Thinking about it, I don't think I've ever held a competition on The Greasy Spoon before, which is stupid of me, I know. And about time too, I hear you mutter. So in the noble interest of experimentation I've come up with a slightly wacky idea. I have no idea if it's going to work or not: I'm either going to be besieged with brilliant submissions, or I'll be facing the embarrassing ordeal of having to admit that I've not a single reply.
Here's the competition: I want you to write a recipe. It's a simple one- It's "How to Boil an Egg". But there's a twist. I want you to write it in the style of a well-known writer or author. It could be anyone or anything: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Shelley, Dennis Wheatley, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Barbara Cartland, The Sun newspaper or even the Court Circular. It doesn't really matter. To get you going, here are two examples I thought up this morning over breakfast:
" To Sherlock Holmes, it was always that egg. On a stormy night- an especially tempestuous event in the autumn of 1888- I returned to my well-remembered chambers, seized with a keen desire to see my old friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes again. The vile wind howled in the hearth, and the windows rattled with the fury of the equinoxical gales. Holmes held out an egg to me with his long, nervous, nicotined-stained fingers.
" A fascinating observation, Watson", said he, lighting a cigarette. "It is simplicity itself. Take this egg- you will observe that this specimen has a brown shell. It was a simple deduction. You will recollect our brief sojourn in Mrs Hudson's pantry this morning. I noticed immediately that this particular egg was speckled with a panoply of coloured spots. It was the only egg in the box with this queer colouring, akin in many ways to the colour of that Piccadilly mud I had previously observed splashed, in fragments, on to those turn-up cuffs of your trousers last week. The remaining eggs- and you will observe that there are five of them- are, indeed, of a lighter hue, hence my double deduction."
He chuckled to himself and threw the egg into a pan, having- in a most fastidious fashion- removed the shell with his nimble yellow-stained fingers. "Pray, take note Watson, that I have raised the water temperature to a precise one hundred and one degrees".
I expressed wonder at my friend's erudition. "How long will it take to cook?" I remarked, laughing at the ease in which he carried out his work. "Two and a half minutes, precisely" he cried, a glint of triumph in his eye. "When I hear you explain, I replied, 'the whole thing seems so ridiculously simple, that I must confess to being baffled as to how you come up with your reasoning". Holmes threw back his head and laughed: "A mere trifle, my dear Watson." I raised an eyebrow. "Elementary", said he."
(With apologies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
And here's another one, with apologies to Ian Fleming:
"The steam and smell and heat of a kitchen is nauseating at seven o' clock in the morning. To James Bond, life was, indeed, a bitch. Ignoring his hangover, he stretched out for his twelve-and-a-half inch, burnt orange, enamel saucepan with its egg-matic, multi-porous, teflon surface which says Le Creuset.
Bond liked to have a good breakfast. But you never knew what they put in their eggs, these days. M had warned him about this only last night during a game of contract bridge at Blade's. Bond re-assessed his egg with suspicion. Could it contain the salmonella virus, genus motile entobacteria?
He looked at the egg with a new respect. A speckled brown special laid by that pretty little Marans hen, a real doll of a girl with the 32 Double D bust he'd had flown in from Goldfinger the previous morning. What to make of it all?
With a studied indifference, Bond let the egg slip between his fingers. The gambit succeeded. So! He'd let May, his trusty Scottish housekeeper clear it up tomorrow, though there was certainly going to be one hell of a mess to pay for later. Bond shrugged. He wasn't going to let SMERSH get away with that one!"
Please email your entries to me at [email protected] by the 3rd May. I'll be posting a brand new copy of Grub Street's excellent Taste of Portugual to the winner. Any other amusing pastiches sent to me will also, of course, be posted up on The Greasy Spoon. Good Luck!
