The world's worst recipe ?

The two boyz tore out of the front gate at high speed in celebration of the start of another day.For me it's just another Thursday but for them it's the first page of an unopened book promising high adventure and excitement. Their post-bath pristine whiteness has now begun to wear off with their muzzles reverting to the more usual mud and vegetation caked look.

We have on the bookshelves a much loved copy of a cookbook by that doyenne of the kitchen Elizabeth David. Published in the late 1940's the book has some rather attractive illustrations and a bright and breezy style aimed at teaching the post-war housewive the benefits of Mediterranean food. For many years she alone preached the benefits of cooking with olive oil in a country where it was usually bought in small bottles from the pharmacy and used as an aid to ear cleaning. Anyway, in this mornings Guardian newspaper they list her Italian salad as the world's worst recipe:

Italian Salad:

1 pint cold cooked macaroni

1/2 pint cooked or tinned pears

1/2 pint grated raw carrot

French dressing to moisten

2 heaped tablespoons minced onion

1/2 pint cooked or minced string beans

Mix the chopped macaroni and vegetables,moisten with French dressing,flavouring with garlic if liked.Serve on a dish lined with lettuce leaves.Decorate with mayonnaise and minced pimento or chives.

If we tried to serve that to an Italian as an Italian Salad we would be looked at with incredulity!

In this mornings paper I see that Mollie Sugden the actress has died at the age of 86.There is a paragraph in her obituary that I shall quote at length. " It was as the bossy sales lady in Are You Being Served ? that she was best known. The long-running,innuendo-laden televison comedy was such a hit that a feature film was made based on the series,and it was successfully exported to America. In every episode Sugden sported a different hair colour and continually harped on about her 'pussy'.What an American audience would have made of the camp kitchness of Are You Being Served? is one of those areas of mutual cultural incomprehension that has kept us all chuckling merrily away at the breakfast table. The television executive who bought it for the US market must have been either very innocent or in possession of a very wry sense of humour.