Hi everyone! Hope you are in a festive mood for the holiday season and/or end of the year celebrations. What food do you typically prepare and eat during this time? In my own family, the food that we prepare is a mix of family traditions with new recipes from my children. I recall celebrating Christmas lunch and dinner with delicious Spanish inspired dishes like Chicken pastel, Lengua and Callos as my aunt was a superb cook. Nowadays, my adult children are preparing mediterranean salads, ham with pineapple, grilled meats and nut-free desserts. This prompt is making me hungry so let’s get right to it.

Our poetry form for this last prompt for 2023 is rhyming recipe. This is a culinary recipe in a rhymed verse. This verse form was common in the 19th and 20th centuries and used as an easy way to remember recipes. Rhyming recipes used to be common in England, they date back to the days when few cooks could read or write.

A good example of a famous rhyming recipe was written by Shakespeare. It is from his tragedy play Macbeth. Picture the scene, three witches huddle around a cauldron:

Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, Lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing.

Yikes.  But not all rhyming recipes are imaginary AND revolting.

There are many real and delicious rhyming recipes.  Here is one from Sydney Smith (1771-1845).  Source

Recipe for a Salad
by Sydney Smith

To make this condiment your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boil’d eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt;
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procur’d from town;
And lastly o’er the flavour’d compound toss
A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce.
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat!
Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
`Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.’

Here is another one, from Stephana Malcolm’s recipe book begun in 1790, Mother Eve’s Pudding.  source: The Regency Cook

                     If you have a good pudding pray mind what you’re taught
                     Take two penny worth of eggs when they’re twelve for a groat,
                     Then take of the fruit which Eve once did cozen,
                     Well pared and well chop’d at least half a dozen,
                     Six ounces of bread, let your maid eat the crust,
                     The crumb must be grated as small as the dust
                     Six ounces of currants from the stones you must sort,
                     Lest they break all your teeth & spoil all your sport,
                     Six ounces of sugar won’t make it too sweet,
                     Some salt, and some nutmeg, the whole will complete
                     Three hours let it boil without hurry or flutter
                     And by way of improvement add good melted butter
                     A little brandy in the composition
                     Will be deemed a great acquisition
                     Adam tasted the pudding & said ’twas wondrous nice,
                     Then begged Mother Eve to cut him another slice.

As mentioned above, the rhyming recipe is a way of recalling a recipe that is as poetic as it is beautiful. 

The elements of the Rhyming Recipe are:

1. written in any verse form at the discretion of the poet.
2. rhymed, usually in rhyming couplets but the poet can develop any rhyme scheme.
3. describes the steps in preparing a culinary dish.   Source

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Just a note:  Since this is our last prompt for 2023, we would like to remind all our poet friends and visitors that dVerse will going on a 2 week holiday break, from Dec. 17-31.    We will resume with our prompts, starting January 1, 2024!     Happy New Year to all of you!  Thanks for your support and participation in 2023.

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Now let’s see you writing a rhyming recipe poem.   Here is the challenge: 

Write a rhyming recipe poem using the elements as decribed above.   The recipe can be real like a family’s recipe or your own meal creation.  Or it can be imaginary recipe set in the future, or moody, and revolting dish, totally out of this world.