The
Journals of Thaddeaus Shockpocket children’s short story series, including
Albion 77, incorporates food throughout the stories to create moods and
settings, and to give hints to the quirky personalities of the eccentric
Shockpocket family of English turn-of-the-century inventors/explorers. A meal
may reveal a clue to their next adventure, evoke a feeling of comfort, or simply
be a product of another crazy invention.
For example, when Thaddeaus discovers that camel vomit makes a great mosquito repellent, he invents a way to make his new bug repellent smell less obnoxious and more like rose water, and then uses his scent modification technique to create all manner of odor altering products, including those that alter the smell of food.
When reformulating my Shockpocket All Organic Bug Repellent to smell less like camel vomit and more like rose water with slight camel breath undertones, I developed all manner of techniques to transform odors. The ensuing formulas have had no end to their potential.
For
instance, I can:
Make spinach smell like steak.
It
works, but the cooked spinach still has the limp texture of soggy leaves and a
taste Tweak can’t stomach.
Make roast beef smell like spinach.
We use
this whenever we have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for supper. The formula
is extremely successful at fooling our dog, Shandy, and keeping the furry mutt
from stealing freshly cooked roasts straight off the kitchen counter before we
even have our first bite.
Unfortunately,
one of the joys of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is the lovely smell that
fills the room when it comes out of the oven. Now our Sunday meal smells like
overcooked greens. Oh well, at least it still tastes sumptuous. And Tweak and I
don’t have to eat leftovers from Shandy.
Make skunks smell like fish.
Okay,
smelling like a fish is probably not a whole lot better than smelling like a
skunk, but it is the only formula that has any effect at all on the family of
little black and white critters that runs loose on the Shockpocket estate.
At any rate, you can see that we became quite adept at scent conversion.
The
very next day I set about on my next invention, the Shockpocket Buffler, a
personal muffler and odor converter.
One of the surprises of creating what I believe to be unique meals, has been finding that they weren’t that odd after all. For instance, Tweak’s absolute favorite lunch is a sardine and peanut butter sandwich. After coming up with the idea, I made one to see if it was edible and found that my wife actually liked it. And recently, I met an older gentleman who told me that he has made sardine and peanut butter sandwiches for his work lunches for decades. Who knew.
Thanks for stopping by to share your food for thought, Henry!
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