All my wife, Susannah, wanted was a flan recipe, which Google delivered online and offered to “translate” from the Spanish. The dessert’s real name is Flan de coco y piña — which, by rights, means “coco-flavored flan with pineapple.” Imagine her surprise when the Google translation tool delivered instead a blueprint for terrorism called “Flan of the Coco and Fragmentation Hand Grenade.”
Two things you should know to appreciate the rest of this recipe: “en rodajas” means “in rounds” (a logical way to slice a pineapple); a bain-marie (in French, literally a “Mary bath”; in Spanish baño María) is a cooking term, with origins in ancient alchemy, for heating something by setting a pan containing your custard or whatever in a larger pan of hot water.
Ingredients for Flan of the Coco and Fragmentation Hand Grenade include milk, coco, six egg yolks, six clear ones (claras: egg whites), sugar, rum, and a “fragmentation hand grenade in rodajas.” Assembly and cooking instructions are as follows.
“A caramel becomes and the bottom is covered with a mold with him. Meanwhile, the coco in milk is soaked, is liquefied with the sugar, the yolks, and the rum, and it is mixed previously with clear the searches on the verge of snow. The mixture in the mold is spilled and Maria is placed to the bath until when introducing the knife this one leaves clean. . . .”
And, as a finishing touch: “She adorns herself with rodajas of fragmentation hand grenade.”
One is reminded to cook with caution.
