Hutch cookery

My secretary placed the printout of the email on my desk, front and centre. He stood back, eyed it critically, then nudged one corner a little; I guessed it must not have been quite precisely square. I coughed.
He jumped, his shoulders coming out of their usually rigid level alignment, and only when he'd got himself back under control did he turn round. I smiled from where I was sat, in the armchair behind the door.
"Hello," I said. "Have you ever studied Desert Cookery?" I indicated the book in my lap, taken from the dusty shelves behind me, and my ostensible reason for hiding behind the door of my office. Though in actual fact I was pretty certain that my secretary had been avoiding me and was only coming into my office with mail, post, and parcels when he thought I wasn't there.
"...no," he said, his voice low and shaking very slightly. "Is that a mishearing of Dessert Cookery? Did you – did we publish it?"
"No and no," I said, my smile widening. "It's actually rather rare and is a collection of recipes that the feral chef-author Chihuahua put together after spending eight weeks in the Gobi with a handful of slightly odd tribes there. Not everything in the book sounds edible, but she swears she's seen people eat them."
"...while out in the desert?" He sounded mournful.
"Funnily enough she always evades that particular question," I said. I stood up, carrying the book with me. "Ah, you've brought me a message. An important one, too, by the look of it."
"I should be getting along," he said, "I have other things to be doin–"
"Not at all," I said quickly. "I've not seen you all day," or all week, in fact, I added mentally and I have a number of things I wish to discuss with you."
"I am quite busy," he tried, but I was ready for that.
"And you work for me, so it's me that's keeping you busy," I said. "I've approved your days off, by the way. The funeral's tomorrow."
He nodded, and I left it at that. My mother had died, and his relationship with her had been something I hadn't wanted to know about or even be reminded about so I was pretending to myself that he was just a friend of the family. I was also working quite hard to keep him from finding out that she'd died after trying recipes from our Trench Cookery book. It turned out that the author, in a misguided attempt at WWI authenticity, had included a recipe that released phosgene gas during the cooking process.
"Ah, Hutch Cookery," I said, reading the memo he'd placed on my desk. "How's that coming along?"
"I've sent out the emails and memos," he said, still sounding despondent. "But... are you sure it's a good idea to deliberately get it wrong? Surely Dutch Cookery would be the best thing to tell people."
"Every time so far someone's misheard, or mistyped, or misthought when we gave the a title in this series," I said. "So let's give them the opportunity to mishear it as the title we're actually after. After all, even the nitwits we work with are likely to think twice about 'Crutch cookery' given that crutches don't cook well. Or photograph well." I had a momentary flashback to the Gerbil Cookery tasting session and had to sit down again.
"I'm more worried about 'Putsch Cookery'," murmured my secretary, "and the fact that we're both out of the office tomorrow."
"We're not," I said with a smile. "Just you. I'm not going to the funeral."

Irritant Cookery

You'd think I'd have learned, but when my manager sat on my desk at far-too-early in the morning and wiggled her bum, spilling stacks of unnumbered papers onto the floor and into the bin, my hangover told me not to argue with whatever she wanted.
"Darling," she cooed, "I want you."
My hangover retracted its previous statement immediately.
"I think I might be spoken for," I said. I still felt nauseous, and until I'd fished the papers out of the bin -- some of them were probably pages for our Modern Art coffee table book -- I couldn't throw up in it. Again. I suddenly realised that some of the pages might be beyond saving already.
"I want you to produce the next book in the series," she said, running her finger through her moustache. She had a bad experience with hair-removal products once and is happier looking like a gorilla than trying again. "We've have French and German cooking, we can't stop there or we risk upsetting our European market."
"Dutch Cuisine?" I suggested, wondering how well a recipe book that required illegal ingredients would sell.
"No silly, and it would be Netherlandish Cooking anyway. That'll be book six. The next book, obviously, is Italian cooking. I want lots of pasta, lots of pesto, lots of--"
"Piss off?" I suggested under my breath, just as she ran out of alliteration.
"I want you to take this seriously. The French cooking book sold well, the German cooking one is also selling well, so there's a high bar set for you. Do well, and I'll see that you get paid this month."
She launched herself from my desk, which rebounded like a continent reacting to the departure of a glacier only faster. Papers fountained into the air and fluttered to the ground like butterflies caught in a cloud of DDT.
"Well, get on with it!" she said. "And clean this office up, it looks like a war-zone."


My secretary swears I said "Irritant cookery" when I explained it to him, and I think I might have done. I was hungover after all, and I was probably joking. With a man who's sleeping intermittently with my mother and has less of a sense of humour than most corpses. Which explains why, yet again, I have another horribly inappropriate cookery book sat on my desk. The highlights include Bleach pudding, Nettle soup(which sounds quite edible until the last step where you add eight tablespoons of chili powder) and Lye and potato pie which just might appeal to the four people in the world who like Lutefisk.
"The first two books are selling well," said my secretary matter-of-factly. He was right, bizarrely enough; Trench Cookery had found a market with World War I renaissance societies, and Gerbil Cookery had found acceptance in South America. This one however, looked like it had the potential to kill people.

Gerbil Cookery

"Dear God, what is she doing?" Ann Maynard, sat next to me, was trembling and her whisper was almost loud enough to reach the chef. Not quite though, so the chef continued beheading gerbils on the chopping board. The not-yet-beheaded gerbils were happily running around in a small wire cage on the counter-top.
"This is not what I would call German food," said Hubert Bayerische. He was next to Ann; an elderly gentleman with a walrus moustache, a paunch that advertised his love of good food, and usually a happy smile on his face. At the moment his face looked disturbed, but I was sure I could still spot him salivating.
"Ah no," said my secretary sitting up straight and fiddling with the knot of his tie until was evenly between his collar tips. "The memo was quite clear when you sent it out. You didn't ask for German cooking, you asked for Gerbil cooking."
Natasha, the last of the judges and sat beyond Hubert, turned ruddy, which unfortunately made her blonde moustache stand out on her face.
"I never!" she said, and slammed her meaty hands down on the desk.
"The memo is in front of you all," said my secretary indicating a folded piece of paper. I knew I should stop it all now, but after the debacle with my Trench Cookery book I was keen to see someone else go down in flames. "You will see--"
"This is a lie!" Natasha levered her 300-pound bulk out of her chair, or rather attempted to. The chair, firmly wedged onto her bum, just came up with her like some bizarrely-placed corsage.
"I can have the email server checked," I said blandly, waving a hand at the memo. "That will retrieve the original email you sent."
"No! That will be a lie too!"
"Natasha dear, could you sit back down please? You're upsetting the cooks."
"Oh no, if they're not upset they'll keep cooking those poor gerbils...." Ann sounded slightly faint, but Hubert wasn't listening.
"Look Natasha, old girl, we all make mistakes now and then. If the gerbils turn out to be tasty, then I don't see what the problem is."
"Oh you monster!" Ann slapped his shoulder, but it was like a fly swatting a human.
One of the cooks scooped up four live gerbils and dropped them into a pot of batter.
"Can gerbils swim?" asked Ann.
"You are all liars and cheats and thieves!" Natasha was rocking from foot to foot now, the chair on her bottom oscillating like a pendulum. "No-one could mistake Gerbil for German!"
"I always thought no-one could mistake Trench for French," I muttered, but mostly under my breath so as not to remind anyone of my own past misadventures.
The cook dropped the battered gerbils into the deep-fat fryer.
"Oh no-o-o-o-o-o-o!" wailed Ann.
"Should give them a bit of a crunch," said Hubert. "Like ortolan, maybe."
"What's Ortolan?"
"Illegal, Ann," I said. "Don't worry about it. Just worry about those gerbils; I think that might be our satay starter."
Ann burst into tears, my secretary headed to the chefs to pick up the first course we were being served, and Natasha fell over, landing with a crash and rolling around like a beached whale. All things considered, my faux pas some years ago with Trench Cookery looked like passing out of people's memories for good this year.

Trench cookery

I sighed and looked back at my desk. The book was still there, square on the leather blotter, gold embossed letters on a heavy-stock cover. Trench Cookery. 320 perfect-bound pages, due to cost £20 in the shops, and unlikely to sell a single copy. Not quite how I'd imagined my career here ending.

The book came about because of my tendancy to mumble, the author's mild ear-infection when we'd been talking on the telephone about the commission, and the sheer intransigence of my secretary, who refused to believe for an instant that anything I had said could be wrong. So much so, that when the title of the book was questioned, he insisted that it had to be right. Without ever checking with me.

My secretary was hired under slightly unusual circumstances. On the day of his interview I was running slightly late, and so as I got out of my car in the car-park, he was getting out of his. I glanced at his car, as it was just across from mine, thinking that it looked familiar, as he glanced at me and did a double-take.

"Are you ok?" I said politely, not interested in his answer.

"I slept with your mother last night," he said back.

And he had. He had recognised me from the pictures my mother has adorning the wall up the stairs and his car looked familiar because he'd been there when I'd called in for five minutes to give her a CD of piano recordings and ask her to stop placing ads in the lonely-hearts column on my behalf. I called my mother anyway, just to check, and she admitted that she had, as my father likes to put it, been tramping it around again.

I hired him. I felt I had to do something to try and protect the family name, though when it came out at Christmas that my brother had been working as an ideas man for the Khmer Rouge for ten years the family name was unsalvageable. He's still doing PR for the kind of people whose usual approach to dissent is torture and murder. He's been talking about organising package holidays to Guantanamo Bay next year.

But I now had a secretary whose loyalty to me was unswerving, and who was probably still sleeping with my mother on and off. I asked him once about the age difference and he started talking about the benefits of experience and I had to leave the room. I'd hate to think that my mother could teach me a trick or two in the bedroom.

And the net result of all this was a book entitled Trench Cookery instead of French Cookery. The first chapter was about actually digging a trench, lining it with charcoal and cooking the food in it, often covered over with leaves, herbs or soil first. The kind of cookery only university students have the time and drive to do, or people looking to make money for charity. Utterly unsuitable for home cooking.

The second chapter was about the kind of food you could eat in a trench, complete with photographs of burly workmen looking stunned and annoyed, probably by the photographer. The food is mostly burgers. And who would cook the food, unless they were planning on spending time in a trench in the near future?

The chapters continue like this, steadily stretching the premise thinner and thinner until the book reaches the piece de resistance: food that would have been eaten in the trenches in World War I. Most of it is rotten in some way, and it's definitely primitive, the food of privation. The suggestion of acquiring trench foot to go with the trench food ("visit a music festival of your choice in Britain in the summer -- the torrential rain and rivers of mud will produce trench foot in no time at all, and all while you're hearing the best new artists of today!") can only have got past the sub-editor because she was beyond believing that the book was serious.

I look again at my desk. The book is still there, and will go on sale to the general public tomorrow. And then I shall pray for grace.