My 10/9/18 posting “Fruit bars” featured my mother-in-law Monique’s recipe for apricot bars / squares/ crisp cookies. Dried apricots made into a chewy filling for cookies with crunchy top and bottom layers, cut into squares.
At the time, Kim Darnell (who’s done all the actual work in this enterprise) and I contemplated other dried fruits as a basis: figs, dates, prunes, mangos, etc. We have so far achieved: apricots, figs, and dried cherries and mixed berries, the last baked yesterday.
I’ve been moved to verse, of a sort, but nothing original — instead, a parody of a bit of Lewis Carroll’s epic nonsense verse “The Hunting of the Snark” (published in 1876, with grotesque illustrations by Henry Holiday: full text available here).
The hunting refrain from the poem, as illustrated by Mahendra Singh on his blog:
My version:
The Cooking of the Squares
We made them with apricots, we baked them with figs,
We composed them with berries and cherries;
We sliced them in squares with a sharp kitchen knife;
We found them both crunchy and chewy.
I abandoned the rhymes of the original in favor of phonologically very distant pairings. On the other hand, my version makes a lot more sense than Carroll’s.
Carroll’s refrain also lacks the ominous possibility that haunts the main part of his poem: the Snark might be a Boojum. My refrain is similarly light-hearted and optimistic. I look forward to processing further dried fruits.
Leave a Reply