The ShortRead: MeatLIQUOR

The ShortRead of 3 December

The Meatliquor Chronicles: Chapter and Verse

Authors: Yianni Papoutsis and Scott Collins

What's the story: No matter how much you like meat, Yianni Papoutsis and Scott Collins like it more than you do.

Founders of the UK's immensely successful (and tasty) MEATLiquor restaurants, the MEATLiquor Chronicles is a fat slice of their best recipes, served up with a side of guest dishes, anecdotes and stories behind the mouth-watering meals. 

The following recipe is for the ultimate hunger cure - the club sandwich - and a journey that led to its infamous position within the hearts of MEATLiquor's founders.

Release date: Out now. Also available in a limited edition gift set pack with Bulleit Bourbon. All proceeds of sales will go to MEATLiquor's charity of choice, Meningitis Now

Extract

The Casino Club

Dead of night. A motorway. Any motorway.

The Road is far from glamorous: bleary-eyed from too many hours scaring down the centre line, mind lugged by all kinds of whitc-line fever, knuckles bulging and stomach knotted, the distant lights of tonight's sanctuary beckon.

The car's pretty much parking itself by this point.

A man takes a credit card in exchange for a key card.

Base instincts take over.

Piss. Done.

Smoke. Done.

Drink. Done.

Now car.

It's well past the witching hour. The restaurants are all shut up tight.

Any cook with any talent has left work and is currently getting messed up on their drug of choice at the closest/cheapest bar/brothel.

Every nerve cries out for sustenance: stimulants will only get you so far in this life, boy.

One choice remains: that stained and dog-eared rectangle of card buried at the back of the faux-leatherette 'Welcome (translation: 'Fuck you') pack.

Why even bother reading it? You know it better than your own address by this point: a cynical selection of nukeable nastiness that can be prepared by even the most exploited night-shift worker.

Thai Curry.

Bolognese (always with a really inappropriate pasta).

Caesar. Fucking. Salad.

And there, tucked away at the bottom, a glimmer of hope in a sea of culinary despair.

The last resort of the hungry insomniac:

The Club Sandwich.

It promises everything a peripatetic inebriate might require in a lace-night meal:

Toasted bread.

Roasted bird.

Crisp lettuce.

Juicy tomatoes, Hellman's mayo.

Crisps.

Easy.

Trembling fingers stab at the buttons on the phone.

Half-understood insults arc traded with a disgusted operator.

Somehow an order is made.

Add a bucket of ice and...

Somehow this has cost forty quid.

Whisky is drunk.

Weed is smoked.

News is watched.

Ablutions are performed.

The anticipation reaches a zenith.

More whisky is drunk.

More weed is smoked.

Clean enough already: more weed is smoked.

A knock.

The door opens.

Ganja smoke billows out into the face of some poor bastard who's pulled the night shift.

Eyes are averted.

Signatures are taken.

Grubby notes change hands furtively in exchange for discretion.

Somehow this has now cost fifty quid.

But Food.

A cloche is raised.

A crest is fallen.

How can anybody get something so simplest fantastically wrong?

Soggy, cold, half-toasted bread; anaemic tomatoes; wilted lettuce; limp bacon; rancid mayonnaise; flaccid poultry.

No sodding crisps.

How do they fuck this up?

Every. God-darnned, Time.

Here's how not to.

WHAT YOU NEED

3 slices white bread

Butter

Good mayonnaise

4 slices smoked back bacon, cooked crispy

1 mad chicken breast

1 large tomato

1 slice S2 155 cheese

Iceberg lettuce

Salt

Ready salted crisps

1 whale dill pickle

Coleslaw 

Cocktail sticks

Avocado (optional)

Build it like this

For more excellent reads, check out our previous choices below - just click on the link:

Peripheral by William Gibson

THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

REVIVAL BY STEPHEN KING

No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Nevill

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Extinction Game by Gary Gibson

Perfidia by James Ellroy

Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

The Pointless Book by Alfie Deyes

A Possibility of Violence by D.A. Mishani

Personal by Lee Child

COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE by HARUKI MURAKAMI

Fool's Assassin by Robin Hobb

Breakfast with the Borgias by DBC Pierre

The Final Silence by Stuart Neville

The Traitor's Heir by Anna Thayer

Cop Town by Karin Slaughter

Half a King by Joe Abercrombie

Heartman by M.P. Wright

Lobsters by Tom Ellen & Lucy Ivison

Want You Dead by Peter James

Caught Short by Anthony Horowitz

No Harm Can Come To A Good Man by James Smythe

The Murder Bag by Tony Parsons

The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins by Irvine Welsh

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Natchez Burning by Greg Iles

Who is Tom Ditto by Danny Wallace

The Girl who saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson

(Image: Flickr/Kate Hiscock)