Those who believe it’s a ‘dog eat dog’ world had never met raptors.
Dr. Weatherby one gloved hand raised for the approaching hansom while the other settled the brim of his hat against the November fog. The cab’s lamps cut yellow through the gas-lit murk of the Strand, and for a moment the wet cobbles threw the light back in broken, oily sheets.
He began composing the day’s journal entry in his mind.
I have, of late, been reading too many cookbooks. Escoffier’s service à la russe, with its seventeen courses and its precise hierarchy of temperature and sequence, is a marvel of control; Babette’s feast is a marvel of wasteful, almost sacramental generosity. Both assume a world in which the ingredients arrive already dead, already portioned, already willing. Neither contemplates the possibility that the main course may still be attempting to argue its case from the larder.
He reflected, again, how much power you acquire in a reign as long as Victoria’s. Not just political power, but interpersonal power. The maids did not fear her; they were just aware she’d slept in a perfectly-made bed for three decades and SHE would be the one to have broken that tradition. Decades from now, with some new ruler, the Head Maid would point at some apprentice and say, “And THAT’S the corner Amelia didn’t move, fold, and tuck properly. Don’t be Amelia.”
It was a horrible immortality.
He turned his mind from Palace intrigue to his stomach, as he’d been invited for cocktails, not dinner, and he was hungry. He thought carnivorously, as he gazed out the window at the squalid gutters below.
What might the Club be serving this night? It was, after all, a Thursday…
The ride was slow. He gave in to the luxury of half-dream, his journal entry everpresent in the back of his brain.
Consider the basilisk. Not the entire animal—its gaze is a nuisance even after the head is removed—but the breast, once the eyes have been carefully excised and the venom sacs sealed with a mixture of salt and crushed volcanic glass. The flesh is dense, almost mineral. It requires a long, low simmer in a court-bouillon of iron filings and black pepper before it will surrender its texture. Served under a thin glaze of reduced port and the faintest dust of powdered cinnabar, it tastes, if one is honest, of cold stone and the decision not to blink. One does not eat it quickly.
Or the cockatrice, which is simpler and therefore more dangerous. The difficulty is not in the killing but in the subsequent negotiation with its own residual pride. A cockatrice will continue, for some minutes after the fact, to insist that it is still the most magnificent thing in the room. (How human of it!)
The trick is to stuff it with a forcemeat of its own eggs and a quantity of bread that has been toasted over a very small, very hot flame; the bread absorbs the residual alchemical heat and prevents the bird from, as the older texts put it, “reasserting itself at the table.” Served with a sauce of fermented apple and a single drop of the creature’s own distilled venom (neutralized, of course, by a measured quantity of quicksilver), it is unexpectedly delicate. Guests tend to eat more of it than they intended.
The kraken presents a different problem of scale. One does not, as a practical matter, cook an entire kraken. One selects a single tentacle—preferably one that has not recently been used to express an opinion about shipping—and treats it much as one would treat a particularly argumentative octopus. The suction cups must be removed; they cling. The ink is reserved for a later course, or for correspondence. The flesh itself benefits from a brief bath in seawater that has been brought, under pressure, to a temperature just below boiling, then finished over a coal fire with nothing more elaborate than butter, crushed garlic, and the sort of black pepper that still remembers having been a berry. It is best eaten standing up, with the fingers, while the rest of the animal is still being debated in the next room.
There are, of course, more refined options. A minotaur’s heart, properly larded and roasted on a spit turned by a small steam-driven apparatus of his own design, develops a flavor not unlike that of a very old, very angry bull that has been allowed to consider its own mythology before the knife. A sphinx’s tongue is better stewed, slowly, with onions and a little too much wine; it becomes surprisingly conversational. One must be careful not to ask it questions after the third hour.
It was no avail. His mind again turned to Academia and the paper he really, really would publish someday. Someday soon.
I have kept notes. The older alchemical manuals are unreliable on matters of seasoning, but the newer French texts are worse; they assume the animal has already agreed to be dinner. In practice, the agreement is rarely mutual. One learns to read the tension in a joint, the particular shade of a still-moving eye, the precise moment when a creature stops calculating its escape and begins calculating its revenge. The window between those two calculations is, in culinary terms, quite narrow.
The cab drew level. The driver touched his hat. Inside, the leather smelled of damp wool and someone else’s tobacco. I settled myself, closed the door, and watched the fog take the street again. Somewhere behind me, in a kitchen that would not admit the hour, a stock was reducing. Somewhere else, something with too many legs was had slain its last adventurer.
He smiled again, more to himself than to the empty street.”
“It’s a dog-eat-dog World,” he said.
“And I know, for very sure, which one I am.”
_______________
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