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Apr. 6th, 2009
Discworld Cuisine
Apr. 6th, 2009 10:23 pmTonight for supper we had a dish right out of the Discworld ancillary volume Nanny Ogg's Cookbook: Slumpie, with clooty dumplings. They were a bit of a challenge, partly because the ingredients were all in metric (I converted them beforehand and stuck post-its in the recipe book with the conversions) and partly because some of the ingredients were a little out of the ordinary (we had to ask the butcher at the local grocery store for some suet—but he gave it to us free; it's not as if he was going to use it for anything else).
Slumpie, as Nanny Ogg says, is "a bit like chop suey, which is Agatean for 'all the labels have fallen off the tins'." The recipe in the cookbook (which is somewhat different from the version seen in the actual novels, in that the one in the cookbook will actually produce something edible) calls for things like ground beef (we used ground sirloin), spinach, beef stock, dark beer, and so forth. There's a recipe on-line for Scottish slumpie, which is a bit similar though with a few slightly different ingredient choices (ketchup instead of tomato puree for instance). We didn't quite thicken it enough, so it was a bit runny, but still not a patch on the version actually served in Ankh Morpork.
Clooty dumplings, on the other hand, are not much like the "real world" version. A footnote in Men At Arms explains that they are "Not to be confused with the Scottish Clootie Dumpling, which is a kind of suet padding full of fruit. The Ankh-Morpork version sits on the tongue like finest meringue, and on the stomach like a concrete bowling ball."
The ediblized version from Nanny Ogg's Cookbook is a big gob of dough made out of wholemeal (that is, whole wheat) flour, suet, and broth. The recipe ended up making four of them, which were each about the size of a golf ball. I expect that in the future I would probably double the recipe if we were serving the slumpie with them alone; we ended up boiling and mashing up some potatos to have it over too. The dumplings were quite dense, and as it happened they did sit slightly heavily on my stomach (I had two of them; my parents had one each)—but in a good way.
Both my parents and I agreed that the dish wasn't quite like anything we'd ever had before. (And, to be honest, probably not all that much like anything any Ankh-Morpork resident had before, either—any Ankh establishment high-class enough to use the quality of ingredients we did would probably scoff at making slumpie!) It's not all that often you get to have such a completely new culinary experience, and it turns out to be so good. I highly recommend the cookbook to any Discworld fans.
Hopefully I can talk the folks into trying a few more recipes from that book sometime soon.
Slumpie, as Nanny Ogg says, is "a bit like chop suey, which is Agatean for 'all the labels have fallen off the tins'." The recipe in the cookbook (which is somewhat different from the version seen in the actual novels, in that the one in the cookbook will actually produce something edible) calls for things like ground beef (we used ground sirloin), spinach, beef stock, dark beer, and so forth. There's a recipe on-line for Scottish slumpie, which is a bit similar though with a few slightly different ingredient choices (ketchup instead of tomato puree for instance). We didn't quite thicken it enough, so it was a bit runny, but still not a patch on the version actually served in Ankh Morpork.
Clooty dumplings, on the other hand, are not much like the "real world" version. A footnote in Men At Arms explains that they are "Not to be confused with the Scottish Clootie Dumpling, which is a kind of suet padding full of fruit. The Ankh-Morpork version sits on the tongue like finest meringue, and on the stomach like a concrete bowling ball."
The ediblized version from Nanny Ogg's Cookbook is a big gob of dough made out of wholemeal (that is, whole wheat) flour, suet, and broth. The recipe ended up making four of them, which were each about the size of a golf ball. I expect that in the future I would probably double the recipe if we were serving the slumpie with them alone; we ended up boiling and mashing up some potatos to have it over too. The dumplings were quite dense, and as it happened they did sit slightly heavily on my stomach (I had two of them; my parents had one each)—but in a good way.
Both my parents and I agreed that the dish wasn't quite like anything we'd ever had before. (And, to be honest, probably not all that much like anything any Ankh-Morpork resident had before, either—any Ankh establishment high-class enough to use the quality of ingredients we did would probably scoff at making slumpie!) It's not all that often you get to have such a completely new culinary experience, and it turns out to be so good. I highly recommend the cookbook to any Discworld fans.
Hopefully I can talk the folks into trying a few more recipes from that book sometime soon.
