Get Your Aprons Out for Cooking with Lovecraft
Victoria
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What do you get when you combine home cooking with cosmic dread? You might end up with something akin to Miguel Fliguer’s Cooking with Lovecraft.
“A lot has been written about [Lovecraft] and sex—an activity that he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about—but not much about his interests at the dinner table,” says Fliguer. “I thought it was worth exploring his works and life under this peculiar lens of food and cooking.”
The book, Fliguer’s first, was first conceptualized in May 2015. “I began by compiling a list of weird stories that could be given a culinary twist,” he says. The list of Lovecraftian contenders ran long and beyond Lovecraft’s own work, including tales such as Frank Belknap Long’s “Hounds of Tindalos” and Robert W. Chambers’ “The King in Yellow.” “After a while I realized some of the references worked better in a pure recipe format, and others required a short story treatment.”
The result is an interesting hybrid: part-cookbook, part-anthology, Cooking with Lovecraft is a collection of 23 stories and 13 recipes that come together to form a tongue-in-cheek tribute to this pioneer of weird fiction. Novices in the kitchen need not worry: The recipes often read like playful in-jokes to anyone well-read in Lovecraft’s body of work—from a sausage-based dish inspired by “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” to banana bread that takes its cues from “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.”
Similarly, many of the tales give you equal helpings of humor and eldritch horror. Some are original works with a wink and nod to well-loved Lovecraftian tropes or references; others are a new take on familiar stories that are told from the viewpoint of not-so-familiar side characters: One, dubbed “The Feastival,” is what Fliguer describes as a “Lovecraftian Passover story” that plays out like a parody of Lovecraft’s “The Festival.” Another, “Bratwurst mit Sauerkraut” is set in the German submarine in “The Temple.”
Cooking with Lovecraft was initially self-published as an e-book in 2016 on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform, then later released in paperback in mid-2017. The paperback edition includes updated text and additional stories, prompting a new edition for Kindle as well. Fliguer is currently working on a Spanish-language version of the book. Check out Cooking with Lovecraft on Amazon.
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