[ book tip by Beat Mazenauer ] The OuLiPo workshop and its best-known representatives, Queneau, Pastior or Perec are like a kitchen where language is constantly being cooked up. Therefore, it is no accident that the “workshop for potential literature” has also initiated the “Ouvroir de Cuisine Potentielle”. The literary cookbook, which Jürgen Ritte has compiled, demonstrates the culinary subtlety of OuLiPo members. Ritte is personally involved as a congenial “maître de table” who amiably explains “oulipotage” to us.

The furious introduction reveals where the journey is headed: Marcel Bénabou narrates the story of creation in the spirit of fine cuisine! Ritte’s comment: “Take any arbitrary text (for instance, Luther’s Bible) and substitute every noun with any arbitrary word that follows after the seventh entry featured in any dictionary.” This is how any text unveils its “endless potential”. OuLiPo transforms literature into “mathematically calculable infinity” and expands language through formal constraints. Food and drink play an enlivening role in this process.

Language and food are carefully whisked together at OuLiPo. This can be in the theoretical form of Jacques Jouet’s thoughts on how to use eggs or in the real practical sense of Harry Mathews’s fabulous dish from the Auvergne. The “farce double”, as prepared in La Tour Lambert, can basically only be prepared in its place of origin – this is the provocation for all aficionados of fine cuisine.

Despite the witty language and language games, this volume includes a great deal of culinary knowledge, as Perec proves with his “81 cooking recipes for beginners”. He systematically declines several ingredients and flavours them, in turn, with new ingredients and herbs – in each case the game leads to enjoyable results. Here, language experiments are never at the expense of good taste. Georges Perec, a Grand Master of rules, also presents a brilliant menu from “Les Revenentes” – everything is to be savoured using the vowel, “e”.

[ book info ] Ritte, Jürgen: Bis auf die Knochen. Das Kochbuch, das jeder braucht. (original language: Deutsch) Hg. von Jürgen Ritte. Arche Verlag, Zürich / Hamburg, 2009 .