Msuppose you take a puppy and put it in a still. The entrails remain where they are, but the animal should already be dismembered. Add a pint of buttermilk, two liters of white wine, four peeled and sliced lemons, fumitory, fieldweed, henna and a pint of Lenten saliva (the first spit of the day). The whole thing is spiced up with rose water, turpentine and winter apples, then simmered and distilled. Puppy water, a coveted skin care product against wrinkles in the seventeenth century, is ready. The recipe came from Mary Doggett, wife of Irish actor Thomas Doggett. It can be found in the “Book of Receipts” from 1682.
Tobias Roth and Moritz Rauchhaus dug it up for their volume on the eccentric kitchen. And there it looks great alongside recommendations for preparing fox lung pulp (1566), eagle variations (1581), pineapple made from butter (1858), uterus from a gilt or electric ray (both from the first century). The book doesn’t take itself particularly seriously and should be consulted without great expectations, read in chunks, rather rummaged through all over the place. It seems as if it had something like a system – next to recipes there are menus, glossaries and pictures – while it is a slightly crazy potpourri, edited with healthy carelessness, whose layout, as a confusing impertinence, corresponds excellently with the content.
Tobias Roth and Moritz Rauchhaus (eds.): “The pantry and cabinet of curiosities of the eccentric kitchen”.
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Image: Verlag The Cultural Memory
But all the nagging doesn’t help, because you get stuck reading everywhere, also and especially in those sections that want to bring party knowledge to the man almost impudently casually. For example, when it comes to sophisticated terms for banal things: à l’anglais – with butter; à la Maillot – with mushrooms; au naturel – without sauce. Here Walter Benjamin’s lines about enjoying figs (and ultimately hating them) are quoted, there Kafka reports on his plan to eat lettuce with cream. In a little EU legislative study, we learn what was laid down in a 1988 regulation: Grade I and Extra cucumbers grown under a canopy must be at least a foot long if they weigh five hundred grams or more. And then we also learn that François Vatel “threw himself on the sword” in 1671 because he failed to produce a menu for Louis XIV.
The publishers have curated a best-of from “two thousand years of European kitchen madness”, in which pleas for unrestrained gluttony are given equal weight with delicacies. They are joking and happy to present an “outside the norm” handout. Because the “scrambled eggs from the Tetra Pak belong to everyone and therefore to nobody”. The eccentric, on the other hand, is always the “individual, unique, unexpected”. When reading this book one can count on mild disgust, amazement and amusement. Boredom will certainly not arise.
Tobias Roth and Moritz Rauchhaus (eds.): “The pantry and cabinet of curiosities of the eccentric kitchen”. Verlag Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis, Berlin 2022. 320 p., ill., born, €28.