Listing to Port

1. Diver’s delight. A four-metre deep, one metre-wide cylinder of creamy mousse developed by celebrated chocolatier Frederick Lowly Peach, the diver’s delight serves two purposes. Its first purpose, as food, is relatively straightforward. The second purpose is more unusual. The different levels of the diver’s delight have have different flavours. The upper layers include such flavours as sock, sand and earwax, separated by the occasional fine layer of gravel. Middle layers include garlic, burnt toast and fish. The lower layers are are a more conventional array of fruit and nut flavours and are, by all accounts, delicious. One merely has to get ones head far enough in at first go to get to the tasty part. Therefore it is also a test of the diner’s cream diving skills.

2. The Stanningford fishslap. This little-encountered dessert consists of three hundred marzipan fish with cherry liqueur centres. It is served by a troupe of five waiters in pierrot costumes whose job is to slap the faces or bodies of diners with the fish such that the liqueur squirts into their mouths. The discarded marzipan skins are then dropped through a grille in the floor, where they are consumed by a horde of tame parrots in the room underneath. Eventually, once the diners are drunk enough not to care, they too are deposited amongst the parrots and left to sleep it off.

3. Skronks. Skronks are micro-desserts, usually the size of a peppercorn or smaller, and often containing amazingly realistic tiny versions of larger ingredients. A successful skronk is experienced only as a fleeting moment of sweetness by the diner, despite the hours of work that went into its creation. The skronk diner, out of respect to the skills of the chef, is customarily expected to lie about the deliciousness of the dish and its amazing, mouth-filling flavour.

4. The Southern Ocean. It is a little-known fact that the Southern Ocean has honorary dessert status, following the ceremonial addition of a quart of vanilla essence off the South coast of Tasmania by well-known homeopathic chef Esperanza Buttocks in 2010.

5. Surprise bubbles. These small, flavourless globes are carefully engineered to burst on a choreographed schedule in the diner’s stomach, releasing a series of fascinating-tasting gases for the diner to burp up over the course of the rest of the evening. Some particularly skilled chefs have even extended the surprise bubble experience well into the night, leading to bizarre dreams about passion fruit.

6. Chocolate poetry. Following the innovative development by gastronomic linguist Rowena Q of an entirely chocolate-based language, it is possible to express many types of poetry in chocolate. Concepts are expressed via a series of combinations of dark, milk and white chocolate, with sugar, cocoa butter and cocoa content all acting as important signifiers of meaning. The utmost form of the chocolate poetry art is said to be the chocolate double dactyl, although it is notable that the criteria for rhyme and rhythm are necessarily a little different when sentiments are expressed in chocolate as opposed to spoken language, so the poetic forms often bear only a slight resemblance to their more common namesakes. Rowena Q’s most recent development, a chocolate triolet, was sadly eaten by a beluga whale before being experienced by its intended recipient, the Duke of Rockall.