truth as recipe

Here is a good way to cook green beans which are usually a fairly bland vegetable.

Carrots and Beans in Butter Sauce

Take four sweet smelling carrots and chop them roughly. Melt some butter in a fry pan (with fitted lid) and toss the carrots in that, sprinkle raw sugar crystals all over and toss again. Meanwhile, get a friend to mash up some garlic - 4 cloves - and rock salt in a mortar and pestle and add thyme, coriander, cajun spices, and a good gob of mashed ginger, binding it all together with a slurp of sesame oil. Add this to the carrots, toss around again, and leave to cook gently with the lid on for about 10 minutes. The carrots should be pretty soft by then. Add the French green beans, washed and halved, and toss around again. Add just a little water to aid steaming and then leave them to cook gently for a further 10 minutes or so. Turn the heat right down then and kept it all warm until it is time to serve.

The vegetables will be creamy in texture and saturated with the delicious flavours of butter, herbs and spices. The garlic flavour is prominent but nicely developed along with the other flavours.

A recipe is a kind of story that is clear in its intention of instructing the reader "how to". Perhaps all stories are inherently recipes: If you do like the hero(ine) does, you will reach the same (usually good) ending. As tragedy or prophecies of doom they become: If you do like the hero(ine) does, you will reach the same (in this case, bad) ending. It might be interesting to analyse stories or purported truth statements in this way, as instructional recipes for "right action".

Just a final note on the choice of words (felicitous or otherwise). I think the word gob in the recipe above might be problematic. I meant it as a synonym for lump without being too precise on quantity (leaving this to the taste of the reader). In British slang, however, gob can refer to a spat out lump of phlegm. Yuk! How appropriate is that inside an erstwhile mouth-watering recipe!

Wouldn't it be neat
Accomplishing a feat
And better still to make
Something good to eat