Nanny Ogg's Cookbook.htm Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

  The Joye of Snacks (banned) Mother Oggs Tales for Tiny Folk (withdrawn)

  INCLUDING RECIPES, ITEMS of

  Antiquarian Lore, Improving Observations of Life, Good Advice for Young People on the Threshold of the Adventure That is Marriage, Notes on Etiquette & Many Other Helpful Observations that will Not Offend the Most Delicate Sensibilities.

  CORGI BOOKS

  NANNY OGG'S COOKBOOK A CORGI BOOK: O 552 14673 O

  Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, ; a division of Transworld Publishers

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Doubleday edition published 1999 Corgi edition published 2OO1

  3579108642

  Copyright © Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs 1999

  Illustrations © Paul Kidby Recipes © Tina Hannan and Stephen Briggs

  The right of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold,

  hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

  and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Typeset 11 on 15pt Class Garamond by Julia Lloyd.

  Corgi Books are published by Transworld Publishers,

  61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,

  a division of The Random House Group Ltd,

  in Australia by Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd,

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, NSW 2061, Australia,

  in New Zealand by Random House New Zealand Ltd,

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  and in South Africa by Random House (Pty) Ltd, Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa.

  Printed by Mackays of Chatham pic, Chatham, Kent.

  CONTENTS

  Preface by the Author ......

  A Note from the Editors .....

  Nanny Ogg's Philosophy of Cookery .

  The Recipes incorporating Dwarf Cookery

  15

  17

  21

  25

  103

  On Etiquette ..............

  NOTES ABOUT Other Species—Rules of Precedence—Modes of Address—Etiquette at the Table—Smoking—Some Notes on Gardening—Births—Courtship-Balls—The Language of Flowers—Marriage—Death—Royal Occasions-Etiquette in the Bedroom

  Afterword

  1/5

  P R E FA C E

  by

  THE AUTHOR

  NOT A DAY goes past but I'm glad I was born in Lancre. I know every inch of the place and every one of the people an' I look out over its mountains, hills, woods and valleys and I think: 'That young couple have been in that spinney rather a long time, I shall have to have a word with her mam.'

  But a lot of the old ways I knew when I was a girl are passin' now. There's six oil lamps in the kingdom to my knowledge, and up at the castle they put in one of them privies that cleans 'emselves, so instead of having to dig out the pit every week my lad Shawn, who does all the jobs up there apart from kinging, now merely has to fill up the 200-gallon tank on top of the tower. That is Progress for you. Of course it all ends up in the river so what you gains in convenience you loses in compost.

  All this means that these are changin' times, and that's when people go around bewildered and full of uncertainty and they turn to me, because I am agrande dame, or 'big woman' as we would say here, and ask me the questions that is puzzling them, viz., if you are givin' a dinner party, what are the issues of etiquette involved in seatin' the man who makes a living putting weasels down his

  trousers at fairs, and who is therefore quite respected in these parts, next to the daughter of a man who once mugged the second son of an earl? Which is the kind of knotty problem a society hostess has to face every day, and it takes Experience not only to get it right but also to make sure there's a really soft cushion on the weasel juggler's chair, since the poor man suffers for his Art.

  They ask me things like: what is the right way to address a duke? An' once again I have to point out that it is a matter of fine details, such as, if there's a gate needs holdin' open and it looks like half a dollar might be forthcoming, it's 'G'day, your gracious-ness,' whereas if you've just set fire to his ancestral piles and the mob is breakin' the windows it is more suitable to address him as 'you bloated lying blutocat!' It is all a matter of finesse.

  People are coming to me all the time to ask things like, what kind of wedding anniversary d'you call it after ten years, or, is it lucky to plant beans on a Thursday. Of course, it is nat'ral for people to ask witches this sort of thing on account of us bein' the suppositories of tradition, but the younger girls I see around don't seem very keen on picking this sort of thing up, them being far too keen on candles and lucky crystals and so on. I reckon if a crystal's so lucky, how come it's ended up as a bit of rock? I don't trust all this occult, you never know who had it last.

  Anyway, there's a lot more writin' around these days than there was when I was young and I thought, I will write down some of those little hints and tips which can smooth the lumpy bits on the pathway that is life. I've gone heavy on the recipes, because so much in life revolves around food. In fact good manners started to happen as soon as all the mammoths were killed off and there was no piece of food big enough for everyone to eat at the same time. A good meal is good manners.

  GOgg

  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

  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...

  Deep-Sea Blowfisb

  (The Easy Version - not requiring years of training)

  SERVES 2 AS A STARTER

  1 deep-sea blow fish

  50g sea bream or other white fish,

  absolutely fresh, filleted 3—4 radishes 2—3 spring onions a few sprigs of watercress

  an eggcup full of light soy sauce to use as a dip, mixed with:

  1 teaspoon mustard or

  2 teaspoons lemon juice or 1 clove garlic, crushed

  THE MOST IMPORTANT thing here is not to use any of the blowfish whatsoever,, since every single part of it is deadly in a very unpleasant way. Basic'ly, they'd be able to bury you in an envelope. So, after covering all work surfaces, dispose of the blow-fish very carefully. Better yet, get someone else, perhaps someone you don't like very much but who doesn't owe you any money, to dispose of the blowfish. An incinerator would be an ideal place, provided the smoke is blowing in the direction of unnecessary people.

  Of course, you might ask why bother to obtain a deep-sea blow-fish at all? Well, if you do not, the dish will still be very pleasant. But it will not have that delicate frisson, as they call it, which lifts the dish to gastronomic heaven. Connoisseurs claim they can tell by the taste if a blowfish has been anywhere near the kitchen on the day of preparation, and woe betide the chef who just couldn't be bothered to go out

  27

  and buy one. They say the dish knows there's been a blowfish nearb
y.

  I heard where some wizards reckon that the blowfish business is a bit like that idea that water remembers what's been in it. That's pretty clever. But when you think of some of the things that people have put in water, and then remember that water goes round and round again, maybe it's best to drink beer.

  My feelin' is that people know the dish is a genuine blowfish dish when they've been charged $100 for it. If some food wasn't so expensive, no one would eat it.

  Since blowfish are so very expensive, perhaps you'd just better settle for the rest of the recipe:

  Check the fish for any scales or bones and remove any you find. Place in a colander and quickly pour boiling water over it, then immediately plunge the fish into a bowl of cold water; the object is not to cook it but to make sure it is clean.