches and silk stockings; or costumed
à la turque
with
shalwar
and embroidered waistcoats. They could be Renaissance courtiers, Swiss guards, marshals of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, hospital porters, airmen of the Second World war… Once, by special request, they blacked up, oiled their bodies, and wore nothing but white satin tangas. They were often thought - wrongly - to be available for ‘rent’, and more than one lecherous alderman was presented with his bill earlier than he had bargained for after presuming too freely on this account.
A taste for the theatrical was also evident in the accoutrements of the place. Strange relics of gastronomic history would appear: food was served in a rare surviving example of Soyer’s Magic Stove, birds were flamboyantly roasted on spits turned by a vastly complicated array of cogs, clockwork and chains; they had a replica of Rossini’s famous silver syringe for injecting
pâté de foie gras
into macaroni; and the cutlery, napkins, pepper and salt came to the table in a
cadenas
- a boat-shaped vessel, made of gold, silver and enamelled copper, used by medieval French kings… These were the fruit of afternoons in antique-shops and auction-rooms, where Medlar’s expert eye could pick out a single fine item from heaps of undistinguished junk.
Everything at The Decadent was idiosyncratic, but nothing more so than the food. Durian and Medlar poured all their turbulent energy, fantasy, playfulness and aesthetic extremism into a series of menus which managed simultaneously to make your mouth water and your hair stand on end. As well as being outrageous and unfailingly bizarre, the food was always exquisitely cooked. Even when you were eating cat in tomato sauce, stewed bull’s genitalia, or armadillo sausages, you felt you were in safe hands.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the food was its provenance. Very little - apart from odd details - came from the imagination. Almost everything was historical. Peasant cooking,
cuisine bourgeoise
, feasts for the rich and the royal - it was all equal to them, and they mixed it with a rare and delicate hand.
The guiding principles were simple: if anyone was likely to have tasted a dish before, they would not cook it; if it sounded shocking, improbable or just extravagant, they thought it worth a try. An odd colour, an unusual name, a quirky shape or historical connection was sometimes enough.
The wine list was also remarkable. As well as an excellent cellar they had an intriguing repertoire of cocktails that changed from week to week. One list went like this:
T
HUNDERCLAP
C
INNAMON
LIQUEUR
S
NAKE
IN
THE
GRASS
A
BSINTHE
A
URUM
POTABILE
W
HITE
CURAÇOA
(
W
YNAND
F
OCKINK
1961)
M
ILK
PUNCH
K
RUPNIK
They once made a working
pianocktail
- the instrument for mixing drinks described by Boris Vian in
L’Ecume des Jours,
which squirted a different alcohol into your glass for every note played. It was a complicated and magnificent structure, literally a ‘piano-bar’ with 88 different bottles suspended precariously above it - but the results were disastrous - or perhaps too successful. A customer drank a large
Saint Louis Blues
followed by a
Chattanooga Choo-Choo
, then danced the boogie-woogie with such reckless exuberance that he crashed into the nest of supply pipes that fed the pianocktail and destroyed its delicate mechanism.