My dearest pals, radiant fellow life adventurers! I write to you today in buoyant spirits. The spirits are not to be found in a handy brown paper bag encased bottle either! These spirits are the kind that sometimes fill your heart with the techno beat of euphoric jauntiness. Today, jaunty is my middle name! Actually it is Esme, but for today’s purposes I shall fly in the face of convention of my designated title.

Following a recent twitter discussion that revolved around the purposeful imbibing of cockles and tripe (I was very much against such chewy morsels) I have decided that it is time I stretched and flexed my cooking muscles again. You may be familiar with a previous blog in which I made sausages entitled “ Spindle Hound – Sausage Wrangler”, which told the tale of when I successfully managed to fashion a “five foot long, distended, misshapen porcine draught excluder”.  As I held forth this beast of exceptional porkage, muvver went off in some dewy eyed reverie, Hector locked himself in the bathroom to escape and the visiting Sister Josephine crumpled to the floor in a faint. Clearly, this was a huge success, a success to build upon. I was fairly sure that I would be unable to surpass the sausage, so I would have to do something different. 

As we were still mostly Covidly confined at home, I had decided to try to elevate the mood at Spindle Towers and create a sumptuous dinner party for the inhabitants/inmates. Food really seems to be the only way to keep the rabble here happy. I put my thinking trilby on, cranked up the Super Spindle Summer Mix on the digital music device and The Isley Brothers wafted around my ears. 

I began my ‘pre cook plan’ warm up by swaying and sashaying around the kitchen, holding aloft my cheeky glass of Pinot and generally circumnavigating ones groove around the room. This turned out to be thirsty work, so after another glass of liquid loosener, I felt suitably liberated from the shackles of sobriety to begin the alchemy of menu arranging. 

I needed to do some research if this was going to be special and this is how I discovered the full range of Fanny Craddock’s finest moments on the internet. Well, what a startling and thorough creature she turned out to be! I was of course aware of her, however this full immersion into her world was rather alarming.

It was an especially dark moment to see a clip where she made doughnuts, and afterwards her husband, Johnny, excitedly decried,  “May all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny’s”. This was then followed by a clip of her gleefully forcing her bejewelled gnarly mitts up a traumatised ex chicken, and proved too too much for me to bear. 

I had therefore sworn off poultry forever. A lesser known Spindle fact – I am actually allergic to chicken. This was discovered when I had just moved to Spindle Towers, the shock of which upset my delicate constitution a little. Naturally they fed me chicken and rice to help my digestive system recover, however this inflamed the issue and dramatically worsened it. The kitchen, then the garden was temporarily transformed into a faecal themed swamp. Similarly sausages were off the menu, as one must never return to ones former victories. I had firmly decided to go 1970’s retro in theme, the provisional menu being:

Melon, carved into a yoga posed prawn (downward shrimp)

Vesta Beef chow mein with deep fried crispy noodles, with avocado jus

Arctic Roll with custard flip

I proudly surveyed my plans and felt that this was going to be a night to remember! Naturally it was at this point that Nelson shuffled in to see what I was up to. He was delighted and very excited about a forthcoming dinner party, but having perused my menu he went very quiet. According to him, the menu didn’t really shout out anything other than a pinched and austere dreariness, something we were keen to avoid.

Then his little furry face lit up and off he scuttled to fetch something from his handbag. This something was a coverless, tattered copy of Nelson’s Home Comforts by Mary Hooper. Emboldened by the name check he began to chatter how much more interesting it would be to use a cookery source from the 1900’s. Naturally I was dubious at one of Nelsons ideas, but I sat down with him and we looked through the book. I was not convinced, being especially discombobulated at what a Dutch Flummery was, which I suspected was really a contraceptive method, written in code. 

We stopped reading the pamphlet when we found a page extolling the virtues of ‘Nelson’s albumen’ and ‘Nelson’s extract of meat’. Our appetites had now totally escaped us, and taking the only action we could in these circumstances, we reached for another bottle of Pinot to rethink matters. More planning was clearly necessary, but I will of course keep you posted.