How to Cook a Lamb Underground
A narrative recipe
Below is a ‘narrative recipe’ commissioned by Arusha Gallery for MYTHIC FROM THE PACIFIC / PISSING ON THE INFERNO, a duo exhibition of new works by Naomi Workman and Plum Cloutman. Special thanks to the gallery for letting me reproduce the text, and for the prompt to write something in response to the artists’ work, especially Cloutman’s, of whom I have long been a fan. I would also like to point out, to the friend who will recognise himself in the recipe, that the man described as "pale and red faced and overweight and cowardly” is me rather than him.
How to Cook a Lamb Underground
The occasion is celebratory. It is spring. Lambs, for looking, graze a field in front of the large house. The lamb for cooking is from a farm over the hill. It is delivered by the farmer’s wife, her wellingtons coated in shit - cow, fowl, pig. The large house was built for a Tory Prime Minister who visited when not tending an England grown fat on colonial exploitation. The lamb can be comfortably carried on the shoulder and should be placed downstairs, in the wine cellar. The wine cellar is very cold and damp, protected by a large oak door and lit by a single bulb. It has beams, with hooks, from which the lamb can be hung. When the farmer asks, say yes, you would like the head. Its reflection in the cellar’s many bottles will prove eerie, its shape now rid of sheepish features – no nose, no ears, no fur – closer to the human than the animal. It will make the base of a wonderful soup. The dog, the small dog, will sniff at the hanging lamb and run away, scared by this culmination of desire. Now dig a hole on a spot with a view over Wiltshire – hill, plain, hill, motorway, it stretches away, ending in Swindon, where Englishmen speak Polish, Hindi and Cantonese. Dig a hole you could fit a man in, line it with stones, and upon these stones lay a large fire. Feed it wood, weeds, newspapers, bills, bailiff notices and court summons. Drink champagne from Lidl. Fetch the lamb and lay it on a table covered with aluminium foil, near the hole, beneath the stars. Stuff the cavity – the place of absence – with apples, plums, onions, leeks, garlic, a bushel of oregano and a fistful of salt and, using a leather needle and kitchen twine, sew it up. All the while your best friend, who is pale and red faced and overweight and cowardly, will be shining a torch onto your work. “It is like battlefield surgery” he says, he who will never know war, who is uncomfortable even in silk. You grunt, half laughter, half agreement. Now rub the lamb with olive oil, the cheapest you can find, and salt. Do not be gentle. Remove the head. Remove it with one swift slice of your meat cleaver. And after this another. And then another. And then go to the kitchen to find the kitchen scissors, with which you will messily snip through its tendons, small bones, reluctant skin. Throw the head into a saucepan on the floor and wrap the body in tin foil, then in hessian and finally in chicken wire, twisting each end. By now the fire will have died down to hot red embers. Lay the lamb upon the embers and bury it, packing down the dirt. You will notice that the head has gone from the pan on the floor. The dog, perhaps? The next day, the day of the feast, you will dig the lamb from its grave, thankful for its transubstantiation. Lay it on a table, upon which you have put a white cloth, as at a wake. When you strip the tin foil back, you will see that it has lost its preternatural demeanour. It is best eaten with fresh buttered bread, salsa verde and West Country cider. In two days – it is a warm spring – the lamb’s head will be discovered beneath your mother’s bed when she wakes, vomiting, half-suffocated by its stench.