Art:Legendary Recipes
Legendary Recipes was a familiar event run in the Y!PP Forums in March and April 2004. Entrants were to submit, in 900 words or less, a piratey story and the recipe that it spawned. For taking first place, Excerebrose won a purple octopus. His winning entry[1] is reproduced in its entirety below. Augurey took second place[2] and 10,000 PoE and Fenumen took third place[3] and 7,500 PoE.
Excerebrose's Winning Entry
So we'd finally caught one, but what in blazes were we to do with the thing? Me crew was out hunting fer what ye call unusual critters; kraken, merwenches and the like. It were our longest voyage yet, deep into uncharted waters in search o' the rarest beasties ye've ever heard in tall tales. Why, it took all our booty from selling narwhale horns off our last outing just to stock fer this great hunt. Months had gone by, with nary hide nor hair o' our prey, before dumb luck struck. The ship'd taken a mean beating from a drunken argument among the cannoneers and I'd pumped so much water outta her hold I thought I was swimmin' with a boat around me feet instead o' proper sailin'. It musta swam through one o' the bigger holes and gotten trapped when we'd done our repairs, but there it was, flopping around and tangled in the ropes was the very beastie we'd been searchin' for! Somehow it just fell right inta me lap, the legendary sea donkey!
Now, except fer the the oddity of it, a sea donkey's not much to look at, and they're too stubborn to be awfully useful critters to keep around. And ye see, most of our hardtack had washed inta the ocean amidst that fightin' and we'd ate up all the narwhale weeks ago... Well, apart from a few trophies to prove we'd had it, we handed the thing over to Cookie so our bellies'd be full on the way home. Unfortunately, sea donkey's a rubbery sort of meat and to be honest it tastes like a- well it tastes like donkey, alright? This was the best that ole Cookie come up with:
- Slice sea donkey into slabs as long as yer knife. Each slab serves one.
- Remove as much of the hair from yer slab as ye can. Don't worry if ye don't get it all, because ye won't.
- Nail sea donkey slab to a plank. I recommend using one o' those T-shaped planks nobody likes anyway.
- Dump on as much o' whatever spices ye can find. Pepper, brine, elderberries, whisker-shavings, sassafras, tacks, lice, ground glass, whathaveye.
- Wrap sea donkey, plank, and "seasonings" in kelp.
- Place whole thing in pan o' hot sea butter. If ye've never tried sea butter, ask yer commanding officer fer some. Nothing cuts quite like it!
- Simmer.
- Probably better simmer that a mite more, matey.
- Okay, really just burn the bloody thing black.
- Ye can tell it's done when yer ribs are pokin' outta yer shirt and ye can't wait no longer.
- Unwrap kelp bundle.
- Throw the cursed sea donkey overboard and eat the plank.
Aye, that recipe's how most o' the swabbies liked to eat their sea donkey, but after we'd run outta planks we could use without sinkin' the ship we still had a lot of sea donkey left. By then most o' it were what we took to callin' jerky. Sea donkey jerky is what ye get when the scraps o' sea donkey such as skin, gills, and guts have been soaking in the bilge water for a fortnight and then dried out in the noonday sun. It's tough as the last barmaid inna port and surprises ye by tastin' worse than it smells. If ye ever find yerself in such a poor scrape that yer gnawin' on sea donkey jerky, do what I did. Dip the jerky in a bowl of the strongest rum onboard between bites. It doesn't soften it up at all and it doesn't do anything fer the taste, but after five or six helpings I find that I don't care anymore.
