One of Bookkake’s favourite Christmas presents, which I can’t recommend highly enough, was the wonderful Decadent Cookbook by Medlar Lucian and Durian Gray. If the author’s names alone don’t tip you off (the medlar is a small, brown fruit, eaten when decayed; the durian fruit tastes goods but smells like sewage), then chapter titles such as Corruption and Decay; Blood, the Vital Ingredient; The Gastronomic Mausoleum; and I Can Recommend the Poodle should be enough to show that this is a long way from Delia. As we’d expect from Dedalus, one of Bookkake’s favourite publishers.
I’ve been itching to try some of the recipes that nestle between suitably decadent culinary extracts from the likes of Flaubert, Huysmans and Homer, but poodles, dormice, pigs’ bladders, bulls’ testes and pints of fresh blood are not to be found in your usual cornershop. However, I realised I could attempt one for a suitably outré breakfast—with a suitably Bookkake-ish twist.
Lucian and Gray’s recipe for “The Monster Egg (or Boiled Egg Gargantua)” is taken from Kettner’s Book of the Table, an 1877 treatise by Eneas Sweetland Dallas, itself based on Brillat-Savarin‘s classic Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste) of 1825. It does include a request for pigs’ bladders, which I decided to supplant with – and delicate readers may wish to go elsewhere at this point – condoms.
Yes, the humble johnny, freshly opened and very well washed, can indeed be made into an excellent cooking utensil, and so we proceed…
The recipe calls for 12-24 eggs, but on this occasion we settled for six – a greater number will have to wait for company (the cookbook places great value on surprise and illusion in cuisine, and the dish is designed to be presented at a banquest, a French jest in imitation of the great Madagascar eggs of the Epiornis Maximus, which “would contain about twelve dozen hens’ eggs”). First the yolks and the whites are separated, then the yolks are boiled in the sheath until nearly hard, before being floated in the whites, and boiled again…
The result, I’ll think you’ll agree, is quite spectacular (presented with a normal egg, for scale), and makes for a quite wonderfully decadent breakfast:
→ Head over to Flickr for the full document of the work in progress…
