My crooked chinese fingers groped the machinery of your throat

I knew what this recipe was going in. You don’t see a recipe bragging about how few ingredients it uses and think “surely this will be delicious.” You think “It’s 1 AM and this looks like a vehicle to carry sugar into my body.” So none of what I’m about to say is on Ms. Davison, or her recipe.

There is a place in Terry Pratchet’s Discworld called the Great Nef desert. This is a desert so dry that even water isn’t wet in the Great Nef. Within this desert is the Dehydrated Ocean, a body of water in an uncommon fourth state of matter. This dry water forms silvery grains and resembles a powder more than a liquid.

There is a kind of wizard in Discworld called a hydrophobe. These wizards are raised from birth without ever coming into contact with liquid water. They are sustained only by the dry water from the Dehydrated Ocean. The result is a fear and hatred of water so ingrained that it allows these individuals to literally repel water, which is then used to power hover craft for crossing lakes and oceans.

When I first read this description in The Color of Magic, years ago, I wondered what kind of food the hydrophobes ate. When a hydrophobe sits down to their breakfast of corn flakes and a mummified orange, with what do they butter their stale, overdone toast?

Empty houses

image description under cut: