Kafka’s soup

2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.

WEEK 17

The book

Kafka’s Soup by Mark Crick

How/where/when did I get it?

Birthday present in, I think, 2006 or 2007. A while ago, anyway.

Have I used it since then?

I have read it several times, which isn’t quite the same as using it.

What Did The Random Recipe Generator throw up?

Lamb with dill sauce à la Raymond Chandler

So, what about it?

There is something delicious about a beautiful concept expertly delivered. Kafka’s Soup is exactly that – 14 recipes written in the styles of famous writers, from Homer to Irvine Welsh. Crick’s credentials as a pasticheur are established in the Raymond Chandler lamb recipe on page one: ‘I took hold of the joint. It felt cold and damp, like a coroner’s handshake.’ So what it is perfectly possible to do, and this indeed is exactly what I have done in the past, is to read this book with pleasure without ever feeling the need to cook from it.

But the strictures of the Random Recipe Adventure dictate thoroughness, so in I plunged.

It’s a subtle balancing act Crick’s pulled off here. It’s one thing for these entertaining short pieces to work as pastiche (they do); quite another for them to incorporate cooking instructions that are clear to follow and actually work. And, based on the relish with which all three of us gobbled this toothsome fare, these recipes do work. (My thanks to Tessa for picking up the reins when I had to leave for work just before the vital point in the recipe – these are the signs of true devotion.) Emboldened, I look forward to Cheese on toast à la Harold Pinter and Mushroom risotto à la John Steinbeck.

The one disappointment is the absence from this book of Anatole’s Sylphides à la crême d’écrevisses in the voice of P G Wodehouse. Still, nobody’s perfect.

The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?

Keeper.