Dining With The Doctor: The Unauthorized Whovian Cookbook (2 page)

Confidentially, this recipe is a modified syllabub - a fine historic mixed drink that also doubled as a dessert, because our ancestors knew how to party.

The texture of a fully frothed red wine syllabub bears a striking resemblance the Nestene Consciousness. Drink enough of them and you’ll also think you hear a menacing voice coming from your glass.

Start by mixing your wine, citrus and sugar until you have an undrinkable mess. Don’t worry. Once they're well blended, you’re going to dilute the dense concoction by pouring in heavy cream.

The Doctor no doubt would’ve witnessed an 18th century household servant spending hours with a whisk properly beating the cream into an edible froth. Today, the miracle of modern technology allows you to pour everything into a bowl and attack it with a hand mixer set to medium high. After a mere ten minutes your Nestene Consciousness should start to transform into a striking red whipped cream.

Once you’ve worked it up into a good, angry froth, layer the mix into tall glasses with a wide bulb on top, such as Guinness pint glasses or ice cream float glasses.

Let your alien lava drink sit in the fridge for about four hours while fluid separates out from the cream. You should end up with a dark, red-black liquid layer lurking beneath a cloudy red layer of sweet, fleshy foam. Serve it with a long, bendy straw and bad intentions.

The Last Human Fruit Leather  (S1, E2 - The End of the World)

1 1/2 pounds/700 grams ripe pears
1/4 cup/60 ml water
2 tbsp/13 g sugar
2 tsp/30 ml fresh lemon juice
1/4 tsp/1 g ground cinnamon
pinch salt
gummy/candy brains
candy googly eyes and lips

The first time I rewatched this episode I wanted to make a glorious sculpted beef head with a broccoli crown that spiraled up to red bell pepper flowers. Then I remembered that would be a tremendous pain the ass without being the slightest bit recognizable to anyone who wasn’t totally obsessed with beautiful women who die within 30 screen minutes of meeting The Doctor. Instead, I decided Cassandra should remain the star of this episode. Fruit leather is a lot easier to make, and once you throw some googly eyes on her, Cassandra is a lot more instantly recognizable.

Start off by heating your oven to 170F/80C. If your oven doesn’t go that low, just make do with your lowest setting and occasionally let some heat escape by propping the door open a smidge. (You can also use a food dehydrator if you happen to have a slightly smelly two headed aunt who gives you random electronics.) While your oven is barely warming, peel, core, and dice your pears. Toss them in a saucepan. They look so lonely in there. Throw in the water, sugar, cinnamon and salt to keep them company. Bring the whole mess to a boil, all while stirring with a rubber spatula. Once it’s boiling, turn the heat down to a simmer and let the water break down the cellular walls of the pears for the next 20 minutes. Give the mix an occasional stir.

You should now have a nice pear paste. Scoop it all into a blender, add the lemon juice, and give it a good spin. It should take less than a minute for your pear lumps to turn into pear puree. Now spread a piece of waxed paper on a baking sheet. It may seem redundant, but go ahead and add a little nonstick spray. Trust me. Once your paper is well lubricated, pour a neat rectangle of pear blend about 1 inch/2.5 cm from the edge of the sheet then fill in the middle with the rest of the blender’s contents. Use your rubber spatula to spread it all into a nice, thin, even layer.

Slide the baking sheet into the oven and wait for six to seven hours. Yes, really. Dehydration takes time. You can make this a couple days in advance, which is a good thing because there’s nothing more boring than waiting for fruit leather to dehydrate. Paint dries faster. Well, watercolors do. Acrylics are dicey. Oil paints will take days. What I’m really trying to say is that if you sit around waiting for your fruit leather to dehydrate you’ll have hours on your hand to come up with even worse analogies. Go enjoy life instead. When you come back from your exciting adventures in time, space, and comparative paint dehydration, you should have a nice sheet of not-quite-white-enough homemade fruit leather. You may look at the fruit leather and think it looks disturbingly like Cassandra spent some time in a tanning bed. Confidentially, if you want that milky white complexion, you can avoid the hassle of making fruit leather and just rip a slice of store bought mozzarella cheese in half. I won’t tell. We both know you’re going to read a lot of these recipes, skim for store bought cheater sections, and agree that you’ll make the complicated recipe when you have more time. Some day. Honest. Right now, though, it’s all about appearances. Don’t worry. I won’t judge. Just be warned that thin slices of cheese are notoriously difficult to keep on display without them ripping into a messy, confusing pile.

Whether you’re using the fruit leather or grocery store cheese slices, rip it into artistic rectangles with rough edges. Now take an extra thick bamboo skewer and carefully spear the bottom and top, as though you’re making a sail to hang on the mast of a pirate ship. Tug your fruit leather as straight as possible on the skewer. Now put some store bought edible eyes and lips around where Cassandra’s face should go. If you’re extra artistic, you can get edible paint pens (yes, those are real things) and draw on a face and eyes. Now plunge the wide end of the skewer into a largeish candy brain. These are readily available in the United States around Halloween. If you can’t find any candy brains, just use the miniature square candy bar of your choice. What you’re looking for here is some stability to hold Cassandra up. If your stability is in the form of a brain, it looks more like the episode, but no one will dock you points for missing that detail.

I got about 16 Cassandra clones from my batch of fruit leather. A dozen of them didn’t even rip when I skewered them. If you really love fruit leather, you can make up to 4 pans of it at a time. Your imperfect fruit leather scraps can be reused as a garnish for the Liquid Flesh Cocktail from Series 6, The Almost People. Just make some crude paper dolls out of brown paper bags and stuff the fruit leather faces in the top. Now you have instant Gangers as well as Cassandra.

Charles Dickens Own Christmas Punch (S1, E3 - The Unquiet Dead)

1/2 gallon/1.9 liters bottled mineral water
1 750 ml bottle dark rum
1 350 ml bottle brandy
2 cups/220 g brown sugar
3 large lemons
cinnamon sticks
grated nutmeg

This authentic recipe from the author of the world’s best known Christmas story is strong enough to animate a walking corpse (at least in Cardiff). No matter where you live, this is a tasty, dramatic, nicely alcoholic drink that will impress the guests at your next Doctor Who Christmas Special party.

To make it, gently warm your rum and brandy in a saucepan. The goal is to warm it up, not boil off the alcohol. When the brandy is unpleasantly warm to the touch, add in the sugar and stir until it dissolves. Once the sugar granules are nothing but a ghost of sweetness past, add in the zest and juice of your lemons.

Let this simmer gently on the stove for ten minutes.

 Just before serving, remove it from the heat and add the bottled mineral water. If you're feeling fancy, you can cut out a wheel of lemon to put at the bottom of each glass. Fill the glass with punch, spike the lemon with a cinnamon stick, and top it with a sprinkle of nutmeg. Dickens described the cinnamon, nutmeg, and lemon wheels as optional, so feel free to experiment until you find your favorite combination. It might take you several drinks.

Since Dickens did have a flare for the dramatic, he also offered an alternate serving method.

Instead of pouring his punch into individual glasses, bring the painfully hot pan to the table and pour the contents into a large, fire-proof bowl. The last part is important if you don't want to be drinking liquid plastic.

Float a ladle full of brandy on top of the punch. Refill the ladle with even more brandy and carefully ignite the surface. Ever so slowly, pour the flaming brandy into the punchbowl. If all goes well, your waterfall of flame will set the punch in the bowl on fire. If not, you'll look a bit pretentious, but under the circumstances, no one will be terribly surprised.

Extinguish the flames by giving the bowl a good, hearty stir, then ladle your warm, no longer flaming drink into glasses prepared with your choice of lemon wheels or cinnamon sticks. Once everyone has a glass in hand, settle in for a night of holiday ghost stories.

Slitheen Killing Beans on Toast  (S1, E4 - Aliens of London)

1/2 can Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce
2 slices white bread
2 eggs
as much butter as you can stand (or 2 tbsp/30 grams)

British readers, you’re entirely forgiven for wondering why Americans, known for their love of starchy foods, find beans on toast to be strange, alien, and exotic. For you, beans on toast is a comfort food. For most Americans, it might as well be served with a Slitheen egg.

I’m going to justify this recipe to folks in the UK by pointing out a few facts about Slitheen anatomy. The acetic acid in both the beans and the catsup is toxic to Slitheen.

You can either chow down with impunity and pretend the after effect of a bean filled meal is part of your clever Slitheen costume or you can suspiciously eye your fellow diners, insisting anyone who won’t try your plate of beans on toast must be an alien bent on human destruction. To make it a really Whovian (and slightly cannibalistic) plate, substitute the hard boiled Slitheen Eggs recipe for the fried eggs here.

From this point on, this barely deserves to be called a recipe. Pour your can of beans into a pot to warm them up. Americans, you absolutely must go to the UK section of your grocery’s international aisle and pick up some Heinz Baked Beans. Our assorted baked beans, while glorious with barbecue, don’t taste anything like theirs. Spend one whole extra dollar for the imported taste.

Throw an obscene amount of butter into a skillet and fry up your eggs. Once the eggs are done, throw some more butter in and fry up your toast. If your arteries aren’t hardening in anticipation, you’re doing it wrong.

Once your toast is golden brown, spread it on a plate, pour about half the can of beans on top, slide your fried eggs over the beans, and serve with extra catsup, Worcestershire sauce, and plenty of hot tea.

If you're still alive in the morning, you're probably human

Slitheen Skin Suits  (S1, E5 - World War Three)

6 firm, green Bartlett pears
6 large green (seed-in) grapes
1 cucumber
handful of very small blueberries

Admit it. The Slitheen look like walking pears. Sometimes it seems like the alien designers at Doctor Who came up with a lot of their concepts over lunch. I can imagine the designer of the baked potato inspired Sontarans staring forlornly into his bagged lunch, hoping for inspiration, when he pulled out a pear. Yes, he thought. That’s it. Who cares that the name Slitheen sounds like it belongs on some great snake headed beast with a terrible lisp? What Doctor Who needs is a race of giant farting pears. I’ll get right on that after lunch. God, I love my job.