• Menu

    What’s it going to be then, eh?

    The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
    About Anthony Burgess
    • Introducing Anthony Burgess
    • The Books of Anthony Burgess
    • The Music of Anthony Burgess
    Discover More
    • A Clockwork Orange
    • Earthly Powers
    • Anthony Burgess and Shakespeare
    • Dystopian Fiction
    About The Foundation
    • Our Mission
    • Visiting Us
    • The Burgess Bar
    • Support the Burgess Foundation
    • Join our mailing list
    • Contact us
    Anthony Burgess Archive
    • About the Archive
    • Visiting the Archive
    • Object of the Week
    • Contact the Archivist
    What's On
    • News and Blogs
    • Event listings
    • Venue hire
    • Burgess Prize
    • Exhibitions
    • Podcasts
    The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
  • What’s it going to be then, eh?

    OPENING TIMES
    Bar Open for events
    Reading Room Available for pre-booked appointments 10.00am - 3.00pm weekdays
    Office Hours By appointment: info@anthonyburgess.org
    HOW TO FIND US
    Engine House
    Chorlton Mill
    3 Cambridge Street
    Manchester
    M1 5BY
    Nearest train station Oxford Road More information
    Next event
    Literature: Poets & Players Sat 25 Mar 2023 2:30 pm Free More information
  • The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
  • What's it going to be then, eh?

    Exhibitions. New writing. Concert commissions. Academic research. Public events, in venues and online. And at the core of everything, preserving and promoting our extensive Anthony Burgess archive.

    Your donation to the Burgess Foundation supports our mission to promote the life and work of Anthony Burgess in so many ways.

  • What’s it going to be then, eh?

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
NEWS AND BLOG POSTS

The Anthony Burgess Cookbook: part two

  • Burgess Foundation

  • 13th September 2011
  • category

  • Blog Posts
  • tagged as

  • Food and drink
  • Journalism

Burgess’s comic novel Inside Mr. Enderby (1963) introduced the failed poet F.X.Enderby to an unforgiving and indifferent world. Living in squalor in Hove, Enderby is oppressed by poverty, writer’s block, indigestion and constipation (all for him, curiously related conditions), and Catholic guilt. How far Inside Mr. Enderby is an autobiographical text is a subject for a longer discussion, so for the moment here is Enderby’s attempt to cook something called Spaghetti Formaggio Surprise, the recipe for which he finds in a magazine called Fem that is to publish some of his poems.

‘Enderby went out with his shopping-net and returned with a pound of spaghetti, a quarter of cheese, and a large garlic for fourpence. Panting with excitement, he took the recipe into the kitchen and followed the instructions slavishly. ‘Enough for four’, he read. He was but one man alone, he himself, hungry Enderby. He must divide everything then by four. He took the pound of spaghetti and broke the brittle sticks into small pieces. He took his frying pan (pity that the recipe asked for a large deep one; still, never mind) and poured one tablespoonful of olive oil. (He had about a cupful of this in his cupboard, saved from sardine tins.) He threw in about a quarter of the spaghetti, lit the gas, and cooked it slowly, turning and stirring. He then added two cupfuls of water, remembering that he was to divide by four, so threw some of the water out again. He turned, breathing heavily, the Fem, which the pan gently simmered. Grated cheese. He grated some with Mrs Meldrum’s nutmeg grater and threw it into the mixture. Now this question of onion or garlic. ‘Two large onions chopped,’ said the recipe, or ‘garlic to taste’. Enderby looked at his garlic, stronger, he knew, than onions; perhaps this one would be equivalent to two of those. Should he skin it? No. The goodness was in the skin: potatoes, for instance. He sliced the garlic warpwise, then woofwise, then threw the bits into the simmering pan. And now.  A greased dish. He found a cloudy Pyrex on the shelf, and he liberally coated its inside with margarine. He now had to transfer the stuff from the pan into the Pyrex. He had some difficulty turning it out: it had stuck for some reason, and he had to gouge vigorously to detach what was willing to be detached. He flopped the mixture into the dish. ‘Top with sour cream,’ said the recipe. There was no sour cream, but plenty of sour milk, greenish on top. He crowned the dish with generous curds, then lit the oven. It had to cook to a slow heat therein, about twenty minutes …

Damn. He had not, he realised, consistently divided by four. Never mind. And perhaps the spaghetti was meant to turn black. He had heard of smart restaurants where things were deliberately burned before one’s eyes, as one sat cool and well-dressed at table. He went back to the electric fire to continue his reading of Fem … He gawped on long past twenty minutes of cooking time, came to with a hiccoughing start, then drew his Spaghetti Formaggio Surprise out of the oven. Its name was not inept. He sat down to it, and savoured mingled hues of burnt farinacity and shouting brutal garlic, loud and hot as an acetylene blast; the tone of these hues was a tired tepidity. He had not quite expected this. He ate dutifully, with many draughts of cold water. He must learn the tastes of his prospective readers.’

 

Will Carr

  • Share | 
  • Print
Related Blog posts
A Shorter Finnegans Wake: editing an epic Andrew Biswell
Inside the archive: Restoring Joyce and Belli Anna Edwards
Blowing the horn for Anthony Burgess in 2023 Andrew Biswell
The 2023 Observer / Burgess Prize has a winner Ian Carrington
SEE ALL NEWS AND BLOG POSTS
Go to home page
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Go to home page
Follow us

© 2023 International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Charity no. 1102623

International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Engine House Chorlton Mill 3 Cambridge Street M1 5BY
  • Site map
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms of use
  • Designed by Instruct
  • Built by OH Digital