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Nanny Ogg's Cookbook

#Pratchat50 – Salt Rat Arsenic Heat

8 December 2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Happy fiftieth episode to us! We’re celebrating with the return of our very first guest, comedian and author Cal Wilson! Cal joins Liz and Ben in the kitchen to brave the recipes within the 1999 Discworld side project Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, co-authored by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, with illustrations by Paul Kidby.

After his latest books are forcibly withdrawn from sale, J H C Goatberger reluctantly decides to publish another manuscript sent to him by Nanny Ogg. He hires a few editors to “put in the spelling, grammar and punctuation” and has his wife vet it for anything objectionable enough to get the book banned. The result is Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, a collection of Nanny’s own recipes, others she’s collected from around the Disc, and some of her wit, wisdom and advice – in particular when it comes to etiquette.

Published alongside The Fifth Elephant (see #Pratchat40), Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is one of several “in-universe artefact” books for the Discworld. It collects around fifty or so recipes – minus a dozen or so joke ones – devised by Hannan. Pratchett and Briggs round out the book with Nanny’s advice on matters of life, death, flowers and everything in between. Paul Kidby provides some great illustrations of various characters, dishes and other glimpses of Discworld life.

What do you think of books like this, that bring a bit of a fictional world into the real one? Which of Nanny’s recipes would you try? How do her observations match up with your own experiences of life, love and…um..toilet seats? Do you want a sausage-inna-Bunnings T-shirt? And are you ready to see pictures of our efforts? (Probably not…) Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat50 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_50.mp3

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Guest Cal Wilson (she/her) – one of Australia and New Zealand’s most beloved comedians – previously guested in #Pratchat1 and #Pratchat3, talking about Men at Arms and Sourcery, respectively. Since we saw her last she’s published two children’s books – George and the Great Bum Stampede and George and the Great Brain Swappery. Cal is no stranger to podcasts; she’s guested on dozens, including StoryKids reading a young listener’s story, “The Gloomy Mist”. She was also co-host of Money Power Freedom with journalist Santilla Chingaipe for the Victorian Women’s Trust. Cal passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness in October 2023; she is sorely missed.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site – including some photos of our culinary efforts! (Viewer discretion is advised.)

December is a busy time for us! To further celebrate reaching fifty episodes, we’ve invited a bunch of great folks, including past guests, fellow Pratchett podcasters and more to cook a few more recipes for a special Hogswatch Feast episode! Watch out for it on Hogswatch day (i.e. December 25, Australian time).

We’re also recording our next episode very soon – December 17 in fact – and we’ll be discussing the next adventure for Tiffany Aching, 2006’s Wintersmith, with Australian fantasy author Garth Nix! So if you have questions, get them in “toot sweet”, as Nanny might say, using the hashtag #Pratchat51, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Cal Wilson, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Mustrum Ridcully, Nanny Ogg, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Patrician, Paul Kidby, Rincewind, Stephen Briggs

Oggswatch Feast 2021

25 December 2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Ho ho ho, Merry Hogswatch! To celebrate the festive season, and our own fiftieth episode, we’ve brought together a bunch of guests of Hogswatch Past, Present and Future – including the hosts no fewer than three other Discworld podcasts – for a special feast of additional recipes from Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. Be warned: this podcast contains bananana!

Got comments on our efforts – or want to share your own? Do you want us to do this again next year? Please, join the conversation using the hashtag #Oggswatch2021 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Oggswatch_Feast_2021.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:08:40 — 92.2MB)

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Our guests this episode are:

  • Comedian and vaudevillian Elly Squire, aka Clara Cupcakes – claracupcakes.com; @ClaraCupcakes on Twitter and Instagram
  • Author Liam Pieper – liampieper.com; @liampieper on Twitter, @liampieperwrites on Instagram
  • Author Nadia Bailey – nadiabailey.com; @animalorchestra on Twitter and Instagram
  • The hosts of the Wyrd Sisters podcast, Manning and Liz – @WyrdSistersPod on Twitter; support them via Patreon
  • The hosts of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Jo and Francine – @MakeYeFretPod on Twitter; support them via Patreon
  • Two of the hosts of The Compleat Discography, Aaron and Ana – @Atuin_Pod on Twitter; support them via Patreon
  • Science communicator Anna Ahveninen – @Lady_Beaker on Twitter

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site; it might take a few days to fully appear, but we’ll be adding photos of many of the dishes cooked for this episode!

While our January episode is already in the can, in February we’ll be discussing BBC America’s series “based on characters created by Terry Pratchett” – The Watch! So have a watch yourself over the holidays, and send us questions by tagging us on social media and using the hashtag #Pratchat52, or by sending us an email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Anna Ahveninen, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Elly Squire, Liam Pieper, Nadia Bailey, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, The Compleat Discography, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Wyrd Sisters podcast

#Oggswatch2021 Notes and Errata

25 December 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat’s special Oggswatch Feast episode for 2021, featuring guests Elly Squire, Liam Pieper, Nadia Bailey, Anna Ahveninen and the hosts of the podcasts Wyrd Sisters, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret and The Compleat Discography. All of them cook dishes from the 1999 Discworld companion book, “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook“, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ll add some more images of other recipes – or links to where you can find them – soon.

Bananana Soup Surprise

Bananana Soup Surprise in the pot.
Served as Nanny Ogg intended!
A few moments from the video we made of this disgusting odyssey.

Celery Astonishment

Are you astonished? We certainly are.

CMOT Dibbler’s Sausage Inna Bun

As promised, the Wyrd Sisters shared some pictures of their sausages!

Thanks so much to @PratchatPodcast for including us in your Oggswatch feast! (Liz's sausage on the left, Manning on the right) pic.twitter.com/wDlvedyZI7

— Wyrd Sisters Podcast (@WyrdSistersPod) December 24, 2021

Figgins

Figgin pastry and filling ready for assembly.
Aaron’s resident big wee hag helping out. (Picture used with permission.)
Figgins ready for the oven!
The figginshed result!

Dwarf Bread

All the ingredients ready for dwarf baking!
It certainly looks like gravel…
…especially close up!
Not much like the illustration…
Pounded flat and ready for the oven!
It really did look like a slab of asphalt at this point…
Finished dwarf bread!
Looks the part, and actually pretty good.
Proof that Anna was still enjoying it the next day.
Anna and Ben’s first adventure in dwarf bakery!

Notes and Errata

  • A huge shoutout to the ever-amazing David Ashton for the Hogswatch version of our theme tune!
  • We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat” from December 2021.
  • We previously discussed Paul Kelly’s 1996 Christmas hit “How to Make Gravy” back in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“. Perhaps we should compile a Fourecksian cookbook and include a gravy recipe?
  • While Kelly’s description of writing “How to Make Gravy” suggests it was written fairly quickly, Ben is exaggerating when he says the song was written in an afternoon.
  • The “Paul Kelly Cinematic Universe” does exist, but the protagonist of “How to Make Gravy” is not the same person from his hit single “Dumb Things”. Instead Joe appears in Kelly’s earlier songs “To Her Door” (1987) and “Love Never Runs on Time” (1994).
  • Whamageddon is a folk game in which players try to avoid hearing “Last Christmas”, the 1984 Christmas single by Wham!, between December 1st and 24th. (No shade on the song – it’s just still very popular in the UK, where the game originates, and so gets played a lot.) The game dates back to an online forum in 2010, though it didn’t get the name until 2016, when the Facebook page took it to new heights of fame. You can find the rules at whamageddon.com.
  • Names suggested for Ben’s proposed Australian variant of Whamageddon have included “Gravygeddon”, “Armagravy”, “Paullkellypse” and “Catastophgravy”.
  • Peppers or bell peppers are indeed what we Australians and New Zealanders call a capsicum. This differentiates it from the other kinds of peppers, which all have specific names. Capsicum is the genus of plants in the pepper family, but that includes most varieties of chilli as well.
  • ASMR is an acronym for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a well-documented sensation of physical tingling and low-level euphoria felt by some in response to certain sounds. ASMR is a form of paresthesia, a term for sensations felt on the skin which do not have (or at least don’t match) a physical cause; “pins and needles” is the most common form. The tingling of ASMR is most often experienced in the scalp and the back of the neck, and can be triggered by a variety of things, though whispering is most common. The phenomenon is fairly widespread, and ASMR videos and audio recordings are all over the Internet. (If you go searching, be aware that while ASMR is not inherently sexual, there’s a fairly large subset of videos that mix in erotica.)
  • Schitt’s Creek is a Canadian sitcom created by father-and-son duo Dan and Eugene Levy, starring the pair of them, Catherine O’Hara and Annie Murphy as a rich family who lose their fortune and are forced to live in a motel in a town they once bought as a joke. It ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2020 on CBC, and is available internationally on Netflix. You can find the “fold in the cheese” scene on YouTube; it’s from the second episode of the second season, “Family Dinner”.
  • “How the sausage gets made” is a common idiom, meaning to discover the perhaps unpleasant process behind something on enjoys, which one might prefer not to know. It’s also a line in the song “The Room Where It Happens” from the second act of Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit broadway musical Hamilton. It describes the Compromise of 1790, in which at a private meeting Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agree to build a new capital city for the United States in the South (rather than making New York the capital), perhaps in return for using Hamilton’s proposed financial system. The song is from the perspective of Hamilton’s friend/rival Aaron Burr, who laments that no-one really knows what was agreed in “the room where it happens”:
No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in the room where it happens
  • American sausages are not all like Frankfurts! They have more English-like ones as well. As the Wyrd Sisters themselves explain: “They’re a fairly common breakfast food, usually as part of a larger meal. The main difference is that they’re smaller and a little drier than what you get in the UK and Australia – if your sausages are grapes, ours are raisins.” Smaller breakfast sausages are also very popular in the UK, but not often seen in Australia, at least on the East coast.
  • There have been several separate chains of supermarkets in the US named Market Basket. Manning is talking about the New England Market Basket, which has stores in the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island. It was founded in 1917 by Greek immigrants as DeMoulas Market in Lowell, Massachusetts. Over the years there’s been a few disputes between branches of the DeMoulas family, which still owns the chain, but these were mostly settled in court in 2014, when Arthur T. Demoulas was fired and, after mass worker protests, reinstated as the company President. The workforce is not unionised, but employees who work 1,000 hours or more a year are entitled to enter a profit sharing arrangement, and the chain does not use automated checkouts.
  • “Freedom units” is a satirical way to refer to the imperial measurements still widely used in everyday American life, though it’s worth mentioning that this may be preferable to the weird mix of metric and imperial that you find in the UK and Canada… As Manning mentions, the “cup” is particularly confusing: a US cup is 240mL (that’s millilitres, thousandths of a litre), or 8.45 imperial fluid ounces. A metric cup – as used in Australia – is 250mL, handily one quarter of a litre. But they’re obviously very close, so you probably won’t go too far wrong.
  • We discussed Maskerade in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, back in September 2019. The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret discussed it over three episodes in September 2021: “Chekhov’s Chandelier“, “As the Actress Said to the Bishop” and “Climbing Into Box 8“.
  • A sous-chef is the second most senior chef in a professional kitchen. The full title is sous-chef de cuisine, French for “under-chief of the kitchen”.
  • Jo and Francine eat scones in their third Equal Rites episode, “Crumbs All Up In There“, from January 2020.
  • Nigel Slater is an English food writer, best known as the head food writer for Marie Clare magazine from 1988 to 1993, and afterwards as the chief writer for The Observer Food monthly supplement. He’s also written an autobiographical column for The Observer for more than a decade; a popular memoir, Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger, in 2003, which was later adapted for television and the stage; and numerous cookbooks, mostly concentrating on simple comfort food. His 2007 book Eating for England: The Delights & Eccentricities of the British at Table sounds like a great resource for those looking to learn more about the influences on Nanny Ogg’s cookery.
  • Tannins are biological molecules which bind to proteins and other organic compounds and cause them to precipitate, ie solidify out of a solution. They are naturally found in most berries, some unripe fruits, nuts, wine, tea and cannabis, and as the name might suggest are also used in tanning, the process of making leather. Wine acquires tannin both from the varieties of grapes used to make it, and through the aging process, from the wood of the barrels, giving wine it’s astringent taste. Tannins occur naturally in tea as well.
  • There’s a bit of confusion about books adapted into films featuring magical cooking with chocolate in the title, so to clarify:
    • Ben is talking about Mexican author Lara Esquivel’s 1989 magical realism novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate), about a young woman forbidden to marry the love of her life, who magically (and unwittingly) infuses the food she cooks with her emotions. It was filmed in Mexico in 1992, adapted by Esquivel, directed by Alfonso Arau, and starring Lumi Cavazos, Marco Leonardi and Regina Torné. Both novel and film include authentic Mexican recipes. A companion work, Tita’s Diary, was published in 2016.
    • Everyone else is talking about Chocolat, a 1999 magical realism novel by English-French author Joanne Harris. It’s about a witchy single mother, Vianne, who arrives in a small French village at Lent and opens a chocolaterie, leading her into conflict with the village’s priest. It was followed by two sequels, The Lollipop Shoes (2007) and Peaches for Monsieur le Curé (2012). It was filmed in 2000, directed by Lasse Hallström with a cast featuring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Johnny Depp, Lena Olin and Carrie-Anne Moss.
  • The media tie-in cookbooks mentioned by Joanne are:
    • The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook (2019) by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, for the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (and it’s many predecessors).
    • A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook (2012), also by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer, based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones television series, plus the companion book From the Sands of Dorne (2017). (There’s also an unofficial one, published in 2012, The Unofficial Game of Thrones Cookbook: From Direwolf Ale to Auroch Stew, by Alan Kistler.)
    • World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook (2017), also by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, based on the MMORPG video game World of Warcraft. (Joanne wasn’t kidding about this being a lucrative gig for some authors; Monroe-Cassel also has books out or on the way for Star Trek, Overwatch, Firefly, Star Wars and more.)
    • Heroes’ Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook (2020) by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Michael Witwer, inspired by the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.
  • While we’re talking about these books, if you’re looking for them, be wary of imitations! It seems since 2020 there’s been a rash of cheap self-published unofficial ebooks of similar collections of recipes, especially where the expiry of a license means the official one is no longer available, or where it was never offered as an ebook in the first place. It’s not clear if these are any good or even actually full of appropriate recipes, so try and save your money for the people who’ve put in the real work.
  • Gilmore Girls is an American dramedy series about young independent mother Lorelai Gilmour and her daughter Rory, who moved away from Lorelai’s rich parents to live in the small town of Stars Hollow. The show ran for seven seasons on The WB and The CW between 2000 and 2007, with a revival mini-series, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life on Netflix in 2016. The show has inspired more than one cookbook, which is unsurprising given how Lorelai and Rory’s lives – personal and professional – revolve around food…
    • Eat Like a Gilmore: The Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of Gilmore Girls (2016) and Eat Like a Gilmore: Seasons: The Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of the Gilmore Girls Revival (2021) are both by Kristi Carlson, and seem to have been the first and most popular of the bunch. They’re also available in a box set of both books, which together contain two hundred recipes!
    • Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook, by Elena Craig and Kristen Mulrooney, will be the first official one, and is coming in 2022.
  • The “Gas mark” is a scale for oven temperature used mostly in the UK and Ireland. It dates back to the 1930s, when many gas ovens were produced using a standard gas regulator, in most recorded cases a “Regulo” brand one, which had “marks” from 1 up to 9, as well as ½ and ¼, to indicate various levels of heat. Their instruction manuals, along with recipe books given away with some ovens, used the marks rather than a specific temperature, in the form “Gas: Regulo Mark 7”. Eventually this became widespread enough that other brand regulators used the same numbers and by the 1950s the brand name was no longer used, with recipe books referring to “gas mark 8” and so on. Gas marks correspond to temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit: gas mark 1 is 275 °F, and each mark above that adds 25 °F (or subtracts it, in the case of ½ and ¼). Similar scales exist in other countries, notably France (labelled “Th”, short for thermostats) and Germany (“Stufe“, German for “step”); those scales are, of course, different to the gas mark and to each other. But modern cookbooks will generally include a temperature, as well as the mark, Th or Stufe.
  • It’s not surprising Ben hasn’t heard barberries, the fruit of the Berberis plant; turns out they grow all over the world except in Australia! The European species is Berberis vulgaris, which grows wild, but has fallen out of use in many countries. It’s still popular in Iran; the Persian name for it is zereshk (زرشک), and in Europe at least most commercially available barberries are grown there. The berries are tart and tangy, and when dried are around the size of a currant, though red in colour.
  • Figjam is the 2005 single released by Brisbane hip-hop band Butterfingers, from their 2006 album The Deeper You Dig… It reached number 11 in the Triple J Hottest 100 that year, but only around 50 in the mainstream charts. In the song, the acronym is “Fuck I’m Good, Just Ask Me” rather than Great.
  • Figgins are indeed mentioned in Guards! Guards!; the master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night uses the term repeatedly as a vague threat, mentioning that interlopers will “have their figgin put on a spike”, and noting to himself that his followers have never asked what a figgin is. A footnote explains that in The Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words, a figgin is defined as “a small short-crust pastry containing raisins”, and provides several other obscure culinary delights that could have made it into the Master’s speeches. CMOT Dibbler is later seen selling figgins from his tray alongside his sausages, and it’s a repeated joke that the Elucidated Brethren assume anything said about figgins describes a horrifying form of torture. Figgins also score a minor mention in Men At Arms, when Vimes imagines his fate if he were to stay in the watch to an old age with no family.
  • The Discworld cookery masterpost on Tumblr is a delight. Thank you, user toooldforthisbutstill, and to the major contributor, fantasyfeasts, who also makes stuff from other worlds.

We’ll add a few more notes soon.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Anna Ahveninen, Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, Elly Squire, Liam Pieper, Nadia Bailey, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Photos, The Compleat Discography, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Wyrd Sisters podcast

#Pratchat50 Notes and Errata

8 December 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat“, featuring guest Cal Wilson, discussing the 1999 Discworld companion book, “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook“, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby.

Iconographic Evidence

To prove we really did cook these things, here are some photos! Be warned: the last one is not for the faint of heart…

  • Stage one of Rincewind’s Potato Cakes: mashing the potatoes!
  • The potato mixture with sage and fried onions added. (It’s already delicious.)
  • Frying up the cakes – these ones are waaaaay too big.
  • A couple of more reasonably-sized potato cakes. They turned out great!
  • The “brinner” meal with scrambled eggs made in the same pan.
  • Liz’s Wow-Wow sauce, artfully drizzled on a plate!
  • You can use it on an omelette…
  • …or on meat!
  • We apologise for this highly upsetting image…but we think you’ll agree Cal did an amazing job of making Sticky Toffee Rat Onna Stick.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is reference to the famous 2017 cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by American chef Samin Nosrat. Nosrat also had a Netflix cooking show of the same name, which appeared in 2018. We’re sure you’ll work out how the rat comes into it, but we may not have mentioned Lord Downey’s contribution to the book: a recipe for mint humbugs which includes the ingredient “arsenic to taste”…
  • Cal’s previous episodes were #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory” from November 2017 and #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind” from January 2018.
  • Cal’s Tiktok username is @calbowilson; look for the hashtag #baristacats.
  • To avoid any confusion:
    • The “Baristacats” are Cal’s cats, Pirate and Barnacle, who like to sit on top of the coffee machine in her kitchen, leading her to create a series of videos in which she tries and fails to get them to serve her coffee.
    • The Aristocats (1970, dir. Wolfgang Reitherman) is a Disney animated musical about a family of aristocratic cats who get into trouble and must turn to an alley cat and his friends for help.
    • “The Aristocrats” is a famous dirty joke in which a family of performers try to get a job by describing to a theatre manager the incredibly depraved and taboo-breaking things they do in their performance – usually a long list, improvised by the comedian – before being asked the name of the act; they respond with “The Aristocrats!” While it dates back to the vaudeville era, it continues to be popular in private among American comedians, with the point being to improvise the most transgressive and offensive description of the act. It was the subject of a documentary film in 2005, The Aristocrats, directed by Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza.
  • Liz’s cats are named after Isaac Asimov and Aldous Huxley. There have been recent prestige television adaptations of their best-known works: Asimov’s Foundation for Apple TV+ in 2021, and Huxley’s Brave New World for the NBC streaming service Peacock in 2020. Brave New World was cancelled after the first season, but Foundation is getting a second season.
  • The Great British Bake Off – known as The Great British Baking Show in the US – is an extremely wholesome reality television show that started in 2010. Contestants are (usually amateur) bakers, who compete in a series of challenges to impress a panel of judges, all for the glory of being crowned the best baker (there’s no prize money). It’s produced by Love Productions, originally for the BBC, where it grew to be so successful on BBC Two that it was moved to BBC One. Despite commissioning Love Productions to make other shows about sewing and pottery using the same format, the BBC made an in-house program about hair styling, Hair, in 2014. This led to a legal dispute over copyright that eventually led to Love Productions taking the show to Channel 4, where it’s been since 2017. Many countries have their own version, including Australia.
  • Bridgerton is a 2021 Regency-era period drama made for Netflix, adapted from the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn. It’s known for its racy sex scenes. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
  • J H C Goatberger – publisher of the Disc-famous Almanack – and his chief printer Mr Cropper both appear in Maskerade. We discussed it in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • The Encyclopædia Britannica is probably the most famous English-language encyclopaedia, which is a compendium of knowledge. The Britannica was first printed in 1768 in the United Kingdom, and most of its editions span multiple large volumes. In 1901 it was taken over by American managers, who shortened and simplified its language and began selling it via door-to-door salesmen. It still exists, though the last print edition was published in 2012; it’s now exclusively online at britannica.com.
  • Where Did I Come From? is the 1973 classic children’s book about sex and reproduction. It was originally subtitled “The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and with Illustrations”, and is the first of many similar books by Peter Mayle, an English businessman who became an advertising copywriter and then author. Mayle went on to write the Wicked Willie series of risqué cartoon books about a talking penis, which might sound familiar: they were illustrated by Gray Joliffe, the same person who drew the cats for Pratchett’s The Unadulterated Cat! More about that in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • We’re pretty sure the “sexy origami” book mentioned by Cal is 2015’s The Amazing True Story of How Babies Are Made, by Australian cartoonist and illustrator Fiona Katauskas. She was inspired to create it because when having the talk with her own son, she found she was using the same book her parents had used – Where Did I Come From? – and thought it could use an update.
  • If you’d like to know about Ken’s underpants area, we recommend this delightful piece from Jezebel, “The Strange, Sad Story of the Ken Doll’s Crotch” from 2019, by Rich Juzwiak.
  • In Kevin Smith’s 1999 film Dogma, Alan Rickman does indeed play Metatron, the angel who is the voice of God. If you’re curious to know what his underpants area looks like, there’s a great photo of him showing it off while holding a Ken doll in this piece for Digital Spy in which Kevin Smith pays tribute to Rickman after his death in 2016.
  • Ben’s very silly quip here is a reference to Patrick Stewart’s appearance in the Ricky Gervais sitcom Extras. Like all the other big name actors who appeared in cameo roles, he plays a weird parody of himself, who tells Gervais’ main character about his idea for a facial comedy film in which he has the power to make women’s clothes fall off. His refrain is that by the time they put them back on, “It’s too late, I’ve seen everything.“
  • The recipe book plagiarism scandal we discuss is about Elizabeth Haigh’s book Makan. Singaporean-born Haigh was a contestant on the 2011 series of reality cooking show MasterChef in the UK; while she didn’t win, the experience cemented her love of cooking and she went on to great success as a chef, even opening her own restaurants, one of which – Pidgin – was awarded a Michelin star in 2017. Her book Makan was published in October 2021, but soon Sharon Wee, author of Growing Up in a Nona Kitchen, made allegations that many passages relating stories of learning to cook from a grandmother were paraphrased or directly taken from her book. Comparisons of passages where posted online by New Zealand cookbook store Cook the Books, and other authors discovered Makan seemed to “borrow” from other other books and recipe blogs too – both in the anecdotes and personal stories, and some of the recipes. You can read more detail about the scandal in this piece from Eater magazine by James Hansen, though it seems no further information has been officially disclosed, pending the outcome of legal action.
  • The introductory text that Ben reads at around the 14:30 mark is for the entire fictional book, not just the cookery section as he suggests.
  • We discussed Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • Ben mentioned some cookbooks for other fictional worlds, specifically 2012’s A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook, 1999’s Star Trek Cookbook – co-written by Ethan Philips in the persona of Neelix, the character he played on Star Trek: Voyager! – and two cookbooks based on Doctor Who. Ben was thinking of the original one from 1985, The Doctor Who Cookbook, but a newer one inspired by the revived series was published in 2016: Doctor Who: The Official Cookbook. It’s worth noting there are plenty of unofficial cookbooks for recipes based on various fictional worlds, too.
  • The character Liz mentions from Game of Thrones is Hot Pie, who appears in the second and third novels in the series, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, and the first four seasons of the television show.
  • Schnapps – from the German schnaps – isn’t a specific kind of alcohol. The original German word is used generically for any kind of strong alcoholic drink. In English it usually means one that is flavoured and sweetened with fruit, but there aren’t any rules – it’s sort of the opposite of Champagne.
  • The famous English Twitter user who grows big vegetables is 72-year-old ex-butcher Gerald Stratford (@geraldstratfor3). He’s not a farmer, but an avid vegetable gardener, and after amassing a huge following on social media published a book in 2021, Big Veg. You can read of Gerald’s rise to fame in this lovely article from Eater magazine by Jenny G Zhang. [We promise we’re not sponsored by Eater, they just seem to write the best articles about English food-related stuff! – Ben]
  • Ben would just like to clarify that when he says Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is “a real fan’s book” (at around 23:40), he means it’s really a book for fans, not a book that’s for “real fans”. We don’t go in for that sort of gatekeeping around here – and neither did Pratchett, as evidenced by the way that he expressly tells readers where to find out more if they’re lacking context. There’s no wrong way to be a fan, except for hurting other folks with how you go about it.
  • Bergholdt Stuttley “Bloody Stupid” Johnson is first mentioned in Men at Arms, as the designer of the gardens surrounding the Patrician’s Palace, which are said to be the “high spot” of his career. His proper given names are revealed in Maskerade, in a footnote about the organs used by the Opera House and University.
  • Speaking of B S Johnson, the “pie bird” is indeed a real thing. They’re an evolution of the originally quite dull ceramic pie funnels stuck into pies to allow some of the steam to vent, preventing fruit pies from bubbling over and helping to ensure a crispy crust. In the earlier twentieth century manufacturers started making them in all kinds of animal shapes, though birds were most popular. Read all about the history of pie birds in this article by Baileyberg at Food52. (See? Not all our sources are Eater this month…)
  • We also discussed the “humour” genre of books in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, in relation to The Unadulterated Cat. The primer example mentioned by Ben was Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, though there are thousands to choose from, and they continue to be published, if in smaller numbers. Modern such books are often compilations of social media accounts, like The Midnight Society, the (entirely fictional) minutes of the meetings of of club made up of famous horror, fantasy and sci-fi authors.
  • Spotted dick is indeed a real dish, also known as “spotted dog” and “railway cake” (the latter name especially common in Ireland). The English version is a baked pudding made from suet and dried fruit – most often plums, sultanas or raisins – which are the eponymous “spots”. (For more about this, see the Hogswatch Feast bonus episode.)
  • Ben did indeed research the various kinds of fat mined in Überwald for #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“. You can find his list of them in the episode notes for #Pratchat40.
  • Vegetable suet is made from refined vegetable oils. Like animal suet it’s only readily available in the UK, and not all varieties are gluten free, so check the fine print if you’re buying some and that’s a consideration for you. Nigella Lawson’s website also recommends grated vegetable shortening as a substitute; the most easily found form of this in Australia is Copha, which is made from coconut oil. (See the link for instructions on how to grate it.)
  • As it turns out, the difference between lamb and mutton varies depending on where you’re from. In the UK sheep meat (and indeed the sheep) is called lamb in its first year, and mutton if the sheep is two or more years old. In Australia, a sheep’s age is measured instead by how many teeth – specifically permanent incisors – it has (or rather had): Australian lamb comes from a sheep with no permanent incisors; mutton is from a sheep with more than two. (Sheep usually grow a pair of new ones each year, so it works out mostly the same.) Meat from sheep in between lamb and mutton age is called “hogget”, though apparently in the UK plenty of “lamb” is actually hogget in disguise – a step down from mutton dressed as lamb, we suppose. Organic and rare breed farmers in England’s North are known to sell hogget, though. Sheep typically live for around ten to twelve years (when not eaten by foxes, wolves or humans), so seventeen year old mutton isn’t something you need to worry about.
  • The Discworld mainstay “sausage-inna-bun” first appears alongside its most famous vendor, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, in Guards! Guards!, discussed in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“. He shows up to hawk food to the crowd watching the hero attempt to slay the dragon, though he never says “sausage-inna-bun”; instead he describes them as “hot sausages”, and shouts “inna bun!” as one of their many attributes. On this occasion he is also selling peanuts and figgins alongside the sausages, all cooked in a tiny frying pan on his tray.
  • We previously discussed Bunnings sausages in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“. In brief: a “sausage sizzle” is a traditional way to raise money for charity by selling cheap (and possibly donated) sausages cooked on a barbecue in slices of bread, usually with fried onions and tomato sauce or mustard. It’s common – or it was, in pre-pandemic times – for ubiquitous hardware store chain Bunnings Warehouse to have a sausage sizzle outside its stores, usually in a carpark.
  • Roundworld drop scones are not siege ammunition, but rather small pancakes made by dropping a dollop of batter onto a frying pan. Depending on where you grew up in Australia, drop scones might be better known as pikelets. We won’t get into the discussion of what constitutes a “regular” scone, as this varies considerably around the world. (Australian ones are generally similar to English ones, though we have pumpkin and date varieties less popular elsewhere.)
  • The French word for bread is indeed pain, but Ben does not pronounce it remotely correctly. The French word uses a neutral vowel sound, not either of the “a” sounds Ben uses. Sorry French speakers.
  • We were unable to confirm it, but it does seem that Paul Kidby’s illustrations for Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook are all originals, done for this book. Certainly the ones of the imps and the various dishes don’t appear anywhere else that we know of.
  • Malicious compliance is when someone follows instructions given to them to the letter, knowing that it will cause harm or problems. It’s often described as a form of passive-aggression, though it is sometimes used as an effective form of protest against ridiculous or draconian demands from managers or officials.
  • “The Sea and Little Fishes” is the third of five published Discworld short stories. We discussed it in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” While it does introduce the Witch Trials, and names the scarecrow used for the Cursing “for several hundred years”, no further information about Unlucky Charlie is given; this section is mostly new.
  • Carved wooden lovespoons are a tradition that dates back to at least the seventeenth century. Welsh ones may be the most well known, but they’re also found in Germany, Scandanavia and Eastern Europe. While the “Lancre Loveseat” may well be inspired by them, it should also be noted that Nanny lists “Llamedosian spoon” as the appropriate gift for a fifteenth anniversary.
  • The tweet advising that women may be “fascinated” by giving them cheese was an image of a page from the 1971 book The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft by Kathryn Paulsen. You can read more about the history of cheese in witchcraft in this article from The Conversation, inspired by the original tweet by Gavin Wren, which we’ve included below. (Pratchat would like to note that we do not condone the use of witchcraft or any other kind of coercion when making advances toward folks of any gender.)

Pro dating tips pic.twitter.com/t0agf7JrgN

— Gavin Wren (@GavinWren) January 12, 2021
  • We’ll learn more about the Discworld’s Moon – and Leonard da Quirm – when we cover The Last Hero, but it is considerably closer to the Disc than our Moon is to the Earth. It has to be, as it appears about the same size, but is only about eighty miles (or 130km) across. The Earth’s Moon is over 2,150 miles across (3,475km), and about 238,855 miles (or 384,400km) away, so for the Disc’s Moon to appear about the same size, it must be a bit under 9,000 miles from the surface of the Disc. (For simplicity we’re going to ignore the likely difference in lensing effects of the Earth’s atmosphere and the Disc’s intense magical field.) For context, that’s a bit more than a third of the distance around the Earth! The Disc’s Moon likely passes much closer to the Rim, so a supermoon is probably a weekly event for places like Krull.
  • The Moon being a giant egg was a weird plot used by Doctor Who in the 2014 episode Kill the Moon.
  • Branston Pickle is a chunky, pickled chutney that’s made from diced vegetables pickled in a sauce made from vinegar, tomatoes, apples, sugar and spices. It’s been made since 1922 and continues to be hugely popular in the UK. In March 2020, manufacturer Mizkan Euro recalled some of their products as they may have been contaminated with pieces of plastic packaging. This recall affected jars with use-by dates of 2022; you can check if you have any affected jars here, but any you find in stores now will be fine.
  • Massel is an Australian brand which makes vegan stock and other vegetable-based food products. They’ve been around since 1982. Ben only ever buys the vegetable kind, but now realises that their other flavours are labelled “Chicken Style” and “Beef Style”, so they’re a good vegetarian substitute for the real deal.
  • Marzipan is made from honey, sugar and almond meal. There are different kinds but they don’t seem radically different, though when its used on fruit cakes it is usually glazed and, as Cal says, more traditional icing goes on top.
  • The Overlondon Project’s question with the emojis was as follows:
    Most practically edible and least edibly practical… 🧙‍♀️🍆🥕🍌🥒🍑🥭 and possibly 🦑
  • The restaurant in Going Postal is Le Foie Heureux – “the happy liver” in Quirmian. There isn’t a description of the food beyond how much it costs, sadly, but we can dream. The restaurant in Hogfather isn’t named, but its dishes include Mousse de la Boue dans une Panier de la Pâte de Chaussures (“mud mousse in a basket of shoe pastry”) and, as featured in this cookbook, Brodeuin Rôti Façon Ombres (“man’s boots in mud”).
  • Biers is the Ankh-Morpork bar where nobody asks your name; it’s frequented by the undead and other creatures of the night who want a place where they can escape the pressures of being normal. It makes its most notable appearances in Feet of Clay (see #Pratchat24) and Hogfather (see #Pratchat26).
  • It turns out that while you can make alcohol from cabbages, it doesn’t seem a popular choice – partly because cabbages don’t contain much sugar, so they don’t ferment into alcohol on their own. Cabbages are more usually fermented into the non-alcoholic food sauerkraut. There is, though, a cabbage wine made in Narusawa prefecture in Japan, an area which like the Sto Plains grows mainly cabbages. (Narusawa wine is also 40% grapes, though.)
  • You can buy commercial beef spreads, but the brands Ben names are beef-extract based drinks, sold in paste form similar to yeast extracts like Vegemite and Marmite. Bovril has been made in the UK since the 1870s, while Bonox is Australian, first sold in 1919 by the same company who invented Vegemite. (For more on that, see the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.)
  • Fairy bread is an Australian children’s party staple: buttered white bread sprinkled with small bits of sugar confectionary, usually spherical “hundreds and thousands” (in Ben’s opinion the superior option), or sprinkles.
  • For more on the great potato cakes vs potato scallops debate, see this survey of regional variation in Australian language conducted by the the Linguistics Roadshow in 2015. (It’s the first response.) For the record, “potato cake” won the bigger vote, but neither cake nor scallop had a clear majority.
  • You can hear an extract from Sven’s podcard in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“. Note though that the bit Ben describes about the ads for Maggi noodles only appears in the full podcard, which is included in the fourth episode of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club, from April 2020.
  • The Australian SF (“Ditmar”) Awards, or just Ditmar Awards for short, are the Australian national awards for achievement in speculative fiction and fandom. Any eligible works can be nominated by members of the Australian fan community; the awards are then voted on by members of the Australian National SF Convention (or “NatCon”) for that year. The established Australian cons take it in turns to be the NatCon; in 2021, it was Conflux in Canberra. You can see a list of all the 2021 Ditmar nominees and winners in Locus Magazine. Pratchat was also nominated for the “Best Fan Publication in Any Medium” award in 2019.
  • The Coode Street Podcast, the winner in our category this year, is a long-running bi-weekly show which describes itself as “an ongoing casual conversation between two friends about the nature of science fiction (among other things).” It launched in 2010. The two friends who host it are publisher and editor Jonathan Strahan, and editor, critic and humanities Professor Gary K. Wolfe. Prior to this win, The Coode Street Podcast had been nominated for seven Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the BSFA Award, and six Ditmar Awards…but not won any of them! (Sounds like we have a few more award nominations to rack up before we win anything…)
  • You can find out more about the cancellation of the 2022 Australian Discworld Convention on the official website at ausdwcon.org.
  • Ben is correct: Garth Nix won the Ditmar for Best Novel for his 2020 book, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. It also won the 2020 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was nominated for the 2021 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Cal Wilson, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Mustrum Ridcully, Nanny Ogg, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Photos, Rincewind

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#Pratchat84 - Ankh-Morpork Archives & Discworld Almanak8 April 2025
Listen to us discuss the in-universe Discworld books The Ankh-Morpork Archives volume I and II, collecting the Discworld diaries, and The Discworld Almanak. Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

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