Sunday, January the 29th, 2006
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Episode six in our daily serialisation of The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet
In dietary matters, Blodgett deferred to the cook, Mrs Purgative. She was a woman of regular habits and iron will. Every day, she prepared four cauldrons of boiling soup, for consumption at dawn, mid-morning, mid-afternoon and dusk. Each soup was prepared from a different recipe, though Mrs Purgative preferred the antique spelling receipt.
The first soup was a thin clear broth flavoured with kidneys, minnows and saffron.
The second soup was thick and lumpy, more like a stew or what the Bible calls a pottage. Its main ingredients were curds, feverfew, whelks, gin, blood oranges and a sort of puddingy sponge of unknown provenance.
The third soup consisted mostly of duckpond water, into which Mrs Purgative hurled delphiniums, muffins, pike and herring, lights, parsley, cocoa and masa harina, eggs, toffee apples and cake crumbs.
Her greatest achievement, though, was the fourth soup. The receipt had taken her years to bring to perfection. The base was a thick paste of mugwort, the pulp of runner beans, finely ground crocuses, and mustard. This was diluted with boiling duckpond water and left to stand for a week, uncovered, out in a field. Brought back to the kitchen, the topmost layer of scurf and froth would be drawn off and used as a filling for small pancakes with an oaty flavour. The pancakes would be tossed into the soup together with mayonnaise, cream crackers, bloaters, pemmican, tulip-roots, agar, an ox head, krill, the crushed bones of a swan, whey, turmeric, marmalade, groist, badgers' brains, and spinach. Boiled until it had the consistency of mush, the soup would be thinned out with the addition of yet more duckpond water and egg custard sherry, and then garnished with brazil nuts and semi-chewed celery sticks. Mrs Purgative usually asked Blodgett to do the prepatory chewing.
At quarterly intervals through the year, she cooked an ample supply of each of the four soups. She then supervised the canning process, which was carried out in a small factory in the grounds of the House. Once tinned, the soups were stored in larders, from where Blodgett or other Blodgett-like figures would collect daily supplies. As far as can be ascertained, the soup was the only sustenance officially available in the House. Oh, apart from cups of tea, of course.