A Taste of Nonsense

Nonsense has a funny taste.

If one were to ask the posthumous Edward Lear to elucidate further, one might easily be led to conclude that nonsense tastes very much like a Crumbobblious cutlet, the making of which being most tickletakingly manifest in the following Learish recipe.

TO MAKE CRUMBOBBLIOUS CUTLETS

Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible slices, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times.

When the whole is thus minced, brush it up hastily with a new clothes-brush, and stir round rapidly and capriciously with a salt-spoon or a soup ladle.

Place the whole in a saucepan, and remove it to a sunny place, -- say the roof of the house if free from sparrows or other birds, -- and leave it there for about a week.

At the end of that time add a little lavender, some oil of almonds, and a few herring-bones; and cover the whole with 4 gallons of clarified crumbobblious sauce, when it will be ready for use.

Cut it into the shape of ordinary cutlets, and serve it up in a clean tablecloth or dinner-napkin.

Nonsense has an often somewhat harsh and salty aftertaste, less like sweet, more like sweat. Hence, it must be artfully prepared to be at all palatable. As Hesse wrote in one of his books: "My story is not a pleasant one, it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams, like the lives of all the men who stop deceiving themselves."

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith