Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich -- Shel Silverstein

Uniting the hippo and food motifs...

(Poem #845) Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich A hippo sandwich is easy to make. All you do is simply take One slice of bread, One slice of cake, Some mayonnaise One onion ring, One hippopotamus One piece of string, A dash of pepper -- That ought to do it. And now comes the problem... Biting into it! -- Shel Silverstein

        (from 'Where the Sidewalk Ends')

The word that comes to mind when speaking of Silverstein is 'inimitable' -
his best poems have a *flavour* about them that is hard to define, but
unmistakably there.

Silverstein was, sadly, not a poet I was aware of as a child - I'd read the
occasional poem in anthologies (and, what's more, remembered them, so that
when I finally did discover his books I could point to the odd piece and say
'hey - I've seen that before'), but his name was lost among a bunch of other,
more-deservingly-forgotten poets. I'm glad to say that his poems lose very
little when read from an adult perspective, but I can't help but wonder how
much more magical they'd have been when I was part of the target audience.

Today's piece is pretty self-explanatory - but note the oh-so-innocent way
'one hippopotamus' is slipped into the ingredient list. And where but in a
child's universe would one slice of bread and one of cake make up a sandwich
recipe? :)

Biography:

  [broken link] http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Club/6166/ss/ssbio.html

Links:

An excellent Silverstein page is
  [broken link] http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/silverstein.htmtin

And here's a great site devoted to all things hippopotamous:
  http://members.aol.com/HippoPage/table.htm

See particularly the poems section:
  http://members.aol.com/HippoPage/hipppoem.htm
(complete with unexpected entries by L. Sprague de Camp and Jane Yolen, and
illustrations for both yesterday's poem and today's)

And speaking of recipes, there's the ever-popular stuffed camel:
  http://home.tiac.net/~cri/1997/camel.html

-martin