Yuletide Fic: "The Yellow Cure-All." (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke) G
Title: The Yellow Cure-All. (On Archive Of Our Own)
Author:
lannamichaels
Fandom: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Rating: G
Recipient:
attheborder
Summary: I first heard of this recipe while studying in Faerie in the Raven King's court. Then I got home and forgot all about it until I suddenly realized I had an impending deadline for Eating The Road's Classical Magical Recipe competition.
I first heard of this recipe while studying in Faerie in the Raven King's court. Then I got home and forgot all about it until I suddenly realized I had an impending deadline for Eating The Road's Classical Magical Recipe competition.
I'm not usually surprised by deadlines. I can see them coming and I know enough spells to duck the worst of their damage. But this time, I admit, I was distracted. And then the deadline tapped me on the shoulder. What I said after that does not have a place in a family blog like this one. Needless to say, I hustled. But despite my hustling, I did not win the competition. :(
However, that just means I can share this with you early! :)
Don't worry, I've revised and tested the recipe a few times since then. Don't feel like you're getting the dregs of a competition; instead, you're getting a sneak peek into what you can expect when Eating The Road publishes the winners next month!
It is important to remember when trying this recipe that repetition is the key. You're not going to get it right the first time. The only times I've ever gotten a magical recipe to work the first time was when I was in the kitchens in Faerie, scrubbing next to other grad students, some of whom had been there five decades and still barely looked thirty. We used to make the most magnificent creations and by the King's luck -- and the King's magic -- things usually went well. If they didn't go well, uh, someone probably turned into a raven and vanished for a while to think about what they'd done, while the King gave them another job to do, one that didn't require, uh, kitchen skills. Look, the point is, we signed binding waivers, and Winston probably didn't need those tailfeathers anyway.
I remember this one time, we made a six-towered castle from dreams and wishes, iced with hopeless tears that we shed ourselves, and one of the fairies told me that she hadn't had anything so good since she'd chased some prince out of her southern keep and eaten his heart. I floated on air for the next week, I'll tell you what. Uh, metaphorically. I never did learn that spell.
There are a lot of things that we made in Faerie that I've never successfully made outside of it; you just can't get the right light, and don't even bother trying to get the winds to play along. It won't work. So I was surprised -- very very desperately surprised -- to find that this recipe worked. Well, first it failed four times. Then the fifth time, it worked. I call that a success.
The key to this recipe is understanding intent. You have to keep in mind why you are doing it. It bills itself as The Yellow Cure-All, but that is a lie twice over: it comes out a pale green and also it doesn't cure anything, not even hiccups. When I read about it in Faerie, it got described as a tonic for laughter or as a magical fertilizer. Yes, the same recipe. These are classical magical recipes we're talking about here, you knew what you were getting into. If you've tried to make Lady Susan's Regret (and who hasn't?), you know what classical recipes are like. This is not something that you make to win awards at the bake sale, this is something you make for your thesis. And then sometimes you get addicted to the challenge and you keep going. (Side note: Lady Susan's Regret will fix an addiction to following classical magical recipes. Please cook responsibly.)
When I called up Winston to chat about The Yellow Cure-All and see if he remembered anything more about it, he told me that he thought it had to do with the magical alliances between King and Country, that a cure was not a curative but a state of mind, and that the reason intent matters so much is because you pour your intent in and then drink it down, symbolizing a binding magical contract with yourself. That's the kind of perspective that got him turned into a raven a record eighteen times before our grant ended. Anyway, I don't believe a word of it.
What I do know is that this recipe features in Catherine of Winchester's papers, but that Catherine of Winchester had the typical handwriting of a magician of her age, so I couldn't read half of it and only skimmed the rest. Pale's translation of it contains six ingredients, four of which no longer exist and the other two of which we don't have a clue what he meant for them. There are several reconstructions, none of them have ever worked for me or anyone I know. This recipe owes a debt to all those reconstructions, to Pale's marginalia, to Enid Corwin's opus on recipe migration, and to everyone in Faerie who told me how it was supposed to taste. The rest was trial and error, and then heavy revision after Eating The Road told me I didn't make the short list because no one was going to go dig in their garden to try to find tangled rootblood when it only grows natively in places where William of Lanchester spat on the ground.
But that's where it comes back to intent. Intent is what saved me and intent is what holds this recipe together. You have to know what you are doing, you have to know why you are doing, and you specifically have to know why you are doing the what you are doing. The mysteries compound on each other and it's a headache. But then the wind blows through the branches and you remember. You remember why you ever wanted to do this in the first place. But you have to remember it.
Therefore, if you try this recipe without reading this intro and it fails, it's your own fault.
Safe cooking!
Recipe:
1 gallon goat's milk, milked from the cheapest goat in the herd. I mean it, if you had to sell your goats right now, this is the one you'd have to pay people to take away from you.
2 full handfuls of homemade toffee made mostly from leftover sorrow. A note on homemade: it has to be made in the home you live in; it does not need to be made by you. But it can't be made by you in someone else's house and then you take it home and try the rest of the recipe. Sorry! The sorrow can be borrowed.
5 unbaked chocolate chip cookies, all of different sizes. The chocolate chips can be any brand or quality of chocolate and you don't have to make the dough yourself. This is the easy part.
12 scales from a yellow ouroboros
A melody of spring and autumn. If you don't have that, ABBA is fine.
Maple Oak vinegar from Newcastle, the kind that comes in the blue bottles.
Bricks
Instructions:
Construct an earthenware oven about the dimensions of the Harcourt Oven (see archives for building plans). Add the bricks and heat them.
In a microwavable bowl, mix the milk and toffees. Microwave for two minutes. Add the scales and vinegar. Stir.
Dab the mixture on top of the cookies and add the melody. Put the cookies on the bricks and allow them to cook. Remove promptly and eat hot.
If you have done this correctly, you will feel every emotion you put into the cookies come back to you. If you have not done this correctly, you will probably get food poisoning. But at least it won't turn you into a bird.
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1172614.html.