Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray
The Decadent Cookbook
Book of the year choice by Nigella Lawson for the Times (UK).

"I point blankly refuse to eat some food called Virgin's Breasts." —Sean Hughes in The Observer

"Repulsive." —The Oxford Times

The Decadent Cookbook is not another entrant in the endless procession of cookbooks written by celebrity chefs, but rather an accessible guide for people with an interest in history, a sense of humor, and a penchant for the unconventional. Perhaps the tip-off that this is not the hundredth book on Provenal cuisine lies in a single chapter title: "I Can Recommend the Poodle." Propelled by their own irreverent narrative and selections from the cuisine of decadents such as the Marquis de Sade and Caligula, Lucan & Gray take us along on a whirlwind journey — steeped in myth, mystery, and misadventure — through the culinary ages while reflecting on the gastronomical quirks, conceits, strange tastes and peculiar table-side manners of the periods' most outrageous figures.

At times useful, at other times surreal, The Decadent Cookbook combines a scholarly temperament with a whimsical passion for the delicious: "Blood makes an excellent basis for a Decadent meal. Dark, heavy, rich and sinister, it combines beautifully with other Decadent themes: vice, corruption, incest and death." Definitely not your grandmother's cookbook.

A special note for American readers of THE DECADENT COOKBOOK Ah, America! The New Rome! As you stagger towards the apogee of Corruption and Grandeur we raise a glass of absinthe to you, hoping to summon up an apparition of the Green Fairy everywhere, from Hawaii to Cape Cod. And––while the purple dawn of Dissolution breaks like a peony from its sheath of night––we express the fond hope that American lovers of Decadence will rebuild the Decadent Restaurant amid the glittering ziggurats of Manhattan, Las Vegas or New Orleans. Take, Eat, Dream. Medlar Lucan & Durian Gray

Edited by Jerome Fletcher and Alex Martin, The Decadent Cookbook is a guide for the adventurous, the versatile, and frankly, the courageous. From the tables of ancient Rome (Stuffed Sow's Womb) to the kitchenettes of Victorian England (A Victorian Sausage) this cookbook is a testament to baroque living, and, if you can find "a heifer's udder" to go with your Andouillettes, practical dining.

Since the scandal-ridden closure of their Edinburgh dining club, authors Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray have gone into exile "somewhere in the Far East."