The problem with rogue states, as George Bush has certainly learned by now, is that they seldom obey orders. The clue might lie in the word "rogue." So when Gill Partington looks down at the skillet and sees that her Iranian omelette is behaving in an infuriating manner, she's hardly surprised.
"I'm never making an omelette again in public," she says. It really is insolent, this omelette - a little more homophobic and hirsute and it could be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The thing has fallen into three pieces in the pan, but as Ms. Partington pokes the fragments with her spatula, she brightens. "Actually, look at it. It's a map of the Axis of Evil. It's not as bad as we thought - or maybe it's much worse."
Oh, it could have been worse all right - we could be making Dog Stew or Sheep Testicles or Tongue of the Judge or one of the other recipes contained in her new book, The Axis of Evil Cookbook. Even the enemies of America have to eat, and they eat quite well, judging by the recipes that Ms. Partington has collected from Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and Cuba (while the first three are traditionally considered the "Axis of Evil" countries denounced by the U.S. President in a speech in 2002, the final three were added later by the State Department. Ms. Partington calls them "The Axis of Somewhat Evil.")
When I invited Ms. Partington over to prepare a luncheon of mass destruction, I was hoping she might suggest Vaca Frita, or Fried Cow, one of my favourite Cuban dishes. Alas, she's a vegetarian, although she began eating fish while completing her PhD thesis on the dissemination of conspiracy theories.
And yes, that did help her in writing the cookbook, an endeavour she'd never attempted before. Academic articles, yes. But kimchi? A little less familiar.
I ask her if a fish-eating herbivore is what's called "pescatarian."
"I think that's what's called being a hypocrite," she says.
She's only tested the vegetarian recipes, so if you make the sheep's testicles and they taste slightly off, feel free to drop her a line.
So with meat off the menu and fish clearly a touchy subject, we're forced into the world of legumes. A good thing that most of America's enemies eat a bean- and grain-rich diet, then. They'd surely outlive their Denny's-scarfing rivals, if not for the diseases and suicide bombings and food shortages and such.
Deprivation provides an unlikely source for the black humour in Ms. Partington's book, which is as much a piece of satire as it is a cookbook. If we were making the above-mentioned Fried Cow, for example, we'd need to follow the Cuban example and smash the beef with a mallet. "But then they have a lot of pent-up aggression," she writes, "what with the shortages."
Saddam Hussein, she notes, loved eating gazelles that were reared for him on a diet of cardamom. (He would occasionally poison enemies during family barbecues, as well.) After being captured, Mr. Hussein was known to wolf down family-sized bags of Doritos in 10 minutes. "And in an irony that surely even George Bush would grasp, the former scourge of America then spent his last days eating hamburgers and fries," Ms. Partington writes.
My kitchen contains no gazelles or cardamom, and even less poison.
Tongue of the Judge, an Iraqi dish of fried aubergine topped with ground lamb and tomato, is also out. Instead, we've decided to make two vegetarian dishes: a Persian omelette (Persia being the former name of Iran, of course) and a pineapple-and-avocado salad much loved in Cuba.
"I'd never done a cookery book before - I wasn't even much of a cook," says Ms. Partington as she vigorously shreds a bunch of coriander and tosses it into a bowl with a leek, three eggs, two green onions and some cumin and parsley. She seldom measures anything, though when I suggest this makes her the Nigella Lawson of the political satire set, she raises an eyebrow. That look would be enough to send Moammar Gadhafi running for his female bodyguards.
Ms. Partington may not have Cordon Bleu training, but she did have a few other relevant qualities for this project: a questioning political sensibility, an interest in the dissemination of conspiracy theories and a sense of humour.
