A Recipe for Flame-Grilled Saber-Toothed Tiger

My mother and sister bought me my first cookbook when I left home for university, believing every young man should know at least the basics. The blurb described it as a list of simple recipes every woman should be able to cook. I thought that was a bit sexist, but it was a woman’s weekly cookbook, so who was I to complain?

Before the recipes, the book had a list of common ingredients that every woman should have in her pantry; a list of spices and herbs and God knows what else. I remember looking over the list and realising I had some serious shopping to do.

 Item one: Pantry

Once I got as far as trying a recipe out, I found they were very specific about quantities. Add three quarters of a cup of self-raising flour to two hundred and forty-five grams of desiccated coconut and the whites of two and five sixths of an egg. Bake it for twenty-three and a half minutes and then turn it over and lightly bedazzle it for another two and eight fifths.

Assuming you made it through all that, at the end it just said, “Add sugar to taste.” Now that is a dangerous instruction to give me. Add sugar to taste? How many packets do we have?

Sugar is fantastic. I get frustrated by the videos my supposedly healthier friends keep sharing about the effects of sugar. The smug little presenter looks down at an entirely superfluous clipboard and says “This is how much sugar is in just one can of soft drink. And this is what you’d look like if you just ate that much sugar.” Now insert stock footage of an angry man grunting and cramming spoonfuls of sugar into his mouth. It seems sugar doesn’t merely affect your pancreas and blood pressure but also your throat, speech, hand-eye coordination and table manners.

Nobody eating that much sugar with a spoon could possibly be so angry about it. Sugar doesn’t make you angry. It might make you fat and unhealthy. You might even die, but you will die happy. Isn’t that what we all want in the end?

Someone else tried to lend me a cookbook for the paleo diet: the one where you only eat the sort of foods that our paleolithic forebears ate. It’s an interesting idea, but why stop at the paleolithic era? I’m going to write a new book promoting the mid-to-late Triassic diet, where we only eat the sort of primeval vegetable matter that was available to our proto-mammalian ancestors as they scuttled beneath the feet of colossal dinosaur overlords. Then add sugar to taste.

One of the principles of primordial catering is that we should eat no meat that also eats meat. It’s a stupidly trite way of saying we should only eat the flesh of domesticated herbivores, with the assumption that serious carnivores of the Paleolithic Era were well above primitive man on the food chain and would therefore have been eating us, rather than the other way around. This too, is nonsense. if the hunting party of primitive man came across the fresh corpse of a recently deceased saber-toothed tiger, they would absolutely have taken it back to the village for a barbeque. You could feed a clan for a fortnight on a cat the size of a Harley Davidson.

By the same principle, if, while I’m out hunting and foraging, I happen to come across a freshly slain chicken and mushroom pizza, then of course I’m going to take it back to the village and share it with my wife and children.

What do you take me for, some kind of Neanderthal?