A Site for People who cook for Friends, Partners and Family
The Realms of Arcady
March 2002

A Recipe Site for people who cook everyday for friends, family and partners and enjoy it (most of the time) and are not too serious about food.

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A lot, but not all, food writing is serious stuff, words like freshest, finest and integrity get used a lot.  These are not words that come to mind when I confront the fridge after forgetting to do the shopping on a wet Wednesday.  Inverting some of these words gives a new approach to food.  Take "fresh", who would buy something that is not fresh, well, the Swedes have something called "surstromming", whilst several Swedish friends have shown pride in this delicacy, few are prepared to offer guests partially decayed fish, but I'm told it's popular in the north of the country.  Closer to home we have ketchup, the classical ancestor of this popular accompaniment to fish fingers and kedgeree is the Roman's garum.  The principal ingredients are fish entrails, salt, oil and a long, hot Mediterranean summer.  After 2,000 years, archaeologists are still finding recognisable remains of the stuff.

We'd like to add our contribution to the tributes to Spike Milligan this week.  I can imagine the results of a Spike Milligan award for food writing, "and the winner is a cafe owner in Lewisham for correctly spelling 'egg and chips'".  Food features in a lot Spike's work, mainly references to egg and chips, spaghetti and cheap red wine (much like this site).  Humour is a personal thing, but the description of chasing a pig through wartime Bexhill alone justifies buying "Adolf Hitler, my part in his downfall".  His trilogy of five books on the second world war should be part of the GCSE history syllabus.  Thanks, Spike, you got Prince Charles into a dustbin and made the world a better place.

From Bexhill to New Orleans, we have a recipe for Cajun Chicken.

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And not only recipes, Mrs. Beeton's "Things in Season". These pages are a graphic presentation of one of the sections of the 1882 edition of "All About Cookery". Whilst being more than a century old, they are a base for a culinary calendar.

Page Updated: 3rd March 2002