During a discussion concerning an upcoming "comfort food" dinner party, we recalled the cookie-dough sushi of our youth. We have not seen this delicacy since, nor been able to make it ourselves (court order). Scofflaws that we are, all the pertinent ingredients were assembled. Except for the anachronistic rum, this is how we remember it from our youth.
Mise en place trays being prepared (a technique we learned while reading "Larousse Gastronomique," J.H. Lang Crown Publishers, New York, 1988, by the light of home-made tallow candles).
Here we see Athos, Porthos, and Aramis separated at last.
Slim inquirer, while the old fathers sleep
you are reworking their soil, you have
a grocery store there down under the earth
and it is well stocked with broken wine bottles,
old cigars, old door knobs and earth,
that great brown flour that you kiss each day.
There are dark stars in the cool evening and
you fondle them like killer birds' beaks.
But what I want to know is why when small boys
dig you up for curiosity and cut you in half
why each half lives and crawls away as if whole.
Have you no beginning and end? Which heart is
the real one? Which eye the seer? Why
is it in the infinite plan that you would
be severed and rise from the dead like a gargoyle
with two heads?
-Anne Sexton
Miscellaneous offal.
Brains.
The Elixir of Life: two shots rum, juice of half a lime, water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.
