The Decadent Cookbook (35 page)

Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise and add a pinch of salt from time to time.

Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.

If you found that particular recipe to your taste, then why not try these two from the same volume:

Procure some strips of beef and having cut them into the smallest possible slices, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times.

When the whole is thus minced, brush it up hastily with a new clothes-brush, and stir round rapidly and capriciously with a salt-spoon or a soup-ladle.

Place the whole in a saucepan, and remove it to a sunny place, - say the roof of the house if free from sparrows and other birds, - and leave it there for about a week.

At the end of that time add a little lavender, some oil of almonds, and a few herring-bones; and then cover the whole with 4 gallons of clarified crumbobblious sauce, when it will be ready for use.

Cut it into the shape of ordinary cutlets, and serve up in a clean tablecloth or dinner-napkin.

Take a pig, three or four years of age, and tie him by the off hind leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of currants, 3 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and 6 bushels of turnips within his reach; if he eats these, constantly provide him with more.

Then procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, four quires of foolscap paper and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown waterproof linen. When the paste is perfectly dry, but not before, proceed to beat the Pig violently, with the handle of a large broom. If he squeals, beat him again.

Visit the paste and beat the Pig alternately for some days, and ascertain if at the end of that period the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties. If it does not then, it never will; and in that case the Pig may be let loose and the whole process may be considered as finished.

Editors’ note: Lucan and Gray use imperial measures (pounds and ounces for weight, feet and inches for length, etc) in defiance of the modern trend. This is, of course, part of their style. Despite the inconvenience, we have thought it best to respect this, and not to impose a metric system where none was intended. We recognize, however, that many readers and cooks today no longer possess imperial scales, measuring jugs, thermometers and rulers, and have therefore provided the following conversion table, which is correct to two decimal places at sea level. (For those cooking in extreme barometric conditions - e.g. in mountain refuges, unpressurised aircraft, submarines, etc - we recommend a correction factor of +/– 0.05% per kilogram of atmospheric pressure at origin. This is in accordance with the 1955 Loughborough Convention. No further adjustment is necessary for climate or latitude.)

To convert degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius: C=
⁵
/
₉
(F - 32)

Also by Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray:

“Following the success of
The Decadent Cookbook,
this is another generous dose of decadent writing, arranged in sections such as the erotic garden, the cruel garden, the fatal garden, the garden of oblivion. Contents include a guide to poisonous plants, Octave Mirbeau’s
Torture Garden,
Edgar Alan Poe on being buried alive (a remote gardening hazard), and Lord Rochester’s’s
Farce of Sodom
or
The Quintessence of Debauchery
(printed in 1689, incinerated 1690; the characters’ names still wouldn’t be printed in a newspaper). Not a book to give as a present to the unsuspecting, but ideal if you want something pervy for the potting shed.”

Phil Baker in The Sunday Times

“ You may remember the author’s previous work,
The Decadent Cookbook,
highly recommended in these pages. This time, they have done even better: they must have done, for under normal circumstances my interest in gardening is not even detectable at quantum level, yet here they enthrall. Plans for sinister, corrupting gardens, planted with poisonous plants such as Hellebore, Hemlock and Meadow Saffron. Contains the full text of Rochester’s play
Sodom
- for production in the garden theatre, of course - itself an uncanny prolepsis of contemporary fears about Aids. The only gardening book you will ever need.”

Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian

“ …for the jaded gardener who has seen it, done it and mulched it all, is
The Decadent Gardener
. Lucan & Grey have been called in by Mrs Gordon to redesign the Mountcullen acres. The book describes and explains their ambitious plans for the estate. A cruel, synthetic and fatal garden are only the first of their transformations. As with their previous book,
The Decadent Cookbook,
the authors reveal that there is a dark side to an activity widely thought to be the preserve only of ladies in sensible shoes.”

Anna Pavord in The Independent’s Books of the Year

“Lucan and Gray trawl the murky depths of cruel and mad kings, kinky writers and eccentric little-known deviants of all kind. In vanished gardens, real or imagined, they trace every decadent inflection.”

Book of the Month in Attitude Magazine

“subversion and perversion at first seem inimical to a fresh-air culture of allotments, hanging baskets and compost heaps. Yet, as this bizarre and often shocking book makes clear, vices of all sort lurk among the mixed herbaceous borders and nature is not always a pretty sight. Lewd, cruel and sometimes very witty, it is more a manual for those gardeners who would rather offend than impress their neighbours.”

James Ferguson in The Oxford Times

“Travel into the dark side of the most suburban and safe activity. Ignoring the ponces in green wellies and old women with rubber kneelers and trays of marigolds, Lucan & Gray concentrate instead on such green fingered fuck-ups as the Emperor Nero, Cardinal Richlieu, the Earl of Rochester and the even more bizarre sex and death, decay and daisies world of the Chinese emperors. Free cutting: “Small fragments of human flesh, caught by whips and leather lashes, had flown here and there onto the tops of petals and leaves.”

Loaded Magazine

“Following their
Decadent Cookbook,
Lucan & Gray return with an equally entertaining account of their horticultural activities. Drawing on historical inspiration such as Nero’s ideas for cheap and practical illumination (human torches), they propose a range of fantastic gardens in which poisonous and narcotic plants, Priapic statuary, erotic landscaping and rude vegetables abound.”

Scotland on Sunday

“Fans of Lucan & Gray’s
Decadent Cookbook
will be thrilled to know that the duo are back with another exilarating guide,
The Decadent Gardener”

Gay Times

Very little is known about Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. Since the scandal-ridden closure of their Edinburgh dining-club, The Decadent (whose bizarre rituals are described in the Introduction to this book) they have gone into silent, mysterious exile somewhere in the Far East. Flamboyant yet secretive, they once described themselves to a local newspaper reporter as ‘collectors, aesthetes, gastronomes, scene-painters, lovers, exhibitionists and jewelled worshippers at the Temple of the Extreme’. Despite a provocative and ebullient lifestyle they have always refused to discuss personal matters, and their friends are equally reticent.
The Decadent Cookbook
is their first printed work.

Jerome Fletcher and Alex Martin are two struggling hacks from Oxford who have taken time off from their many other duties - writing children’s books, cooking, parenting, teaching, editing, translating, intervening in museums and performing in schools - to tidy up Lucan and Gray’s chaotic manuscript and see it through the press for Dedalus. They are occasionally to be seen at louche bohemian dinners or in the Catalogue Room of the Bodeleian Library, sharing recipes and arcane bibliographical jokes. Both are of medium height and build; lean, dark, flitting figures who look as if they could do with a good lunch.

Alex Martin has published three children’s novels -
Boris the Tomato, Boris the Return,
and
Snow on the Stinker
. He is the editor (with Robert Hill) of the four-volume Prentice Hall
Introductions to Modern English Literature
. His novel
The General Interruptor
introduced the world to Victor Ubriakov’s lost imaginary masterpiece
La Cuisine érotique
(St Petersburg, 1888).

Jerome Fletcher, former real tennis professional and elver catcher, is the author of two children’s novels -
Alfreda Abbot’s lost Voice
and
Escape from the Temple of Laughter
- and a book of poems -
A Gerbil in the Hoover
. He teaches and translates French and Spanish, works with Big Wheel - a Theatre-in-Education group - and collaborates with an installation artist on a large-scale museum project entitled
Divers Memories
. At present he is working on a second book of children’s poems -
The Broken Joke
- and a third novel -
Mr Fish and the Ship of Fools
. He is also co-authoring two film scripts.