HANNIBAL'S TASTY FAMILY RECIPES TO FEED YOUR HUNGRY BUNCH

Hannibal Lecter was a cannibal who ate people for many reasons, mostly if they were rude or inept. He is of course a fictional character in the celebrated film masterpiece: The Silence of the Lambs. Regardless, he is (or was) held to be skillful in culinary preparations involving unusual meats. But as human flesh is similar in texture and taste to pork, the recipes for pies or roasts should serve as (tongue in cheek) examples.

Dr Lecter would have liked to be alive as food shortages give weight to his argument, that humans can make a nourishing meal, sampling undeserving people from all over the world. Undeserving, as in generating methane and CO2, without giving anything back to society. In Hannibal's view, sacrificing themselves to feed others who are starving to death, is a noble cause; an ideal way to make amends. Or to force those wretched mouthpieces to do the right thing.

Food is essential for life for all animals on earth. The problem being that we now need more food for our growing population from less and less farm land, as desertification worsens, and fish become a rarity - reducing the net yield, until the number of humans simply cannot be catered for. This will lead to shortages sooner than anticipated, as those fossil fools - our so-called world leaders, ramp up the burning of coal and oil, despite it being a criminal offence to take or cause lives to be taken, or suffer inhumane treatment, either directly or indirectly.

SUSTAINABLE COOKING AFTER FARMING

After all the chickens, cattle, lambs and pigs have been eaten, and farming all by dried up, the only way to survive will be by gathering berries and foraging for small animals such as rats, pigeons and insects. Pets having been targeted early on with dogs and cats falling at the first survival hurdle.

But this would be insufficient to feed around 9 billion people for very long. In Africa they'd fare slightly better with Zebra and other large game animals, as bush-meat, but soon they'll also turn their attention to neighboring tribes.

ROAST LEG - After three seasons of masterfully cooked limbs and beautifully filmed cooking scenes, NBC’s dark drama Hannibal came to a close in the winter of 2015. For a franchise about a sociopathic psychologist who murders and serves his kills to honored guests, Hannibal is the most food-centric adaptation of Thomas Harris’s four-part novel series. (Celebrity chef José Andrés served as the show’s culinary consultant.) With mouthwatering shots of dishes like foie gras au torchon, beggar’s clay chicken, south Indian kudal, whole ortolans and stuffed heart (from what or whom, we’ll never know), the program features the same visual prestige of visually stunning cooking shows like Mind of a Chef and Chef’s Table. While this delectable drama has been put to rest, we’re not done obsessing over it, and neither is the show’s food stylist, Janice Poon. Her head is still deep in the Hannibal universe as she’s working on the show’s official cookbook, Feeding Hannibal: A Connoisseur’s Cookbook. Excitement ensues.

Projected for a fall 2016 release, Poon’s Hannibal-themed cookbook will feature all the dishes seen on the show and some special never-before-seen goodies — all human-free, she assures us. Yes, there will be a recipe for osso buco, but it will be made with veal shank (or you can opt for Poon’s vegetarian version) instead of somebody’s leg. There may even be a recipe for dog biscuits in the works if you fancy yourself a canine-rescuing Will Graham (played by actor Hugh Dancy). Poon says the book relies heavily on looks, just as Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) himself would have wanted it.

While the Lecter character was known for throwing lavish parties with intricate dishes, Poon tells us that the cookbook will be full of simple recipes that even the entry-level home cook can accomplish.

“I wanted to make a book for the fans,” she says in a telephone interview from her hometown of Toronto. “The ‘Fannibals’ are so eager, but many of them don’t have a lot of kitchen experience, so I didn’t want to make it too difficult. I wanted to make it fun to read, great to look at and, hopefully, a gateway to a lifetime of glorious food.”

Feeding Hannibal, which is also the name of the blog Poon kept while working on the show, will be her third cookbook.

“Not to sound cliché, but it truly is a blessing to have the cookbook because, for me, it’s closure,” she says. “It’s like the bouquet that I get run up to me after my final bow.”

Poon had previously styled food for a period detective series on A&E Network, A Nero Wofle Mystery (2001). The series only lasted two seasons before it was off the air for financial reasons. Before that, Poon ventured into the lands of fashion design, advertising and fiction writing. With the show having wrapped, Poon returned to a young adult novel she had been working on, Possibly Paris, vaguely based on her experience in the fashion industry; that project had been put on hold for Hannibal. While her professional background may not have been entirely in food, Poon says it plays a huge part in her life. “I really like it. I eat it a lot; it fascinates me,” she says. (For those of you who have not seen the series in its entirety, you may want to stop reading now, as the rest of this article includes a few plot spoilers.)

While her official title on the show was food consultant, as IMDB states, Poon did more than dream and conjure up magnificent food sets for the show. She also got to try her hand at writing and some set design. Poon described Hannibal’s creator, Bryan Fuller, who has also worked on shows like Heroes, Star Trek: Voyager and Pushing Daisies, as generous and encouraging of staffers’ ideas. That sort of freedom is not always the case for food stylists. Fuller asked for her eye in designing the set of Vera Dal 1926, the store in Italy to which Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) returns daily, requesting the same items. Her task here was not to create a traditional Italian food store, but a fantasy of an Italian food store, where freshly killed rabbits dripped blood onto idle cheese and food gracefully tumbled out of its displays. Poon says that in building the elaborate and unrealistic set, she was trying to evoke “a hazy memory of what it could have been.”

Designing and constructing dishes like stargazy pie, “pork” loin with a red fruit sauce and a Mobius strip of anchovies set in aspic to look real but fantastical and drool-worthy all at the same time was no small feat. (The latter was Poon’s most hated dish to work on for fear of it falling apart, she says.) Time and temperature and other conditions always played a part in how the food would hold up before it spoiled or fell apart. However, the actors sometimes aided in these measures. Because Anderson and Mikkelsen are oyster aficionados, the real deal was often used on set when needed. If cost was ever an issue, however, Poon headed for bananas and eggplant to render oyster impostors instead of the industry standard of custard.

The singular dish that Poon felt the most pressure about and the dish she put the most love into was Bedelia’s leg, pit-roasted kalua style, wrapped in ti leaves and garnished with tropical fruits and flowers on a bed of coals.

“Bryan said this had to be the best thing I’ve ever done,” she says. Poon’s sentiments were similar, and for good reason, as the shot is the series’ final scene. The actual leg on set, according to Poon’s blog, was made of “pork loins stitched together over beef and lamb leg bones.”

One of the more memorable experiences on set, and perhaps not for the best reasons, was the setup of Hannibal sawing into Will’s head, a hallucination of Will’s that involved Dr. Lecter’s last supper. Because of the “liquid nature of a hallucination, not that I would know,” Poon explains, the dishes were enlarged, dripping, sliding off the table and differing in colors. Poon played mostly with size for this scene, where a giant yellow melon would become a tiny mustard seed. What Poon didn’t know was that the scene was going to be flooded with backlight, causing the viewer to see little to none of her hard work in the final product.

“The one thing that kept me alive was the thought of ‘Never mind, I’ll feature it in the cookbook,’” she says.

Fuller’s next project, a television adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, has already started production in Toronto, according to Poon. She’s been tapped again to style the food in this show, but don’t expect too much. Food will not be a major theme in American Gods like it was in Hannibal.

PREDICTION

Cannibalism had almost disappeared, before the climate famine took hold, alongside water shortages, causing civilization to break down - as it was then - based on farming and animal rearing, that could not be sustained as temperatures soared, after the ice caps disappeared. So almost removing cooling convection currents, and that is when countries that were previously lush farmland turned to dustbowls.

It is predicted that humans will die en mass, despite being relatively intelligent and resourceful, because they had become used to buying food from supermarkets - and gone soft. The softies inevitably being easy targets, as they traveled to and from work to pay steep mortgages for overpriced housing, the system that perpetuated renting and landlords, being itself a climate crime. Bankers and landlords then becoming fair game.

At that stage, neighbours would come to be viewed as livestock. Those not well thought of, or unable to defend themselves would be sure to be eaten first. They'd be rounded up, or not be able to run fast enough. Or, maybe, with civilization ceasing, they'd not even care about ending up in the cooking pot.

Politician Pie - will be an early success, being devoured preferentially. So ridding the starving masses of the cause of their plight - and reducing the population at the same time.

Council Curry - will soon reduce local authorities to a skeleton staff, no longer needing armies of town planners, as nobody had the strength for construction, so inhabited premises of those who'd been eaten.

Banker Stew - took care of the city slickers and building society managers who'd been living off the fat of the land, so giving more time to those who'd toiled long hours for no reward to keep landlords in luxury.

These venues herded meals conveniently for those dying of malnutrition. But members and civil servants will soon take the hint and learn to fend for themselves, by joining self-help groups, and forming hunting parties of their own. Though they are unlikely to be a match for persons used to working the land, and sports hunters.

Mock Pork Pies -

Inspired by such greats as Margery Lovett and Sweeney Todd (the demon barber of Fleet Street) and the Texas chainsaw preparation guide, Hannibal Lecter thought to share his favorite recipes.