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Ten reasons why The Hungover Cookbook makes a fantastic (adult) stocking filler this Christmas:
1. Booze and Christmas go together like Santa Claus and Reindeer. This also means that hangovers come along for the ride too (there’s a downside to reindeer too: they create a lot of shit, but no-one ever mentions that). It means that this gift will be put to immediate practical use (always gratifying for the ‘giver’).
2. For drinkers that don’t cook, it might provide them with the incentive to pick up a frying pan and start cooking.
3. For cooks that don’t drink, you can give it to them so they can look after you when you have a hangover.
4. It’ll make the person you’re giving it to wet their pants with laughter. It really is that funny.
5. It comes in a very fetching, and dare I say it, Australian, yellow colour.
6. On the subject of Australia, there’s going to be one big collective hangover when you guys lose the Ashes. This might help you get over it.
7. Not only is it a humorous book and a cookbook, it’s also brilliantly and wittily illustrated by my friends at 300million.
8. It offers a revolutionary approach to dealing with hangovers, by using quizzes and visual tests to diagnose the type of hangover you have before matching it with suitable recipes. This should make you not only feel better but have fun while you’re making yourself feel better.
9. Its compact size means it would probably fit in a very narrow stocking (though I haven’t tried this yet).
10. Did I leave it until now to say that it’s really not expensive at all! Buy it now!
This is one of my favourite recipes – a truly hearty breakfast for when you’re in a mood to eat and eat. It’s pretty much exactly what it says it is: the essential ingredients of an English breakfast cooked in a single pan which ends up resembling a Spanish tortilla (but full of fun bits).
This is how to cook it:
Ingredients (for 2 people)
Olive oil
4 outdoor-bred pork chipolata sausages, each cut into three pieces
6 medium free range eggs, lightly beaten and seasoned
100g streaky bacon/pancetta
3 medium-sized old potatoes, peeled and cut into thin slices
½ onion, finely diced
½ red sweet pepper, cut into 5cm strips
A handful of cup mushrooms, sliced
1 tbsp fresh thyme (optional)
Pinch of sweet paprika
Salt and pepper
Milton’s Method
1) Wash and par boil the sliced potatoes for about 4 minutes until they are slightly softened, but still firm. Drain them and set them aside.
2) In a medium, non-stick, oven-proof frying pan (no plastic handle!) heat a little oil and fry the bacon and sausages over a medium high heat for about 6 or 7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the ingredients begin to turn crispy and take on a golden brown colour.
3) Introduce the potatoes and the mushrooms to the pan and stir them in carefully so the potatoes don’t break up. Fry them for a further 4 minutes or so until they start to take on a golden colour.
4) Add the onion, fry for a further couple of minutes, and then add the sweet pepper with a pinch of sweet paprika and the thyme leaves. Season to taste. Let everything cook for another 2 minutes, stirring to make sure nothing is getting burnt.
5) Make sure the contents of the pan are evenly distributed then turn the heat down to low/medium and pour in the eggs. Make sure that the egg mixture covers the entire pan by tilting the pan and moving the ingredients gently with a wooden spoon. Leave it to cook gently for about 6 minutes or until the egg in contact with the pan has set (when this has happened you should be able to slide it around after gently peeling away the tortilla from the side of the pan).
6) Put the pan under a medium grill for 5 minutes until the egg on top has also set.
7) Divide in half and serve immediately, with buttered toast and condiments of your choice; I always like a couple of pickled chillies with it.
It would be quite easy, writing a book about hangovers and inevitably having to be hungover in order to do so, to create a chaotic book that had no structure and made no sense at all. How fortunate I was, then, to have comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse’s decisive statement on the classification of hangovers to help me.
Wodehouse wrote in his 1940 Jeeves and Wooster novel The Mating Season that there are six different types of hangover: ‘the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie.’
Each type of hangover has different symptoms. Wodehouse was never clear what these are, but I felt that the names in themselves offer a decent-enough explanation. The Broken Compass, for example, is what Kingsley Amis might have called ‘a metaphysical hangover’: you feel directionless, indecisive and futile. The Sewing Machine, by contrast, is a far more physical type of hangover which involves stabbing pain, rather like knitting needles, generally aimed at the head.
I realised that the trick of treating a hangover correctly was to first discover which type of hangover you have and then to find an appropriate food to ‘treat’ the symptoms. (This, I’m sure you realise, is not actually as scientific as it sounds). So I suggest spicy food for the Broken Compass, in order to reinvigorate your directionless soul; and comforting recipes for the Sewing Machine, to ease the forbidding pain.
The tools for diagnosis and cure are all contained within The Hungover Cookbook. Buy your copy now.
Many great writers have been great drinkers too, or perhaps, as The New Yorker suggests, that should be drunks. Dylan Thomas famously said that ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do’. The distinction between the two categories surely lies in a question of productivity. If you drink a lot and produce great writing, you’re a writer that drinks a lot. If you drink a lot and fail to do much of anything (except, perhaps, fall over, sleep and walk to the bottle-o the following morning), then you’re a drunk.
The drunks needn’t bother us, but writers who drink a lot are considerably more interesting. Writers such as Byron, Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Dylan Thomas and, the sole female representative, Dorothy Parker. But was alcohol a necessary part of their writing lives or merely a way of trying to calm their brains after epic bouts of creativity?
Alcohol is hardly the most inspiring of drugs, after all, unlike the laudanum that Coleridge took and which inspired the poem Kubla Khan. Instead, let’s face it, excessive drink makes people boorish, repetitive and, ultimately, depressed. Parker attempted suicide twice. Hunter S. Thompson and Hemingway, egregious quaffers of the most masculine variety, both shot themselves.
Others on the list prematurely ruined their health from drinking: Dylan Thomas died age 39, Fitzgerald when he was 44 and Truman Capote died from liver failure, aged 59. Perhaps it is Hemmingway’s line that offers the most plausible link between writing and alcohol. ‘When you work hard all day with your head,’ he wrote, ‘and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?’
This is the sentiment which inspired The Hungover Cookbook; the morning after a few drinks I find that new ideas for writing (if not always the application required to put them into motion) fill my head, because the continuity with the previous day has been interrupted by alcohol. There has been a pause. I wanted to write a book that celebrated the hangover as an opportunity for great ideas and whimsical deeds.
I use P. G. Wodehouse’s delightfully named classification of hangovers, mentioned in his Jeeves and Wooster novel The Mating Season, as the starting point for my cookbook. The categories are: the broken compass, the sewing machine, the comet, the atomic, the cement mixer and the gremlin boogie.
It is rather ironic, then, that Wodehouse was one of the most disciplined and prolific writers of the 20th century, who preferred to sit at his typewriter everyday rather than in a bar, and who died at the grand age of 93.
The Hungover Cookbook was inspired by hangovers, of course, but also by being hungover with friends who had crashed out at my house after a hard night’s revelry. In the morning we’d wake up and resume talking and have some food together. It felt like a disjointed continuation from the previous evening. We filled in gaps. We laughed again about the same things we had laughed about while drunk. There was a warm glow, albeit punctuated – it is true – by bouts of nausea and vacancy, of shared good times fondly remembered. I realised that the hungover me was often more lucid, spontaneous and creative than the regular me. I enjoyed cooking and experimenting with food for the pleasure of my friends. I was enjoying myself. I liked hangovers.
So when the idea of the cookbook started to take shape, these impromptu hungover breakfasts with friends turned into informal breakfast clubs. I tried out some curious recipes. Some worked; some did not. The ones that did made it into the cookbook.
For the launch of The Hungover Cookbook, then, it seemed that the best thing to do would be to host the mother of all hungover breakfast clubs, in majestic homage to the humble origins of the book. I worked closely with pop-up dining experts 99 Delights in Hackney, East London, to produce a five-course tasting menu inspired by recipes from the cookbook.
The menu was:
We assembled thirty-two red-eyed, wild-haired, hungover guests on the morning of Saturday, October 2. Our mission was to make them feel better; or, if we could not do that, then at least to make their suffering more interesting. Head-waiter Whetham Allpress and his glamorous waitresses donned dressing gowns in the elegant dining room of 99, complete with gramophone and vintage tea set and everyone who came had a very jolly time indeed.
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