Conceptual, Historical, Literary etc.

My meat shall all come in, in Indian shells,
Dishes of agate set in gold, and studded
With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies.
The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels’ heels,
Boil’d i’ the spirit of sol, and dissolv’d pearl
(Apicius’ diet, ’gainst the epilepsy):
And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber,
Headed with diamond and carbuncle.
My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calver’d salmons, 5
Knots, 6 godwits, lampreys: I myself will have
The beards of barbel 7 serv’d, instead of salads;
Oiled mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps
Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off,
Drest with an exquisite and poignant sauce;
For which, I’ll say unto my cook, There’s gold,

[from The Alchemist, first performed in 1610]

Ampex 407 analogue tape had an issue in c. 1975 with the chemical composition of the glue that held the magnetic oxide onto the backing tape…

So when you played the tape, the oxide started to come off and the heads and the rollers started to gunge up and the tape would disintegrate. Every time you played it, you lost a bit of signal, mostly high end.

so…

the solution, and the recipe:

Bake the tapes at 50ºF for 4 days continuously, which solidified the glue.
after testing, 3 hours at 50ºC (fan oven) was sufficient, providing it was played within a couple of hours… which is enough time to master the audio.

So I would set the oven on auto to turn on at 3am and load the tapes in the oven (ex-box) before I went to bed. Arise at 7ish, breakfast, shower, start mastering at 9am when they had cooled down…

Take 2 ounces of the powder of juniper, benjamine, and storax each 1 ounce, 6 drops of oyle of cloves, 10 grains of musk, beat all these together to a past with a little gum dragon, steeped in rose or orange flower water, and roul them up like big pease and flat them and dry them in a dish in the oven or sun and keep them for use they must be put on a shovel of coals and they will give a pleasing smell.

The food, sometimes the ointment or perfume, of the Greek and Roman gods:

In ancient Greek mythology, ambrosia (Greek: ἀμβροσία) is sometimes the food or drink of the Greek gods, often depicted as conferring immortality upon whoever consumed it. It was brought to the gods in Olympus by doves, so it may have been thought of in the Homeric tradition as a kind of divine exhalation of the Earth.

Ambrosia is sometimes depicted in ancient art as distributed by a nymph labeled with that name. In the myth of Lycurgus, an opponent to the wine god Dionysus, violence committed against Ambrosia turns her into a grapevine.

Tantalus was banished to the underworld for stealing ambrosia from Zeus’s table and for offering his son, boiled and cooked, as a peace offering.

Ingredients:

Several pounds or kilos of words
A pinch of careful judgment
Grammar and spelling as needed
Garnish with flair

Directions:

Start with a vessel to catch your ideas. Add a number of words. Weigh them if you wish. Skim off the tops. Taste and add more if bland.
Pepper it with adjectives. Add declarative verbs and nouns liberally. Let simmer until reduced in size.
Remove most of the adverbs. Reserve them for another use.
Measure carefully as needed. Season to taste.

Serves as many as you wish.

Note: Most will keep 5 to 10 years when refrigerated, even longer if left out to age gracefully.

Maids of Honour tart (also known as maids of honour cake is a traditional English baked tart consisting of a puff pastry shell filled with cheese curds. A variation is to add jam or almonds and nutmeg. Traditionally the tart was puff pasty filled with sweetened milk curds.

The tart is said to date back to Henry VIII when he witnesses some of the Queen’s Maid of honours eating some cakes and demanded to taste one. He found them delicious and named them after the maids. There are ideas that go even further, citing that that the maid who made the tarts was imprisoned and had to produce them solely for the King.

However, there is another theory that they were named after Anne Boleyn, a maid of honour at the time, who made the cakes for Henry VIII.

A tea room in Kew in Surrey, “The Original Maids of Honour”, dates back to the 18th Century and was set up specifically to sell these tarts.

“Why, there they are both, baked in that pie;
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.”

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), ‘Titus Andronicus’ Act V Scene III

A number of stories in Greek mythology involve cannibalism, in particular cannibalism of close family members, for example the stories of Thyestes, Tereus and especially Cronus, who was Saturn in the Roman pantheon. The story of Tantalus also parallels this. These mythologies inspired Shakespeare’s cannibalism scene in Titus Andronicus…

Found some plastic bags in the freezer, blended the contents with spices and apple sauce. Cannot be more specific.

A culinary nonsense limerick (Cooking some of the creatures featured in Chris Watson’s album, Outside the Circle of Fire)

There once was a fine chef called Mike
He’d steam beetles (1), put them on a spike.
He’d braise hippos (2) as such
Roast deer stags (3) with keen touch (4)
He’d stew hyenas (5), that fine chef called Mike.

Notes:

1 RATTLE OF WOOD. Deathwatch beetles, the rattle of wood over a black stream.
2 AT DUSK. The Maasai say hippos spend the day on the river bed telling jokes. At dusk they surface, laughing.
3 DEEP ROAR. The deep roar of a red deer stag.
4 What a clever reference.
5 CONTACTS. Hyena contacts.

Stuck for what to make for those dinner guests? Just clear a space, put some plastic sheeting on the floor, crank up a very long Terry Riley record and put on a nice pinny.

Ingredients:

1 Human being
1 brightly coloured plastic cape
1 gallon of Hellmans Extra Heavy Mayonnaise
3 boxes of instant mashed potato
3 jars of Heinz onion gravy
2 tins of supermarket baked beans (not too sweet)
1 dozen asparagus
1 large cabbage
1 packet grated cheese

Garnish with sliced red onion, radish

Drink beer

Add the above to a human in accordance with your mood and their disposition.
Preferably in front of an audience.
For money.

Frank Hurley, Shackleton Expedition
Thursday, 30th March, 1916. N33, 8:32pm.

Abundance of bird life,
Temp. 35, Wind in North East.

A day of activity. The watchman called an alarm at 5 am to the effect that our flow was cracking up and all hands turned out immediately. All equipage was removed to safety but shortly before breakfast, a recurrence took place, the floe breaking up into a smaller section about 100 yards square. One crack passed under the runners of our large boat, ‘the james caird’ and opened so rapidly that we just saved her from falling in. A pronounced undulating swell is noticeable over the surface of the ice, apparently coming from the north west. All the large floes are breaking up under its influence, and in order to avoid a contretemps, the party is halved, taking a four hour watch.

A huge sea leopard, was secured during the morning, which enables us to increase the meat daily ration; and essential expedient to preserve the strength of all, under the present uncertain circumstances. In the stomach of the leopard, were found some 50 predigested fish, in excellent condition, their stomachs in turn crammed full with amphipods. The fish is reserved for tomorrow´s breakfast. The remainer of the dogs shot and skinned, and some steaks cut of the young dogs born in Antartica were fried, and proved exquisitely tender and flavoursome, especially Nelson, who tasted like veal.

Mutated Armadillo baked in its own lead shielding (from The Voices of Time, Phoenix, 1997)

An Excellent Recipe to make a Compleat Parliament or (if you please) a New Senate Fitted to the English-Man’s Palate

…one and fifty Anabaptists, blach’t in fair river water, threescore Independents, a quarter of a pound of John Lillburn’s bones beaten into a fine powder and sear’d, the better to unite with the rest; whereunto adde an ounce of Oyle of Saint-John’s-Wort, a drachme of the scrapings of the Divell’s cloven foot; five spoon-fulls of the marrow of old Oliver’s nose; half a Committee man; two Gallons of Aquafortis, seventy Scot’s haslets, together with a Kidderkin-full of Hugh Peter’s sighs and tears, evaporated into water in an Alembiqu’ made of an Organ-pipe..