Mud Pie

“Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.” - John Le Carre

So here it is – the recipe for my mud pie. The pivotal dish I cooked on Masterchef, meant as sabotage, that I dreamt up on a hallucinatory kind of night. Probably the closest I’ll ever get to Kubla Khan. The original dish was far more complicated, involving a menagerie of garden delicacies, but I decided to simplify it into something more iconic. Even I’ve learnt a thing or two from Andy Warhol’s soup.

I know that, at the end of the day, this is just a recipe. But for me it was a piece of art. An experiment to see if food could evoke nostalgia, even memories. If it could evoke emotion and thought then it was as powerful an artistic medium as any painting or composition (yeh I said it Hegel!)

This was the first of many other experiments to use taste in art, thought up by my 18 year old self riding out insomnia.

If you want to know what the 22 year old self thinks of it you can dare to read the theory below. Call me crazy.

An exploration of the objective systematicity of the ‘aesthetic-in-itself’ produced by the practical principles of taste, by examining the power of food to evoke emotion, and even memory. The nostalgic force of food also features in Jen Susman’s work Practice Makes Perfect. This artwork is an adult recreation of the mud pies of early childhood, flavoured with thyme and rosemary, and with crystallized tarragon leaves to evoke the sense of grass. The herby, earthy, bitter taste tries to recreate the taste of a real mud pie by making use of the changes in the developed palate. It examines Bergson’s idea that “the aesthetic imperatives of unconscious apperception and remembrance are at the same time archaic vestiges incompatible with the increasing maturation of reason,” which suggests psychological cathexis as a condition of aesthetic perception.

Mud Pie Recipe

300g sweet dessert pastry (250g plain flour
100g cocoa powder
20g finely-grated 80% cocoa solids chocolate
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp salt
130g caster sugar
150g butter, softened)


2 large free-range eggs, 
lightly beaten


400g dark chocolate, 
60 per cent cocoa solids


200ml whole milk

Salt


200ml double cream

2 tbsp runny honey

1 bunch of Thyme

1 bunch of Tarragon (whole leaves)

1. to make the pastry, cream together the sugar and butter until light and fluffy. Add the salt and vanilla extract, creaming into the mix. Now add the cocoa powder and chocolate. Mix to combine thoroughly.

2. Add the flour and mix to combine. lift the pastry from the bowl onto a sheet of clingfilm and shape into a disc. Wrap securely then chill in the refrigerator.

3. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured work surface to aprox ½ inch thick. Use a large cookie cutter to cut out about 10 rounds of the pastry. Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and chill for an hour.

4. Preheat the oven to 
200C/Gas 6. Prick the
pastry rounds with a fork and then place a layer of parchment paper on top and then a close-fitting baking tray weighed down with baking beans. Blind bake 
for 10 minutes. Remove the parchment paper, the baking tray and beans and return to the oven for another 5 minutes until the pastry 
is cooked through.

5. While the pastry rounds are still hot, brush over with the beaten egg and bake the case for another 2-3 minutes to seal the egg glaze. Remove and leave to cool while you prepare the filling.

6. Chop the chocolate and put into a large heatproof bowl. Add a tiny pinch of salt to the bowl of chopped chocolate.

7. Put the milk, cream, thyme bunch and sugar into a saucepan 
and bring to a simmer, stirring well to dissolve the sugar. Bring to the boil and then leave to infuse for a few hours. Then bring to the boil again and immediately strain the hot liquid onto the chocolate, whisking well until 
all the chocolate has melted and the combined mixture is smooth and silky. Allow to cool until the mixture resembles twice the consistency of double cream.

8. Take the tarragon leaves and lay them on a foil sheet. Place 1 cup of caster sugar with ½ cup of water in a saucepan and slowly bring to the boil to create a syrup. Use a sugar thermometer to tell when it has reached ‘hard ball’ stage and when it does use a pastry brush to brush the sugar over the tarragon leaves to crystallize them.

9. To serve, place a pastry round on a plate and then top with a layer of the chocolate ganache and then place another pastry round ontop and add another layer of ganache. Then decorate with the tarragon leaves and raspberries if you like.

Rose, Beer and Pig Fat Chocolate Lollipops

I went to the bank and asked if I could borrow a cup of money. They said "what for?" I said "I'm going to buy some sugar" - Stephen Wright 

I had an epiphany. I finally realized the full extent of my naivety when leaving university. I had run into the first artsy-sounding job that hit my radar and put up with being paid minimum wage, way below if you count overtime, to be a clog in the machine of consumerism. Somehow tricking yourself into thinking data entry was a creative job with litres of gratuity booze and some hijacked goods, plastered with names. Don’t believe me? I sat in a meeting where the head alcoholic ranted about the company investing in new software to cut down their work by 75%, leaving more time for ‘client-relations’. But the first thought that came into my head was that 75% of the people in the room would be fired. Unless he had some brilliant plan to hoodwink the company into paying them to hang out 75% of the time. I gazed into his glazed eyes and thought, “probably not”.

But there is another way. The land of milk and honey! except who cares about cripplingly over-produced milk anymore? And honey? Leave it to the bees, they need it more than we do now. Instead it’s 'the land of greed and money'. A place for all those special perks of money; hedonism, lose morals, strange dollar bill signs in your eyes. Where you sacrifice the right to wear bright colours, just slipping back into uniform for the Etonians. But you get a lot of money. Same menial, data entry job but this time with commission. Suffice to say, it’s jammed full of Oxford. Even the occasional turncoat ‘die hard’ socialist, which is always amusing to behold in pinstripe.

England is crippling it’s own economy, with its best and brightest adding their skills forged in dusty libraries to the tune of bach and the scribble of pens. It’s not their fault, its chaos theory. We’ve just reached beyond our grasp and let our lives be governed by it. The bankers know their job, they know how to make money. They just happen to be in charge of more than their own selfish desires. Game theory is all very well until taxes get cut for the super-rich. And bankers are wallowing in their success, powdering their noses with 50 pound bills whilst the NHS gets cut. The heart of socialism in the UK operated on by the inept hands of a shaky politician, so that the pigs can remain fat. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from our briefly acquired middle ground it’s that it’s healthy to let the rich get fatter and the poor leaner. Although ironically, this time, it’ll be the other way round. The poor will be choking down MacDonald’s while the rich dine in gold-guilt for free because they made the most money that week. Coddled by their misguided faith that the market acts as a rational system. Never wondering about the implications of that sheet of numbers they have to increase. Smearing away their guesswork with some dippy science and an over-arching desire for money. But watching the bankers laugh at the economists, doesn't exactly fill me with joy.

Because that’s the problem with bankers, they are free radicals thinking only as far as their pension, capable of upping sticks and moving to Dubai, Hong Kong or America. Where ever seems the best place to worship their Golden God. The people whose money they control are more dispensable to them than their Jag. What do they care for the poor fools who haven’t seen the golden light of God - metal, paper and all. Those who didn’t join the pre-recession free-for-all that went on behind the banks’ closed doors. That is, you and me?


We could be angry, we could be ravaging the City as I speak, as the bankers suspected when some of the corruption came to light. But alas, Britain’s economy is dangerously dependent of revenues from the financial sector. You can thank Margaret Thatcher for that. So we’ll have to sit tight accepting the hefty commission we pay on our money, funding the bankers’ habit. After all there’s no rehab for money-addiction. Communism is long gone.

And so, I cooked some sickenly sweet chocolate lollipops. Flavoured with rose, beer and pig fat. Corruption-flavoured in fact. Pigs for pigs. Their smiles still fixed in place as their faces become frenetically morphed in Dorian Gray’s final visage. The Earl of Rochester would empathise with their rotted noses and unseeing eyes. I just wanted to see the bankers munch on their own visage, in decadent white chocolate, feasting on the spoils of their corruption.

And off I trotted to the City, land of greed and money, armed with a box of chocolate lollipops and a camera. 

I had to put up with a lot of beady eyes looking at me in disbelief and agitation, with pinstriped patriarchs asking “why are they free? That’s not how the world works”. Well maybe not for you, who have sold your soul, but for the rest of the world a simple act of generosity can make all the difference. Which I tried diligently to preach to the Bankers, in the knowledge that my words would not wash and their paychecks would remain fat.

Some were quite friendly, wishing me luck making it as an artist; hardly knowing the irony that there’s no place for art in their paper religion.