Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Nineteen Spring 2009 |
Creative Cookery for Gracious Living: A Lesson in 4 Courses Susan Slaviero Your job in this new world of fabulous eating is to make the best foods attractive and to create in the family a desire for a healthy balance of varied and nutritious fare. --From The Pillsbury Family Cookbook, c. 1963 i.
appetizers and other titillations
Unshell him with glazed, salted almonds, garlic-toasted cashews. Butterstich the hollows of stuffed shrimp with parsley stems to suggest a verdant spine, a plush leaf. Tease his eye. Like this. Obscure lingering notes of brackish water, iodine. ii.
the meat monologues
O meat, O pan, O loaf! Fleshly apparitions, layers of seasoned beef and bread stuffing, shellacked with Heinz 57 sauce and honey. The whiskey mingle of steak, marinade, a woman’s reddened hands. iii.
oh, the salad days
Practice variety in your knifework— cluster balls & spears, cubes and sections. A ruffle of romaine, a shaft of celery. Rarify the wombs of hollow melons with frosted grapes and grenadine. iv.
a cakework orange
Chocolate lush, lemon moon, the murmur of pudding basins, rasp of biscotti against your teeth. Try the pears helene in syrup. Here, here. Wilting like torten on the tongue. |
About Susan Slaviero |