Many years ago when my friend the great children’s doctor, Lionel Lubitz was still good-looking, I witnessed a Moment in the History of Ideas.

 

Lionel placed toast in the toaster and took raspberry jam from the pantry. He spread the jam on his toast and stopped. He said, I’ve just had an idea. He rose, returned to the pantry, coming back to his toast holding a jar of chilli powders. Lionel sprinkled the jam with chilli powder. I urged him to get help.

 

Lionel bit rashly into his toast. He said, beaming, Try a bit, Howard. Humouring the lunatic, I took a taste. It was a sensation. This was a moment of invention, a breakthrough in human alimentation, and I was there as a witness. As I remarked above, this was history. Human thought had moved forward.

 

The United Staes of America has been the birthplace of another such stride forward. In 1901, Julia Davis Chandler wrote a recipe in the Magazine of the Boston Cooking School of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. In her article she described a sandwich recipe with crab apple jam and peanut butter. Peanut butter had become a popular spread in New York tea rooms of the period. One tea room, anticipating the latter-day Lubitz, offered a peanut butter and pimento sandwich.

 

If I am to be truthful, I am unable to describe the latest Moment in the History of Gustation with any modesty at all. In a thunderbolt moment of mentation, I thought, What about a peanut butter, raspberry jam and chilli sandwich?

 

I made one. Sitting in an unpromising kitchenette in my Alice Springs accommodation, I applied raspberry jam to a Corn Thin. I covered this in smooth peanut butter, then sprinkled chilli powder on top. Once again, sensation! I was silent for a moment, like Stout Cortez and his men when they stared out at the Pacific, silent on a peak in Darien. I found my voice and offered a bite – just a small bite, it was too good to share generously – to my friend, Rod Moss, the famous artist. (Yes I do have famous friends: with this invention, Rod and Lionel now have one of their own, to wit, this writer). Rod shook his head. No thanks, Howie. Like eating polystyrene. 

 

How little, how very, very little, does Rod know.

 

Yes, the invention is truly a leap of the human toward high heaven. I must have recourse to cliché: like Sir Isaac Newton before me, if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

 

 

While awaiting my Nobel, I will share the recipe with humankind.

 

 

Raspberry Jam, Peanut Butter and Chilli Toast*

 

INGREDIENTS

Raspberry Jam (must be bright red, a bit runny and have seeds).

Peanut Butter (smooth or bumpy, salted or unsalted, all are good).

Toast or *Corn Thins (I have not tried polystyrene, but you could give it a go).

 

METHOD

Combine the above in any order and apply to the farinaceous.

Eat, roll eyes, swallow. Be prepared to swoon.