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?
Finally, in the pile of yellow dust I pulled from my oven after 7 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius, I have my answer.
This is exemplary writing.
If you ever need an example of “show, don’t tell”, stop looking.
Don’t worry if you want to work on an original story and you only have one scene on mind because Toby Fox is making deltarune only because of a fever dream he had in which he only dreamed about the ending of the game
